monsters

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Mediterranean Journal of Human Rights, 1999, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 467-477

ARE HUMAN RIGHTS FOR MONSTERS TOO?

FRANCESCO SIDOTI

Abstract: The idea of the monster as an evil person with no human feelings and deprived of any rights is a recent creation of the collective imagination. The confusion of the notion of criminality with the teratological notion of the monster is a typical fable of the troubled times we are living in. The monster begins his adventure in the traditional Western culture as a prodigious creature. He is endowed with benevolent understanding in the famous pages of Montaigne, presents the occasion for sanctity to the canon Giuseppe Cottolengo, suffers peculiar amorous throbs in tales from Mary Shelley to Mel Brooks, and is called 'delicate' by Baudelaire. He is even enrolled among indirect educators by Bruno Bettelheim, because he could be useful in children’s fables to prepare them for the horrible experiences they will have to face on becoming adults. Sadly the monsters of the past are no more, as the Granguignol-like analyses of the private slaughterhouses of the cruelest murderers show in detail. The children of darkness and the children of light battle on in the twilight of the old certainties; while the survival and the meaning of democratic systems are called into question by new “demoniac religions”. Unfortunately, we still need monsters to calm us. The monster is the alien in our midst; and his radical otherness can help us to define ourselves. It could help support an uncertain, ambiguous, and shaky identity. In conclusion, the monster is often a kind of cheap therapy to assuage the persistent mental disorders of the average citizen of our times.

l. In this paper I shall try to show that the idea of the monster, an evil person with no human feelings and deprived of any rights, is a recent creation of the collective imagination. The revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment, following in the footsteps of authors like Beccaria and Voltaire, proposed the idea of the humanization of the criminal system. Since 1764, the year when Dei delitti e delle pene (Of crimes and punishment) was published, the age of torture, public executions and quartering began its decline. The criminal slowly became one of us, almost like us, marked by specific but not really hateful characteristics, which covered all the degrees of ordinary humanity, from bad luck to ill health, obviously including the extremist pursuit of personal interest. In 1968 our compassion with the criminal reached its highest point of compassions which had been building up for two centuries. However, almost immediately after this date a precipitous inversion started: the criminal was often labelled a monster. Not of the wonderful, occasionally good-natured kind, as in the past, but a new type of monster, who no longer incarnated physical abnormalities but total abjection and utter waywardness. A personification of Evil.

2. A direct line descends from the Magna Charta Libertatum to the American Bill of Rights of 1791, and then on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The human rights tradition is almost universally considered the best Western traditions born on the basis of the universal brotherhood preached by Christianity (which clearly distinguished itself from Judaism on this point). In the paradigmatic case of Anglo-Saxon history, the achievement of human rights came about in the form of graded progress in each century: civil rights in the 18th, political rights in the 19th and social rights in the 20th century.

In the Sixties many new rights were vociferously established: for students, workers, women, children, refugees, the handicapped, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, the mentally ill, drug addicts, and so on. While people began talking of the rights of the plant kingdom and of the animal kingdom (including fleas, bugs and mosquitoes) even criminals made it to the terminus of a historic route: from the recognition of their status as human beings, with rights that could not be ignored, we moved on to proposals for the abolition of prisons and to a romantic idea of the delinquent which did exist in the past but now appeared in the colours of new ideologies. Suffice it to mention the manner in which the perception of the author of a crime was turned on its head: he now came to be considered first of all as a 'victim' of a repressive, authoritarian, capitalist society and so on.

In the endless history of criminality very significant changes have come about, which in certain aspects are surprising. The year 1968 was a fundamental turning point which marked the apogee of a centuries-old trend to reduce crimes and the serpentine beginnings of a different trend: a fresh increase in crime and a new social anxiety. The great sociological movement of the 19th and 20th centuries had stressed the importance of the ever-growing cult of the individual and of personal dignity to explain the reduction in crime supported by indisputable numbers (for example the figures for murders decreased objectively and significantly).

In modern societies, parallel to the process of civilization of customs and coexistence, there has been a process of the civilization of crime. Between the civilization of crime and the establishment of human rights there is an evident logical and chronological relationship: the constant decrease in crimes co-existed with a constant enlargement of the sphere of the individual's recognized rights.

