Monsters And The Moral Imagination Summary

Why is the element of fear always associated with monsters? Is it because these creatures are as touchable in real-life as they are in the movies? Alternatively, perhaps the human mind creates their monsters? Stephen T. Asma explores the human mind’s attempt to create monsters in his article “Monsters and the Moral Imagination” by stating that “monsters are a part of our attempt to envision the good life or at least the secure life” (63). Humans envision monsters based on emotional fears, personal life experiences, and psychical conceptions.
As most behaviors develop over time through evolution, Charles Darwin, one of the largest contributors to the science, studies primal fear to understand where from human horror stems. In one of Darwin’s experiments, he brought real and stuffed snakes to a

In his article about monsters in the modern world, Chuck Klosterman claims that “we tend to classify [monsters] as personifications of what we fear” (41). This classification means that we associate monsters with real-life threats such as robbery, physical assault, and murder because our brains hardwire feelings of horror and fear to the emotional process of attack. According to Asma, a person’s nervous system, when put in the position of an emotional, personal attack, tends to follow three common physiological changes: fight, flight, or freeze (Monsters on the Brain 941). Loosely translated, the human body either attacks the threat in a dangerous situation, attempts to escape for the sake of personal survival, or in cases of extreme fright, is unable to move or think. Asma, in another article titled “Monsters and the Moral Imagination,” believes that for humans to attempt control over our fears of given surroundings and potential attacks, we create and imagine monsters to assess our moral abilities when forced into a threating situation