INTERVIEW & ANALYSIS // NOTES FROM THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
By Walter Foley
Volume 2 // Issue 3 // Winter 2021 // APOCALYPSE
Notes From the Zombie Apocalypse
“I basically want to steal the culture from the people who have been abusing us for such a very long time.”
—John Vervaeke, early pandemic interview on The Stoa
Why is there suffering? Why is love so complex? Why is there ultimately no satisfaction in chasing pleasure?
John Vervaeke, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, believes we are beset by a “meaning crisis,” that we’ve lost the ability to confront these perennial problems, and that our inability to cultivate wisdom places us within a metaphorical zombie horde: homeless, directionless, without a deep understanding of our lives.
In their 2017 work, Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis, Vervaeke and co-authors Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic describe how this monster—an insatiably hungry, laconic being that shuffles aimlessly between the worlds of the living and the dead—came to symbolize the effects of our loss of meaning. Beyond the metaphor, we see tangible consequences in rising rates of suicide, addiction, and reported loneliness, as well as in a loss of trust in institutions that are tacitly replacing spiritual traditions.
The book, freely available as a PDF through Open Book Publishers, delves through historical, philosophical, and sociological literature to pinpoint how the authors believe we ended up here. Vervaeke’s summation, in brief: We threw away cognitive tools that had been honed over millennia specifically to deal with these perennial problems.
“I don’t expect that the gods of our time, the market and the state—and now they’re becoming indistinguishable—are going to want to hear this, because they have built themselves around adversarial processing,” Vervaeke tells me over a video call in November. “They’ve built themselves around bloodthirsty competition.”
How does one cultivate wisdom? It isn’t by memorizing as many facts as possible, nor is it done by joining a club in which everyone holds the “correct” worldview. Through his research and online lectures, Vervaeke has been arguing that much of a person’s ability to navigate complex systems—whether it be familial drama, romantic relationships, or deep existential questions—is garnered through implicit learning, below our conscious awareness and in the domain of intuition.
One way to connect with this mode of learning is through immersion in physical, meditative, and conversational disciplines that bring us into a more attentive type of consciousness, often referred to as a flow state in the psychological literature. Meditation, body-movement techniques, exploration of nature, music, and thoughtful dialogue are all elements of “ecologies of practice,” the term Vervaeke uses to highlight the fact that mindfulness and contemplation require a variety of movements and mental orientations. Although he is encouraged to see a renewed interest in meditation in the West, he hopes to expand people’s understanding of mindfulness beyond the seat cushion.
“I don’t know what the hat is I’m wearing in this space, and I’ve sort of stopped trying to figure it out. But whatever it is, when I’m there—giving people these tools by which they can articulate and also activate and enhance and understand and develop their practices—that’s been for me extremely gratifying,” says Vervaeke, reflecting on a younger cohort who are applying his research to their own lives. “It’s been deeply encouraging to me because I’m by nature kind of a dour guy. I tend towards the darker side of things.”
What follows are an edited interview with authors Vervaeke and Mastropietro, as well as excerpts from their book.
Your work often highlights the ways in which old wisdom traditions got certain things right. People have intuited for a long time that practices such as meditation have cognitive benefits, but I heard you say, John, that when you started teaching about mindfulness in the ’90s, you had to be a bit apprehensive. Does it ever—and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but more in that it seems like it would be an interesting thing to experience—does it ever feel silly to have to legitimize very old ideas that to you just seem like common sense?
John Vervaeke: It does and it doesn’t. While I have great respect for these ancient wisdom traditions, we also engage in some pretty significant critiques of them. The work I published on mindfulness begins with a large section criticising how it’s currently being understood and being studied. The dialogue between the current cognitive science and the ancient sapiential traditions is where I feel most at home. I do value the fact that I can get people to revalue and revalorize these traditions, but I see it as much more than legitimating them. I see it much more as trying to break them free from the ways in which they’re encrusted by past formulations that are actually preventing them from being as viable as they could right now.
Christopher Mastropietro: The same thing could be said of discourse as of mindfulness. What’s really interesting is when we initially wrote the book, it sort of ends with this skyward gaze of this half-dour, half-hopeful gesture to the possibility of some legitimate response to the meaning crisis. And what’s really been interesting over the last couple of years, especially this last year, is we’re starting to find [that] the possibility of a viable response is hiding in plain sight. … We’ve lost sight of conversation as something that can actually be done well, or not done well. This old Socratic idea that discourse isn’t just a way of opining at each other—it’s a poetic process; it’s not just a disputatious process. You can actually use it to create; you can use it to build. You can use it to illume territory that hasn’t been illumed yet.
