The Halloween month of October is
upon us again, and I thought it would be an opportune time to discuss an
interesting trend in horror novels and movies that I have observed. This is the theme of human beings as prey. I don’t think that the trend is
accidental. I strongly suspect that it
has come about due to the observation that human beings have overrun this
planet. It took all of human history to
reach a global population of 1 billion people by the year 1800; during the 20th
century alone, population increased from 1.65 billion to 6 billion. The earth is currently home to about 7
billion people, and it is projected that this number will increase to 11
billion by the end of this century.
Of course, such phenomenal growth
has not come without cost to the rest of our ecosystem. Biologists contend that the earth is
currently undergoing its sixth global extinction crisis, and that the current
extinction rate of animal species is at least 1,000, and perhaps as high as
10,000, times higher than the normal rate.
This means that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species on the planet are
becoming extinct each year.
As a species with no natural
predator to keep us in check, we have become like those rabbits that were
introduced in Australia
in the 19th century, which eventually overran the island continent
and caused a devastating impact on its natural ecology, eradicating native
plants, and eroding topsoil. Resident
Australians have resorted to desperate measures to try to keep them in check,
including poisoning, the introduction of fatal diseases, destroying their
warrens (nests), aggressive hunting and trapping, and introducing predators
(ferrets). (In the United States ,
the common housecat, which is also technically an invasive species, has wreaked
similar ecological devastation, particularly on the native bird population.)
Economists have raised the hopeful
prospect that the human race will eventually contain its explosive growth as a
natural course, noting that wherever standards of living have risen, there has
been a concomitant decline in the birthrate and, indeed, in several developed
economies, populations actually seem to be decreasing. But whether this natural slowdown in
population growth will occur in time to prevent the continued degradation of
the global ecosystem is far from assured, and it may be that we have already
passed a critical point of no return in terms of the irreversible damage that
has been done.
And so I come back to the horror
genre of contemporary fiction. It seems
this medium has become a sort of outlet for channeling our fears of
unrestrained growth, as a new species of monster has taken precedence: the
predator of human beings. There is
something of a population explosion occurring here, as these creatures have
almost overrun the genre: in literature, in television, and the cinema.
I have identified five distinct
types of such predators. These are the
subhuman (zombies), the human (serial killers), the meta- or super-human
(vampires), the non-human (generally alien invaders, but also mutant creatures
which have arisen on this planet), and the non-living (machines). Most of these categories present, I think,
rather uninteresting ways of introducing predators of humans into our
human-dominated ecosystem, because they ignore the intimate and intricate
relationship between predator and prey.
I have already commented on the zombie phenomenon in a previous blog
entry (“Apocalypse Then”, April 2013), and can only add that this would be a
very unsatisfactory predatory solution to human overpopulation, since the end
result would probably be (unless the zombies were completely eradicated
themselves) a total end to the human race, and a replacement of human beings
with creatures that were incapable of emulating or going beyond the best
elements of human civilization. With
respect to serial killers, I could never imagine the ranks of these growing
beyond a relatively few aberrant individuals, and, with the exception of the
effete and sophisticated serial killer Hannibal Lecter, it seems unlikely that
they would create a more interesting ecosystem as a result of their
presence. Non-human predators present a
genuinely viable solution to the human ecological crisis, but it is hard to
imagine what these would be like, and where they would come from. And finally, while some science fiction
movies have envisioned future sophisticated machines as forming a predatory
symbiosis with humanity (the best example being The Matrix movies), it seems much more likely that machines which
have achieved self-awareness would find little or nothing of value to extract
from human beings, and would therefore either ignore them or exterminate them.
This leaves the meta-human predator
and its most popular fictional incarnation, the vampire, and here I think we
have some fertile ground for imagining a creature which could form an
authentic, endurable, predator-prey relationship with humanity. Vampires, after all, are acutely aware of the
fact that their survival is contingent on the continuing survival of human
beings, and so (unless they were as foolish and short-sighted as people have
been) would deliberately keep their own numbers down, so as not to jeopardize
the survival of their food supply. But
vampirism, as it is portrayed in popular fiction, presents an interesting
problem, because all vampires were, at some time, human beings themselves.
