The Problem of Nations is Not Just America
The Final Meditation on Zombies and Being Christian in America
Christian ethics depends on being for particular places. The difficulty for American Christian ethics is that America is a place which values never standing still. How can one live the moral life in such a place as America?
Zombies and the Problem of Moral Agency
In the first part of this series, I proposed that the figure of the zombie helps us understand one of the key problems of the Christian moral life: so much of the moral life is beyond our control.
Say as much as we want about the role of moral deliberation, of rational calculation and material goods, there is too much which lies beyond our say, and on the other hand, too many ways in which we can be co-opted.
Scripture talks about this at the edges, gesturing at dramatic forms of possession: Saul being overcome by an evil spirit, Judas being overtaken by the devil, the enslaved girl in Acts. Little is given to us by way of how this occurs, or whether the baptized can be possessed in these kinds of ways, and much reflection has been given to what these stories mean. But beyond these bodily dimensions, Scripture seems to indicate that whatever possession means, it does not end with the body.
Zombies, as I argued, help us to see how this works because there is a power which occurs in the body, but their power which occurs there is part and parcel with an entire world of effects: when Paul says that we have a fight against powers and principalities, it is one which plays out in histories, in imaginative frameworks, in the ethos of a people.1
If what happens in the conscription of our minds, our bodies, and our institutions is more easy to see, then what happens at the social level is bit more nebulous.
In some ways, national movements play an outsized role in our imaginations: that local conversations always have the overtones of national politics is a sign of this pathology.
And yet.
What happens on the level of a nation frames our lives in various and sundry ways—taxations, mythologies, road projects, regulatory projects, holidays, treaties—these are the background operations which give shape our moral lives by making certain things thinkable, unthinkable, or objects of altogether indifference.
And so, thinking about what nations do for our moral lives matters.2
Zombieland: A World Of Endless Motion
One of the key parts of zombie lore is their ambulation: they may have been neighbors, parents, or friends, but now, their address is nowhere. Zombies lose their distinguishing features over time, as they decay and become indistinguishable from other zombies, and most importantly, they lose their sense of place. This aimless wandering is a perennial theme of the zombie film, whether American, British, or global: South Korea’s Train to Busan is the Father’s Day movie to beat all others and takes this theme as the whole reason for being—the zombies are stuck in a train, amplifying their traveling ethos with horrifying and heartbreaking results.
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But forget zombies roaming aimlessly to Atlanta; forget Dawn of the Dead with zombies roaming endlessly within a shopping mall3. These are just symptoms: they are microcosms of the bigger problem, which is the place itself, that the world is such that it makes zombies not only possible, but the inevitable norm.
In these films, even if you’re among the lucky few who don’t succumb to the zombie-starting event, quickly you find yourself smothered by the terrain, constrained by the world populated by the undead, those who move with aim and in that aimlessness destroy much.4 The reason the terrain is so important in zombie film is that the terrain, like the zombies, is one of which values pure motion: there is no further or deeper reason for being than survival, and once that, in play, any other reason for existing is eviscerated.
For better or worse, this is America. Before America was a legally constituted entity, it was an idea, and in that idea, the possibility of new movement and endless expansion is king5. America, the land of constant motion and reinvention from persecuted to persecutor, from impoverished to baron. America, the land of new beginnings, unless we’re talking debt. America, the place in which you can forget where you came from within a few years, in part because few of us are really any longer from anywhere more than a generation.
That constant motion—this soul of America— is how jazz comes to be, how strip malls in Abilene can have amazing Thai food, and why free agency sucks the life out of every sport it touches. It is why church shopping never ceases, and why the interstate system will be the ultimate national monuments to be protected by federal law. And it is how America never learns from its past, because it will always count on being cleansed by its future.
America: Finding Our Way Out of the Flux
The internal motion of America is possible because of another layer, though: America is what it is because it is a part of a global circulation, a never resting beast, in which goods circulate, and in which all the ideas are constantly scuttled for new ones. It belongs to an economy in which entrepreneurship and innovation are the rule of law, and in this way, what kind of people could ever grow in these lands, except the constantly moving, aimlessly propelled zombie?
This presents real problems for the moral life, in that it puts a question mark on any project of resourcement, of piecing back together a world which can never be put back together. There is no crossing back over the bridge into a safe harbor, because even the most vaunted traditions themselves have been irrevocably marked by this global flux. And most of us will have to do with remaining on the move and trying to remain human.
There are exceptions to this flux, places which remain outside circulation.6
But the question is not how to find those places, but what it means to live as humans within a nation—a nation most representative of the world within which it floats—whose identity consists solely of change?
That America is the kind of place which consists of endless change is, on the one hand, corrosive to any kind of vision which emphasizes the need for stability, for staying put, for learning virtue with a people over time. But we reckon with America not by wishing for some other nation to belong to, but by recognizing that frailing, old America is a sign of creation writ large: it is the kind of nation which could only exist in a creation made by migration, by global tradewinds, by flux.
What do we do with America at this point?
