Predator and Prey

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 20^th 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 19^th 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.