The sea is the land's edge also..
-TS Eliot
When fighting monsters one must beware that one does not become a monster too. And if you look long enough into the abyss the abyss will also look into you.
-Nietzsche
Climatologists, and other scientists, tell us that if we keep on our present course of historical regression, warming the Earth, things will happen we won't like -- like the permafrost melting, for instance, and reanimating ancient monsters, viruses, as bad or worse than Covid-19. Historian Mike Davis wrote about this in his sobering book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2006) and his post-Covid follow-up, The Monster Enters (2020), in which he argues for an immanency of the H5N1 (bird flu) pandemic. Davis even mongers up a Doomsday image, by way of citing Belgian influenza expert Rene Snacken, who says: "Eight years of research on H5N1 had convinced him that this cunning little Darwinian demon was capable of ecocide the wiping out of entire species."
Davis's books were explicitly meant to warn us before it's too late to adequately respond. But then we went ahead and re-elected Donald Trump. Sadly knowing that it doesn't matter. The Doomsday Clock, reduced to 90 seconds before midnight just after Trump's first inauguration, is now 89 seconds to midnight, and to when the last monster ball begins.
Such eschatological doom is maybe the only monster scenario that matters right now. But in his new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, historian Surekha Davies provides a broad survey of interactivity with human concepts of monsterhood from antiquity to the present. She provides a convincing argument for describing humanity as tangled up in the process of monsterizing the Other. Humans is essentially a companion to her award-winning book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge, 2016). In both books, Surekha explores a sense of historical embodiment, of understanding self as something other than the Other.
Davies's guiding questions are: What is it that defines a monster? What, exactly, makes something or someone so monstrous? To address these questions, Humans has ten chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue. It also contains 50 figures and plates. The search for a definition includes considerations of ecology; relative humanity/animality; nations and immigration; gender, sex, and monstrous births (Macbeth); gods and supernaturalism; machines; extraterrestrials and, monstrofuturism. Davies writes,
What ... real and fictional monsters share is a capacity to challenge or transcend ideas about typical bodies or behavior...By showing wolves and people are not entirely separate after all, a werewolf would reveal the limits of our categories and change how we thought about who, or what, humans really are.
This is intriguing. I recall for a moment, with a sip of passable pinot, how Michaelangelo sculpted Moses as having vestigial horns, and could see how that figured into his thinking about the golden calf, and humans needing the structure implied by the decalogue. Humans, the gesture seemed to imply, will go Dionysian at the drop of a hat. Nietzsche said as much himself. And if Nietzsche said it, then it must be true.
Humansbegins with a phenomenological consideration. Where does my body-in-the-world end and the body of other objects/subjects begin? At first spark, this seems a silly point, but seen from the perspective of, say, the interpenetrability of all things, as perhaps depicted in a Seurat work of art, it has ontological implications.
Davies writes that nations will reject and cull immigrants seen not as humans but as bringers of dark energy and mischief. In this light, one could see how MAGA types, now seemingly in charge in the USA, hate people from El Sur, want to zap them like mosquitoes, break families up like they did at Auschwitz. In this case, monster seems more of a projection.
The immigrants as monsters theme is old in America. We told the world, "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," and when the world responded -- maybe a little too gleefully from France -- we often sent them packing before they could unpack. Monsters. We monsterize them at the southern border. Fly them out. Lefties weep, and play Dylan and Baez singing, Deportee. Monsters in Gaza given a choice: Die, motherf*cker, or get out. I guess, the two-state solution is a no-go, huh? Monster f*cker Trump sees building luxury resorts up and down the Gaza coast. Why not send the Palestininans to Greenland. Let then duke it out in a massive snowball fight for the ages. Of course, Trump wants to put resorts there too.
Davies writes that she was inspired to write Humansduring an astrobiology conference at the Library of Congress in 2014. The subject of extraterrestrial life arose, along with the questions of what human scientists could expect to find and how we might see Them. We have imagined monsters coming at us from outer space for a long time. At the same time. in a bizarre twist only CG Jung was able to explain, we need to believe we'll be rescued from ourselves one day. Stephen Hawking admonished us to be careful what we asked for -- that ETs might not save us or pal up, but come bearing a droll gift book, How To Serve Humanity, with humans looking like popcorn chicken to them. Nope, we best get goin solvin our own problems, which are many.
Addressing contemporary issues, such as AI, Davies relates a trip to a Rhode Island university to talk with graduate students in robotics, one of whom wanted to see a day when a robot could write poetry, so humans won't have to. This disturbs the author. She writes, "To get robots to write poetry 'so that we don't have to,' seemed a toe dip in a new pool of dangerous waters--waters that might dissolve what 'human' means entirely. Especially if the water turns out to be acid put there by grinning AIs or their Australian agents. Davies sees how AGI could mean superintelligence so humans don't have to be (no cogito, no sum).I read this and recall a recent article that says humans are losing IQ points by the decade. Soon we'll be the dumb chits we now seem to be. Idiocracy, the film, come true. In short, there are ethical issues to sift and weigh, but we humans haven't done anything meaningful or Nobel Prize-winning in the area of Ethics since we fucked up our deal in Eden.
Humans: A Monstrous History is very much a follow-on to Davies' previous work, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (2017). As her editor describes it:
Through innovative interdisciplinary methods connecting the European Renaissance to the Atlantic world, Davies uses new sources and questions to explore science as a visual pursuit, revealing how debates about the relationship between humans and monstrous peoples challenged colonial expansion.
Humans continues with this anthropocentric and ultimately existential angst play. Ontology is not for the weak of heart.
Davies book could have had more on the usual suspects of monsterhood: witch trials, slave markets, and Victor Hugo. It could have brought in so much more -- the recent streaming series, Lovecraft Country. More Freud (The Uncanny). Jordan Peeke's classic, Get Out! (2017). More politics. More angry white men blathering on, as in this scene from Man Friday (1975), starring Peter Toole and Richard Roundtree
Humans: A Monstrous History is an interesting read, informative and pleasantly narrated. It details a very long history of humans coming to grips with their baseline beastiness, and, frankly, not faring as well as you might expect after millenia of civilizing dialectics in historical progress. Humans/Monsters is only a slash mark of diffrance (h/t Derrida). But for all its readerly value, there is an urgency missing. I wondered to myself: Should I be sitting here reading this book, with a decent glass of red, when I should be out colluding with others to end the Trump regime?
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