Vampires and Liberalism
Posted: Wednesday, January 20, 2010
by Robert Gibson
R&M Tutors
Sometimes an author just doesn't know his own strength. He or she will wander into realms of truth which his or her conscious self will deny.
The orthodox liberal Stephen King does this in Salem's Lot.
This is an author who staunchly supports the values of the permissive society - by which I mean that in his writings he is obviously non-judgmental about the sexual revolution. He sticks to the politically correct line, which proclaims that good and evil boil boil down to motivation - to benevolence versus malevolence - to individual moral choice. The logical consequence of this is that what used to be regarded as perversions are now either accepted as valid life-styles, or as mere misfortunes or illnesses - not as evils. You can't help being X, and therefore there's nothing morally wrong with being X. Liberalism's historic shift has propelled society away from the traditional, much wider view that "good vs evil" covers not only "good and bad intentions" but also "straightness versus distortion", "natural versus unnatural".
You may retort that since there are no such things as vampires, there is no point in considering the question anyway. But the value of the thought-experiment may become plain if you ask yourself the question: what provides the power for a good vampire story? How does such a way-out idea (ridiculous on the face of it) manage to resonate?
It is because it symbolizes the profound truth, that evil exists over and above our narrow liberal definition.
Stephen King conveys this brilliantly in the thoughts of his character Father Callahan.
...the invention if the electric light... had killed the shadows in men's minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire's heart - and less messily, too.
The evil still went on, but now it went on in the hard, soulless glare of parking-lot fluorescents, of neon tubing, of hundred-watt bulbs by the billions. Generals planned strategic air strikes beneath the no-nonsense glow of alternating currents, and it was all out of control... We were all soldiers, simply following what was written on our walking papers. But where were the orders coming from, ultimately?... I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?
As evening draws in Father Callahan feels a terror for the fate of his soul - a terror against which modern social and ethical ideas provide no defence. The shadows may have been killed in men's minds, but that only made them more vulnerable to the realities that were casting the shadows.
Some things are evil in themselves, whether the perpetrators can help it or not. Most vampires can't help being vampires; they got that way through being bitten by other vampires. All right, maybe the few who initiate the process were exceptionally bloodthirsty people during their natural life, but they are the exception. Most of them just caught it from others. So it's not their fault. Yet once they're in that state, they're evil.
This is a dangerous idea; but then, what truth isn't?
The most dangerous thing of all might be to ignore what the legends are telling us. One day, after all, we may discover an intelligent race of parasitical organisms; or one may evolve from human stock.
To return to my previous question: if there were such things as vampires, how would officialdom cope?
My guess is: by creating a layer of bureaucracy (paid from taxes) to register all vampires and set up a system of blood banks (open all night) for their maintenance. People like Dracula would have to accept official transfusions because garlic would be handed out to every citizen (another tax rise) and in fact there would be penalties for travelling at night without a supply.
The Van Helsing method of dealing with vampires would be condemned as "discriminatory". Jokes about fang clubs and how-do-you-want-your-stakes-done would become politically incorrect and taboo; you could lose your job if you indulged in them.
The final stage might be to ban the word "vampire" altogether and refer to them as "nocturnals".
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