Humans: A Monstrous History
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. What is a monster? Why do humans create stories about otherness? And what does it tell you about a society that engages in monster-making? Our guest today is Siraka Davis, writer and historian who has written a book about these questions, Humans: A Monstrous History.

Davis was joined in conversation by Sophie McBain, Associate Editor of The New Statesman, to discuss the topic. Let's join our speakers now. Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared with me, Sophie McBain. Our guest today is Sreka Davis.

She is a writer and historian and the author of Humans: A Monstrous History, a book that mires medieval history and modern sci-fi, that weaves stories of zombies with plots from the Muppets, to show how people have defined, explained and vilified otherness across the world through long, wild traditions of monster-making.

The book also looks forward to consider how, amid rising political polarisation and ever more powerful AI, we prevent people from being dehumanised and turned into monsters.

So, Sreka, to start with a very simple question, what is a monster? Ha! Well, one of the ways I define them is by saying there are no monsters and monsters are real. So what on earth do I mean by that? Monster is really a word that's a story in a single word.

Anywhere you have categories or things, whether they're wolves or people or planets, if you have something that transgresses, transcends a category and touches on another one, that is by definition breaking a category. One way to define the monster is to say that it's actually just a story, not a thing in the world. Anywhere you have a classification system for animals or plants or people,

Anything that transcends a single category and maybe it's two things at once or three things at once or maybe doesn't fit the categories, that's a category breaker. So this book is a history of monsters by which it's a history of stories societies have told about individuals and groups who supposedly didn't fit comfortably inside categories so well.

For example, we're used to the kind of TV style fictional monsters, Frankenstein, werewolves, you know, the Borg cyborgs in Star Trek.

And what each of those examples does is it struggles two categories. You know, Frankenstein is scary because, or rather, Frankenstein's monster breaks the boundary between dead and alive. And, you know, the monster's made up of several bodies. Werewolves break the category of human by also being wolves. And cyborgs are humans and machines at the same time.

And so to a certain extent, are monsters an inevitable feature of any community, that there are always these edge cases? And then what matters is not so much that monsters exist, but how we treat them, the value judgments we ascribe to monsters, whether we choose to embrace people who don't quite fit in or whether we try and push them further away from our community.

There are two ways of thinking with monsters that are better than monstrifying people in groups. One is to see each person as on a continuum. There are no fixed boundaries with gaps.

that separate beings. And another way is to embrace the sheer variety of what, you know, seven plus billion people are and can be, rather like in the Muppet Show. They're all different. They're all special. And if everyone is monstrous in the sense of being wondrous and unique, then no one's a monster. So,

inspired you to embark on this very ambitious history of a human history told through monsters? Where did this idea begin? It probably began when I was watching Star Trek: Next Generation as a small child and seeing how the universe actually is much stranger and different than anything any one of our little brains can comprehend.

And I became very interested in the history of exploration when I was an undergraduate. And again, I think this is the deep effect of watching Star Trek and Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. Of course, like in a moment, you start looking at the history of European exploration in the 16th century. I just saw these questions of categories everywhere. You know, before you can make decisions about, you know, colonies or evangelizing people who seemingly haven't heard

the word of the true religion. All of those issues are also tied up with figuring out who is a human, who is capable of salvation, what kinds of rights do people have. And I was a historian of science and still am, and it seemed to me that everywhere you looked there were categories and there was a history of how those exceptions shaped laws or how people decided to shape laws and customs.

around them. So I guess that huge range that you so beautifully alluded to in the beginning from zombies and beings of fiction and, you know, kind of fun and utopian visions like the Muppet Show through to how societies are structured and what's considered normal for human rights and civil rights seemed to be

And it seemed to me that as someone who had started as a physics major for the first half of my undergraduate degree, I'm not afraid of numbers and I'm definitely not afraid of people who work with them. There seemed to be something creative that could be done. People might come for the monsters and the pop culture, but stay for the science, the history and the ethics.

