Monsters Born and Made

The previous post talked about the distinction between ontological monsters – creatures that are monstrous because of their body – and moral monsters – those who are monstrous because of their behavior. (In short: Godzilla is an ontological monster, but Norman Bates is a moral monster.) If you haven’t read that post yet, you might want to take a minute to go over it, because my hope is to build off that discussion for this post.

I hope I’ve established that ontological/moral monsters are distinct categories, even if they might overlap. A monster can be both – but just because something has a monstrous body, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s also morally monstrous.

We blur these categories together all the time. We only have one word to cover both, “monster.” And when we ask a word like that to do double-duty, we can find ourselves slipping between the category if we’re not careful. Or sometimes, we can be led from one category to other by rhetoric that wants to intentionally elide the difference. 

Here’s what I mean by that: If we can establish that something is an ontological monster, if its body is monstrous, our natural assumption is that it’s also morally monstrous. Monsters do bad things. When zombies try to eat someone’s brain, we’re not surprised because that’s what they do. It takes some intentional effort for us to unbind these two traits, like The Shape of Water asks us to do with its kind-hearted amphibian man. Our natural inclinations go in the other direction – we assume that a monster is also dangerous, destructive, and unable to play nice in the sandbox with other children.

So when the rhetoric of monstrosity is used in the public sphere, it often starts with describing someone’s physical characteristics. But the clear intent is to move the audience towards thinking of this person (or group of people) as monsters in both senses of the word. We start with reducing a group of people to the tattoos they have, tattoos which might make them seem frightening or not-like-us. Monstrous, you might say. Or we start by describing the extraordinary size of someone who was accosted by the police on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, a size that could only be something unhuman. Once we’ve established someone as an ontological monster, people are much more willing to assume ill intentions.

And this rhetoric is quickly used for dangerous purposes. Once we begin thinking of someone as a monster, the course of action is clear. Monsters are for killing. We slay dragons, we stake Dracula through the heart, we head-shot zombies. (And double-tap, if we’re smart.) So when the monstrous rhetoric gets amped up, it’s a short step to the answer: fight back, with lethal force – whether that’s rounding people up (and asserting they’re too dangerous to allow for habeas corpus), or using excessive force in a more direct way.

When we hear politicians, or other people in positions of authority, using rhetoric that monsterizing an individual or a group, it’s imperative that we stop and ask questions. How is this monstrous rhetoric being used? Are we dealing with an ontological monster or a moral one – or really no monster at all, but just a ham-handed attempt to create one in order to make us feel afraid? And is there clear evidence of danger, or is monstrous rhetoric simply being used as a way to lay the groundwork for a response that might not otherwise be justified?

Mostly, we should start hearing alarm bells go off whenever the rhetoric of monsters is used in the public sphere. Usually, there’s another motive behind it. And the categories of monster are being blurred so that we’re more likely to go along with whoever’s trying to scare us.