Who Gets to Be the Monster?

Part II of Monsters

By K.F. Hartford

In the first century CE, Pliny the Elder attempted something extraordinarily ambitious: he tried to describe the world.

His Natural History sprawled across thirty-seven books and gathered what was then known—or believed—about astronomy, geography, animals, plants, medicine, minerals, art, and human beings. It was an encyclopedia written when much of the world remained beyond the direct experience of those reading it, which meant that observation and hearsay could occupy the same page.

At the distant edges of that world, the human body began to change.

Pliny described peoples supposedly born without mouths, people with enormous ears, people with a single leg and a foot large enough to shade themselves from the sun. He wrote of the Blemmyes, who were said to have no heads at all, their eyes and mouths situated instead upon their chests.

They were human.

Almost.

For centuries afterward, versions of these “monstrous races” persisted in European manuscripts and maps. The farther one traveled from the familiar center of civilization, the more elastic the human form seemed to become.

This is easy to dismiss as the credulity of people who knew less about the world than we do.

I think that misses the more interesting question.

Why did strangeness so often live somewhere else?

The People Beyond the Border

In the first post in this series, I argued that monsters tend to appear where categories become unstable. The werewolf crosses human and animal; the vampire, living and dead; the ghost, presence and absence. Monsters occupy boundaries.

Geography creates boundaries too.

There is here, and there is there. There are the people we know and the people beyond the mountains, beyond the sea, beyond the edge of the map. Before photography, mass travel, telecommunications, and instantaneous access to images from nearly anywhere on Earth, most human beings had little opportunity to test stories told about distant strangers.

Imagination filled the distance.

But geography alone does not explain what happened. The people beyond the border were not always imagined simply as different. Their difference could become physical evidence of another kind of existence. Bodies became distorted. Customs became proof of savagery. Language became noise. Religion became superstition. Difference accumulated until the stranger stood somewhere uncertain between human and other.

The monster had left mythology and entered anthropology.

That should make us uncomfortable.

Because once monstrosity is attached to a human being, it begins doing moral work.

What a Monster Permits

There is a significant difference between saying I fear you and saying you are a monster.

Fear describes my relationship to you.

Monster describes what I claim you are.

The distinction matters because categories carry consequences. If I believe another person is dangerous, I might avoid him. If I believe he is criminal, I might think he should be arrested. If I believe he is an enemy soldier, I may accept violence against him under circumstances in which I would never accept violence against a neighbor.

But a monster comes to us already carrying its verdict.

We do not traditionally negotiate with the dragon.

We kill it.

This is part of the usefulness of monstrous language. It compresses moral complexity. A monster does not require a childhood, a family, a grievance, a history, or even an explanation. It enters the story already outside the ordinary moral community.

The hero's violence against it therefore requires remarkably little justification.

Human beings have repeatedly discovered how useful that narrative can be.

The language varies. An unwanted population may be described as vermin, parasites, disease, infestation, predators, beasts, or contamination. Sometimes the target is made less than human. At other times, the target becomes something almost superhuman in its danger: cunning, invasive, secretly powerful, impossible to assimilate, capable of corrupting society from within.

These are slightly different maneuvers.

Both can create monsters.

To call people animals strips something away from them. To call them monsters can add something: an exaggerated capacity for danger that makes their exclusion appear not merely permissible but necessary.

The monster does not simply deserve less protection.

The monster must be stopped.

When Metaphor Becomes Permission

This pattern becomes especially visible in propaganda.

During war, caricature has often transformed enemy populations into animals or grotesque bodies. Political movements have represented unwanted groups as disease invading an otherwise healthy society. Colonial powers repeatedly described the people they conquered as savage, primitive, childlike, irrational, or violent and then used those supposed deficiencies as part of the justification for governing them.

The logic can become circular.

We dominate you because you are uncivilized.

Your resistance to our domination proves that you are violent.

Your violence proves that you are uncivilized.

Therefore, we must dominate you.

Once the category has been established, almost any behavior can become evidence supporting it.

The most catastrophic examples make the mechanism impossible to ignore. Nazi propaganda repeatedly depicted Jews through dehumanizing and contaminating imagery, including associations with vermin and disease. The genocide that followed cannot be reduced to vocabulary; mass violence requires institutions, ideology, bureaucracy, participation, coercion, material interests, and power. Words alone did not produce the Holocaust.

But language helped construct a world in which human beings could be discussed as though their existence constituted contamination.