Yeah, because you have this fascinating passage in the book where you're at a astronomy conference and you ask the question, well, is anyone thinking about how we should consider non-human beings who we might make contact with as we explore in space? And everyone there said, that's not the right question. But am I right in thinking that one of the things you've been thinking about is that

if we do start breaching, exploring further into space, that currently we're almost like medieval mapmakers who assume that the further you get to Earth, the more monstrous,

beings will be. We are rather like that and thank you for bringing up like the second origin story or rather the real impetus for this book. So I was at the Library of Congress 10 years ago as a fellow working on my first book which was about voyages of exploration in the 16th century to the Americas from Europe

And I went to this conference on, you know, what I then learned was astrobiology or the study of the possibility of life on other planets in distant galaxies. And there were a whole bunch of scientists and a couple of ethicists and even the official Pope's astronomer, the Pope has an astronomer. And they were talking about how to prepare for the possibility of discovering life in

And there were papers about what to do if the aliens turn out to be hostile. You know, what if there are new pathogens that end up on Earth? And, you know, there were these papers about

threats and how we were going to fight them. And I was thinking, honestly, I mean, if you watch Star Trek, you know that if people are going to, aliens are going to get here, that technology likes to be much too, you know, profound for us to have much chance of dealing with. And it immediately seemed to me that, well,

We need to prepare people on Earth, certainly as they say, but we're not even able to deal with each other, you know, whether it's a committee meeting at work or nations fighting about who gets the water from a river. If we can't deal with these ridiculously little differences between us and recognize that

that maybe we all deserve to live before anybody has 10,000 yachts, for example, then, you know, how on earth are we likely to be able to imagine not having nervous breakdowns or shooting, you know, whatever weapons we have?

if sentient life comes down. It seemed like there was something important that people trained only in science were not getting about how even seemingly very scientific challenges like aliens are landing involve expertise and knowledge that's about people and really the

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic really showed that, and this was not some extraterrestrial alien, but this is a pathogen that has suddenly found people, that's a completely new pathogen. And, you know, we had the, you know, what can only be called a miracle of a vaccine within about a year of the virus being noticed.

But that is not enough. As historic medicine have said, a virus is biological, but a pandemic is social. So the ways in which we deal with something that is on one level very, very much a scientific problem, it's a virus, cannot be separated from how people think about one another and where they think they end as an individual, supposedly at their skin.

And the reality that we are continuing with our environments, with other people and with the microbes that live in our own gut. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

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Learn more at phrma.org slash IPWorksWonders. Yeah, that one of the many false categories we draw is between ourselves and others and ourselves and the world. And a pandemic shows that we are completely interconnected. We're connected to nature, we're connected to pathogens, we're connected to each other. One of the challenges I realized that you must have faced as you write this history is that generally people who have been

treated as monsters, people who've been marginalized throughout history, their voices tend not to be recorded. We hear from the people who turn people into monsters and not from the powerless. And how did you try to redress that as you go through the archives?

Gosh, that is a really important question and it is a challenge not just for people working on the history of the idea of monsters.

So I did two kinds of things. One was to be very explicit at showing how the idea of a monster is actually a process. It's a storytelling process. So I was very clearly doing a dissection of the ways in which stories get told that monstrify others. So this is really denormalizing the monster making.

The second thing I did is, you know, I tried to get kind of behind the eyes, you know, behind the senses of some of the individuals who we do know something about and where we know something about their lives and their choices. For example, there was in the 18th century an incredibly tall man called Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant.

And he used to perform his tallness at fairs, and this is how he earned a living. He was almost eight feet tall. And he died in his late 20s. You know, his heart just couldn't pump blood throughout his body any longer. And he left instructions in his will for...

what he wanted done with his body. He left money to some fishermen to bury him at sea because he didn't want to be displayed after his death. You know, he tolerated it in life to earn a living. So we know something about how he felt, you know, I mean, he, you know, he, once he didn't need the money anymore, implicitly, he really didn't need to be an exhibition piece anymore. But of course, what happened?

And the fisherman didn't bury him at sea. He ended up having his skeleton put on display in London. And there you can see what someone who was monstrified wanted and what actually happened to them in real life.

So where there are traces of people's choices, I mean, that's a point where you can push back against the narrative that those who are, you know, usually writing are writing.

Yeah, the other story that really struck me that I wondered if you might be able to share with the podcast is of Petrus Gonsalves and his family. Could you tell us a bit about him? Yes, indeed. Petrus Gonsalves was a kind of boy aged about eight, kind of late 15th century, living in what we now call the Canary Islands. And he was kidnapped by...

Spanish sailors and taken to France where he was brought up at court. The thing that was unusual about him was that he was covered in hair from head to foot, more or less, all over his body. And so he was what was known as one of these unusually hairy people and the kind of person who in the 16th century was framed as

You know, one of those extraordinary monsters. And he was also from kind of far away. One of those places that was the kind of earliest space of Spanish colonization. But, you know, Petrus's life is strange because he was, on the one hand, he was educated in Latin. He was brought up by court. He became a courtier. He had lots of nice clothes.

