For all of humanity's strengths, for all that we've conquered countless frontiers of thought on our way to earthly preeminence, we remain a species driven by fear. Hundreds of phobias have been documented, ranging from the mundane to the strange, from the mild to the cripplingly severe, but it may be that none of them can compete with our fear of the unknown. This terror is so vast, so all-consuming, that it has lead us to fabricate entire belief systems just to have some sort of order to explain the chaos. We need stability. We need the world around us to make sense. For when it doesn't, we flail for answers we cannot find. Mr. Asma has assembled, here, a wonderful catalogue of humanity's monsters, but it is this fear of the unknown that empowers them to haunt our imaginations.
From misfits to mythology, from demons to the deranged, On Monsters is a tour through the museum of humanity's mental and physical nightmares. Frankensteins and beast men appear alongside zombies and land-bound octopi in this gallery of the grotesque and the devilish, the real and the imagined. The steady progress of science has de-fanged most of these monsters, reducing them to little more than the products of twisted imaginations, but why did we invent them in the first place? What lead otherwise perfectly rational men and women to put their names to first-hand accounts of such deformities when they clearly belong to the realm of the fanciful? Fear and ignorance... The former, revulsion for the unknown, the impure, the apocalyptic, the theological, gave them form, human imaginings based on elements of nature and animated by our disgust. The latter, blindness to the truths of the world, of evolution, of the nature of life, allowed them to persist until scientific advances sucked these creatures back into the pages of myth and story. This virtually guarantees that monsters will always be with us. After all, until science can explain the universe, there will always be room for monsters.
Disturbing and enlightening, On Monsters is an engrossing journey through man's twisted psyche. Mr. Asma, a professor of philosophy, puts our gremlins under the microscope, examining not only the fears that went into their creation but the purposes their existences served. Pleasingly scientific, he relies on reason and research to explain the origins and popularity of the fanciful and the actual. For the author is most revelatory when he connects our nightmares back to the actual creatures that gave rise to them, things so brutally purposeful that they put to rest, for good, any notion that Nature is kind or gentle.
A fascinating read, as much for the history lesson in monsters as for the stroll through the human imagination and the lengths to which it will go to layer logic atop the inexplicable. What's more, Mr. Asma's avoidance of a lecturing tone allows the reader to join him in his exploration of the root causes for our monsters. This invitation should be taken up by anyone even mildly curious about how the mind works and fears. For here lie those forces that spawn prejudice and racism, us and them, good and evil. A better understanding of such forces is bound to make us wiser souls. (4/5 Stars)
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