This is a moral problem. It is something that the predators that
currently exist in earth’s ecosystem have never had to contend with, since
(with the exception of human beings, and more on that later) they are not
rational. No lion ever engages in
metaphysical speculation about the morality of killing a wildebeest, nor does a
wolf entertain anguished self-doubts about killing a hare. But humans are rational beings, and, if they
have managed to insulate themselves from any moral qualms about preying on
other living creatures because these are all non-rational beings of a
significantly lower intelligence, then what recourse would a formerly human creature
have in justifying its predation of humans?
In the history of vampire
literature, this was a question that was initially not contended with. Bram Stoker’s Dracula seemed to have no
qualms whatsoever about preying on human beings, and, indeed, in the earliest
genre of vampire stories that were inspired by his classic novel, there was a
suggestion that perhaps the vampire convert underwent a mental/psychological
transformation that deadened any such sympathies.
I think that it was Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire that was the
first to address – in a very direct fashion – the potential moral conundrum faced
by a former human being who must now survive by preying on humanity. A horror classic that ranks with Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula, Rice’s novel has since inspired
a deluge of imitations – in books, cinema, and television – and while these
(including Rice’s own sequels) are generally of lower quality and less
memorable than her original masterpiece, they have followed her lead in
portraying the vampire as more than simply a demon in human form.
Her novel centers on the character
of Louis, a French-American living in New
Orleans who is already undergoing a sort of moral
torment even before his conversion. A
younger brother had taken the path to religious piety, and while Louis at first
supported and accommodated him, even building a chapel on their plantation, he
then watched helplessly as his brother drifted into a hallucinatory madness
that eventually leads to the brother’s death.
Louis is stricken with doubts about the value of his own life, and
descends into a debauched lifestyle that invites a violent end to it. In an interesting inversion of one of Jesus’
sayings – “ Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” – Louis is “saved”
just at that moment where his death wish is about to be satisfied, by a
vampire, Lestat, who attacks him and then converts him into a vampire. Louis discovers, in this new state, that both
his ability to experience and perceive the world around him, as well as his
powers to act upon it, have heightened immensely. But much of the rest of the novel centers on
Louis’s resistance to accepting Lestat as a mentor and guide for his new life,
because he find’s Lestat’s behavior morally repugnant. And yet, while condemning it, Louis is forced
to accept the fact that he must
become like Lestat, if he is to survive.
(And it is interesting to observe that the next line Jesus speaks in
that Gospel quotation above is, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the
whole world and loses his soul?”)
Rice’s novel introduces us to a
terrifying ecosystem, in which vampires, as predators of humans, hunt either
individually or in groups, and these jealously guard their respective
territories from potential interlopers – driving them out or even destroying
them, just as animal predators do in the natural world. Her vampires are also very careful about how
they prey on the human herd, making their kills look like accidents, so as to
prevent a general, disruptive panic. And
there is a suggestion that these hyper-sensitive, hyper-sophisticated creatures
do more than merely prey on the lives of human beings. They also enjoy the products of human
civilization – the artistic and other accomplishments of the more talented
members of the species. (Lestat, for
example, is a fan of the theater.) We
are thereby introduced to a higher order of predation: a predation that is
suitable for a species of beings that has evolved to hunt a rational,
intellectually-endowed creature.
But as horrifying as this picture
is, one cannot help but concede that such an ecosystem actually would remedy
many of the ills that are currently plaguing the human race – and, through
them, the rest of life on earth.
Creatures such as these vampires would effectively prevent humans from
overrunning the planet and destroying its ecology, as the rabbits in Australia
nearly did. And, if these vampires were
selective in their killing, only preying upon human beings that did not satisfy
their other cravings (i.e., by not producing things of artistic or material
merit), then a higher order of “natural selection” would set in, and their
predation would leave a progressively higher caliber of survivors. (In Anne Rice’s first sequel to her vampire
novel, for example, her character Lestat even claims that he only kills human
beings who have a depraved moral character.)
