Zombie Ethics: What Happens When We Are Not Our Own?
Whole Body Surrogacy and The Question of Outside Influences
Apologies for the unexpected hiatus. I was traveling last week to speak at the annual conference of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the digital church.1 The summer will most likely continue to be spotty.—The Management
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Zombies: A Brief History
In popular monster lore, zombies remain a kind of black box. Dracula? Transylvanian murdering prince. Frankenstein’s Monster? Lab experiment. But the origin stories of zombies has moved around quite a bit. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the origin stories of the zombie has been traced to Haitian voudou rites, to viral infections, to asteroids and space particles, and on and on. The whole origin story of zombies is pretty fun, and every time you watch a zombie show—if that’s your thing2—the story changes a bit.
But the common thread of all zombie lore. The body—whether living or dead—has come under the sway of some kind of outside force which puts the body into service. The reasons for this event vary. Sometimes, as with Night of the Living Dead, there’s no specific reason offered3, whereas in The Last of Us, it’s a plant species trying to take over the world. But in any event, the bodies in question are taken up for reasons which elude the remaining humans: even when the origin is known, the aims which develop among the zombies themselves remain a mystery to the non-zombies.
This is, I think, what makes the zombie so interesting: there’s agency, but it’s extremely obscured; there are plans, but they emerge from the ground up rather than from a central figure4. But pivotally, the body of the zombie exists in a recognizable form of a human, though put to use for ends which are beyond the grasp of the former human and the onlookers alike.
Zombie Frontiers: Whole Body Surrogacy
Within biomedical ethics, surrogacy remains a fairly contested area. The practice has long biblical roots, with handmaids and concubines carrying babies for others who are unable to have children.5 The status of surrogacy as a commercial act is the most contested version of this, with it having been legalized (and then de-legalized) in India, and being only selectively legal in the United States.6 I have friends who have engaged in surrogacy as an act of mercy and love for friends, and want to set these cases aside for moment, and focus on surrogacy as an instance of something larger: an ongoing question of how are bodies serve outside interests.
In a recent essay by the philosopher Anna Smajodor, a proposal is made for what she calls “whole body surrogacy”. The proposal is something like the following:
If a) organ transplantation is uncontroversial, and b) we know that children can be born after the mother is brain dead, then the possibility exists for people to donate their whole bodies as gestational vessels.
At one level, this is the logical extension of surrogacy: a body put to use for reproductive purposes which originate beyond the body. What whole body surrogacy proposes is that there need to be no consciousness at all for this to happen. Babies can be grown through donated bodies, and with the added bonus of not having the surrogate change their mind: what could be the problem? If maximum efficiency is the aim here, it would seem that this would be an arguable solution: why not just line corpses up with viable embryos, and crank out babies?
The problem is that, like the zombie, we recoil at the notion of a body being put to use in ways which treat the will as a problem to be overcome. To have a child is an act of intention and agency, whether done by couples or through a surrogate, and it involves the intention of all persons involved. The “full body surrogate'“ solution sidesteps the thorniest part of this: the will. Ostensibly, a person might donate their body for this purpose, but to do this after death eliminates the possibility that a) a person might change their mind, or b) might object to some part of the procedure.
Much of the surrogacy discourse turns on whether or not such an act is just: does it create better conditions for the surrogate? Does it provide a true gift to the would-be parents? And I don’t want to deny that the entrance of a child into the world is a good thing, full stop. But the beauty of the child obscures a question that the zombie wants us to face up to: what is causing us to act in these ways to begin with?
What we recoil at in full body surrogacy opens up an important question: whether commercialization is not simply a different version of this dynamic of bodies being put into service to alien forces. When economies exist in such a way that there remains no option available except to make gestation into a profession, we are firmly in this territory. The economic conditions, having exerted a subtle and alien control over our imagination now governs our decisions, pushes over strong barriers and builds itself into our reasoning. When governments function in a way which steer public opinion toward certain outcomes and away from others, the subtle behaviors of the body follow.7
All of this gets complicated in a really interesting way by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:
19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
It is not the case that the alternative to being a zombie is to be an autonomous being, capable of self-creation. This is itself a very different kind of zombification: possession by a virus which puts our bodies into service to different idols, ideals, and maxims. To be a human is to be responsive to God as one’s source and end, with what it means to be human lived out in that world. The God who gives life and works among us for our good is in this way parodied by the zombie, for whom their agency is controlled by ends they know nothing of.
Zombie Ethics: The Frontiers
What I want to get at here, and in the next few issues, is that this dynamic of the body being overtaken by agency lies at the heart of not a few issues. In saying this, I am opening the space for the moral life to not just be about those things which we will, but also about those things which will us. To presume that the moral life is a matter of rational argument, of careful deliberation in which all factors are within our control, is a mistake. But it is a mistake which we frequently only notice in its most gruesome versions, like the zombie.
But consider, as I have written at length about, how this happens in institutional life, when beloved institutions take on a life of their own above and beyond any particular agency? Or consider the phenomenon of the mob action, in which a group of people do things more heinous than any one person would will? Or when, going about their ordinary lives, people awake to find that their lives are now characterized by habits, opinions, and dispositions that they never dreamed themselves holding—and not in good ways.
That the moral life consists of both those elements which we make use of, and those elements which insidiously make use of us, is both orthodox and controversial. That we live in a world which refuses to take these outside elements seriously means that we will always try to make zombies understandable or rationalized, as opposed to a cultural worry which keeps resurfacing. Despite the assurances that the zombie plague can be undone if we can only reach Atlanta, or find the child with the right blood type, or build the city walls high enough, we understand that it is not that simple.
The first step, though, is being able to name the zombifications for what they are.
For paid subscribers: on June 19th, we’ll be hosting the Howard Thurman Jesus and the Disinherited Zoom book club. Details coming this week!
It was a lovely gathering, and one that is very much worth your time. You can see this year’s lineup here, along with more info about the group.
It’s kind of up my alley.
Can I highly recommend Kim Paffenroth’s excellent treatment of the George Romero films? Did you know that Romero’s zombie films are actually good sociocultural commentary?
Apparently, there’s a Zombie King movie starring Cory Feldman. That Feldman didn’t know that zombies don’t have kings doesn’t surprise me.
Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness has a great treatment of this theme in the Old Testament. Ample resources for exploring this topic abound.
Insert your least favored government mandate here.
Have you come across the abolish the family socialists? Their hope is for a world where all children are born via Surrogacy.