So, he's having quite a relatively good life compared to a random peasant in 16th century Europe, perhaps. But, you know, his life was less his own than the ordinary poor person, I would say. You know, he married a woman who wasn't covered in hair, an ordinary French woman. They had about six children, most of whom were unusually hairy. And then, you know,

What aristocrats did at this point is they would gift away some of the unusual people who had come into their quote-unquote collection. And so members of Petrus's family ended up being gifted. So they inhabited this place between pets and enslaved persons and fancy objects of the sort that would later end up in museums.

And every so often you have these sort of signs that Petrus and his hairy children were seen as somewhere between human and animal. There are some portrait of Petrus and, you know, one of his sons and his little daughter Antoinette, all wearing lovely clothes in these, you know, wonderful portraits, but in the background are canes. And this is supposedly where Petrus came from. So...

They are being storified in ways that then made it okay to treat them differently. I mean, often these hairy people were examined by physicians. There are doctors who wrote about how, for example, his daughter Antoinette was hairy all over her body and the hair, I think, was softest on her, softest on her forehead. And he checked all the way down to her private parts.

And so these stories show how bodily autonomy and privacy and dignity are these things that many of us deeply value and often take for granted that can be snatched away. The main stories are written about how someone is actually halfway to some other category or a monster, as they would have called them in the 16th century.

And so one of the themes that is already emerging and comes out through the book is that so

So many of the categories that we use and we live with, whether we're thinking about nations or race or gender, are much more fluid, they're much more socially constructed than a lot of people realize. And I wondered, I know this is quite a big question, but if you could summarize some of what you've written about how the history of monsters sheds light on the origins of

our ideas about race and also with that kind of white supremacist thinking. So today if you say race people are kind of usually thinking about I don't know sort of black brown and white maybe and in the US historically it's often been very binary you're either black or white. Today we also think about race as being about skin color and a few facial features

And there are stories, you know, that are in, you know, the popular imagination about how countries that are multicultural are a very new phenomenon. But actually, none of that is true. People have been traveling to places where they didn't look like one another. They had different faiths. They had different languages for thousands of years. And people have also been framing one another differently.

as different in ways that are very similar to the way white supremacists today talk about how some people are intrinsically better because of their ancestry in ways that carry down through the generations. And if you go back, for example, to the Middle Ages in England, in British Isles,

There was, for example, this chronicler, Gerald of Wales, who was descended on one side from the Norman conquerors and the other side from Welsh nobility, and he wrote about how rubbish the English were. They were supposedly the people who worked with muck and excrement and they could never be better. And so that language of

you know, also of monsters was used. It was kind of language that the English used for centuries about the Irish in the sense that, you know, some people were not civilized and you could tell that from the ways in which they behaved. So even where people didn't, you know, look that different, you know, if they were, I don't know, in a lineup wearing the same costumes,

This deep attempt to say groups are different so as to justify unequal rights is something that is centuries old.

It's also something that the idea of the nation has packed into it. So supposedly people are citizens of a country, you know, for potentially for a variety of different reasons. They became naturalized or they live in a country that at that moment had birthright citizenship. So they inherited their citizenship from their parents. And that's an administrative category on one level. And you could look like anything.

like anyone and have a citizenship of any country in theory. But that's not how people treat one another. So there is this idea of nationhood that's tied to what people look like. So you could be an Irish undocumented person in the US and if you had an American accent, you wouldn't get, you know,

pulled out in a line for looking like, as if you can look like, someone who's not legitimately there. Whereas if you were brown, you could be someone with many generations of ancestry who had been citizens of the US, and yet you supposedly don't look like you can belong to the nation. That's an old myth that is still here.

