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We seem to be heading into something of a meaning crisis in our society. So this is work I do with Christopher Mastapietro. And what we’re doing in a book we’re writing called Science and the Sage is we talk about what we call the zombie zeitgeist. That what’s going on right now is we’ve got this proliferation of presentation and stories and movies and TV shows about zombies. So you have The Walking Dead. We’ve got a movie right now doing a riff on Romeo and Juliet involving zombies. We’ve got World War Z coming, which is about zombies. And then, Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead. And we’ve just got a proliferation and we actually track this and there’s been sort of this exponential increase in all of this presentation. But it’s not just presentation. People want to be, they want to participate. They want to be involved on it. We have sort of zombie happenings. People will suddenly dress up as zombies and take on the mannerisms of zombies. There was a discussion just in the Canadian Parliament about whether or not we should sort of use zombies to prepare ourselves for particular emergency situations. Now there’s a humorous aspect to this, but there’s also a deeply serious point. And the deeply serious point is this culture is zeroing in on a mythology, a mythic representation that is trying to give expression, trying to articulate something that is going profoundly wrong. We’re trying to create an image. We’re trying to create a narrative. We’re trying to give speech and picture to something that is very pervasive, very profound, but very hard to articulate. And this is what Chris and I call the growing meaning crisis, because the zombie represents a loss of meaning. Think about all the weird features about a zombie. Okay, so first of all, zombies have lost most of the capacity for meaning. They can’t speak anymore. They can’t generate meaning. They’ve dropped down to this very, very basic level of just wanting to eat and consume. What’s really odd is it’s kind of a whole, because they want to eat the very organ that typically creates meaning. They want to eat brains. So they represent this fundamental loss of meaning. But the way they move, they drift. They drift around. They represent, again, one of our pervasive metaphors for finding our lives meaningless, that we’re adrift. We’re wandering aimlessly. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t have a purpose. Notice also that zombies, unlike, you know, Dracula or Frankenstein, they’re homeless. They’re by definition not only lacking in home, but incapable of having a home. And that, again, is a way in which people often express a sense of meaninglessness. I have no home. I don’t belong. There’s nowhere I should be. But think about the weird other features about a zombie. Zombies don’t have any supernatural powers other than coming back from life, coming back from the dead, right? They don’t represent any important intervention from supernatural forces or divine agencies. They’re just this catastrophic failure that is being inflicted on the struggling remnants of humanity. And they have this weird, again, twist in them. The zombie is the only communal monster. You don’t get usually packs of vampires, right? But the zombies hang out in herds. It’s like they almost have community, but they represent, in fact, that they can’t actually enter into community. They long the way. They, in some sense, represent the longing we have to belong to each other. They represent a loss of how we belong to ourselves. Zombies, unlike vampires or other monsters, zombies lack self-awareness by definition. It’s one of the fundamental things. A zombie in no way belongs to him or herself. They’ve lost this in a profound way. And even the narrative around the zombie points to the meaning crisis. Usually what’s going on, right, in a supernatural story is there’s some answer or solution to the problem. Or if it’s even if it’s a tragedy like, you know, the tragedy of Odysseus or something, or the tragedy, not the tragedy of Odysseus, but the tragedy of Orpheus or the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, right? We know what’s going on. We have the answer. But when we’re watching a zombie movie, right, that’s missing. There’s no answer to the problem. Yeah, you could kill some zombies, but then what? And we know that, you know, there’s inevitable it’s going to get worse and worse. But we don’t have any answer either as to what should be done. I mean, the answer is, you know, to create a meaningful civilization. That’s the actual response in a zombie situation. But we don’t know what that is. We don’t know what to do. We’re no better off. And so it’s not a tragedy. It’s not like we have an insight into what the hero should be doing. Instead, we sit there and we go through the zombie apocalypse, but we’re no better off than the people suffering in the film. And there’s a weird sort of take in the genre that points to the fact that, you know, there’s this lack of self-awareness. There’s the lack of our superiority. Because one of the weird things is, it’s one of the standard tropes of the zombie genre, is that nobody uses the word zombie to describe the monsters in the movies. Now, there’s some variation on it, but in almost all the films, you don’t call them zombies. They’re called the walkers or they’re called this or they’re called that. Because that’s a reflection of the fact that we, right, really don’t have, right, any kind of participatory superiority over the poor folks that are in the zombie apocalypse. Yeah, we know they’re called the zombie. They never say that. And that’s a way of saying, like, we can’t offer them anything. We can’t help them. It’s useless. We have this profound symbol that’s becoming pervasive and almost magnetic. And it’s attractiveness for the fact that our culture is facing a profound crisis of meaning. The way we’re connected to ourself, the way we’re connected to each other, the way we’re connected to the universe and find it a home that we belong to. All of this has been seriously undermined and lost. And we don’t know how to address this meaning crisis. Now, what I want to suggest to you is that there is an answer to this, but it involves a very different approach to understanding what’s going on in how human brains and minds make meaning. And this would be a discussion about the nature of wisdom and the cultivation of compassion. But that’s another talk.