My situation is that I was stuck in a rut musically and also mentally—I spent most of my 20s drinking way too much, which got really bad. Coming out of it, all of these conversations were emerging related to your areas of research. I was prompted to come up with a more meditative approach to music that helped to clear my head and also gave me something productive to do instead of drink all the time. The next part of the puzzle is seeing how much of this sort of experimentation will take place in the public sector versus the private sector, and whether long-established, tax-exempt meeting centers—such as religious institutions—will be interested in opening up to some of these approaches.
JV: What excites me about this is that these ideas... are translatable into the guts and sinews of people’s lives. … That possibility is always richly available to people. We need ecologies of practices that help people get access to how to do this, and we need a scientific worldview that properly homes it. Well, I would call it both a scientific and religious—or philosophical—review that properly homes it. … While I don’t expect the state and the market and a lot of the institutionalized forms of religion to be particularly responsive, I do think there are churches and monasteries—I know, because I’m in discussion with them—where people are taking this up and taking it up deeply and authentically as part of this countercultural movement.
CM: The particular impotence of the state, and its blindness to the presence and the importance of the sacred, is probably more pronounced now than it has been in a very long time, because of the pandemic. What it has revealed is that the state’s scope of concern is confined, as we see, to the health and wellbeing of the body. It’s very, very materialistic. … One of the things that’s happening right now is that the incapacity of our institutions to be able to provide meaningful guidance or pedagogy about the place of the sacred in a person’s life is laid pretty much bare now. … The meta-meaningful governance of the religious life has long since descended from its place at the top of that hierarchy.
Politics was perhaps the most proximate and the easiest substitution. Any accommodation [government institutions] make to any kind of sapiential practice is purely accidental. If we wanted to be charitable, we would say it could come from a pluralistic liberalism—what’s left of it—and, perhaps at its more pernicious, tribalism. … It’s one of the reasons many of us have lost our faith in the institutions that govern our day-to-day lives. They don’t attend to the individual in the individual’s due complexity.
JV: We’ve just got so much more information, and the rate at which we’re being exposed to it is going up, also dramatically. And it’s also polluted: There’s so much disinformation in the information, and that’s simultaneously making us aware of how complex the problems are, and yet numbing us and distorting our awareness of the complexity of all the problems we’re facing.
One response is: No, no, no! Give me the final, complete, finished story that will give me the absolute, pure signal. This is the main hunger of ideology: Here’s the finished account, the final story, and—I’m going to use this deliberately—the final solution to everything. And here’s the strong person that will get us there.
That will overlap with a propensity for the ideology to be linked up to all kinds of conspiracy theories about the evil others and how they’re preventing the utopia from ensuing, and all that bullshit. By and large, the state and the market are exacerbating and contributing to that move.
The other way is you can take an example from the longitudinal success of life on Earth and do what life does, which is to come up with a way of constantly evolving and adapting and re-deciding, and there’s no final point. …
How do we get people so that they can, in their day-to-day lives, get that kind of comprehensive adaptivity that allows them to zero-in on what matters most—what’s most relevant for flourishing? That’s the way of wisdom.
You’ve suggested that the time is ripe for “stealing the culture,” because people are hungry for something different. But if this project is nonviolent, as you advocate—operating by enticing people to come over and see what we’re up to—a big part of it seems to rely on letting outsiders know that cool stuff is happening over here.
JV: That’s where the artistry of this comes in. Beauty is the great antidote to being fixated on pleasure.
CM: One of the things that beauty does, is it cultures an interest in what people don’t yet understand. That’s a big one. It’s probably its most significant attribute in this sphere, and when contesting this kind of problem.
When you bring people to what the Socratic tradition calls the aporia—when you reveal that the game that they’re playing is insufficient and calcified and will not avail wisdom—then you can lapse into a very deep form of despair or nihilism. … But one of the things that beauty does, especially the beautification of philosophy, is it attracts people to it without promising the kind of closure and certitude that John was just equating with ideology. That the open-endedness of its meaning becomes the thing that attracts, rather than the thing that deters or the thing that discourages. Beauty disarms people. It displaces them from egocentrism. One of the properties of dispute and debate is that people are always trying to maintain self-image: The ego is the object of debate, fundamentally. That is what’s different about the Socratic discourse. It’s fundamentally vectored by beauty rather than vectored by ego, because beauty transcends ego. There’s a kind of faith that is generated by the experience and the encounter with beauty, that suddenly there becomes this crackling intuition that if you bind yourself to it, if you become faithful to it, it will disclose something to you that will be unlike anything that you could have expected.
