Evolution, Psychology, and Horror, Part IV

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

Source: videobuster.de

Note: This post assumes that you have seen the movie Final Girl (2015). If you have not, Wikipedia offers a fairly detailed, accurate summary of the plot.

What distinguishes the final girl of chillers and thrillers from other characters in such films. Which of her “evolved adaptations,” or traits, enables her to survive when many others in her situation and in similar environments have not?

Source: YouTube

The movie’s protagonist, Veronica, benefits from twelve years of martial arts training she receives from William, who takes her in after her parents die, when she is five years old, and from drug-induced hallucinations which result from the drugs William injects into her system so that she can experience her greatest fear, which turns out to be her dread of failing to accomplish her mission. As a result of William’s mentoring, Veronica learns both that she is a “special” person and how to fight.

She accepts a date with one of William’s targets, Shane, and Shane and his friends take her to a forest, where the seventeen-year-old boys hunt her, as they have hunted—and killed—other girls on previous occasions.

Source: regarder-films.net

 Given a head start after tricking three of the four hunters into drinking whiskey laced with a hallucinogen, she dispatches the predators, one by one, as, thanks to the hallucinogen they have ingested, the boys face their greatest fears, just as Veronica had, years ago.

So, what makes Veronica the film’s final girl?

In his article “Evolution, Population Thinking and Essentialism,” Elliot Sober distinguishes between “adaptive traits” and “adaptations.” The human appendix, for example, is an adaptation that is no longer adaptive.

Sober also distinguishes between “phylogenetic adaptations” and “ontogenetic adaptations.” The former “arise over evolutionary time and impact the fitness of the organism,” whereas the latter are “any behavior we learn in our lifetimes, [which] can be adaptive to the extent that an organism benefits from them but they are not adaptations in the relevant sense.” Clearly, the martial arts skills that Veronica learns from William are ontogenetic adaptations. As is true in regard to many other claims, these assertions are controversial and have met with several criticisms.

 Source: earth.com

In providing concrete examples for their points, evolutionary psychologists often refer to the morphological and physiological traits of animals, such as “clutch size (in birds), schooling (in fish), leaf arrangement, foraging strategies and all manner of traits.” This explanatory method can help us to see how Veronica’s fighting skills, her self-image as someone who is “special,” and her fear of failing at her mission promote her survival as a final girl.

 Source: reptilescove.com

As a World Atlas article points out, “Mimicry is an evolved resemblance in appearance or behavior between one organism and another.” Usually, a harmless animal mimics a predator to protect itself from the attack of other, lesser predators. For example, “non-venomous milk snakes appear brilliantly colored like venomous coral snakes [to] deter predators from approaching.” Veronica adopts this same strategy in reverse. A martial artist of the first rank, she is a dangerous predator, but she pretends to be simply a harmless, vulnerable teenage girl. Her attackers learn, too late, that they are the harmless snakes, as it were, and she is the deadly predator, a tactic she has learned from William.

e: pinterest.com

Veronica is also predatory in other ways. She uses her beauty and her sexuality to attract her victims, the way an orb-weaving spider lures its victims (bees in search of nectar) with “web decorations” and the “spiders' [own] bright body colorations.” Veronica’s beauty attracts the attention of Shane and his friends, and, like the beauty of the orb-weaving spider, prove their undoing. While her physical appearance is not a behavior, her use of it as a lure certainly qualifies as an ontogenetic adaptation, or trait, which she learns, again, from William.

Source: inaturalist.com

In giving her would-be victimizers whiskey laced with a hallucinogen, Veronica adapts a defense mechanism used by certain animals, making it an offense tactic. The “large granular glands on the neck and limbs” of the Sonoran desert toad (aka “psychedelic toad”) “secrete [a] thick, milky-white, neurotoxin venom called bufotenine,” which is a “potent hallucinogen.” Although this compound is often fatal in dogs, it can cause hallucinations in humans and, perhaps, in canines, since its symptoms in dogs include a “drunken gait” and “confusion.” Obviously, since William injected Veronica with a hallucinogenic substance so that she could feel what her enemies would experience when she gave them the same hallucinogen, her knowledge of its properties and use as a weapon result from his training and is, therefore, an ontogenetic adaptation.

