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2 SINOGRAPH Zombies in the communism of the
mall By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - At the time when death was very
real, when humanity lingered every day on the
verge of extinction because of war, famine,
epidemics and just poor sanitary conditions, we
dreamed of eternal life.
Where once it was
the case that whole peoples were wiped out and the
total number of humans did not grow significantly
for thousands of years, now we are 7 billion and
can reasonably expect to live actively over 80 -
double of the average humanity ever lived in its
history. We in the West have nightmares about
zombies: living dead transforming everybody in
their own image. Is it really the end of life on
Earth? Or is it the end of life just for the West?
The total world population probably never
exceeded 15 million
inhabitants before the
invention of agriculture [1], around 10,000 BC.
About 10 millennia later, the world population had
increased immensely. In the Eastern and Roman
Empire alone there were about 60 million people
(AD 300-400). [2]
The plague outbreak that
began during the reign of Emperor Justinian caused
the population of Europe and the Mediterranean to
drop by around 50% between 541 and the 8th
century. This killed the hope of a return of the
rule of the Roman Empire and opened for a massive
Arab invasion and the birth of Islam in an area,
the Mediterranean Asia and North Africa, formerly
cradle of the Byzantine authority. The
consequences of that plague are still present with
us now.
The population of Europe was more
than 70 million in 1340, when Northern Italy had
taken the lead in shaking the clout of the old
Holy Roman German Empire by creating groups of
cities self ruled and dominated by a new class of
merchants without the aristocratic lineage of the
old feudal society.
Then an epidemic
killed millions and at the end it gave virtual
birth to the Renaissance (literally: rebirth) and
modernity. The Black Death of 14th century,
described in Boccaccio's Decameron, reduced
the world's population from an estimated 450
million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400.
It took roughly 200 years for Europe's
numbers to regain its 1340 level. China
experienced a population decline from an estimated
123 million around 1200 to about 65 million in
1393, possibly because of a combination of Mongol
invasion and the plague. We are directly children
of that plague.
During the Industrial
Revolution, children's life expectancy increased
dramatically. Between 1700 and 1900, Europe's
population increased from about 100 million to
over 400 million. The areas of European settlement
comprised 36% of the world's population in 1900.
Now the situation is just the opposite:
wars are not for extermination but for vague
political purposes, famines are an oddity to be
kept on a reservation in Africa, and epidemics are
the stuff of films, seeming to be far from
endangering humanity.
Our biggest risk
appears to be overpopulation, being suffocated by
our own people as we incessantly spawn and by our
ever increasing and unstoppably improving living
conditions. We - the West, America, Europe, and
Japan - now dream of the living dead. This is the
clear, apparent, and yet overlooked truth Spengler
reveals to us in his latest essay. (See Zombies
remind us that death is social Asia Times
Online, May 15, 2012.)
The living dead are
our own people, giving birth to and raising seven
healthy children when thousands of years of
history tell us that only one or two should
survive. They are the immigrants and people in the
BRICS countries, spewing new wealth and new young
people, and thus challenging our ancestral
conception that only a few will live, and only a
few will have good living conditions.
On
the contrary, the BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India,
China and South Africa - are bringing us closer to
the inconceivable dream of a "communism of wealth,
where from Vladivostok to Vancouver, via Asia,
everybody can be middle class, can access and
ransack a shopping mall."
The zombies are
the about 400 million unborn Chinese (the
reduction in Chinese population growth from strict
family planning) sacrificed on the altar of
economic development by means of the one-child
policy since 1980.
All these facts, we
know in the memory of our genes, are unnatural: we
should die at 40, as our DNA is programmed, and as
our ancestors did until 100 years ago; we should
have 11 children, only three of whom survive
infancy or birth, as happened to our grandparents.
We, in our world, are the unnatural
monsters waking up from death and deciding
everyday, without God's help, who should live and
who should die with an abortion or a pill. In this
world, where life is stretched beyond its natural
limits into a morbid yet real fantasy of ever
prolonging the possibility of staving off death,
we are obsessed with living death, as if it were
our real condition.
Up to 100 years ago,
when daily life was precarious, tough, and
uncertain, people dreamed of eternal life. Now,
when death seems defeated at every moment by the
ever-growing mass of healthy people and our ever
lengthening and more comfortable life, we have
nightmares of death. Eternal life seems in our
control, and yet we know it is an illusion: we are
going to die, but life is booming all around us.
What is this personal death with so much life
around us, something that humanity never before
experienced? We are the zombies, we have turned
into zombies, and we accept the zombie life as
long as we can still have a semblance of life.
Can old religions, the only link to the
ancient world and a world beyond our own, provide
answers for this new mindset, which blows apart
the feeling of what we know we should be? We
should be mortal bodies in a mortal body of people
dithering on the brink of extinction. Or, it is
like a new pact with the devil: we have traded our
immortal souls for immortal bodies that-we know
it-will die anyway. It is a new version of the
legend of Faust, trading his eternal soul for a
slightly prolonged life - 100 years, something
that in the view of eternity is incommensurably
small, but for humans wobbling on uncertainly
every day, looks close to immortality.
Yet
the incredible boost of vitality, which in 100
years brought humanity from one billion to seven
billion people, is perhaps about to grind to a
halt. In many countries, the reproductive rate is
moving below replacement levels. UN statistics see
a drastic population contraction in the Arab world
in the next decades. Spengler argues [3] that once
Muslim populations learn to read and write, they
drift away from traditional faith and thus have
fewer children.
Nor is America, the
country with global cultural hegemony, faring much
better. Spengler [4] says that always in countries
liberated by the US, the population will halve in
half a century. The West, explains Spengler,
confuses individual survival and freedom with
cultural survival. "The possibility that a people
(a majority of a people) might cling to a backward
or even barbaric culture, because that culture
offers them a bulwark against mortality, does not
occur to Enlightenment political philosophy," [5]
which has shaped and is shaping modernity.
In fact, it is death, the end, the
ultimate goal, that gives meaning to life, but
this has lost and is losing its cultural value,
through the pursuit of some kind of eternal youth
obtained through drugs and concoctions. If
transplants and supplements can put off death
almost indefinitely (doctors blame our diseases on
our bad habits such as drinking and eating, as if
without them we could live forever), new recipes
promise us eternal black hair and eternal sexual
strength - the hallmarks of eternal youth. Not
only is individual death waning, but so is old
age. No need for prudence or wisdom, it is the
time of eternal youth and recklessness.
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