One could damn America for its motion, for how it’s mutability forbids anything like thick moral traditions. And like recent saints, it would not be out of bounds to do so, Scripturally speaking. But careful that, if we do damn it, that we do so for the right reasons, and not because it—like all other nations—change and are caught up in the maelstrom of change. Damn it because it becomes inhuman, because it eats alive its people or turns that cannibalisms into law. But do not damn it for being a mutable creature.
Or one could, with the new nationalists, seek to purify this land, and opt for a kind of moral life which sees a stable nation as the indispensable condition for moral life to be defended at all costs. But to live as a creature is to live in a world which you are made possible by its changes, by shifting seasons, by the influx of new people, by the ripening of winds and currents which know neither borders nor national sovereignty.
But if the world is one ripe for change, shifting beneath our feet, with the zombie its figure, how do we live in it?
Belonging to the Somewhere that is Everywhere
In contrast to the zombie—who belongs nowhere—and the world in which the zombie is the only possible figure, we can say that there is another way to exist in that world which exists as a maelstrom: the pilgrim.
The pilgrim is one who has left behind a home, and who travels through new lands not only to survive, but to be changed by them. It does no good to mourn the changeability of the world, to try to fight off the scarcity of the world by resenting it, or by reducing ourselves to survivalists.7 To be a pilgrim is to embrace the change of the world—to embrace the frailty of America, in this case—and make use of that.
The pilgrim knows that the world is made, in its constant changing shades, to be brought into rhythm: that the seasons, the tides tell us that we can see journeys as aimless or as deliberate, and that in that deliberate journey, we can be changed by our learning to be dependent on God’s good grace. The pilgrim knows that the places which are sought out are part of how we are changed, because God is in them, and because God is in them, they are home.
The pilgrim knows that because God is our home, and because of this, we can belong to a home which has many outposts. And this outpost, we call the body of Christ, a transnational body which roots itself many places without calling any of them the center, a body which exists across time and which binds all those homes into one. The pilgrim can journey through any land, then, knowing that what good is in them is a good which God has seen fit to put there, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the creation which God loves.
And the pilgrim, seeing her home across nations, is able to see the value that is there. The pilgrim, thus, is able to give away that the nationalist sees as sacrosanct, and to value that which the jeremiad wants to burn, if only because what is good is to be preserved that it might be shared. And in that process of journeying with God, of learning to value what should be valued in order that it might be shared, and in loving that which God has given for provision but not for defending—we learn to live among the zombies, without becoming them.
Reading: Karen Fields and Barbara Fields’ Racecraft, for my mind. John Cassian’s Conferences, for my soul. Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, for a book club. Lots of ecclesiology, for a summer writing project and for a new course in the Fall.
Karen and Barbara Fields’ Racecraft is a phenomenal example of this. In arguing that racism is the problem rather than race, the Fields sisters redirect our attention away from the nebulous and undefinable question of what “race” is—a concept concerned with the elusive question of identity and which identity matters more—and toward the actual structures of prejudice , class, and racism. In the wake of the affirmative action decision from SCOTUS, their work is incredibly important.
For the sake of this essay, I’m not going to be getting into the dynamics of nations, except to say that I largely take nations to be projects of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities”, constructed realities which have real histories but also mythic ones, and that people are very willing to defend myths with their lives.
This is one of the most incisive criticisms that George Romero offered via his zombie films: that people who become zombies circle endlessly within a consumer framework which has no beginning, end, or meaning. But then again, there’s actually now a live zombie game taking place in an abandoned mall: film becomes reality.
This incidentally is why I find ethics of virtue so compelling, but also too focused: sometimes virtue ethics pretends as if the environment in which we try to be moral makes no difference. The terrain ultimately wins, and the perennial challenge is how to live amidst the ruins. See Lisa Tessman’s work for one example of how “burdened virtues”, virtues which emerge in situations of emergency, operate.
Greg Grandin’s work The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America is a terrific exploration of what happens to this expansionist ethos when there’s no more land left to expand into.
One possible off ramp to the flux is to focus on identity, a stable core out of which we might operate. Identity offers one harbor from the storm, a way for people to grab something stable which might buffer them again a wandering dynamic.
As Fields and Fields argue, race-as-identity is a cultural construction which has wandered around, not providing the stable foundation that identitarians and race-biologists alike want it to have. In an unstable world, many categories of personal identity multiply, both as an effect of the storm which tosses us around, offering us endless variations on being human, and as a stabilizing way out of that storm. But it cannot be both.
The recent ethnocentric claims about nations gets us no further, doubling down on the same kind of stable identity claims, only for geographically bounded populations. For the ethnonationalists, peoples and places and races all come as a package deal and nations should be fine with guarding racial borders. But what could that kind of place be, particularly if race does not carry the substantive claims of identity that we think it does, if race is itself is a kind of fiction? What kind of nation emerges ex nihilo, fully formed within to the degree that it need never admit anything from outside, that it need not be formed by visitors, strangers, and outsiders? What kind of people exist as a homogeny, as a rarified collective unified and pure? Is there a place outside the flux to be able to stand?
Survivalist shows are mirror images of reality dating shows in this way: both trade on scarcity as something to be turned into a game, to be toyed with, rather than taking it seriously.