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Popular Culture Review
stumbled on “self-reflexive consciousness” and gave it a try with humans. But it
turns out that creatures with this quality come to think of themselves as selves—
as monadic, solipsistic, selfish beings that are above all other creatures. Slowly,
and now more rapidly, they begin to destroy the very preconditions of their own
existence. They wipe out the ecosystem, kill off the environment, and hurry
toward their destruction. It will not be long, I think, until nature allows this to
take place.
But this will not be the end of life on Earth. Other wonderful and
wonderfully non-self-conscious life will flourish and go on about its business.
We have another six billion years or so until the sun turns into a Red Giant and
engulfs the Earth, eventually turning into a zombie version of its once-brilliant
and blinding yellow self. During that interim time, there will be plenty of new
life that will find its way. Perhaps something very much like zombies will,
indeed, replace us. Because the experiment of our type of consciousness will
have run its course and proven not to be conduciv e of survival. Natural selection
will select us out. And out of the ashes of our corpses, out of the failed
experiment of our rotting organic matter, new beings will arise the natures of
which we cannot even imagine.
All of the world is a graveyard. The living soil is itself flesh: dead and
reborn, dead and reborn. Look around you even now—the future is wholly
already here. The future echoes of those who will take our place are with us,
calling without language to us, hungry and impatient to wait for us to turn into
their food, into their bodies. They are the zombies-to-come, the promise and the
horror of what we are on-the-way toward. They tempt you to love them. They
disarm you with their familiarity. They are hunting you. They hold us
accountable for each act of narcissism, for each immoral meal of flesh we have
enjoyed, for each failure to communicate with those who need us, for each act of
loving the dead, each failure to realize that we are loving only ourselves. Left on
their own, they turn you into what they already are, replicating themselves.
And here, now, you and I are already one of them.
DePaul University
H. Peter Steeves
Notes
!See Youtube.
2See, e.g., “TV reporter speaks about speech problem at Grammys,” Shreveport Times
(18 February 2011).
zThe Walking Dead, “Days Gone Bye” (Frank Darabont, dir., 31 October 2010).
4Dawn o f the D ead (George A. Romero, dir., 1978).
5Joan Ullman, “I Carried It Too Far, That’s for Sure,” Psychology Today (May 1, 1992).
6C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1961): 18, 20-22,
65.
7Or a perfect Las Vegas, if that’s more your style.