Like war stories and disaster stories, stories of the zombie apocalypse are
stories about a society where society no longer really exists. All
the guardrails that we normally, sort of, rely on to keep people within the range
of certain boundaries are gone. And so there is a powerful sense that one of
the most important questions to be explored in a world like this, and that
these stories actually help us explore for ourselves, is the field of human
ethics. What are we doing, what should we be doing, how should we be doing it?
And what makes them particularly important questions in the world of the
zombie apocalypse, is that many of the things that people relied on in the past,
those guardrails, have to be examined in a new light, in terms of what is possible
in the new world. So, for example, one of the guardrails that we have in many
traditions is some version of the commandment 'thou shalt not kill'
and yet, if you're going to survive in the zombie apocalypse, you're going to
have to kill zombies. You may have to kill other human beings and you're going
to have to come up with a rationale that allows you to do that and somehow keep
your sanity. And so in many of the stories of the zombie apocalypse, there
are actual debates, often as people are surrounded by zombies, about what it is
that they should do and what is the right thing and what is the wrong thing?
One of the stories that I read in my book, Living with the Living Dead, is the
Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The monsters
in that book are not George Romero zombies, you know, they're not dead
returned to life, but is this apocalyptic world where the the main characters, a
boy and his father, are running from other creatures who want to kill them
and eat them. And so there's this very strong sense in which it's the identical
sorts of questions being wrestled with and what I love about this book is not
only that it's a beautiful and hard and painful, but amazing, read, but that
there's this ongoing discussion between the father and child about
what kind of person can you be in a world like this? The way that they format
it, is to say 'are we the good guys?' and the son continually asks that question,
'are we the good guys?' and after his father does something which allows them
to survive, they'll often have that conversation again, 'are we still the good
guys?'. So here's a conversation from the novel and the boy has a question about a
horrible scene that they have stumbled into where a number of human prisoners
are being kept as food and they escaped barely with their own lives and we know
of course, from our understanding of ethics, that a heroic thing to do would
have been to free those people. But, that's not the world that the man and
the boy live in anymore. And so, the boy begins by asking this
question: 'We would never eat anybody would we?' 'No, of course not.' 'Even if we
were starving?' 'We're starving now'. 'You said we weren't.' 'I
said we weren't dying, I didn't say we weren't starving'. 'But we wouldn't'. 'No, we
wouldn't.' 'No matter what?' 'No. No matter what.' 'Because
we're the good guys?' 'Yes and we're carrying the fire. And we're carrying the
fire. Yes.' 'Okay.' That metaphor of carrying the fire is the one that I used in the
book to think about what the ethics of the zombie apocalypse feel like, look
like and how we can sort of transfer them to our own modern-day questions
about our own desires to be isolated and also our own desires to do the right
thing. Carrying the fire in The Road is about
trying to hold on to human values in an inhuman society, in a place where there
is no society anymore. And it's a question that many of the characters in
many of these stories of the zombie apocalypse wrestle with.