The vampire predator, then – at least
as conceived by Anne Rice – would best fulfill the role of an effective species
that would restore ecological balance by keeping the human race in check. It would realize that its own ultimate survival
was intimately intertwined with that of its prey, and that if it were too
successful in its predatory activities, then the result would be its own eventual
demise. And, being a more evolved predator,
engaged in the pursuit of a similarly higher-level, intelligent species, its
method of selective hunting would go beyond merely outrunning and overpowering
the old, the sick, the lame, and the weak: its methods of selecting prey would
involve detecting more subtle forms of degeneracy. Its methods of killing, too, would involve
techniques of stealth that lower-order predators could never conceive of, since
it would realize that to create a wide-spread panic, and consequent chaos, would
mean the end of the material and artistic products of human civilization that
it also savored.
But there are problems with the
vampire model of predation, and these, as mentioned above, comprised much of
the focus of Rice’s novel. After all,
vampires were once humans themselves, and so, like Louis, the new convert could
face a severe existential crisis when he or she realizes that human beings must
now be treated solely as means, and never as ends. No lion need ever face the sympathetic anguish
of remembering what it was like to be a wildebeest; or a fox what it was like
to be a rabbit. (Of course, very young
predators, such as lion cubs, might have the experience of being preyed upon by
others – including adult members of their own species – though I doubt that
this ever produces a compassionate reluctance among those who survive into adulthood
to engage in the hunt.)
Only a predator of humans that
never had an experience of being human could be completely free of such moral
ambiguity. Or could it? Is there a certain level of intelligence
above which one creature would be incapable of preying upon another – at least
in a non-pathological way – if they were both above this threshold? But what if the predator was so far above us
in intelligence that we appeared as bestial to it as the rest of the animal
kingdom does to us? Would this allow it
to hunt us and feed upon us and still feel certain that it is behaving in
complete conformity with its own higher moral code? Is there really some absolute threshold of
intelligence and rationality above which any creature that possesses it should
never be hunted, or even treated merely as a means to obtain some other form of
benefit or satisfaction? If so, what is this
threshold, and what is the justification for establishing it there, and not at
some higher or lower level? And, even
assuming that there is such a justification, what if a species tends to be
above this threshold, but some of its members fall below it (perhaps because of
some genetic disease, such as mental retardation)? Will these particular members then be outside
of the protection of the rule? If some
being of higher intelligence informed us that we had fallen below its threshold
of predation (i.e., we weren’t intelligent and rational enough, by its
standards, to be “exempt” from its hunting and exploitation activities), how
could we convincingly argue that their threshold is too high, and that their
moral code needed to be revised accordingly, particularly with regard to their
treatment of us?
Questions like these haunted me
after I first read Rice’s Interview with
the Vampire (and many of these were directly inspired, if I recall, by a
reading around the same time from one of the philosopher Robert Nozick’s books). We flatter ourselves that we are the world’s “apex
predators”, and yet the irony is that we seem to be wreaking global destruction
due to our behavior which is more akin to that of a prey species (like rabbits)
that have been allowed to proliferate unchecked. Hence the apparent macabre wish for a predator
of humans, which seems to be manifesting itself on such a large scale among writers
of horror and science fiction. Perhaps,
ironically, part of the problem is that we are no longer really predators at
all: rather, we are “proxy predators”. Our
technologies have allowed us to engage in predation and other forms of violence
at arm’s length – with drones and guns and long-range missiles and factory
farms – and we rarely have to experience in an immediate sort of way the
consequences of our proxy predation. Sadly,
it is hard to imagine how we will ever be able to reverse this process, which
has been the dark accompaniment to civilization itself. Perhaps at least a partial solution to our
global crisis might arise if we collectively take a hard look at where we, as a
species, have set our own “threshold of predation”: with respect to all life on
this planet – animal and human alike.
