SPENGLER Zombies remind us that death is
social By Spengler
Paradoxical as it may sound, the one
thing that each us of must do alone - namely die -
is the most social of all acts. That is because we
construct our lives so that they will have meaning
after our death, and we depend on others to
sustain that meaning. What we call culture is
communication between our ancestors and
descendants; what we call tradition is the link to
past generations which we transmit to future ones.
When we cease to construct our lives this way -
when we reject tradition and transgress the
culture - we also know that our lives have no
meaning beyond our physical existence, and we
begin to feel dead.
That explains the
improbable popularity of the zombie sub-genre. A
search of the International Movie Data Base for
productions with the term "zombie" yields just
under 1,000 titles, the same number as the search
term, "cowboy." Thankfully, only one title in the
IMDB data base combines
the two genres.
Zombies are boring by
construction, even more boring than cowboys. All
zombie films, moreover, have the same plot: some
untoward event turns people into zombies, and
people killed by zombies also turn into zombies,
until no-one is left but a tiny band of human
survivors. Of all the formulaic genres, zombie
films are most predictable in terms of plot and
the least suggestive of new of special effects.
The fact that they are especially cheap to produce
does not explain why people watch them.
There are any numbers of reasons for the
why monsters command the attention of movie
audiences, including the fact that our world is
beset by real monsters who perpetrate inhuman acts
(How
the hijackers changed the culture, Asia Times
Online, September 8, 2011). One out of 10
Hollywood features released in 2009 was a horror
film, according to the International Movie
Database; 10 years ago only one in 25 belonged to
the horror genre. During in the 1930s, the
proportion was one only in 200.
Why
zombies, though, of all supernatural creatures?
Vampires, werewolves and other monsters can have
personalities - I still find the 1931 version of
Dracula creepily effective - but all zombies are
the same. The zombie sub-genre depends entirely on
the appeal of an image and a situation, which was
done rather well in the 1968 film "Night of the
Living Dead," and which filmmakers have remade
almost a thousand times since.
Nonetheless
the zombie theme continues to gain popularity,
presently through the American Movie Channel's
"The Walking Dead" series, now in its second
season. It is the most popular series in the
history of cable television among men aged 18 to
34, and one of the most popular of all time.
There is something iconic about the
struggle of survivors against the zombie herd.
Modernity tells us that each of us is alone in the
universe to wrest what meaning we may from our
brief span of sentience. That is a hopeless task;
if we must invent our own meaning, then by
implications, the meanings that our ancestors
invented will be just as meaningless to us as our
meanings will be to our descendants, if any. The
notion that we must find the meaning of life for
ourselves ultimately negates itself, as I argued
recently in this space (Why
you won't find the meaning of life, Asia Times
Online, August 30, 2011). Any sense of meaning
that applies only to us, but not to our ancestors
or our descendants, will putrefy along with our
flesh. That is why we cannot invent meaning for
ourselves: we can only receive it from tradition
and pass it on. Call this the existential paradox.
If we detect no meaning in the lives of
our ancestors, to be sure, we are unlikely to
bother to bring children into the world who will only
come to despise us the way we despise our own
parents. Demographers across the ideological
spectrum, including secular liberals like Eric
Kaufmann and Kevin Phillips, agree that people of
faith tend to have children while the
non-religious tend not to have children.
In the long term, secular modernity will
liquidate itself through infertility. But in the
meantime, people trapped in the existential
paradox experience a kind of death in life - the
reverse of the religious idea of life in death,
thanks to the God "who keeps faith with those who
sleep in the dust," as Jews pray daily. That helps
to explain why zombies, the most tedious of film
personalities, fascinate young-adult audiences.
Zombie film plots may be stupid and
repetitive, but there is something preternaturally
compelling about the image of dead people walking.
Why this should be the case becomes clear if we
consider the opposite case, namely the Jewish and
Christian ideas of eternal life. These are not
identical, but are closely related. Eternal life
is God's gift to his people; individuals partake
of it by virtue of membership in God's people, as
Harvard professors Kevin J Madigan and Jon D
Levenson of Harvard University explain (Life
and death in the Bible, Asia Times Online, May
28, 2008):
What does not die is the people
Israel, because God has, despite their grievous
failings, honored his unbreakable pledge to
their ancestors. Israelite people die, like
anyone else; the people Israel survives and
revives because of God's promise, despite the
most lethal defeats.
That, the authors
write, is what Isaiah meant when he proclaimed the
abolition of death:
He will destroy death forever. My
Lord GOD will wipe the tears away From all
faces And will put an end to the reproach of
His people Over all the earth - For it is
the LORD who has spoken. (Isa
25:8).