Source: 7esl.com

The nature vs. nurture controversy is as important (and as controversial) to evolutionary psychology as it is to other disciplines. The question of “what matters more when it comes to personality, nature or nurture?” is important, although it may, ultimately, prove unanswerable. As both Backcountry and Final Girl suggest, we are products of both our genes and our surroundings, of our nature and our nurture.

Source: the-other-view.com

Veronica survives for the same reason as Jen: she is better adapted to her environment than the other characters. Her traits (self-esteem, ruthlessness, and duplicity), coupled with her deadly martial arts skills, make her, not her stalkers, the apex predator, just as her attacker’s traits (sexism, misogyny, perfidy) make them her prey.

Next post:Evolution, psychology, and The Exorcist

Implications of Horror Fiction's Natural Antagonists

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

Bela Lugosi is Count Dracula. Source: Wikipedia.

In a previous post, we considered the ethical and metaphysical implications of supernatural villains. In this post, let's consider the implications of horror fiction's natural antagonists.

For those who subscribe to a metaphysical dualism, sources of evil are often divided into supernatural and natural. The latter are often animals or natural disasters. Since such entities and forces are not moral agents, they are not held responsible for the “evil” (destruction, injury, and death) they cause, so there is no ethical dimension to their behavior.

However, when a moral agent controls a natural force or being, a moral dimension does exist, but in regard to the human actors, since they, as moral agents, are responsible for the harm that they unleash through the agency of the natural forces or creatures they direct.

The creature from the Black Lagoon. Source: pri.org

Nevertheless, as anyone who has watched a movie such as King Kong (1933), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), or Jaws (1975) is aware, wild animals can cause great havoc.

In The Creature, during an expedition to the Amazon, geologists investigate the fossilized remains of an organism intermediate between Earth's marine and terrestrial life forms. Thereafter, the team leader recruits an ichthyologist to assist them, but when they return to their campsite, they discover that the other team members have been killed, supposedly by a jaguar. (In the leader's absence, a surviving member of the species represented by the fossilized remains, curious about the scientists' camp, visits the site, where, frightened by the researchers, it attacks and kills the victims.)

Kay Lawrence and the creature. Source: reddit.com

The expedition then visits the black lagoon at the end of a tributary. When one of their members, Kay Lawrence, goes swimming, she is stalked by the creature, who loses a claw after becoming entangled in one of the drag lines of the crew's ship. Subsequently, the creature kills other members of the expedition until, caught, it is caged aboard the ship.

Escaping, it kills several more of the scientists and captures Kay, taking her to its lair in a cavern. The remaining scientists track the creature, rescue Kay, and kill the monstrous “Gil-man,” shooting it repeatedly.

Although the monster commits several murders, kidnaps Kay, and terrorizes the scientific team, it acts in self-defense, rather than with hostile intent, in an effort to protect itself and, in the case of Kay, perhaps as the result of its seeking a mate.

At no point does the creature intentionally harm anyone, other than in defense of its own life, and its self-defensive behavior is prompted by its instinct for survival, just as its abduction of Kay is an effect of its mating instinct. There is no malice aforethought. The creature does not plan; it does not act with conscious and deliberate intent; and most of its behavior is reactive, rather than causative. Therefore, the creature is not a moral agent.

King Kong meets Ann Darrow. Source: basementrejects.com

King Kong and the great white shark of Jaws are, like the creature from the Black Lagoon, merely animals that react to threats to their lives or, perhaps, with respect to Kong, the mating instinct (although, in his case, this possibility seems a stretch, given his size respective to that of his captive, Ann Darrow; it may be that Kong carries her off simply because he has been conditioned to do so by the natives' periodic practice of offering him a human female sacrifice.)

Indeed, it is often the human characters in such films who cause the reactions of the animals they encounter, hunt, or harass, which, of course, makes the human characters, as moral agents, morally responsible for the resulting destruction, injuries, and deaths their own behavior toward the “antagonists” sets in motion.

God questions Job. Source: wondersforoyarsa.blogspot,com

In Judaeo-Christian-Christian theology, God is a moral agent because he holds Himself morally responsible for the acts he performs. Although his behavior may be mysterious, at times, to human beings, since they lack his omniscience, He declares Himself “righteous” and “without sin,” and holds human beings, his creatures, morally responsible for their lack of faith and trust in Him and His self-characterization, expecting them to trust that He is the perfect moral agent he declares himself to be. It is a sin for them to characterize him as other than he has revealed Himself to them to be. Angels are also moral agents, with free will; some, rebelling against God, were cast into hell; those who remained faithful to Him reside in heaven with Him, as his messengers and servants.