That distinction matters. It is too easy to say that hateful language “causes” violence and leave the mechanism unexplored. Language does something subtler before violence begins.

It changes what can be imagined.

If another person is a neighbor, certain actions seem unthinkable.

If that person becomes an infestation, a different set of actions enters the imagination.

The body has not changed.

The category has.

The Monster Is Not Always Powerless

There is a temptation here to make the argument too easy.

If monstering is something powerful groups do to powerless ones, then all we need to do is identify the marginalized person and reverse the moral judgment. History rarely cooperates with such clean arrangements.

Enemies can be dangerous.

States can face real threats. Individuals can commit atrocities. Political movements can be murderous. People who have been victimized can victimize others. A person described as monstrous may actually have done something horrifying.

The problem is not that monsters are always secretly innocent.

The problem is what happens when monster becomes an explanation.

Calling a mass murderer a monster can express moral revulsion, but it can also allow us to avoid the more disturbing fact that a human being committed the murders.

If the perpetrator is a monster, then perhaps there is nothing to understand.

He is simply not like us.

That conclusion is comforting.

It may also be dangerous.

Human beings commit genocide.

Human beings torture.

Human beings abuse children.

Human beings build systems that exploit other human beings and then go home for dinner.

The insistence that extraordinary cruelty must belong to something fundamentally different from us can prevent us from examining the ordinary human capacities from which extraordinary cruelty sometimes grows: obedience, resentment, ambition, fear, conformity, tribal loyalty, self-interest, ideological certainty, and the ability to stop seeing another person as fully real.

The monster gives evil a different species.

History keeps returning it to ours.

The Face of the Enemy

This may be one reason personal contact can become so disruptive to systems built upon abstraction.

A category is clean.

A person is messy.

“Enemy” can remain coherent from a distance. Then the enemy tells a joke. Shows you a photograph of his child. Complains about his mother. Is frightened of dying. Likes terrible music. Has an irritating habit. Offers you food.

None of this makes him good.

It makes him particular.

And particularity is inconvenient for monstrosity.

It is easier to hate populations than people because populations can be imagined collectively. The individual keeps interfering with the abstraction.

This is what the ancient gravestone does when it gives us a name instead of a demographic category. It is what a diary does. A letter. A photograph. A pair of shoes behind museum glass.

Suddenly history has a face.

The mechanism works in the opposite direction too. If we want to make cruelty easier, we can remove the face. Replace the name with a number, the person with a category, the individual with a mass.

Human beings become easier to administer when they become data.

They become easier to fear when they become symbols.

They become easier to destroy when they become monsters.

Who Names the Monster?

There is another question buried inside all of this.

Who gets to decide?

Monster stories usually grant this authority without examination. The dragon is a dragon. The demon is a demon. The hero and audience agree upon the category before the confrontation begins.

Human life is not so obliging.

One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. One civilization's barbarian may be another civilization's citizen, parent, poet, soldier, or saint. The empire calls resistance savage; the resistance calls empire monstrous. Each side can construct a story in which violence becomes defense because the other side crossed the moral boundary first.

This does not mean that every moral judgment is merely perspective or that atrocities become defensible when viewed from the correct angle. Some acts deserve condemnation regardless of who commits them.

It means that the power to name deserves scrutiny.

To call someone monstrous is to make a claim not merely about behavior but about belonging. It suggests that something has moved beyond the boundaries of ordinary humanity.

Sometimes we may mean it only metaphorically.

History suggests we should nevertheless be careful with the metaphor.

Because eventually someone may ask what we are permitted to do to monsters.

When the Monster Answers

For most of human storytelling, monsters had a useful limitation.

They rarely got to explain themselves.

The dragon roared. The demon deceived. The beast attacked. The monster existed primarily through the eyes of the people who encountered it.

Then, in the early nineteenth century, a young woman began writing a story about a scientist and the hideous being he assembled from the dead.

At first, Mary Shelley seems to give us the familiar arrangement.

Victor Frankenstein looks at his creation and recoils.

He calls it a wretch. A daemon. A monster.

He runs.

For a while, we see the Creature largely as Victor sees him: something unnatural has entered the world and should not exist.

Then Shelley does something much more dangerous than creating a monster.

She lets him speak.

And when the Creature finally tells his story, he does not sound like the thing Victor named.

He sounds like someone.

That does not mean he is innocent.

It means we can no longer destroy him without listening first.

And once the monster has a voice, the old story becomes much harder to tell.