Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  The libertarian answer to the question of whether humans could be forced to donate blood, however, is a clear no. Even if vampires are persons, they do not possess rights that humans lack. Just as humans may not violate others’ rights to get money or food, neither may vampires. If vampires wish to sustain themselves, they must find willing victims.

  Would libertarian policy lead to the mass starvation of vampires? That’s one conceivable outcome, especially if we cannot imagine humans who would be willing donors. But the blood-brothel in Buffy raises another possibility: perhaps humans and vampires could coexist peacefully, meeting each others’ needs and wants through voluntary exchange. If there’s something that humans can do for vampires and vice versa, then the vampire-human interaction need not be a zero-sum game. It is actually a positive-sum game, in which everyone can come out ahead for having participated. Libertarian philosophers place great emphasis on the capacity of voluntary cooperation and trade to generate happiness and prosperity for the members of society.126

  While Buffy’s blood-brothel scenario had humans paying vampires, it is entirely possible that payments might flow in the other direction. Who paid whom would depend on the relative magnitudes of the human supply and vampire demand for blood. If willing donors were scarce, vampires would have to pay humans, and the market price might be too high for some destitute vampires. If the vampire population grew faster than the human population, the rising demand for blood would push the price even higher. While some vampires might find employment—as club bouncers, nightshift guards, and so on—others might not find a way to contribute enough to society to pay their way. Such vampires would have to subsist on the voluntary charity of other vampires and humans.

  From Politics Back to Personhood

  We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us.127

  A clever welfarist might claim that the libertarian argument above actually supports his position. Vampires able to pay for their blood would not have to rely on forced transfers. Coercive transfers would only be needed to support those vampires who could not support themselves. In addition, if there were well-developed markets for blood exchange, welfarist moral requirements could be met through transfers of money instead of blood. The government could use tax dollars to subsidize blood brothels or voluntary blood banks, or it could offer “blood stamps” (much like food stamps) for needy vampires. Although everyone would be forced to pay higher taxes, no one would be forced to donate blood.

  In this context, it’s worth noting that some welfarists oppose policies that involve substantial infringement of bodily integrity, even if such infringement would bring great benefits to others. These welfarists take the more modest position that only external wealth and assets may be forcibly transferred for the good of others. They would not, for instance, force a person with two working kidneys to forfeit one to a person with none, though they would force him to pay taxes to pay for dialysis. While this variant of the welfarist position would dodge the possibility of forced blood transfers, it would have to affirm a “blood stamp” program or similar policy.

  What would be the economic consequences of adopting such a policy? First, the policy would encourage dependency by some vampires. Given the chance to have blood for free, fewer vampires would find it worthwhile to contribute to society by performing some useful job. There would be a tendency for the burden to grow as more vampires became “hooked” on the system. Second, higher taxes on productive humans and vampires would reduce their incentive to work, because they would get a smaller share of the fruit of their labor. The magnitude of these effects could be small or large, depending on how responsive each group is to its economic incentives.

  More important to my argument, though, are the political consequences of the welfarist policy. While it might seem obvious to philosophers like Singer, Unger, and perhaps you that vampires deserve the same moral consideration as humans, that point could easily be lost on a citizenry saddled with providing blood-money to a parasitic underclass. As a result, they would be more inclined to oppose any extension of personhood to vampires.

  The claim here is relatively simple: people’s willingness to extend moral consideration to the interests of others depends, at least in part, on the burden that results. If the burden is merely having to respect a minimal set of rights, as under a libertarian system, it is likely to be met with some resistance, but there is a reasonable chance of overcoming it (witness, for example, the gradual emergence of equal rights for women and ethnic minorities). When the burden rises to the provision of goods and services, however, the level of resistance naturally increases. It is one thing to allow others a chance to succeed; it is another to be forced to support them.

  Ample historical evidence supports this claim. One of the earliest and best examples is related by philosopher and economist Adam Smith, in his description of the Poor Law of England.128 That law of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries required each parish to raise money for the support of indigent people within its borders. In response, parish officials raised difficult barriers to laborers who wished to settle in their parish, for fear they might come to rely on public charity. A tangle of regulations arose to define the conditions under which laborers could legally settle in another parish. The regulations substantially impeded the mobility of labor, effectively confining most poor people to their places of birth.

  In modern times, similar events have occurred with respect to immigration. One of the most frequently invoked arguments against allowing more immigrants into the country is that immigrants will take advantage of the welfare system. Organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) routinely point to immigrant claims on welfare to justify restricting immigration into the U.S. One typical FAIR news briefs says, “If we are to have any hope of reducing poverty in the U.S., our immigration laws must be revised and returned to the sensible practice of excluding aliens who are likely to become public charges and to deport those who do.”129 The perception that immigrants depend disproportionately on welfare may or may not be correct, but that is not the point. Even the appearance of dependency can generate opposition to the inclusion of new members in society.