From a Judaeo-Christian perspective, other supernatural agents are either evil in themselves (demons, the “fallen angels” who rebelled against God) or evil because they participate in evil (unrepentant sinners) or allow themselves to be empowered by evil supernatural agents (witches, vampires, werewolves).

From this point of view of this religious tradition, therefore, moral agents can be either supernatural or natural, although, among the latter category of such agents, only human beings, not animals or forces of nature, can be so classified.

Ethical and Metaphysical Implications of Supernatural Villains

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

 Twisted Tales series. Source: Amazon

Like all other genres of fiction, the literature of horror, a type of fantasy, expresses philosophical implications about the way its characters view the world, even if their Weltanschauung is not altogether clear to them.

 Witches' Sabbath by Francisco Goya. Source: Wikipedia.

The existence of a supernatural antagonist, or villain, posits the existence of  supernatural, or spiritual, dimension of existence as well as a natural order of being, both a supernatural world and a natural world.

 God as Architect by anonymous. Source: Wikipedia

In a story in which such a dualistic metaphysics exists, a supernatural villain is, by origin or nature, as its powers or abilities confirm, linked to a realm that transcends the natural world. Such beings are beyond the universe, outside nature. Therefore, they are also beyond human ken, outside human knowledge and understanding. Supernatural entities are mysterious, which tends to heighten our fear of them; the unknown is always especially frightening when it appears to have a threatening aspect, as, of course, villains, human or otherwise, do.

 

 St. Francis Borgia Helping a Dying Impenitent by Francisco Goya. Source: Wikipedia

The question arises as to whether an audience whose members disbelieve in the existence of a supernatural order (and, therefore, of course, supernatural antagonists) can experience fear while watching a movie such as, say, The Exorcist, the villain of which is a demon (or, maybe, the devil himself), A Nightmare on Elm Street, which features a supernatural bogeyman, or Poltergeist, the antagonist of which is a not-so-friendly ghost. Of course, the same question also applies to any movie that posits the existence of a vampire, a werewolf, a witch, or any other supernatural villain.

 Source: Gallup.

As far as I know, no one has conducted a study, or even a poll, concerning this particular question, although, in 2005, Gallp conducted a few polls concerning whether or not Americans believe in various supernatural (and paranormal) beings, with the results well under half. (However, the poll seems flawed, since it includes "aliens," which, should they be discovered to exist, would be entirely natural beings, not supernatural entities, since "nature" constitutes the entire universe and everything in it, which is why we say that God, a supernatural being, for example, is transcendent to, or beyond, nature and, in fact, in many religious traditions, created the universe.)

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Source: Wikipedia Commons 

However, based on a thoughtful thread of posts on Religious Forums, materialists (those who believe that the universe and all things in it are material and that spirits, souls, and the like do not exist except as imaginary or metaphorical constructs) are likely to experience a continuum of feelings, from a lack of fear altogether to terror, when they come across a villain the likes of the devil, Freddy Krueger, or a poltergeist, whether or they believe such villains exist--or can exist.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Source: ardhendude.blogspot.com

 For example, Mister Silver seems to employ the strategy of "a willing suspension of disbelief" suggested by the great English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, accepting the existence of the supernatural in a horror story or movie simply for the sake of enjoying the fiction: "Through my materialism I can understand the difference between fantasy and reality enough for me to enjoy the fantasy for that which it is; merely fantasy created for the purpose of entertainment."

Zener cards. Source: Wikipedia

Jumi follows a tactic that is more prevalent among today's skeptical materialists: "You're in luck, materialism itself doesn't rule out strange phenomenon from existing. It just doesn't actively promote these ideas. The materialistic Soviet Union had multiple researchers study paranormal phenomena in hopes of finding something useful to further the materialist dialectic.