This national triumph over
death is realized fully in the ultimate
resurrection of each individual as a "unity of
body and soul," in a doctrine that Christianity
adopted from Judaism. Again, as Madigan and
Levenson maintain, "The ancient Israelites,
altogether lacking the materialist habit of
thought so powerful in modernity, did not conceive
of life and death as purely and exclusively
biological phenomena. These things were, rather,
social in character and could not, therefore, be
disengaged from the historical fate of the people
of whom they were predicated."
The Temple
at Jerusalem was the physical manifestation of
God's promise in this world, "a paradise-like
place where God, for all his purity and holiness,
is nonetheless available on earth and his blessing
as abundant. It is the antipode to the grave, a
"fountain of life" (Psalm 36:9). In ancient Israel
the whole male population was required to present
itself at the Temple for the three annual
pilgrimage festivals, and sang (Psalm 115): "It is
not the dead who praise the Lord, those who go
down to the place of silence; it is we who extol
the Lord, both now and forevermore."
Much
of what we know about Temple ritual clarifies
ancient Israel's understanding of eternal life. A
member of the hereditary priest-caste, the
Kohanim, couldn't preside over Temple sacrifices if
he had come into contact with a corpse, which
causes ritual defilement. Nor could a priest with
a physical defect officiate at the Temple,
presumably for a similar reason: nothing that
bespeaks physical corruption has a place in the
Temple service. No animal with a blemish or a
defect might be sacrificed, and no priest with a
physical defect could perform the sacrifice. The
Temple service, the "fountain of life," excludes
all contact with death and the appearance of
physical corruption.
Christianity's
salvific claims, in turn, rest on continuity with
the Temple. In Matthew 12, for example, Jesus
asserts that his disciples have the authority to
break the Sabbath and gather grain, by the same
authority that allows the priests in the Temple to
perform sacrifices on Sabbath. "The Son of Man is
Lord of the Sabbath," Jesus states, in the first
explicit Christological declaration in the
Gospels. He claims that his person embodies the
Temple as the source of eternal life. Pope
Benedict XVI in his 2007 book Jesus of Nazareth
emphasizes this passage, citing the work of Rabbi
Jacob Neusner.
The biblical symbolism of
the Temple - the embodiment on earth of God's
promise of eternal life to Israel - is worth
contrasting with images of the walking dead. I do not mean
to suggest that the makers of zombie films
intentionally set out to pervert the symbolism of
the Bible - I doubt any of them bother to read
Leviticus 22. Nonetheless, the death-ravaged
features of the zombie herd convey the concept of
collective death just as vividly as the Kohanim
represented the ancient Israel's collective life.
With the destruction of the Temple in 70
CE, to be sure, the priestly ritual was suspended.
Rabbinic Judaism transplanted the holiness of the
Temple into synagogue and home. The detailed
attention that observant Jews devote to the rules
of the kosher kitchen may seem strange to the
casual observer, until it is considered that the
Jewish home is intended to be a sort of Temple in
exile, and its Sabbath table an extension of the
Temple altar.
Among Christians, the
identification of holiness with bodily integrity
persists in the notion of incorruptibility of
saints among Catholics and especially Orthodox
Christians.
How quaint, how superstitious
these ancient notions of eternal life seem to the
secular modern world, and how strange and
primitive the rituals which sustained the
Psalmist's conviction that God would not abandon
his servants to the grave. Modernity tells that
nothing in the universe cares whether we exist or
not, and where the meaning of our lives is
concerned, we are all on our own.
We think
of ourselves as rational folk. And yet we find
almost 10 million pairs of eyes glued to the
television screen each week when a new episode
airs of "The Walking Dead," enthralled by the same
images, but in reverse: the walking dead in place
of the dead awaiting resurrection, animated
corpses instead of wholesome priests or
uncorrupted saints, a terrified band of survivors
huddled against encroaching death instead of the
happy procession of God's people to the source of
eternal life.
We have dismissed the Jewish
and Christian hope of eternal life as superstition
offensive to reason, but instead, we find
ourselves trapped in a recurring nightmare. We
know that we will die, but (as Woody Allen said)
we don't want to be there when it happens. We act
as if exercise, antioxidants and Botox will keep
the reaper away, but we know that our flesh one
day must putrefy nonetheless.The more we try to
ignore death, the more it fascinates us. The more
we tell ourselves that mortality doesn't apply to
us, the more it surrounds us. And the more we try
to fight off the fear, the more we feel like the
beleaguered survivors resisting the zombie herd.
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