  In short, when people believe their pocketbooks are endangered by the extension of public support to some group, they become more willing to exclude that group from the community. The prospect of paying for the upkeep of outsiders stokes the fires of xenophobia.

  Possibilities for Human-Vampire Co-operation

  These People are Our Food, Not Our Allies.130

  Philosophers should not blithely assume the good will of man toward his fellow man and proceed from there to a discussion of the morally best public policy, because public policy influences the degree to which people are willing to extend such good will to others. As economist Ludwig von Mises observed, feelings of sympathy and friendship are not the cause of social co-operation, but the result. Without opportunities for mutual gain, Mises says, “Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.”131 But voluntary co-operation transforms this zero-sum game into a positive-sum game; it transforms war into commerce.

  What kind of society, then, creates the greatest room for the acceptance of vampires? The welfarist vision creates the distinct possibility that humans will have to support vampires with blood and money, and without compensation for their sacrifices. The resulting resentment would only exacerbate the intolerance of humans toward vampires, possibly driving vampires to have even less regard for the interests of humans. The libertarian vision, on the other hand, emphasizes the potential for humans and vampires to work together and to improve the condition of all—at least, all those willing to do their part. Only in the latter scenario will humans and vampires be likely to develop the sympathy and good will necessary for them to treat each other as persons an
d moral equals.

  15

  Rousseau and the Vampires: Toward a Political Philosophy of the Undead

  PHILLIP COLE

  “No Evidence Is Lacking”: A Plague of Vampires

  Vampires have not always been works of fiction. At the start of the eighteenth century, reports came out of eastern Europe about plagues of vampires—the dead were rising from their graves in vast numbers to inflict terror and death upon the living. These epidemics began around 1670 and ended around 1770, throughout what was then the Hungarian Empire. The best source of information is the official reports written by representatives of political and religious powers sent to the regions afflicted by these outbreaks of “revenants,” as the Undead were called, to discover what was really going on.

  One especially notorious case was that of Arnold Paole, a peasant who died in 1726, the subject of an official report published in 1732.132 According to that report Paole returned from the dead and tormented the people of the village of Medvegia, causing the death of four of them. The villagers decided to disinter his body, which they did forty days after his death. The report reads: “His flesh was not decomposed, his eyes were filled with fresh blood, which also flowed from his ears and nose. . . . His fingernails and toenails had dropped off, as had his skin, and others had grown in their place, from which it was concluded he was an arch-vampire.” The report continues that the villagers decided to drive a stake through his heart. As this was done, Paole “gave a great shriek, and an enormous amount of blood spurted from his body” (Vampyres, p. 21).

  But it didn’t stop there, as the victims of vampires were believed to become vampires too. The four people thought to have died from Paole’s attacks were disposed of in the same way, as were other people who died from eating the contaminated flesh of animals also thought to have been attacked by him. Those, too, had to be disinterred, staked, and their bodies burned. These included a woman who had died in childbirth three months before who had claimed she washed in the blood of a vampire. The report states: “She was in an excellent state of preservation. Cutting open her body, we found much fresh blood . . . her stomach and intestines were as fresh as those of a healthy, living person . . . fresh and living skin had grown recently, as had finger and toenails” (p. 22). And a sixty-year-old woman who had eaten contaminated meat was, after ninety days of burial, “much plumper,” and “still had much liquid blood in her breasts” (p. 22).

  These reports were received with incredulity in western Europe. This was the time of the Enlightenment, when philosophy and science were supposed to have won the struggle against superstition and dark fantasies. Vampires certainly had no place in the modern world view, and philosophers tried to explain them away in terms of science or of the primitive state of eastern Europe. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the exception. In a famous passage he says: “No evidence is lacking—depositions, certificates of notables, surgeons, priests and magistrates. The proof in law is complete” (Vampyres, p. 31). In fact Rousseau was noncommittal concerning whether vampires existed—this was not the point. Rather, the epidemics were important because they revealed something about the nature of political authority.

  The explanation Rousseau sought was political, because in the end the epidemics were a political phenomenon. First, we can take the vampire as standing for our social and political condition, for the exploitative relations that arise from private property (p. 34). Second, we can see the ways in which religious and political authorities seek to control populations by appeal to popular myths and superstitions, by exploiting irrational fear of imaginary monsters (p. 33). In this chapter I follow Rousseau’s lead in placing such imaginary monsters at the center of political philosophy. If political philosophy’s focus is on the nature and purpose of political communities, then Rousseau has shown the role of fear in constituting those political communities. Vampires and other Undead beings represent some of our deepest insecurities, and so can tell us something crucially important about the politics of fear. So this essay takes a first step towards developing a political philosophy of the Undead.