The problem with this approach, in general, is that it is often based on a confusion of the supernatural with the paranormal. Materialism, by definition, does rule out the supernatural. The universe is nature; therefore, anything that is held to transcend nature, to be "outside" the universe (e. g., God, angels, demons) or wields supernatural power (e. g., performs miracles or magic or otherwise defies natural [or, as we call them today, scientific laws]) would be supernatural and, therefore, in materialists' view, impossible, because nonexistent. However, paranormal phenomena are possible, perhaps, if, by "paranormal," we mean simply natural beings, properties, or powers of natural origin that ares imply not known or understood through science or reason. For example, if extra-sensory perception does exist, but it is simply inexplicable in terms of present-day science or reason, then it is possible; it may even be actual. Until it can be explained, however, it remains merely a possibility, but a possibility, nonetheless. Jumi's statement, therefore, seems to be related more to the possibility of paranormal phenomena, rather than to the possibility of supernatural facts and events.

In either case, either Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" strategy or the more fashionable recognition of the possible existence of paranormal, but not supernatural, phenomena can allow materialists to enjoy, and even, perhaps, be scared by, the literature and drama of horror.

 

An Essay on the Monstrous

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

Source: Public domain

What is “monstrous”? Does the concept change, thereby altering the understanding of the meaning of the term; do merely the specific instances, the incarnations, so to speak, of the monstrous change; or is there a modification of both the understanding and the incarnations?

 

Source: Public domain

Certainly, the idea of the origin of monsters has changed. Once, monsters were considered omens, or signs warning of divine displeasure, or anger, concerning various types of behavior. Later, monsters were regarded merely as mistakes, or “freaks,” of nature. The origin of monsters, once supernatural, became natural. The hermaphrodite became Frankenstein's creature; the Biblical behemoth became the great white shark of Jaws. (Between these extremes, perhaps, as the great white whale, Herman Melville's Moby Dick.)

 

 Source: Public domain

Prior to the shift from a supernatural to a natural cause of monsters, there had been a shift in the way in which the world, or the universe, was understood. When God had been in charge of the universe He'd created, the universe and everything in it had had been meaningful; in God's plan, there was a place for everything, and everything was expected to stay in its assigned place. The universe was an orderly and planned place, because it had been created according to God's plan, or a design, and existence was teleological. Monsters were beings or forces that disrupted the orderliness of the universe, sought to disrupt God's plan, or showed disobedience to God's will, either by tempting others to sin or by giving in to sin (and sin itself was, quite simply, disobedience to God's will). Anything that differed form God's plan was a monster or was monstrous.

Source: Public domain

When the idea of an accidental, mechanical universe replaced the concept of a divinely created and planned universe, only nature existed (or, if God were to be granted existence, He was seen, first, as indifferent to the universe, as the Deists viewed him, or as irrelevant.) Offenses became unnatural actions, behavior which was not grounded in nature. Anything that “went against nature” was a monster or monstrous. Indeed, a naturalistic understanding of the universe is seen in the change in viewing monsters and the monstrous that is indicated in the etymology, or history, of the word “monster,” which, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, originally referred to a “"divine omen (especially one indicating misfortune), portent, sign” and, only about the fourteenth century became understood as meaning “malformed animal or human, creature afflicted with a birth defect.”

 Source: Public domain

Although some continue to believe that God exists, that He created the world and human beings, the latter in his own “image and likeness,” according to a plan and that the universe is consequently not only orderly, but purposeful, teleological, and meaningful, many others believe that God either does not exist or, if He does, His existence is inconsequential and that human beings must chart their own courses. In the former conception of the universe, wrongdoing is evil, and it is evil because it involves intentional disobedience to God's will; in the latter conception of the universe, wrongdoing is immoral because it is counter to that which is natural. In the former universe, the monstrous takes the form of demons and unrepentant sinners. In the latter universe, evil takes the form of “freaks” of nature, such as maladapted mutants, victims of birth defects, or the psychologically defective: grotesques, cripples, and cannibals.

Alternatively, in a naturalistic universe, monsters may be social misfits. Not only serial killers, sadists, and psychopaths, but also any group that is unconventional, or “other,” or is vilified or ostracized by the dominant social group (e. g., a community or a nation), examples of whom, historically, include homosexuals, Romani people, “savage” “Indians,” current or former martial enemies, cult members, and so forth.

 

Source: Public domain

Our line of inquiry leads, at last, a question and a conclusion. First, what happens when we run out of monsters? As our ideas of the monstrous change, monsters lose their monstrosity: homosexuals, Romani people, Native Americans, the nations that joined together as World War II's Axis powers, members of religious organizations once condemned as “cults” and “sects” have, today, become acceptable. Their members are no longer monsters. As the pool of candidates for monstrosity shrinks, what shall become of the very idea of monstrosity itself? Who will become the monsters of the future, when all the monsters of the present and the past are no longer considered monstrous?

