On Monsters and Scapegoats

One more reflection as the spooky season comes to a close. What follows is a lightly edited selection from my first book Unclean, a book that become more and more relevant with each passing year. 

This comes from Chapter 6 entitled "Monsters and Scapegoats." 

Sociomoral disgust, experiencing people as a source of moral or spiritual defilement, can vary in severity. On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless and innocuous (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is “the demonization of the ‘Other’ in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy—the transgressors and deviants.” These deviants are considered to be “deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness.” Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating “monsters” who are threatening to society.

The “monster” tends to be the nadir of sociomoral disgust, the final outworking of its logic in which people are dehumanized to the point of being ontologically Other. Worse, monsters are sub-human and malevolent, a source of social threat and danger. This is important to note as the category of “monster” tends to mask the mechanisms of social scapegoating. Scapegoating has become, for the most part, morally transparent. When named we consider scapegoating to be a social evil. In contrast, the monstrous tends to obscure the scapegoating mechanism. It does this in two ways. First, the monstrous activates disgust psychology. And once activated these feelings of revulsion justify the acts of social exclusion or violence. Second, while scapegoats are considered to be innocent and passive, monsters are dangerous, malevolent, and threatening. Again, this threat justifies violence against the “monster.” In short, the category “monster” is a visceral and emotional category that fuels the acts of social scapegoating. By analyzing the monstrous in relation to the scapegoat we are able to focus upon the social psychology of groups where the real moral battle against scapegoating is to be waged. No one knowingly engages in scapegoating. But crusades against monsters are all too common.

The word “monster” has its origins in the Latin monstrum meaning “omen” or “warning.” Given this meaning we might ask, what are monsters warning us about? A start on an answer comes from the anthropological literature. David Gilmore notes that monsters are cultural universals. Every culture has its monsters. And across cultures monsters appear to share similar characteristics. Gilmore lists many of these:

• Aggressive
• Gigantic
• Man-eating
• Malevolent
• Hybrids
• Gruesome
• Atavistic
• Powerful
• Violent

Fear dominates this list. Fears of predation. Fears of destruction. But, as noted above, disgust also seems implicated in the monster schema. Monsters, visually and in their behavior, trigger revulsion and disgust. From Gilmore’s list I’d like to analyze how purity and disgust are implicated in the feature of hybridization.

Monsters are often ontological mixtures, blends, and composites. A quick tour through the world of mythology and legend shows us this: minotaurs, centaurs, fauns, mermaids, Pegasus, unicorns. But many of these hybrids are not very monstrous. They are strange, otherworldly, and uncanny. But unicorns and centaurs don’t seem to be monsters, widely understood. In short, monsters are not simply hybrids. They are a certain kind of hybrid. If so, what kind?

Generally speaking, the hybrid must be transgressive, illicit, and taboo. The question then becomes, what makes a mixture illicit? Why am I not repulsed by angels (i.e., the depiction of winged people) but find a man with a bug-head monstrous?

I believe the illicit mixing seen in monsters involves the mixing, and therefore transgression, of the sacred. Disgust regulates our experience of what moral psychologists have called "the divinity dimension," how we monitor of the mixing of the holy and the profane. Given that sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters (e.g., stigmatized groups like the Jews in Nazi Germany) it should come as no surprise that monsters are divinity violations. Something “high” on the divinity dimension is being mixed with something “low.” A man with a bug-head is taboo as it mixes something sacred (the human person created in the Imago Dei) and brings it into contact with something low and base, in this example an insect. By contrast, in Western traditions wings are symbols of the heavenly and the angelic. Thus, when wings are seen in depictions of angels we find the human/wing hybrid elevating rather than monstrous. In the propaganda art of Nazi Germany the Jew was hybridized with rodents. This rat/human hybrid allowed the Nazis to create a monster out of the Jew and, as a consequence, create widespread sociomoral disgust within the German population.

In short, the monster is often a symbol of degradation and contamination. In this, the monster is sub-human. This degradation triggers disgust and activates the expulsive response. The monster must be expelled or eliminated. This means that, once created, the monster often functions as a scapegoat. Again, this was clearly illustrated in Nazi Germany. Not only were the Jews made out to be monsters, they were also blamed and scapegoated for the German defeat in WWI and the nation’s subsequent humiliation.

As noted earlier, the “logic” of the scapegoat works if the scapegoat is seen as an object of defilement. This attribution activates disgust psychology which, in turn, makes scapegoating seem reasonable, intuitive, and right. Somehow, purification is accomplished by an act of expulsion. Something vile on the “inside” is forced “out.” Scapegoating is the religious and social analogue of the vomit response in disgust, a violent rejection of a contaminant from the body. This is the same dynamic seen with the expulsion of monsters from the community. Monsters and their ilk, representing degradation and defilement, must be expelled from the community to secure a “cleansing.” Thus, it is no coincidence that the rodent-like Jew (the monstrous hybrid) fit nicely with the Nazi notion of national, blood, and ethnic purity...

In all of this we see connections between purity and violence...

As noted above, the creation of the monstrous tends to obscure the psychology behind scapegoating practices. Again, scapegoating has become a fairly transparent process, morally speaking. When exposed we understand scapegoating to be a social evil. But the category of the monster is less transparent. We don’t think we are scapegoating when we go after monsters because, well, they are monsters...This is largely a consequence of the fact that the monstrous is an attribution fueled by the passions, very often the emotions of disgust and revulsion. Monsters are transgressive hybrids, objects of desecration and degradation. Consequently, sociomoral disgust makes it difficult for us to step back from monster-hunting crusades to expose the scapegoating mechanisms at work within our own hearts and minds.

But here is some good news: We moderns, in the wake of the gospel, have grown wary of scapegoating. We know “witch hunts” are often misguided and immoral. And this observation also converges upon the monster myths. Monsters are, strangely, both victims and victimizers. This imbues monster stories with a complicated ambivalence. At the communal level monsters are malevolent and dangerous. This provokes the expulsive response. But many monster stories, like the gospel accounts, have a subplot that sits in tension with the dominant expulsive narrative. Often, the monster is discovered to be kind, charitable, and human. The violent mob, in fact, is now the true monster. In a moral inversion we come to identify with the monster over those who seek to kill him. The stories of Frankenstein and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast come to mind. Embedded in the monster myth is the gospel-induced fear that we, in seeking to kill monsters, have become the monster. It is as Nietzsche warned in Beyond Good and Evil: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”