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And you write that humanity is presently hurtling towards a monster event horizon. I wondered if you could explain what you meant by that. Yes, indeed. The media is currently full of stories about how various groups who have been historically minoritized or discriminated against are facing more of it for being women or trans or ethnic minorities. But

That kind of monster making is contagious. More and more people start becoming people who, for a variety of reasons, are storified as deserving fewer and fewer rights. And that's happening today around AI and where the rights and demands of AI

technology companies to make more and more money by having access to more and more of our data without our permission, you know, that's, you know, where somehow individual people have become the beings who are being monstrified. You know, humanity has become an inconvenience that's in the way of, for example, generative, you know, large language model based AI technology

hoovering up all the things we write and say without our permission so that they can feed it into their models to create pretend people, to create pretend art, to create pretend social media pages. So we are at a point where all of our rights for everyone, even if you are a rich white man,

are at risk and just yesterday Google announced that they were removing all kinds of language about things that

their company wouldn't do and that includes something along the lines of things that are currently seen as transgressing human rights that they're no longer going to check that the work that they do doesn't do that. I forget the exact language but it was in a Wired article this morning so you can see how humans being treated as humans is no longer seen as something that's necessary.

Yeah and from what I understand you felt that as we build AI and AI replaces more human functions then from the perspective of these big tech companies humans are kind of a machine unlike a human doesn't need a coffee break or rights or a home or a salary. Absolutely so you know you

they are kind of envisioning ways of making more profit by their needing to employ fewer people and they're also selling this technology as a way for other companies to come

cut costs. But that's a very, very limited way of looking at the cost benefit analysis. It's only looking at the costs and benefits for a tiny kind of sliver of people, you know, the CEOs whose paychecks are going to be bigger. It's not looking at the environmental cost. It's not looking at intellectual property theft. And it's also not looking at

Whether or not, you know, when we read a novel where, look, what we as consumers might be even looking for. If we receive a piece of fan mail, you know, there's a story last summer about a tech billionaire helping his child write a piece of fan mail to an Olympian athlete. What does well-being human mean if we don't write our own fan mail? If we don't watch TV shows ourselves, but, you know,

read AI summaries of TV shows, everything that makes us human, which is reaching inside our own minds and sharing what's in there, no matter how terrified we are, you know, that's just disappears.

Yeah, it also made me think about what kind of increasingly sort of contactless, automated society changes how we relate to one another. You know, a few years ago, there was that horrible story of a delivery driver who collapsed and the customers stepped over him as he was lying on the floor to ask about their Thai food order. And I thought there's something about the way that information

if you order everything virus green and wait for it to be delivered to your door, it's very easy to forget that there was a human there who had to prepare the food and then had to drive to you or cycle to you on a really snowy, cold day and deliver it. Yes, it's a short answer. And there's a cost factor.

to that because people forget that they're not actually separate from one another and they forget that the kinds of things they normalize for other people aren't going to actually come back and affect them. And a lot of rich people as well as a lot of poor people lost their homes in Los Angeles just recently.

And, you know, Silicon Valley will, you know, tell you it's, you know, or maybe they don't, they're actually not even bothering anymore to say they're, you know, they're looking to make the world a better place. But the idea that you create technologies that expand the distance between us by, for example, removing any need for people to write their own letters or their own novels or

That's a lot broader than the world of creative arts because those kinds of business decisions show people who haven't actually spent any time being a person. They've just been very busy being people looking at a balance sheet. And there's a cost now for all of us.

Yeah and this book was written before the US election but a lot of the threats you see looming on the horizon have been very much turbocharged like the attacks on diversity and exclusion initiatives and the demonization of critical race theory, attacks on trans rights, the sort of

complete failure of climate justice. And as the final question to wrap this up, I wondered if you could say what the history of monster making tells us about what we might be able to do now to protect these vulnerable groups who are now at risk of being demonized. The history of monster making is full of stories being written.

And laws come into being. People, lawmakers in places like 17th century Jamaica and Barbados sat down and wrote laws to define black slaves and white Christian servants, black African slaves. So people are sitting down and writing laws and laws.

One of the things people can do is to notice those stories that are being written about vulnerable groups, notice the mythologies of binary genders and notice that these are stories that are attempting to sow fear and redirect people

people's legitimate grievances about things like financial precarity or their health. And we need to think of our own agency as going beyond the moments we go to the ballot box and try and change those minds of legislators and get information to people who may not have thought about these, you know, categories as social constructs that had changed over time. And so we see moments

like Nazi Germany, moments like the writing of kind of black codes in the Caribbean and the Americas where those stories are happening and to not fall for those individuals who are telling you that

people who are actually just like you are monstrous and threats. Well, thank you so much. It's been a really fascinating discussion. I'd like to thank Sareka Davies for a fascinating conversation. The book, again, is Humans, A Monstrous History, and is available now from your local bookshop. I'm Sophie McBain, and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle,

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