Zombie Ethics: The Life of the Mind Overtaken

TLDR: We Choose What We Choose For Other Reasons than Reason

The second in a series on how the notion of the zombie helps illuminate problems in the moral life. There’s a reason why we bump up against the same ideas all the time, and sometimes, it’s the algorithims. Sometimes, it’s because how we reason has been changed.

The Social Imagination: A Brief Inquiry

Did you ever wonder why it is that everyone is wearing the On Cloud shoes? Or why no kids have G.I. Joes anymore? It has something to do with market placement, brand recognizability, and the fact that G.I. Joes hasn’t been on TV in thirty years and done really badly in film reboots. But it has more to do with the way in which something called “social imaginaries” work.

“Social imaginary” is a term coined by the philosopher Charles Taylor in the late 1990s, as a way of describing how it is that certain ideas become “in the water”. In his big book from 2007, he undertakes an exploration of how it is that Europe, for example, went from being a place where everyone believed in the supernatural and organized their lives around some sense of it, to a place where unbelief was thinkable. It’s the thinkability of it which is interesting, because it represents something new—an earwork, a possibility which even if not visible to us yet is still entertainable as something which could be real.

Once thinkable, it becomes actionable, and once actionable, it becomes a social possibility. And once a social possibility, it becomes routinized and normalized. It’s the way that any new idea comes to overtake old ones: through an ordinary process of a few people doing it until it simply because “the way things are done”. This change in our reasoning then circles back around to shaping future enacted realities. Why is so hard to get people to call something a tissue instead of a Kleenex, even when you may not have ever purchased a Kleenex (TM)? Case in point.

What I want to suggest, though, is nothing novel: this process never happens in a vacuum, but because of incentives which ultimately change our sense of what is thinkable, in good and bad ways.

Because the humanities in particular operate in situations of scarcity, there’s rarely enough jobs, research money, or time to go around. There are innumerable interesting things in the world, intriguing and world-changing questions which go laying around for decades unasked, but why do some questions get asked and others not? Sometimes, you have an intrepid individual who dares to ask the thing which no one has thought to ask, but a lot of times it’s because there is an incentive attached: someone offers a researcher a grant, or makes a product attractive as a status symbol, or links the ineffable “efficiency” to it.

It’s not enough to slap these two terms together, but to do it in a way which now bundles mentally together the terms of “this object” and “this value”: “valuable questions” with “research about gender”, or “shoes” with “On Cloud”. It’s not a matter of marketing, but ultimately, something that happens before marketing now: a foreshortening of the reasoning process into proscribed possibilities which now become difficult to unthink. Someone could still believe and organize their lives around water sprites, in Taylor’s example, the way that an ethicist could still pursue mundane questions about metaethics or cognitive processes, but it’s much more desirable and profitable—and thinkable—to write about how the church is nothing but an abusive power structure.

BRAAAAAINNNNS: The Goal of Zombie Ethics

If zombie ethics has to do with something alien to us altering our lives, then the way in which our reasoning patterns happen are an intrinsic aspect to this process. Once thinkable, a thing can over time become co-extensive with reasoning patterns themselves.

In zombie lore, the eating of brains is a relatively recent addition, added because the eating of the brain helps the zombies cope with being zombies. The destruction of other human’s reasoning processes makes the fate of being out of control of your own body more…palatable. Misery loves company, even if it creates more misery. The possession of the zombie constrains first and foremost the reasoning centers of others.

Photo by Gaspar Uhas on Unsplash

In Romans, when St. Paul describes the renewal of our minds, one way to approach this is through this dynamic I’ve been describing: that an idea, once entertained, becomes not so much enactable as merely thinkable. And ideas are notoriously hard to contain. But what is interesting here is the way that Paul does not see the mind as a free agent, but as that which will fall either under the sway of “this world” or God:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will (Romans 12:1-2).

Thought, habit, and routine always become self-reinforcing, in a kind of near slavery which Paul describes here, or in a kind of transfiguration, in which our reasoning¹ conforms to a different “social imaginary”. Both of these, however, require enactment for the thinking to “stick”. It requires, in the positive case, a reformation, in which the assumptions are put to scrutiny, in which we undergo a conversion over time in which something becomes thinkable, and then livable.

There are innumerable ways in which our reasoning becomes constrained: by convention, by social media echo chambers, etc etc etc—and these are all true, and beaten to death. What I’m more interested in are the ones which are deemed unthinkable because they are deemed impractical. That which we name as reasonable is that which we have determined to fall within the scope of a prudential action, possible on the basis of the situation in front of us. But what if the mind of Christ, as Paul means, is that which is unthinkable to us because we have ruled out in advance its practicality?

This is where I think the whole notion of the constrained mind becomes very interesting: that our social imaginaries gain traction because we cannot see a way in which our thinking might find form in the world in any other way. It’s why we turn increasingly to technology instead of reduction of consumption to resolve long-term environmental crisis, or why we rest into autopayments for credit cards instead of evaluating purchasing habits. It’s why we continue to refine the same processes for the same problems, and wonder why the problems persist: new possibilities are unthinkable because our practice is intractable.

The only way out of this might just be to start doing something different, to embrace the crisis, and see what happens. Because in a crisis, you have nothing to lose: the old pattern no longer works, and has been found wanting. All you have to lose is your brain-worm.

1. Part of what is in view with “mind” but not its totality. I’m less persuaded that it carries the connotations of self-abnegation, as to be “mindful” of something is to concentrate on it as an object of desire, not to seek more distance from it.