 

Source: Public domain

 The answer to this question, it seems, is that we shall be left with the few actions that are universally condemned, that are unacceptable in all lands, everywhere. We might list among such behaviors incest, rape, premeditated murder that is unsanctioned by the state (that is not, in effect, condoned as a necessary wartime activity), child abuse, and, perhaps, cannibalism, which leaves, as monsters, the incestuous lover, the rapist, the murderer, the child abuser, and the cannibal. These could be the only monsters that remain in the future.

Source: Public domain

But they won't be. Here's why: horror is a type of fantasy fiction. As such, it includes characters, actions, places, causes, motives, and purposes that are unacceptable in more realistic fiction or drama. There is room for demons and witches, alongside werewolves and vampires, as well as the monsters embodying truly universally condemned behaviors and the people (or characters) who perform them. For this reason, horror fiction will never be without the monsters of old, even if, metaphysically, epistemologically, scientifically, and otherwise, they have long ago worn out their welcome. Fantasy has had, has, and always will have a home for them.

Meanwhile, however, the history of horror fiction has provided a way to identify threats that, rightly or wrongly, dominant societies have considered dangerous to their welfare or survival, and these threats, once they are seen as no longer threatening, have likewise shown what perceived menaces, in the final analysis, are not dangerous to social welfare, just as they identify the true menaces, the true monsters, that are condemned not just her or there for a time, but everywhere, at all times.

"Man Overboard" by Sir Winston Churchill: A Commentary

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 Deceptively simple, Sir Winston Churchill's 1899 short story “Man Overboard: An Episode of the Red Sea” is a true work of art. The story's technique is superb, highlighting the human condition through juxtapositions of pairs of contrasting extremes—comfort and misery, safety and danger, camaraderie and loneliness, accommodation and abandonment, security and vulnerability, hope and despair, joy and horror, civilization and nature, music and silence, light and darkness, ignorance and revelation—as a means of evoking the plight of humans as beings whose existence straddles two worlds, the natural and the spiritual, and who are as much out of water, as it were, in one as in the other.

The story opens in media res, presenting readers with an anonymous passenger aboard a mail steamer that is making its way through the Red Sea. After stepping outside the hot confines of the steamer's companion-house, where a concert is underway, the protagonist, listening to a raucous song, “The Rowdy Dowdy Boys,” seems in good spirits as he remembers “the brilliant and busy streets” he used to frequent years ago, perhaps in his younger, carefree days. His reverie is broken when the rail against which he leans, not having been tightly fastened to the ship, breaks, sending him plummeting into the sea.

A moment before, all was well; all was right with the world. He was safe, among the ship's passengers and crew, aboard a steamer which might be taken as a symbol of the human civilization of which the man overboard is a member. Civilization, as represented by the steamer, however, is not an infallible hedge against nature. Swept overboard, swept away from civilization and humanity, on his own in the sea, the nameless protagonist is alone, helpless, and vulnerable. 

 

One wants to escape company, to be alone, at times, but not for long. A smoke break is one thing; being alone in the sea, in the darkness, far from human society is quite another. “The Rowdy Dowdy Boys” brought fond memories to the protagonist's mind, while he was safe aboard the steamer, but the exploits of the boys of the song are no help to him now. Music, an artifact of civilized life, is replaced by the silence of the sea, in which only the man's sobs are now to be heard as he, and he alone, laments his fate. The song, which was “all the rage at all the music halls” only a few years ago, is meaningless now, its strains nothing more than an ironic and dispiriting reminder of the situation in which the man overboard now finds himself.

Irony is repeated throughout the story, at first stressing the difference between civilization, as it is encapsulated by the steamer, and nature, as it is represented by the sea. Aboard the steamer, there is an “accommodation-ladder”; there is a “companion-house”; there is a “concert”; there is a gathering of fellow “passengers”; such accommodations are not offered by the sea. In the ocean, there is only darkness, silence, and loneliness. The progress of the steamer highlights the gulf between civilization and nature, as the vessel puts more and more distance between itself and the man overboard. The steamer becomes less and less distinct and less and less significant, as the sea becomes the protagonist's sole and entire world—an alien and inhospitable world that exhausts him, causes him to despair, and leaves him, literally, without a prayer.