The rise in crime that began in 1968 came to the public's attention especially after the fall of communism, when it was evident that a new age was born, marked by politological, technological and sociological aspects on an international scale which were very different to those of the past. If we take a look at the history of criminality through the centuries, the enormity of the change is impressive. From a period marked by the decrease in crime we progressed to a period characterized by a marked qualitative and quantitative increase.

3. The terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York was followed by the attacks on the Tokyo underground, both of which left deep repercussions on the public's imagination. Those attacks mark a turning point in the perception of contemporary societies, because these concrete demonstrated how vulnerable their structures are. Comments have been made on the shift from horizontal terrorism (the subway) to vertical terrorism (the skyscrapers); one can speak of the combination of both, or better of the effect of both: the one multiplied by the other with the sum total repeated in a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Every country adapts itself to the spirit of the times by observing national traditions. For example, sabotage on the Deutsche Bahn, the railways of very well organized Germany, led to the mobilization of helicopters with infrared visors and Tornado squadrons equipped for electronic reconnaissance. The traditional skill of the Italians to make an art out of everything also led to an ingenious novelty in this field: not only illegality as a form of art (a topic which would need someone like Burckhardt, the author of Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, to give an adequate explanation), but the use of terrorist attacks as a symbolic means of explanation, communication and bargaining. This is what some people see in the serious attacks carried out in Rome, Milan and Florence.

In an extremely vulnerable world, for a series of technological, demographic, and economic reasons which ore known to all, the potential of making threats and of destruction is enormous. Even from this perspective the old, or better the eternal, topic of criminality is metabolized and exorcised within unprecedented cultural forms. Some old patterns for absorbing the thrusts of fear have become obsolete, namely those linked to communism or to the direct anti-communist reaction. In the industrial age fear was materialistically and rationalistically motivational (especially as social fact, and only exceptionally as degeneration of science and industry). Now the definitions of fear are more intense, widespread and indeterminate, occasionally connected to an unprecedented phobia of the body and sexuality, worthy offspring of this age of genetic engineering, organ transplants, test-tube fertilization, hard drugs and AIDS, and the thriving commercialization of corneas, kidneys, blood, embryos, gametes, virgins and children. It's not that reason has gone to sleep, but worse in a sense; reason is surrounded and in certain aspects it has been overpowered by a world which is brimming with traps and dangers. The monsters of Goya were separate and distinct from reality, like the windmills of Cervantes, the imaginations of Ariosto or the damned of Dante. Now reality is apparently producing monsters who live in the real world, feeding on threats and real nightmares.

It is certainly a new age in various aspects. The founder of criminology had a certain idea of the criminal, not of the monster. Since 1870 following Lombroso’s approach a vision connected with historical evolution which, at the individual level, could get blocked or move backwards towards the ancestral and animal past of humanity has prevailed. He stresses that primitive instincts “eliminated from civilization could turn up again in just one individual”; he-believes that the criminal is incapable of pain and morality, and is marked by instability and by the violence of passion; he concludes by defining delinquents as "savages living in the midst of a flourishing European civilization”. The ideas of Lombroso are also shared by other eminent authors of his time; for instance in Freuds descriptions of the psychology of the masses, certain dynamic processes are seen from a non-historical and universal perspective which con be defined as typically Lombrosian: Freud considers the repressive action of civilization as positive and he fears the risk of release from moral inhibitions, with a possible unsettling return of 'relics of primordial times' to the human mind, which reawaken, re-emerge and drive one to the satisfaction of primeval aggressive and violent urges.

The eighteenth century criminal was not a monster: he was still a human being, perhaps even too humane; at worst he was a savage, as in Lombroso or Freud. This concept was perfected during the twentieth century. For instance it was pointed out that there are different ways to judge a person who is considered guilty in the juridical sense of the word. For a considerable amount of legal literature, the larger part of the kind of behaviour which is termed criminal is simply the result of failure in the battle for sharing wealth. The theory according to which “it would not be possible to draw a clear line between the behaviour of a person who works honestly and that of those who are commonly called rogues" has been “a constant point of reference, confessed or unconfessed, of much scientific writing”.

