Wednesday 5 September 2012

For my Legionaries

I'm reading Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's "For my Legionaries (the Iron Guard)". Codreanu's strong personality, moral integrity, mysticism and spirit of sacrifice are mesmerizing. Blinded by decades of communist and then "free-market" capitalist propaganda, many generations of Romanians had only a distorted idea of the leader of the Iron Guard. However, now that his writings are widely available, Romanians and people around the world are free to open their eyes, wash the mud off their faces, bask in the Capitan's spiritual glory and follow into his footsteps up the hidden, steep mountain path. In our age of unfettered, decadent capitalism Codreanu's writings point the way towards a unified, organized resistance and meaningful counterattack. His example, as well as that of other leading Romanian intellectuals like Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Nae Ionescu provides a invaluable source of inspiration for everyone who struggles against the capitalist hydra. 
 

Dostoyevsky begot God by repeatedly striking his pen against his temple. God crawled out of the writer's head wound. Then God knew the Holy Spirit and they begot Jesus and his brother, The Captain. Once the Pharisees and Sadducees heard of the new leaders they ordered them killed. Their spirits were already tainted by murders and plunder and they didn't want Jesus and his follower to reveal their corruption and decay. Knowing they are in danger, Jesus and the Captain retreated deep into in the forested Carpathian Mountains and they prayed to a cross made of swords. There they found one of the painted monasteries built by Stefan the Great. They spoke with the saints and angels on the walls, and Archangel Michael himself flew out of the stone to know them better. But, underneath their calm, peaceful voices were bitter screams of pain and agony coming from the stones, and curses and gritting of teeth. Jesus and the Captain knew that Romanian peasants had been buried into those walls by the Pharisees and Sadducees who meant to silence them: wipe them from the face of the earth and burn their memory. The two leaders closed their eyes and prayed. The voices from the walls rose steadily as the saints and angles turned into warriors with painted faces and weapons at the ready. The church itself grew and began pulsating like a woman's ripened womb. Rivulets of blood poured from its foundations, gripping the earth like a red dead hand. Jesus and the Captain followed the blood and its whispers.
        "This is my blood," Jesus said.
        "These are the songs and poems of the stillborns," the Captain added.
     Looking ahead towards the green valley and the mountain crests, Jesus replied: "Let's hope someone will hear the tears of the forgotten saints."

 
Emil Cioran on Corneliu Zelea Codreanu:

"Before Corneliu Codreanu, Romania was but an inhabited Sahara...I had only a few conversations with Corneliu Codreanu. From the first moment I realized that I was talking to a man in a country of human dregs... The Captain was not "smart," the Captain was profound... He didn't want to improve our miserable condition, but rather to introduce the absolute in the daily existence of Romania. Not the revolution of a moment in history, but of history itself. Thus the Legion was not only meant to recreate Romania, but also to redeem its past, to make amends for its secular absence, to recover, through inspired and unique madness, all the time that has been wasted...In a nation of servants, he introduced honor ...In absolute terms, if I had had to choose between Romania and the Captain, I would not have hesitated a second... With the exception of Jesus, no one else has managed to live after death the way he did."

Emil Cioran, The Inner Profile of the Captain, December Issue of Glasul Stramosesc, 1940.  






Monday 30 July 2012

Flesh Eaters and George Bacovia


I just finished reading Flesh Eaters by Joe Mckinney. It starts with a huge hurricane which causes the flood of the city of Houston and, as if this wasn't bad enough, a virus breaks out, turning the dead into zombies starving for flesh. The story focuses on a family's struggle to get out of the ruined city: Eleanor Norton, a police woman, her husband Jim and their daughter Madison. The scale of the novel is much smaller than Zombie Apocalypse, which covers the whole territory of the United States. But its being small scale makes it better. After all, Joe Mckinney is no Stephen King and The Stand still stands unchallenged. One of the characters I found interesting is Brent Shaw. Captain Mark Shaw is the commander in charge of dealing with the crisis. Brent, one of Mark’s sons, is an alcoholic unable to come to grips with the devastation affecting the city. Paralyzed by the situation, Brent decides to strangle his own consciousness with hard liquor. I think Mckinney does a good job of creating a bleak atmosphere of doom and helplessness. However, he does not escape the cliché of a family struggling through adversity and coming together stronger than ever. In this respect I prefer the nihilism of Brian Keene, whose characters are trapped in hopeless circles of despair and rarely find a way out. After all, the very idea of struggling in such mind-boggling circumstances is quite embarrassing and vulgar. Now that I think about it, struggling in general is quite pathetic. This is partly why I liked Brent Shaw, because he decided to follow the more authentic path of half-assed self-destruction.
The dark atmosphere of the novel combined with the flood and the multitudes of zombies crawling out of ruined buildings remained me of the emptiness and cruel monotonicity of the universe created by the Romanian symbolist poet George Bacovia (1881-1957)

Here are two famous poems which came to my mind:



Lacustrine

So many nights I've heard the rain,
Have heard matter weeping ...
I am alone, my mind is drawn
Towards lacustrine dwellings.

As though I slept on wet boards,
A wave will slap me in the back -
I start from sleep, and it seems
I haven't drawn the bridge from the bank.

A void of history extends,
I find myself in the same times ...
And sense how through so much rain
The heavy timber stilts are tumbling.

So many nights I've heard the rain,
Always starting, always waiting ...
I am alone, my mind is drawn
Towards lacustrine dwellings ...

