Familiar Concepts Lead to Changes

“Monsters and the Moral Imagination” by Stephen T. Asma sums up a lot of our discussions in class. I feel like we have gotten to the point where we have talked about so many aspects of monsters that we have become familiar with the author’s main points.  

Some examples:

“The uses of monsters vary widely. In our liberal culture, we dramatize the rage of the monstrous creature—and Frankenstein's is a good example—then scold ourselves and our "intolerant society" for alienating the outcast in the first place. The liberal lesson of monsters is one of tolerance: We must overcome our innate scapegoating, our xenophobic tendencies.”

We have talked about this many times. We create these monstrous creatures that serve as our fear for different and unknown and to protect ourselves we condemn them to a life of alienation.

“Monsters can stand as symbols of human vulnerability and crisis, and as such they play imaginative foils for thinking about our own responses to menace.”

We discussed this back when we read “The Monster Within: Post-9/11 narratives of threat and the U.S. shifting terrain of terror.” They reflect what has happened in our lives and how that has changed us. They represent our newfound fears after tragedy.

“In a significant sense, monsters are a part of our attempt to envision the good life or at least the secure life… In order to discover our values, we have to face trials and tribulation, and monsters help us imaginatively rehearse. Imagining how we will face an unstoppable, powerful, and inhuman threat is an illuminating exercise in hypothetical reasoning and hypothetical feeling”

We want to survive and monster stories are exaggerated circumstances of what can happen to us. But they can also prepare us for realistic situations where we might actually have to fight those monsters. This can also be traced back to our post 9/11 discussion or when we read the X-Men comic. The monster represents those struggles and obstacles in our lives that we need to face in order to survive and become better.

We have discussed so many of this points so I wondered, why are we reading about this again? Haven’t we heard all of this before? Maybe we have, but it’s a good thing that we are reading this. It serves much more than just a refresher; it can help you change your mind a little bit or it can confuse you.

Asma’s words confused my perspective of a monster. Throughout this whole course I have placed characters into two different categories: monsters and wrongfully accused monsters. Monsters are usually our enemies who are trying to harm us. Their actions are devastating and unforgivable.  However, there are other characters categorized as monsters who we sympathize with because they have no other options but to act like monsters. The actions may be monstrous, but they are not monsters. The definition changes for each situation/character. Now I am not so sure this is valid. I realized that I was basing the definition on the connection with or feelings towards a specific character. In other words, if the character’s actions were justified by a troubled past or unfair circumstances, the character was not a monster in my eyes and their actions were forgivable.

After reading “Monsters and the Moral Imagination,” I realized that a character’s actions make him/her a monster, regardless of the reasoning behind it. Asma states “if you can gather a man's family together at gunpoint and force them to watch as you cut off his head, then you are a monster. You don't just seem like one; you are one.” This is true, there is nothing that can justify this action. We can make up a story that the man could have done horrible things to the person who murdered him, and this man was just getting his revenge. He is still a monster and his actions are devastating and unforgivable. This is an extreme case, but it can be true for every case. However, I think it is important to state that some monsters are worse than others and that some monsters can change their ways and become better. Furthermore, it is okay to sympathize with monsters, it is okay to feel bad about what caused them to become this way. It is even okay to understand why they are doing what they are doing, but we must realize that they are monsters. Our connections with and feelings towards them does not change anything. At least this is what I think now, maybe next week we’ll read something else and I’ll change my mind again!

Blurred Lines

Grey areas. No matter how logical, how black and white you think you are, there is always some part of you that finds itself in a grey area. Right and wrong. Good and bad. Typically these are easy things to categorize, to separate and identify. But sometimes, those lines become less distinct and more blurred. The entire storyline of the X-Men movies is set in one giant cluster-fuck of a grey area that makes your head spin. 

The movie begins with the explanation of the new mutant population that has developed and the issues that have come with it. We immediately feel sympathy for these mutant people who are just struggling to live a normal life. They are really people, just like us, but with some difference that make them outcasted from their societies and homes. But its easy to feel sympathy from the comfort of your couch.

We see the evil Senator, hitched on the idea of making mutants identify themselves, perhaps even wear some sort of identifying marker that sets them apart (cue the gut-wrenching reminders from the treatment of the Jewish people in the Holocaust which was presented in the opening scene.) We hate this idea, this outright attack on personal freedom. We hear what he says and we identify it as wrong and bad.  It seems so far fetched to us that someone could think this narrow-mindedly and be so prejudiced. 

But then we meet Magneto and things begin to blur rather quickly. Here's a mutant just like the others, in fact very good friends with Xavier, but he does not seem to be so good and just. He too, fights for mutants' rights but he's also fighting for mutant superiority. He and his cronies are easily identified as the bad guys, the monsters, but the real issue is, are they?

I believe this goes back to the idea that monsters are not inherently bad just as heroes are not inherently good. They have a mixture of both, perhaps monsters have less good and heroes have less bad, but they still have both. Magneto was fighting for what he believed in, for his rights as a mutant and for the mutants to become the dominant power in society. The Senator was fighting for what he believed was best for the humans and their personal safety and to continue to ensure that the humans remained at the top. Magneto wanted to stop the discrimination; the Senator wanted to stop something that was a threat to his status-quo. It’s easy to say that discrimination is bad and that the Senator was evil but we also cannot forget that we are also humans. 

Like I said, it’s simple to be on the mutants' side when I'm sitting on a couch, in a society where mutants don't exist. But it does make me question what would society do if this were a real situation. Is there not an entire group of individuals in our country who want to stop other groups of people from entering our country based on their differences? Yet can this be equated to mutants?

I am, body and soul, against discrimination. It disgusts me and makes me sick to see what others do to each other in the name of their own perverted ideas of social norms. Mutants represent every past culture, society, religion, sub-culture, you name it, that has been discriminated against because of their differences. There are people who don’t agree with me on my ideas of acceptance and tolerance but these are people who raised me, who love me and whom I love. Do I think they are evil and wrong and unjust? Do I throw them into the same category as the Senator? Can we identify Magneto as the bad guy outright? What is right and what is wrong?

It’s a grey area. There is no right or wrong answer, no black and white. So how would we as a society react if a mutant population began to develop? Only time will tell.