In the book, you discuss the Grassy Narrows First Nation as well as the ancient Hellenes in order to describe domicide—the destruction of home—and its effects on mental health. It seems you’re also using this framework to explain the effects of rootlessness that some middle- and upper-middle-class Millennials and Zoomers are experiencing, with this idea that a person should go to college and then simply move to wherever the jobs are, even if that means leaving friends and family behind. And it seems you’re also referencing the destruction of opportunities within poorer communities—often due to larger economic factors that are outside of their control—which can leave them stranded. It also sounds like you’re talking about “domicide” within the individual, when they are separated from some sort of higher realization of their nature, culture, or ability to make sense of their world.
JV: Yeah. Domicide is a multi-scale thing, and all of the different levels are interacting with each other in very complex ways. So when you get into an addiction, for example, you are cut off in a profound, existential way from your future self. There’s no alternative for you. That’s a kind of domicide. And it’s not, “Well, I like where I am”—because you don’t like where you are. So, when you don’t like where you are, and you have nowhere to go: That’s what it is to not have a home. “Well, I have a shelter around me”—that’s not what I’m talking about. You don’t have a home.
There’s these levels at which people are bereft: It can be individual addiction; it can be a generational thing about how the culture is just not there for them; it can be at the civilizational level—that we no longer have, as Chris was saying, a “meta-meaning” system. I often put it this way: We generate a scientific worldview in which we don’t belong. We have a scientific explanation about everything except how we do science—how we make the meaning and find the truth that generates the science. And it’s not independent from the way in which we disenfranchise groups of people economically, politically, ecologically.
BOOK EXCERPTS
The zombie apocalypse as metaphor for our meaning crisis
The outbreak of zombieism is a twentieth-century phenomenon, but in the twenty-first century it explodes into zeitgeist. ... Two great waves have lapped onto the shore of American cinema since 2000: one around 2001, and then again in 2008. Twenty-Eight Days Later comes out in 2002, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is remade in 2004, and Zombieland becomes the highest-grossing zombie film to date in 2009. This is quickly overtaken in 2013, first by Warm Bodies, and then by the Brad Pitt epic, World War Z. By 2015, there are three TV series based on zombies: Z Nation on Netflix, iZombie on CW, and AMC’s breakthrough hit, The Walking Dead. The genre has also enjoyed considerable success in the medium of video games, most notably in the highly lauded The Last of Us. …
The zombie has become a pervasive cultural symbol that is constantly expanding its reference, not content to relegate itself to its tradition. As Deleuze and Guattari (1972: 332) put it “the only modern myth is the myth of zombies.” The zombie seems to be a shifting signifier with an unending hermeneutical compass. And yet its features remain remarkably consistent from one story to the next, and it has represented many varieties of apocalypse without altering its basic nature: consumerism, poverty, hunger, political dystopia and environmental degradation. … Zombies have pressed us with the dangers of a unique moment in time, and they have become the most enduring, expressive, and consummate metaphor for our crisis in meaning. …
The collapse of ‘Americanism’ and what it means for our wellbeing
One of the more puissant cultural canopies in the twentieth century was the phenomenon of “Americanism.” Particularly in the latter half of the century, being American connoted a strong apotheosis of values and perspective for most Americans. In most cases, if two Americans had diverging interests, backgrounds or orientations, they could be sure to touch base on certain convictions held mutually fundamental. Significantly, many attribute the vitality of Americanness to the influence of a vernacular religiosity―the “faith in America.”
Yet, as Dreyfus and Kelly (2011) observe, we no longer share a uniform worldview that guarantees agreement on sacredness or standards of behavior. We are talking about a changing worldview, rather than a single event or moment in history. This has been a gradual process. Now, the powerful twentieth century “Americanism” is nearly a misnomer; two persons can share its title and share almost nothing else. The alienation we feel in everyday life suggests that experiences of foreignness―exposure to “otherness” of persons or place―are becoming inherent in domestic life. This dovetails with burgeoning literature discussing the disintegration of social candor, “common courtesy” and the sense of locality that made America perceive itself as a neighborhood of frankness and fluid exchange. Public intimacy is what is at stake, the feeling of recognition; understanding, and being understood, by other human beings. …
Losing our sense of home with ourselves and with others
“[Humans] are animals who most fundamentally understand what reality is, who we are, and how we ought to live by locating ourselves within the larger narratives and metanarratives that we hear and tell, and that constitute what is for us real and significant.”
—Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture
“When such narratives collapse, we are lost in the dislocation, fragmentation, moral paralysis, and disorientation of homelessness.”
—Brian J. Walsh, From Housing to Homemaking: Worldview and the Shaping of Home
Walsh discusses the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation who live on a reserve in northwestern Ontario, 80 kilometres from Kenora near the Manitoba border. They were relocated there in 1963 by authorities in the Canadian Federal Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Motivation for the relocation was well-reasoned; access to a variety of provisions―including schools, roads, electricity, health care institutions and employment opportunities―would be considerably improved. Most significantly, the housing that the Nation was provided with was brand new and infrastructurally upgraded. They had more power and more protection against the elements. In a very short period of time, Grassy Narrows was spared from the modest conditions of their old reserve and inaugurated into the life of contemporary suburban domesticity.
What followed was an effect that very few individuals―and apparently no one within the Federal Department―managed to foresee. By 1970, the Grassy Narrows Nation was “the site of some of the most severe social and familial disintegration, together with environmental despoliation, ever to be seen in North America” (Walsh 2006). Cases of domestic conflict, violence and suicide exploded in number, employment plummeted, welfare dependency increased and as many as 1,000 people showed symptoms of being infected with Minamata disease, caused by mercury-dumping upstream. “By the mid-80’s, the Grassy Narrows community demonstrated the numbness of spirit and utter hopelessness that rivaled any Third World situation” (Walsh 2006). ...
The old reserve of the Anishinaabe provided more than shelter. It provided a worldview,
a vision of life that provides its adherents with a foundational understanding of how the world works. That means, however, that a worldview necessarily also functions as a vision for life that gives direction for normative and life-giving ways to live. A worldview shapes those who live in its embrace so that they develop certain habits [...] ways of living and relating to each other in the world. (Walsh 2006) ...
The residents of Grassy Narrows weren’t homeowners anymore because the moment the housing project was completed, they had ceased to be homemakers. They weren’t recognizing themselves within their homes, and they weren’t connecting to anyone through their homes. At home, you are more than simply an occupant; home remembers you, home understands you, home is where you are recognized, home is where you belong. ...
“Strip a people of that sense of place, deprive them of the space that they feel is necessary to establish such a sense of place, and they are rendered homeless” (Walsh 2006).
Following Walsh’s definition, the loss of home may be called domicide. …
Realizing it’s up to us
According to a study by the Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of the US public and “a third of adults under 30―are ‘religiously unaffiliated’―the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling” history, overtaking Catholics, mainline Protestants, and all followers of non-Christian faiths. …
This unclassifiable group has come to be called the religious “nones.” ... Though fewer and fewer people identify openly with a particular organized religion, it seems that the want of a meaningful spirituality has never been more pregnant. What is clear, however, is that the spiritual vacuum is not moving people towards organized religion; it is (at least in part) causing their dissent.
In the culture of criticism, “nones” of analysis have now emerged in response to the vacuum. Many of them assemble loosely under the title of postmodernism, taking an approach to theory that subverts conventional formulations of structure, and subjects human activity to illimitable interpretability. Postmodernism reacts to the precariousness of social identity, the dilemmas of relativism, the problems of agency and the denaturalizing of mind, message, power, language and the anthropocentric world. It wonders how the individual hopes to navigate an unnavigable sea of possible meanings and whether there can ever be an “essentiality” to the living of life, a definitive indication of who and where we are and what we ought to be. It wonders because the answers aren’t clear anymore, because modernity feels the absence of a singular governing system for our beliefs. It is as though we are struck suddenly with the realization that no one is watching us. There is no skyhook of appraisal for our performance. There is no superintendent to approve or disapprove of our actions. We have awoken to the task of being our own minders, responding to our own directives, drawing our own maps and writing our own rules. We are adolescents reeling from the prospect of our independence, disarranged from the sudden loss of a parental source. And now, it sometimes seems that anything goes. The world no longer offers itself as an attendant. All responsibility we put upon the once fated world now rests entirely upon our shoulders.
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