Final Poem

I must drink, to forget what nobody knows
Hidden in the deep cellar, without saying a word
Alone to smoke there unknown by anyone
Otherwise, it's hard on earth ...

On the street life shouts, and death,
And may the poets weep over their vain poem ...
I know ...
But the terrible hunger is no joke, no dream -
Lead, and storm, waste,
Finis ...
Contemporary history ...
It's time ... all my nerves want you ...
O, come at once, magnificent future.

I must leave, to forget what nobody knows
Upset by bourgeois crimes, without saying a word
Alone to lose myself in the world unknown by anyone
Otherwise, it's hard on earth ...







Tuesday 17 July 2012

Zombies' rights?



Should we have moral obligations towards zombies? Intuitively, if a toothless, completely senile old woman with vacant eyes threatens to eat your brains, it's not okay to beat her to a pulp with a baseball bat. But if the same old bag turns into a zombie and attacks you, you're permitted, even encouraged, to beat her or burn her or do whatever you want to her (or it). But it seems that there's no ethical difference between the cases. Let's call the first woman Demented Jane and the second Zombie Jane.

One prominent ethical view, Kantianism, is centered around the ideas of rationality, autonomy and freedom. Ethical norms are justified rationally and understanding them requires the capacity to reason. These norms are meant to direct our will and promote good will. But, without entering into details, we can already see that this view doesn't really apply to our puzzling case.  Neither Demented Jane nor Zombie Jane enjoy conscious cognition. Their minds are rotten, the light of reason forever extinguished. They have neither good will nor bad will, but lack the very capacity to will anything. It would be strange to say that Zombie Jane wills brains; she desires or wants brains in the way an animal wants to eat and reproduce.  

Moreover, the Kantian can't even begin to account for our strong intuition that attacking the old woman is wrong, since she enjoys no autonomy, rationality or freedom. Similarly, it can't explain our sense that we have moral obligations towards non-human animals or the mentally disabled. Since the cultivation of good will is the purpose of ethical norms, these norms can't apply to creatures incapable of good will. 

Another popular ethical view, utilitarianism, links the morality of an action to the amount of pleasure and pain it creates. Roughly, a right action leads to pleasure or happiness and diminishes pain. So, it's not okay to beat up Demented Jane because this leads to pain and suffering, but Zombie Jane doesn't feel pain so it might be okay to beat her up. Plus, Zombie Jane's bite could infect you, which is bad. So, it makes sense to avoid the agony of becoming infected by beating Zombie Jane to death.

However, we can easily describe the example in such a way that these differences disappear. What if Demented Jane is so messed up that she doesn't feel physical pain. Pain, after all, is the result of neurons firing in the brain in a certain pattern. We can easily imagine that Demented Jane's nervous system is so ruined that her pain centers aren't firing in response to physical damage.  In addition, we can imagine that Zombie Jane isn't infectious or that maybe we wear a suit which protects us from the virus. Then still, our persisting intuition is that we shouldn't beat up Demented Jane and we are permitted to mistreat Zombie Jane. 

Someone may object that even if Zombie Jane can't spread the infection, she's still a rotting body. Such decomposition presents health risks in its own right. So maybe keeping Zombie Jane away with a stick and then burning her with a flame thrower is the only prudent thing to do. In response to this critical point we can further change the example. What if Demented Jane starts decomposing? It may be physically impossible that someone is alive and yet decomposing but here we're talking about zombies so such physical constraints are irrelevant. Let's suppose that Demented Jane starts rotting before she actually dies. She maintains some feeble brain activity and some small degree of awareness but her skin turns blue and she begins to bloat and worms crawl out of her mouth when she speaks. I think our reaction in this case would be to put her away in a sealed room rather than destroy her. Similarly, if a group of people present a health risk for us we quarantine them, we don't exterminate them. Why shouldn't we do the same in the case of Zombie Jane?
                                                                                                            
In contrast to Kantianism and utilitarianism, virtue ethicists judge the moral worth of an action by reference to the moral virtues or vices it displays. In our case, caring for Demented Jane may be a sign of virtues like respect or compassion for her as a person.  But we don't have to exercise compassion with respect to zombies because they aren't people. This approach, however, begs the question. Why shouldn't a virtuous person care for both Demented Jane and Zombie Jane? After all, aren't Zombie Jane and Demented Jane the same person? They share the same body. Plus, neither of them shares the memories of Younger Jane. So, demented Jane has no more psychological continuity with Young Jane than Zombie Jane does.

Finally, it might be objected: "But Zombie Jane is dead while demented Jane is still alive. Demented Jane's heart is still beating and she still has some brain activity. But Zombie Jane has neither of those. We have no obligations towards the dead." This is a fair objection, but we can tweak our example so that the intuitions animating it lose their force. Again, we can bracket the laws of nature and imagine that demented Jane's heart stops beating but she still registers some brain activity. Is she alive then? Or, what if she enjoys a moment of lucidly while the electroencephalograph detects no brain activity? She may passionately talk about her past while there are no medical signs of her being alive. After all, these physical criteria for distinguishing the dead from the living are the product of procedural definitions. They are nothing more than conventions used in order to better apply criminal laws. But we don't want our ethics based on such arbitrary conventions.

So, all in all, the issue of zombie rights is connected with a network of other problems about the limits of personhood, what makes us human and the murky distinction between being alive and being dead. While the issue of the moral rights of animals might have seemed crazy at first, now we are more aware and sensitive towards it. Will the same happen to the rights of zombies?