On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Read Online Free PDF Page B

2002 blockbuster
Signs
, with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix fighting off the invading aliens. All these films portrayed the monster killers as fathers, family men forced to extremes to protect their children. As Robert Neville (Will Smith) in
I Am Legend
tells his daughter, “Don’t worry, Daddy’s going to take away the monsters.” This may seem trivial, obvious, and even naïve to the cynical cognoscenti, but what father hasn’t felt this same impulse deep in his bones?
    Contrary to the narrative of early twentieth-century anthropology, early humans were probably not bold, assertive predators, marching confidently through the savanna to spear their threatening competitors. Male aggression, we were told, was put to good use in the realm of the hunt and of course in primitive warfare. This kind of domination and mastery of the field was helped along by some burgeoning brain power, but such domination of the other animals led to much further cognitive and cultural progress. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book
Blood Rites
, surveys more recent anthropology and corrects the old story. We should not think about “man the hunter” in Paleolithic times, she writes, but “man the hunted.” She reminds us that humans are fragile creatures: “Our biology is alone enough to suggest an alarming level of vulnerability to the exceptionally hungry or casual prowler.” 7 If we are to infer some aspects of human psychology from the evolutionary environment in which they developed, than we had better get an accurate picture of that environment and our status in it. Early humans were not uber predators but scavengers, waiting in the bushes to sneak in and pilfer morsels. It doesn’t occur to us anymore to factor in the huge role that big cats, for example, must have played in the cognitive, emotional, and imaginative lives of our progenitors, but we were constantly harassed and victimized by them. Moreover, even in recent history, when the numbers of such predators are way down, a staggering number of deaths from lions, tigers, crocodiles, and wolves have been chronicled. “The British,” Ehrenreich reports, “started recording the numbers of humans lost to tigers [on the Indian subcontinent] in 1800, and found that by the end of the century, approximately three hundred thousand people had been killed, along with 6 to 10 million farm animals.” Though it may seem a remote possibility to us now, during the formation of the human brain the fear of being grabbed by sharp claws, dragged into a dark hole, and eaten alive was not an abstraction.
    Men tend to respond to fear and vulnerability with aggression. The philosopher Harvey Mansfield writes, “Men have aggression to spare; they keep it in stock so as to have it ready when it is needed and even, or especially, when it is unneeded and unwanted.” 8 Before men ever fought for honor or economic gain or even turf they must have fought for their own children and mates. Monsters, both real and imagined, are bound up with our feelings of insecurity and our responses to those anxieties. Masculine audacity and bravado is the reflex response to vulnerability.
    This universal paternal impulse to protect and use whatever aggression is necessary is rehearsed again in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 novel
The Road
. McCarthy gives us a powerful story about a father trying to protect his son in a postapocalyptic world of roaming cannibals. The father must safeguard his son, lest he become a captive catamite slave whose limbs are harvested by cannibal monsters. Among other things, it is an allegorical story about the need to shelter the good, which is fragile, from the monstrous world.
    To a young boy, monsters are exciting and alluring. They are invoked daily as the imaginary foes of the playground. Anyone, I think, who has raised a boy gets this point. When that boy becomes a man, however, he feels keenly, rightly or wrongly, that monsters have become his responsibility, part