Highly respected criminologists have often insisted on the normality of criminals; from this point of view many persons condemned to imprisonment (for example for crimes against mankind’s heritage) are substantially prisoners of war, unlucky fighters, captured in the course of military operations aimed at re-enforcing trench outposts in the battle for control of the economic system (Vold 1980).

Regarding the normality of much illegal behaviour, a number of treatises have stressed one important point: certain acts can become criminal overnight (like the consumption of alcohol in the United States during the period of prohibitionism) or they could be redefined as no longer criminal after having been considered so for many years (like voluntary interruption of pregnancy). The more significant problem, however, is a different one: in societies where conflict for sharing power and money is very marked, everyone attempts to brand his rivals criminals, or to present as legal their own illicit behaviour. On this subject Marxist writers have written whole libraries, but even non-Marxists and anti-Marxists have stressed this point; in this perspective Pareto, in paragraph 2086 of the Trattato di sociologia, points out how fine the line that separates the legal from the illegal actually is: “Whoever uses illegal violence would like nothing better than to transform it into a legal action”.

4. Sophisticated and articulated ideas on criminality were established and became dominant until, from 1968 to 1989, there was another epoch-making turning-point. This change threw interpretative categories into confusion. For instance the concept of the criminal State entered into literature based on the massacres of minority groups and innocent peoples (Hebrews, gypsies, Armenians, Kulakis, Cambodians, etc.). Such atrocities had always occurred in history but now they open up an interpretative category, which is welcome since it serves as a justification of direct and indirect intervention in many parts of the world. The term criminal State is associated with the so-called democides, that is the mass massacres perpetrated by governments which, in this century, have been calculated as reaching the figure of about 170 million victims.

According to certain observers a complex of events (first of all the cold war, but in a significant manner also the disturbing traffic in psychotropic substances) must have produced the criminalization of wide sectors of the international economy, so much so that some experts, like the American senator Kerry, have affirmed that reality has surpassed the imagination and that we should start no less than “a new war"; it is true that States have often adopted behaviour which can be considered as typically criminal, but today the spread of the notion of criminal States seems to be a tortuous way to depict the global village as lacking law and order, waiting for the arrival of a pure-hearted and fearless sheriff.

The major risk here is that excessive demonization will not only affect innocent people but that will also build up solidarity for the actual perpetrators or it will induce persons who need answer only for small errors to behave like louts.

To better explain this evolution, or degeneration, of the interpretative categories it will be useful to mention the transformations of the Mafia, which constitute another evident case of deviation of phenomena that, on account of the extraordinary historical acceleration of our time, have undergone a kind of genetic mutation. Up to 1968 the Sicilian Mafia was a pre-modern relic within the industrial society. It used to function in general like a kind of parallel State, selling its protection in a more effìcient way than the State proper, dealing out sentences and collecting taxes, on the basis of a strict moral code, albeit bloody and illegal: they never murdered women, magistrates, policemen, and so on. The old code of honour has now disappeared, taking with it its Spartan and sober customs which in its own way, respected law and order. The term itself has become a metaphor, and has been taken out of its original geographical context; in fact now one speaks of the Russian Mafia, the Albanian Mafia, and so on, with reference to criminal organizations which are characterized by a tribal set-up and by their ferociousness.

Originally, the Sicilian Mafia was anything but tribal and ferocious; the constant search for a privileged relationship with the forms of political power corresponded to a vocation for order that made it a parallel State rather than a criminal organization, so much so that people spoke about it with authority as an institutionalized power.

In a situation of great tension the evolution of intelligence apparatus is very significant. According to an age-old tradition these intended to act against a foreign enemy, against them and not against us. It is increasingly clear, however, that the distinction between external and internal is becoming less important. Besides it has been stated that the “more important” element for the definition of intelligence units is the concept of threat, because “without threats there would be no use for intelligence services... A threat is not only an unknown factor which could harm somebody’s interests, but something which is capable of causing very serious harm”. It has also been observed that intelligence itself can be defined as “the threatening collection of secrets which threaten someone else”.

