I found this in my notes, looking for something else. I have no idea if I ever posted it, but if not, here it is:
Last night,
I dreamed I was immersed in a massive,
interactive game, where large buildings were filled, alternately, with zombie people
who had lost their minds due to communicable illnesses, that I had to kill, and
normal people. My task was differentiating
the two instantly, and without getting touched.
It was a grim task, as there were so many who were on the continuum to
being lost fully to reason and wellness, but who retained some semblance of
their former humanity.
The setting
was a gothic industrial complex, a sort of castle which has once been filled
with life, but which had passed away slowly to death and decay. In the end, I did make my escape, and passed
on the way out a sort of parade, put on by those who were infected, but not fully
gone. It was an outwardly happy affair,
with many colors and balloons, and led by someone who looked very much like
Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter. But it was
quite obviously dedicated to death.
We see
zombies very often in contemporary culture, just as we see symbols of
death. If you go in Target, or Penneys,
or other fashionable stores (note: high fashion is quite beyond my means), you
will see t-shirts and jackets covered with skulls, sometimes large mountains of
skulls, of the sort the Mongols left outside Baghdad. You have “humorous” movies like “Zombieland”.
You have cult favorites like “From dusk til dawn.” You have Rob Zombie, who both dresses as a
zombie, and directs horror films. There
are even literal zombie parades, in which young people (mostly, from what I can
tell) dress as zombies, and shuffle down the street. You have video games, in which you do
literally shoot your way of zombie attacks by the score. You have books like “Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies”, in which the protagonist herself is a zombie, or guides to surviving
the zombie invasion. All of these forms
of cultural entertainment are doing well.
Clearly,
these themes, repeated so often and in so many places, mean something. In discussing them, let me begin with a
presupposition: that coherent, useful statements can be made about generalized
cultural processes, where useful is defined as both enabling understanding, and
corrective action if the process is deemed undesirable. I state this in such a bald way because, as
we will see, the failure on the part of so many of those who should be leading
us to actually do so is one of the most perfidious problems we face.
Further, let
me propose an analytic heuristic (a heuristic is an aid to thinking), by
stating what I view to be the point of life: generalizing deep qualitative
happiness, beginning with ourselves, and working outwards. This differs from mere freedom from material
affliction.
Self evidently, the appeal
of movies like “Avatar”, “The Last Samurai” and “Dances with Wolves” show a
widespread nostalgia or latent desire for community, that is far superior to
the desire for the material wealth which we have amassed. We want to belong. We want to trust one another. We want to know what to expect from others,
and we want clear codes by which we ourselves can navigate our lives. This is my assertion, with which of course
you can disagree, but I want it to be clear and in the front.
To this I
will append the assertion that science is unequal to the task of
“objectivizing” our internal states, which makes it necessary that we do so
through a process we have historically called “culture”. Culture works in the shared symbol and shared
myth. Individual
artists—myth-makers–will sort of “tap into” insights which—when expressed in some
public medium—interact with other members of their community in such a way that
deep, latent understandings are shared, and integrated. That is what I am attempting to do here,
although the form is not obviously that of art.
The
countervailing impulse is the story—manifestly, itself partaking of culture,
although the practitioners of this ideology would deny it—that man can make an
object of himself. We are told that
Science is the sole arbiter of truth.
Within this view, in general, is the further claim that everything that
appears to exist, does in fact exist in an absolute way, and that no accidents
happen in our Universe, which is orderly, rational, and determined by laws that
can be known.
Within this
view, B.F. Skinner’s famous claim that consciousness is irrelevant to science
becomes quaint—sort of “old school”, if you will. You see, if the mind is an object, it can be
disassembled. Consciousness can be built
of its component atoms, molecules, and cells.
The brain can be deconstructed as a biological computer, and then
reconstituted through “software upgrades” in which the sense of self itself is
mutable, and, ultimately, a nullity.
You, per se, do not exist.
Biological death is final, and all that exists exists merely to
reproduce prior to dying. They haven’t
proven this, of course; but they are going to.
This is the doctrine of Scientism, which we might define in brief as
“the claim that all cultural processes can be reduced in the end to measurable
material processes, without necessary reference to Consciousness.”
Do you see
that we have begun discussing zombies?
Where
humanists want to make a special place for Mankind in the universe, the
apostles of scientism want to deny, in effect, that we exist at all. How do you, the reader, react to this
idea? Do you dispute it? Can you dispute it? What were you taught in school? I think this basic process of thought—which
denies that we can survive death, that there is a God, that we have free will,
or that life has an ultimate purpose—engenders in a great many people pessimism, withdrawal, and emotional pain,
all of which are unnecessary, as this argument does not make use of the actual
evidence, but let me finish with this track.
Morality is
that part of human culture in which we determine for what principles we are
willing to sacrifice our comfort, pleasure, and–where necessary–our material
well being and even lives. In an intact
cultural system—one in which people still feel deeply connected to one
another—this is encoded in the Sacred and Profane. Quite often, metaphysical components enter
in, but let us content ourselves with the sociological ones. We understand readily enough, do we not, why
American Indians were willing to fight for ground they held sacred? We recognize and appreciate readily enough
why our grandparents were willing to endure hell in Europe and the Pacific in
order to protect our way of life here, do we not? Was it not because they held Liberty and our
right to national self determination to be sacred, and by contrast the
rejection of same to be profane, vulgar, and inhuman in some way?
Now,
obviously factors of conformity, the force of law, and the habits cultivated in
the process of military indoctrination enter in as well, but if you read their
correspondence, they did believe in what they were doing.
What do you believe? It is a simple enough question.