(not) Zen and the (not) Art of (not) Zombies

Today on my way to work I passed a neon sign with a girly devil face on it, an art and design studio of some kind, called “Zombies.” Art and design, I will remind. Girly devil face, I will remind you.

Let’s do some meta-analysis. There’s “classical” which is the idea that truth is beauty and beauty truth, that there’s an underlying universal structure to things. Then there’s “modern” which is the idea that there’s no underlying universal structure, only the structures we create. Then “post-modern,” which says not even the structures we make have any structure. ‘Post-post modern” would be “Ironic,” and so would say there are structures after all, but only in a lack of structure, and “Post-Ironic” says nevermind structure at all, just be.

That’s glib, but sue me if you don’t think a person who never took a single philosophy, art history, or music survey course has any business talking about this stuff. This is a zombie blog, for Romero’s sake.

Let’s apply my glibness to zombie history. Start with the first zombie movie, call that classical. Then the first zombie apocalypse move, call that modern. Then the first zombie movie where people are killing each other more than zombies are, call that post-modern. Post-post or ironic would be all of this zombies stuff we’re experiencing now, zombies in commercial, cute zombies on T-shirt, zombies as metaphors.

Post-ironic zombies, then, just are. The zombie art and design studio doesn’t try to do anything to discuss the zombie “thing,” to further any kind if understanding. It’s pseudo-zen. It’s returning the word to the very core of existence—just a word, devoid of connotation, barely even a label. A sound stuck on a wall over an image next to a place where they… well, I don’t know what they do. And so I don’t know what they do, I don’t even know if they exist.

There’s cartoon out there on the web, showing four zombies at a dinner table. One says “I've always thought of zombies as representing a pervasive American xenophobia.” The next says “Really, I’ve always considered us a metaphor for runaway consumerism.” The next one says, “There’s something to the idea that we illustrate the tenuous line between civilization and barbarism.” The last zombie thinks to himself “I feel really stupid for ordering brains now…”

“Xenophobia” is the classical concept. “Consumerism” is modern. “Barbarism” is post-modern. Ordering brains, and the cartoon itself is “ironic.” This blog post is post-ironic. Get it now?

Yeah, me neither.

Are Zombies Evil? Yes, We Are

It’s Philosophy Thursday (which I just made up as an excuse to write about something. I probably won’t even remember to do this again, and next week I’ll declare “It’s Zombie Tacos with Too Much Cilantro Thursday!” although, to be honest, I have no idea what that would even be. But that’s the great thing about making up stuff about stuff that’s made up: I can say just about anything I want.). So let’s talk about evil.

Are zombies evil? The word “evil” has connotations of viciousness and cruelty, of sadistic delight in another’s misery or suffering. It has connotations of apathy, as well as selfishness, a love of destruction, chaos, heartlessness and oppression. 

Central to all of those concepts is a theme of will, which is to say, a conscious desire and drive. I think we can all agree that while zombies have a desire and a drive-- specifically to consume flesh in great bloody chunks, gore dripping from their jaws even as they shamble in ripped clothes, wounds oozing, towards their next victim—this is not a conscious desire.

Indeed, as we’ve talked about before, the word zombie is used in philosophy to define an entity that does not have consciousness but is otherwise unidentifiable from an entity that does have consciousness (which is why I disparage the usage because if there are two people standing there and you don’t which is the zombie and which isn’t, you’re in big trouble—not to mention the non-zombie person, who’s about to get eaten).

And yet, it’s easy to apply such consciousness to zombies, even if we know they’re dead, albeit inappropriately mobile and deadly in that death. Look at one of the words I used above: “victim.” It’s easy to say the zombie is seeking another “victim,” and with that scenario in mind we can easily suggest such hunger is “evil.” Rationally we dismiss it, but our gut wants to attribute a foul Theory of Mind (look it up. It’s a psychology term, but whatever).

The take away from all of this is that a zombie attack is different from, say, an earthquake, even if you could style a movie based on ether, if you’re going to focus on survivors competing with survivors. In each scenario, rationally, there’s no “will” that cause society to break down. But since we can’t help but to “feel” that the zombies are evil, it changes the way we survive at all—by being evil to other survivors. 

My suggestion is that we individual living humans see reflected in the zombies our own evil, and I contend the reflection is all the sharper for the realization that zombies are not actually evil. We use zombies to justify cruelty and selfishness, and when we think on what we’ve done compared to mindless shufflers with no actual consciousness, we either kill ourselves out of guilt, or embrace the evil and take delight in the suffering of others.

Damn it, this got WAY deeper than I meant it to. I didn’t even get to discuss how I think the above definition of “evil” isn’t even correct (although I stand by the concepts posited here if man’s innate selfishness and love of cruelty). Fine, next week, I WILL talk about tacos. Or something. Man oh man, it’s going to be a long Thursday.

Philisophical Zombie Abuse

I’ve mentioned it before but it bears repeating: brain research leads to zombie culture. Once again, while researching and writing for the Great Brain Robbery, I came across another reference to zombies.

Can’t say I agree with the assessment offered, this time. 

“In director George Romero’s 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead, terrified people trapped in a Pennsylvania farmhouse try to survive zombies hungry for human flesh. 

But real zombies aren’t like that, …. The word ‘zombie’ is a surprisingly technical term, introduced by philosopher David Chalmers.

This is very misleading. First of all, there are no such thing as “real” zombies. In as much as philosophers have taken the word zombie to as a metaphor to describe beings in a thought experiment, they’re as real as anything else you can think up. For zombie lovers, every zombie move is a thought experiment; every video game is a “what would you do” scenario. Reality = zero.

Nor is “zombie” a technical term. It’s a metaphor. Its descriptive—and in every introduction to thought experiments that use “zombies,” there’s by needs a lengthy explanation of what that means. Then the “term” is as “technical” as any other co-opted word.

And of course. David Chalmers may have “introduced” the use of the word, but not the word itself. As any dedicated undead enthusiast already knows, the word comes from Haitian Creole, “zonbi,” which itself probably comes from an older word “nzumbe” which means “ghost.” Interesting, isn’t it, that the above article claims “Consciousness is definitely the modern conception of the soul” and then tries to confound a “soulless” being with a word that originates from the concept of the soul itself.

But, you know, that’s what we’ve been saying here at Zombie for Life: zombies are a thing. Zombies are here to say. People are going to use the word in metaphors, co-opt the term in new nomenclatures, and in general, abuse the concept like an erstwhile apocalypse survivor abusing trusted colleagues, while outside the brain eaters bar him in from precious resources.