You can check the ending: there’s no cheesy “twist” where the real monsters are human beings.
But I do intend to challenge a common nighttime comfort offered to nervous children. I have to think about these kinds of things because I’ll be a first-time father in (God willing) less than a month.
The scene is a crying child, desperate for his parents’ attention, insisting that there’s a monster under the bed. Imagination has run amok and the blankets and teddy bears no longer seem an adequate defense for such an urgent threat. How do we respond?
“There’s no such thing as monsters.”
Silence ensues. The child wonders, Could it be true? Is there really nothing for me to be afraid of? And, in a perfect world, these words dissolve every sinister apparition concocted by the young restless mind. The household is at peace; alertness gives way to slumber; the lights go off without complaint.
But I don’t have it in me to lie to a child. Of course monsters exist. And I don’t mean demons or human criminals. I mean giant hairy things that would just as soon maul you and eat you.
We call those bears—grizzly bears, especially.
It doesn’t have to be a bear, though. There’s colossal, violent wildlife all over the world! I’d never pick a fight with a silverback gorilla, nor a rhinoceros, nor an anaconda, nor a saltwater crocodile. How do these things not count as monsters!?
To be clear, I understand the intent of the question. If Junior is more precise in his worried fussing, he might say, “I am greatly concerned that there is a living creature residing beneath my mattress, the nature of which no human science has ascertained.” In other words, “There’s something down there and I don’t know what it is.”
This is why, in the first place, it is better to simply go through the motions of checking under the bed and affirming its monster-vacancy. It’s a greater consolation because it shifts the category of that space from that-which-is-unknown to that-which-is-known. But this known-ness is at the heart of the problem of talking about monsters at bedtime for another reason. Classification is the definitive characteristic that distinguishes a regular dangerous animal from what could be called a “monster.” It is what the child’s more verbose supplication implies: there are threatening creatures in the world that we don’t even know about. If we knew what they were, they wouldn’t be called monsters; they would have names.
But, again, of course those are real. No self-respecting biologist would claim that we’ve identified every living species on earth, not even every species that could pose a threat to a small child. So, even in this technical sense of the word, monsters exist. Is it acceptable or responsible to tell a child otherwise?
Why have I gotten all uppity about this? Mostly because I think it’s perfectly reasonable to call a grizzly bear a “monster.” If you checked under your child’s bed and found one of those, you wouldn’t say, “No monster here! Just a regular ol’ grizzly.”
But, secondarily, there’s a philosophical niggle here that I’m trying to tease out. Adults, like children, find safety in identifying and categorizing objects in the world around them. That’s a mainstay of human thought, and I see no reason to lament that fact. What irks me is our (extremely modernist) tendency to portray human knowledge as an omnipotent, nearly-comprehensive kind of thing. We took over the world with science. There are no deep mysteries in the world because we solved them all. There is no danger because we’ve already given it a name. There are no monsters because we’ve classified every living thing.
This is the kind of philosophical conviction latent in a statement like, “There’s no such thing as monsters.” You teach children, without them even noticing, that their firmest grounds for safety is the encyclopedia of human knowledge. There is no unknown to be afraid of because we know it all.
Now, if we’re being honest, our science has given us unprecedented command over the natural world. True danger is relatively scarce in modern domestic life because we’ve suppressed it with technology (barring the tech we’ve designed to destroy ourselves with). But, in our technological tranquility, we are prone to trivialize that which remains unknown. With every surface-level facet of life accounted for, the practical upshot is that the unknown doesn’t exist. Forget the make-believe monsters of childhood; there are no monsters of adult life that cannot be addressed with psychology or medication or social justice or a better job or a phone app. There’s no problem you can think up that won’t deliver hundreds of thousands of results when typed into Google.
If that paragraph sounded more like a celebration of modern living than a sardonic diatribe against it, then I have nothing of interest to say to you. What I’ve described is the results of flat naturalism—belief exclusively in a material world and nothing beyond—and I make no attempt to dialog with it.
For those of us less convinced of humanity’s complete apprehension of the realms it indwells, consider this a word of caution. A world without monsters is also a world without any Being grander than ourselves. The child who is taught that monsters—terrors we haven’t given names to (or refuse to name)—don’t exist will inevitably be confounded to anxiety upon confronting such a terror. The lie is that we are gods and our power over ourselves and our environment is ever increasing. But we are not truly omnipotent, and we can feel that to our core. There are such things as monsters, and a child is better off finding comfort in the One who tames them than by hiding under the blankets of denial.
Thumbnail picture by user ambquinn at Pixabay.