Our Monsters, Ourselves

Humans have always lived alongside monsters, both real and imagined. The etymological root of the word also gives us “demonstrate,” and monsters have always been used by humans to demonstrate the same thing: what is not us. What Surekha Davies’s new book Humans: A Monstrous History reminds us is how the need to taxonomize the monstrous — in myth, in medicine, in politics, and elsewhere — is always a fraught and desperate attempt to identify, by default, what it means to be human. (I’ll confess that while writing this review, I continually confused Davies’s title, writing it as Monsters: A Human History before correcting myself.)

Humans began, Davies explains in her introduction, after she attended an astrobiology conference focused on extraterrestrials. If contact was made, the panelists asked, what pathogens might they communicate to us, and what weapons might be needed to combat them? During the Q&A, Davies asked a different set of questions:

Davies’s queries were dismissed as being off topic, but they triggered one of the main thrusts of Humans: Scientific and technological questions, taken in isolation of the humanities, are simply not enough. “Not only did science lack some of the answers for how humanity should interact with life on earth,” she realized, “but it was also insufficient for thinking about the cosmos. What I had to offer came, instead, from deep in the humanities. And that something involved monsters.”

Ultimately, Davies’s book is a radical and timely plea to renew our focus on the humanities. At a time when biology and other sciences are making great strides in understanding how we are put together, chemically and physically, Humans makes clear how vital it is that we invest in understanding how we are put together culturally.

“People define what they mean by human,” Davies makes clear at the outset, “by defining where they think ‘human’ ends: at the monster.” Those deemed monstrous, she continues, “reveal something about the person or communities doing the naming, not the person or communities they name.” From there, Humans offers a rich historical and literary survey of the pathological and contradictory means by which we define the monstrous, a process often slapdash and mutable. Tracing our history of monster-making through conversations around race-making and nation-building, gender and sexuality, our relationship to the divine, machines and extraterrestrials, the book reveals the myriad ways we express and compensate for a fundamental fear that we ourselves might not be “normal.”

This monster-making involves defining and demarcating the individual human body and castigating any deviation from that norm as aberrant and (usually) sinful. For much of human culture, for example, fetal abnormalities were treated as a physical reflection of some imagined transgression by the mother, as in the story related by Samuel Pepys’s manservant James Paris du Plessis in the early 18th century. When he was 15 years old, du Plessis recalled, a pregnant woman staying in his house had become obsessed with a picture of a two-headed monster in an almanac; despite her husband’s attempts to get her mind off the image, she remained obsessed, and according to du Plessis, consequently birthed a still-born, two-headed fetus. “Regardless of the story’s accuracy,” Davies concludes, “the account illuminates a widespread interpretation of unusual births: A woman’s insatiable attraction for a deviant creature — even in the form of an image — could generate a child who was in some fundamental way not her husband’s.”

These boundaries define not just the human body but also entire landscapes. In medieval topographies, monsters patrolled the boundaries of the world. On a mappa mundi, for example, one would find at the center Jerusalem and Europe; as one got farther out, monsters would abound. Chroniclers like John Mandeville described increasingly strange beings beyond the edges of the known world: men with no heads, their faces in their chests, or those with a single, giant leg. This was a time-honored tradition for making sense of the world. As far back as Pliny the Elder, these monstrosities had been explained via humoral theory: In warmer places, for example, the proper proportions of blood, bile, and choler would be upsetting, leading to deformities.

If the work of creating monsters is always an attempt to define a stable and discrete definition of the human and the locus of human civilization, it is also an attempt to define humans as not part of nature, set somehow above it, born “as beings who operate under different conditions and expectations form everything else in the world.” It is, for Davies, itself a form of exceptionalism, where we see ourselves as having exceeded the realm of animals and ecology, no longer subject to the laws of the natural world.

The problem with this binary is that the dividing line is always far more fluid than we think it is. As Humans illustrates again and again, these attempts at categorization are always in flux. While humans are set above other animals, certain behaviors could cause them to become monstrous. Davies notes, for example, how the 12th-century philosopher Bernardus Silvestris warned that those who turned away from God and led sinful lives would become no different than apes: “Thus the human was only conditionally fully human: There was a spiritual contract that, if ignored, would bring about the morphing of the human soul into something bestial.”

Additionally, the humoral belief that environment and behavior may determine whether one is human or monster became increasingly fraught during the age of European colonialism. As Western European nations ramped up their colonialist projects in the Modern Era, commentators and philosophers wondered what would stop “normal” Europeans, newly exposed to differing climates, from turning monstrous. Gradually, Davies argues, “geography created a new inflection point in the category of the human in Europe and among its settler-colonists abroad. The problem was this: People feared that minds and bodies were malleable. In theory people who had (been) moved thousands of miles might be reshaped by their environment. Settlers might even change into monsters if they spent too long in a monstrifying climate.” A process for othering foreigners that had worked during one era was newly incompatible with colonialism, and new explanations for what made one monstrous had to be devised.