  Hunting Satan’s Brood: The Enemy Within

  Rousseau claims that authorities—religious or political—seek to create and exploit panic in order to gain and hold on to power. An earlier panic, the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and North America, shows the same pattern, and is useful because it has received far greater attention from historians. Hugh Trevor-Roper, in one of the best treatments of this period, concludes that the witch crazes arose because of a struggle for power.133 They flared most strongly between 1560 and 1630 when religious warfare blazed across Europe. In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, both the Catholic and Protestant sides identified their enemies as being in league with Satan. Trevor-Roper observes: “Every crucial stage in the ideological struggle of the Reformation was a stage also in the revival and perpetuation of the witch-craze” (European Witch-Craze, p. 88).

  These were times of great fear and insecurity, and, as usual when a society is in the grip of a panic, it fixed upon a stereotype of the enemy within. This stereotype, once established, “creates . . . its own folklore” (p. 120). Here, then, we have a treatment along Rousseau’s lines, in terms of the struggle to assert authority over resistant communities, and there is evidence that similar forces were at work during the vampire craze. What seems to have happened in the vampire case is a struggle between local religious and regional secular authorities, with local religious figures invoking fear of the diabolical supernatural to reassert their power, and the regional authorities seeking to understand and control that fear. But a puzzling question remains: why are communities so responsive to this kind of strategy? Why are we so easily “spooked” such that we join enthusiastically in the “witch hunt”?

  Beyond Hunger

  Vampires—and the Undead in general—generate a particularly deep horror. Sigmund Freud, in his famous essay on “The Uncanny,” 134 identifies “anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts” as “perhaps the most potent” example of the uncanny, and argues that “in hardly any other sphere has our thinking changed so little since primitive times or the old been so well preserved under a thin veneer, as in our relation to death” (The Uncanny, p. 148). One commentator on the essay, Michiel Scharpé, makes the insightful point that what is crucial is not so much our relationship with death, but our relationship with the dead.135 The boundary being challenged is not that between life and death, but between the living and the dead. These are, of course, connected, but not all journeys between life and death and vice versa are disturbing. What strikes us as most uncanny, or rather, as we might say, spooky, is the return of the dead themselves into the realm of the living.

  The fear of vampires, ghosts and zombies becomes clearer when we see it as a fear, not of death as such, but of the dead. What is at stake is our relationship with the dead and the fear that they are going to return. Fear of our own death is, of course, connected, because they bring the threat of our destruction with them from beyond the grave. But there is something special about this particular form of death. Death is to be feared in many forms. Flying, disease and illness, acts of war, road accidents, murder, old age; these can all give rise to fear of death. But death can also be welcomed; death holds the prospect of peace. In the HBO television series Six Feet Under the Fisher family run a funeral home and encounter death and dead people each week. In one episode, David—one of two brothers who run the business after the death of their father—is confronted by the violent prospect of death when he is sadistically robbed at gunpoint.

  But in the same episode we get a radically different picture, as his art-student sister Claire displays her self-portrait photographs to the rest of the class for comment. One of the students says of them: “Dead. That’s what I like about them. This girl who’s, like, dead, and beyond everything—beyond hunger, beyond sex, beyond boredom. And really it’s so beautiful to be in that state. Like, nothing can reach her, n
othing can get to her.” The dead people in the funeral home have a serenity even when they have met violent ends, and occasionally they return in a benign way to have discussions with family members. Quite often these discussions are comforting and revealing, as the dead seem to have acquired a depth and a wisdom lacking in the living. Here, then, both death and the returning dead hold, not fear, but an attraction. By contrast the Fisher family’s lives are filled with disappointment and torment. The attraction is, perhaps, that of being absorbed into a greater whole, even if that whole is a complete nothingness, an emptiness. But even in this attractive, beckoning form, death must be resisted, and the Fishers do resist it, stubbornly sticking to the living despite their seemingly remorseless misery. In Six Feet Under existence appears in all its absurdity, but in the end the program, despite its darkness, is a comedy, albeit without a laughter track, and represents one of the traditional existentialist responses to the absurdity of existence: wry amusement.

  Itchy and Scratchy: Cartoon Cannibalism

  The point is that death is not necessarily something to fear, and in the forms in which we do fear it this is not necessarily based on anything to do with the uncanny or the spooky. So we are left with the question: what is so especially chilling about the dead in the form of vampires and zombies, and what is especially horrifying about the prospect of death they offer? Perhaps what they represent is motiveless malignity, evil intent to destroy us for no reason. The dead, then, bring with them a supernatural malice towards us, which is inexplicable and irresistible. And so there is something especially disturbing about the death these creatures offer, in contrast to the death we encounter in Six Feet Under. Here, again, there is absorption, but this time it is not a promise but a threat, a violent absorption— we will be consumed. The vampire will drain our blood; the zombie will eat our flesh. We are reduced to blood and flesh in this act of absorption. Here we become nothing, not by entering a pool of greater nothingness, but by being eaten. But what’s the difference between this and dying, say, in a traffic accident? It may seem a nonsensical question, but it has a point—in both cases we are dead, whether we enter the Fisher’s funeral home or the vampire or zombie’s digestive tracts. Why should the latter be so horrific?