#societies

What are people getting at, what do they think they recognize when they call something monstrous?

I think I have a useful answer to this question, in the sense that it can be distinguished from all the monstrous misuses of the term monstrous.

The human ability to recognize things relies on generating a lot of false positives and then checking each to see if it is a false positive.  

Visual art relies on this. We can look at a painting (in reality a spread of different chemicals in a medium on a surface) and recognize people, animals, plants, skies, terrain features, etc.

Something is monstrous if it generates false positives and relies on those to do harm to the person recognizing it as what it falsely portrays.

However, there will be false positives in recognizing something as monstrous.  

Again, all human recognition relies on generating false positives and then checking them.  A person can think something or someone is monstrous and be in error.

This presents us with four possible situations, each needing work:

Recognize the monstrous as monstrous Recognize the non-monstrous as monstrous Recognize the monstrous as non-monstrous Recognize the non-monstrous as non-monstrous

Because two of these situations are errors and the other two might be errors that can lead to harm to one or both of the beings involved, people need to develop tests to determine if something is monstrous or not.

Here is where the problems develop.

Human recognition is not separable from other aspects of human thinking.  As a result, recognition can be adjusted by experience, lessons, and stories.  

People can be taught to see some people or things as monstrous or not monstrous, to see some people or things as harmful or not harmful, and can be taught what to do to discern the monstrous and what to do about the monstrous when discovered.

There is a vast amount of art and a wide range of stories in, if not all, then most human cultures that do this.  

There is also a broad range of art and stories that anthropomorphize aspects of the real world or human society or individual minds and their ways and look at them as monstrous or non-monstrous.

This only works if the art and teachings are honest about what is and is not harmful and what does and does not do harm.

But if the teaching is not honest things get very bad very fast.  

It is possible to get people to identify the monstrous as non-monstrous and the non-monstrous as monstrous.

This can only do so much.  It is not possible to replace ways of thinking nor erase personal tastes or interests.  

But it is possible to get people to think that some of their ways of thinking, tastes or interests are monstrous.

And it is possible to get people to think or at least to say that some forms of doing harm or being harmed are not actually harmful.

This undermines the utility of monstrousness by overlaying a veneer of normalization and denormalization on top of the question of what is and is not monstrous.  

When this happens monstrousness becomes a tool of propaganda rather than a functional aspect of teachable human awareness.

Monstrousness is useful to propaganda because of its use of proximity in recognition and the warning that it is vital to be able to recognize the monstrous rapidly lest harm befall.  

Every form of prejudice uses propaganda like this by caricaturing the people being declared as monstrous and by making icons of the people declared to be non-monstrous (These need not be visual caricatures and icons. Writing and music work equally well for this process.).  

Any human activity or appearance can be declared monstrous or non-monstrous.  

Here’s a video about the 2000-year-long process of labeling smiling as monstrous.  The video was made by my wife, Alessandra Kelley (who goes by Achronal Art on a variety of online platforms):

The processes of normalization and denormalization can conceal completely practical social changes and leave a blank canvas on which other social frameworks are written.  

Here’s another of Alessandra’s video on the effects of the Little Ice Age on clothing in Western Europe.  Every change depicted has, in fashion histories, been attributed to non-climate factors.  Some of them, such as morality, are used to create ideas of monstrousness.  

What happens when a society goes all in on the process of teaching monstrousness?  

It seems to me that such societies erase all concept of human need and social good.  They pick monsters of the week and declare themselves enemies of those monsters and therefore good.  There is no encouragement or social assistance for actual humanity.  There is only the space of declared monsters and the assertion that those who oppose those monsters are the inherently good people because they do harm to the declared monsters.

Unsurprisingly, the societies that frame themselves as the enemies of monsters become havens for monstrous people.    

Monstrousness can still be a useful concept both in reality and fiction. But it is an aid to recognition and action. It cannot serve as the central focus of humanity and human activity.