Monsters is very much a book about the West. Though Davies brings in other cultures, particularly indigenous American beliefs, they are often presented as foils and counters to a chauvinist Christian Europe and occasionally overidealized in the process. Davies, offers, for example, Mesoamerican beliefs in shape-shifters — nahualli — as a critique of the rigid binaries of Christianity, suggesting that such thinking “enlarged and blended individual types of beings and made the boundary between humans and the rest of the beings in the world porous.” But this worldview could contract possibilities as well as expand them: The Latin Americanist Lisa Sousa, for one, argues in her 2017 book, The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico, that as a result of this belief that human boundaries were fluid, Mesoamerican culture responded by establishing rigid standards of gender via clothing, speech, and behavior, attempting to enforce order in a disordered cosmos.

Borders continually shift, and we continually try to reestablish them and enforce them, depending on our beliefs and our needs at any given time. But during times of rapid change — cultural, technological, political — these shifts become acute and particularly fraught, which explains why we’re once again enmeshed in a heated, dire conversation about who is human and who a monster. Behind the flurry of recent moves by the Trump administration, one can read a desperate attempt to define what is and isn’t normal: Who gets to belong to that group (with the privileges and protections that come with membership), and whose “abnormality” puts them on the outside of the human continuum? In times of fear and massive change, the definition of what it means to be human contracts, and the definition of what it means to be a monster expands.

But beyond the immediate political moment, it’s clear that the attempts to demarcate the line between human and monster are always tenuous at best. The belief, for example, that humans are discrete entities, separate from all other forms of nature, has become increasingly untenable to maintain in light of our current understanding of microbiology — and specifically, the effects the bacteria in our digestive tract may have on our personality and actions. If what makes us “human” depends in no small part on the microbes that live inside us, we may have to revisit our entire history of mythological human-animal hybrids to better understand our monstrous selves.

Likewise, as Davies points out, space exploration may so radically change our biological constitution that we may end up monstrifying ourselves. She cites the science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson’s observation that long-term space habitation may deprive us of the very microbes and gut bacteria that help constitute our personalities; without access to the other beings that live inside us and make us human, slowly, over time, we would begin to change physically and existentially — perhaps to the point where, if humans ever settle on other planets, “they may end up changing in ways that challenge definitions of what it means to be human.”

But such changes — new understandings, new developments, and new conceptualizations of who is and isn’t a monster — are nothing new. After all, evolution is itself characterized by the arrival of the monstrous; the new hybrid, the random deformation that confers an advantage, the aberration that in time becomes the new norm. History is written by the winners, and often it is the monsters who win out.

But it is when the appearance of such monsters abruptly accelerates that they outpace our ability to conceptualize their ramifications. In fact, it may be the case that it is precisely the rapid changes in how we understand what it means to be human that are driving some of the more-reactionary attempts to close off the fellowship of humanity to those we deem “abnormal” or monstrous. Which is to say, the kind of history one finds in Humans will become increasingly relevant as we continue to change and adapt our definition of the human and its borders. It’s the kind of necessary work that is constantly being downplayed in the privileging of STEM, and the result is that we lack the concepts to understand our own technological advancements. Without the language or understanding to make sense of these changes, without the history and perspective that the humanities provide, we are going to be increasingly at a loss to make sense of where we’re going and increasingly prone to lashing out ignorantly in search of the monstrous.

Which is a shame and a travesty, since we need monsters. They don’t just drive evolution; they also drive culture. It is precisely those who’ve transgressed, broken borders, mutated and grown in unexpected, unpredictable ways, who have pushed our species and our culture forward. Those who were monstrous in their day enlarged what we came to see as human, and enriched our lives as a result. But currently, Davies notes, the category of the human is “shrinking”: “Far-right activists and politicians around the world are defining their nations in flat, limited ways that cast multiple groups as threats to the majority body politic.” What we need instead, she argues, is a “monster-centered ethics,” which recognizes our proclivity for making monsters and the unintended damage such a proclivity might have. “What might a monster-centered ethics look like?” Davies asks. “It would take those ways of thinking that create monsters — that exclude people — and turn those assumptions on their heads to welcome in the so-called monsters. It would mean understanding that when a person does not fit a system, the system is failing, not the person.”

As a catch-all term, “monster” can be slippery. For not only can differently abled people or mothers of fetal abnormalities be wrongly and cruelly labeled as monstrous, but so too can genocidal butchers and those who commit atrocities toward their own kind be called monsters. We rightly label Nazi war criminals as monsters even as they were labeling their targets — those from Jewish, Sinti, Roma, and LGBT communities — as monstrous (often through dehumanizing language and references to “vermin” or “pestilence”).

Which is to say: Any discussion of monsters is complicated. It is about more than simply saying that those who once worked circus sideshows deserve all the respect and dignity afforded to others, or that those responsible for monstrous behavior should be shunned. It is a recognition that any attempt to name a person a monster is always a declaration of ethics and belief, an articulation of how one understands the world and one’s own place in it. And for this reason we will never see the end of monsters. It may be the case that a monster-centered ethics recognizes monstrosity not in being but in action. But that doesn’t mean we need welcome all monsters into the human fold.