Ms. Robinson-Greene ("Better Off Undead") raises the next big problem: the existential dilemma of soulless people. A gloomy fact
about self-reflective creatures is that they are capable of recognizing what
Albert Camus called absurdity, "the confrontation between the longings of
humans and an indifferent universe.”
The Walkers in
The Walking Dead
provide a great example. Not only are they dead and zombified, rotting while
cannibalizing the world, but virtually no one exists to grieve who they are or
celebrate who they were. There is only blind, pitiless indifference.
Stephen Crane, your universe has arrived.
Camus’ existentialism would claim that our
ordinary life is not philosophically that much different from the world after a
zombie apocalypse. “We make demands on
the universe that it simply doesn’t (and can’t) care about. We want justice out
of the world. We want the guilty punished. We want the innocent to be spared
suffering. But that isn’t the way the world works.”
Camus said there are three options for
those who see this relentless gloom pressing in from all around: Commit
suicide, pretend life is not absurd, or turn to religion. In the face of these
absurd choices, Camus recommended we become “absurd heroes.” If nothing else we
can shake our fists at gods and men, even while knowing the gesture is
meaningless. What is more heroic than fighting in the face of inevitable
failure?
And inevitable failure is what awaits the
survivors in
The Walking Dead. We found out at the end of Season Two that
everyone is infected. Is there anything
meaningful left to do? They can rage at the sky, but who cares?
Despite all their rage they are still just rats in a zombie-filled cage. The hero in this Camus-haunted world is anyone who
keeps fighting (and if the premier of Season Three is setting the tone, that's going to be everybody all the time). If there is a silver lining behind the
zombie cloud, it is the solidarity that comes with a shared sense of doom.