The central position of the concept is therefore relevant both concerning threats, which must be faced, and threats which one may pose to his adversaries. Some intelligence operations, which have taken years of hard work, like the French secret services' efforts to trace Carlos the Jackal, or like the American secret services' quest for Aimal Kansi, have followed the logic of instilling fear in a world in which it is necessary to be in a position to dissuade, in the old traditional sense. The consequence being that an idea which actually already existed in classical culture, although in the midst of limitations of various kinds, could be extended to extreme limits: the idea that the formal legal set-up and common morale themselves are not completely binding.

Hobbes rightly said in his De Cive: “All the duties of those who hold power are included in this one saying: the salvation of the Community is the supreme law” (XIII, 2). On the occasion of very serious events, people often speak of monsters, and so one must ask: how shall we behave when dealing with monsters? A special case is how to deal with terrorists. Of the members of the Real IRA who in 1998 killed 28 persons in a bomb attack in Ireland, Tony Blair said that they were 'psychopaths' and minister Mo Mowlan stated: “These are not normal persons, they are animals” (slandering, as often happens, those animals which are known for their gentle nature, and in general all animals which, from a moral point of view ere much more likeable than persons who coldly plan the murder of innocent people and even try to justify their actions by referring to so-called revolutionary values).

In all countries, the media and the people become obsessed by the idea of monsters. The consequences ere of great importance. There is an element of truth in Frederick Nietzsche’s statement that: "as a result of looking down the abyss, the abyss looks inside us". When they are convinced that they ere facing events that do not seem typically human but more akin to the behaviour of savages, animals or monsters, many people (private citizens as well as victims, the media and the police) may resort to behaviour, which does not respect the careful observance of procedure. This kind of deviation may induce a large number of anomalies, ranging from rough justice to the manipulation of evidence.

One can conclude that in an age marked by shifting moral criteria and by a high level of vulnerability, there is the constant risk of monster-hunts, inspired by the desire to hunt down a scapegoat to appease bloodthirsty public opinion. A step back from the process of civilization can be taken by whoever perpetrates the most hateful crimes as well as by the well intentioned who oppose these crimes. Private vendettas, the rejection of commitment for civil liberties, calls for lynching and capital punishment are legitimate products of this new age of criminal phenomena. According to various observers a deep identity crisis is at the root of many cases of deviation which have occurred inside corrective institutions and which have led to serious charges against officials who should be responsible for mainting public order. If the concept of guilt becomes controversial, even the concept of responsibility will become hazy. When these fundamental ideas ere distorted and become problematic, uncertain and ambiguous notions, then the citizens can easily be induced into misunderstandings and errors, and the corrective institutions themselves will be the victims of serious confusion about the usefulness and the meaning of their role.

It is highly significant that the notion of criminality is often confused with the teratological notion of the monster. It is a typical fable of the not-so-tranquil times we ere living in: the monster begins his adventure in the most classical and oldest Western culture as a prodigious creature.

The monster is endowed with benevolent understanding in the famous pages of Montaigne, presents the occasion for sanctity to the canon Giuseppe Cottolengo, suffers peculiar amorous throbs in tales from Mary Shelley to Mel Brooks, is called 'delicate' by Baudelaire, and he is even enrolled among indirect educators by Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment because he could be useful in children's fables to train them in facing all those horrible experiences that they will have to face in adulthood.

Sadly the monsters of the past are no more, as the Granguignol like analyses of the private slaughterhouses of the most cruel murderers show in detail. The children of darkness and the children of light battle on under the livid sky of the twilight of many certainties; while the survival and the meaning of democratic systems are called into question by new “demoniac religions".

For all these reasons, as used to happen in the classical shifts between fantasy and reality, unluckily 'we still need monsters to reassure us'. The monster is the alien in our midst; he's the inexplicable, the incredible, and the inadmissible that has finally become visible and tangible. The radical otherness of the monster can help us define ourselves; it could give credit, by contrast, to an inexistent kindness; consequently it can give reassurance to an uncertain, ambiguous, shaky identity. By way of conclusion, the monster is often a kind of cheap therapy for the thumping mental disorders of the average citizen of our times.

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