 

Left to his own devices, the man overboard soon realizes that he is no match for nature. The camaraderie of his fellow men is replaced by the indifference of nature. As the ship “dwindles” in the distance, its light is all but extinguished, and the protagonist is left alone in the darkness of the immense sea, a predicament in which neither shouting, swimming, praying, nor cursing avails anything. He is—and understands that he has been—“abandoned”; that he is alone; that he cannot survive; that he is helpless. He can do nothing, he realizes, and the discovery makes his brain reel. There is but one thing he can do: appeal to a power beyond nature, its Creator, for assistance, for salvation. He prays, but his words are clumsy and “incoherent,” sounds of madness.

Ironically, the man overboard feels “joy and hope,” and gratitude fills his heart, as he thinks the appearance of a faint light upon the dark surface of the sea may be the steamer returning for him. However, as the light withdraws, becoming increasingly smaller, almost as if it taunts him, he realizes that the ship is not returning, that he is alone, and “despair succeeds hope,” as he grapples with the significance of the tiny pinprick of light's vanishing in the distance and the darkness of the sea. Where, in desperation, he has prayed, he now, desperate again, this time, curses, but his curses avail him no more than had his prayers. He is alone; he is abandoned. Either God has not heard his prayer or has chosen not to answer the man's petition.

He finds that he cannot summon the will even to drown himself. His only recourse is to offer another prayer, and he begs, “O God! Let me die.” Ironically, he spies the fin of a shark fifty yards from him, and, as it approaches him, the narrator concludes, “His last appeal had been heard.”

The end of the story is terrifying for either of two reasons. It may convey the horror of living, as a human being, in a world that is indifferent by nature to one's existence. Alternatively, it may suggest that, if God exists, if He hears prayers, He may answer them, if at all, in a way that is, from a human viewpoint, utterly alien to such concepts as compassion, mercy, and love. In such a case, not only is the source of nature, of life itself, unconcerned about His creation, but He is also capricious. He might fefuse to answer a prayer for death that is uttered in despair, or He might elect to respond to a plea for deliverance from the anguish of hopelessness and absurdity in a way that brings terrible and horrific violence upon the distraught petitioner.

In the final analysis, Churchill's use of irony ends in a sense of astonishment that can be captured, if at all, only by a sentiment such as that of Moby Dick's Queequeg, who declares “de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.” Short though it is, “Man Overboard” is more than the hour's amusement Churchill described it as being when he shared the tale with General Ian Hamilton. Churchill's tale ranks with Stephen Crane's fabulous short story “The Open Boat” in its portrait of existential angst—and all in a space of 1,100 words or so.

 

The Three Lessons of the Watchbirds and the Hawks

Copyright 202 by Gary L. Pullman

The fabulous short story “Watchbird” in The Robert Sheckley Megapack: 15 Classic Science Fiction Stories (a true bargain at only 99 cents for the Amazon Kindle version) is a masterful satire concerning logic, linguistics, and morality.

In a futuristic setting, the brainwaves and glandular processes of potential murderers tip off high-tech, flying guardians, alerting these “watchbirds” of impending murder. The watchbirds then swoop down to shock would-be killers into submission. If multiple shocks are necessary, so be it: the watchbirds' first rule is to protect potential victims, regardless of the cost. By using them as their enforcers, the government hopes to stem a rising tide of violence and save lives.

At first, things go even better than officials had hoped, and the murder rate plummets drastically. However, one of the manufacturers of these drone-like guardians is concerned that human beings shouldn't shove off their duties and responsibilities onto machines. His protests are all but ignored. Meanwhile, by regularly sharing “new information, methods, and definitions” with each other, the watchbirds become more and more effective at policing the public.

The definition of terms is a key concern of the story. Initially, murder is defined as “an act of violence, consisting of breaking, mangling, maltreating, or otherwise stopping the functions of a living organism by another organism,” as opposed to a more traditional understanding of the concept, such as “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” The definition programmed into the watchbirds may seem clear, detailed, and exhaustive, but it contains some odd wording. It is not often, if ever, that a killer “breaks” or “mangles” another person. The engineer's definition (and, therefore, the watchbirds', into which the definition is programmed) is also too broad, specifying “living organisms,” rather than the traditional definition's “human being.” In formulating the definition, Sheckley lays the groundwork for much of the conflict and suspense that the remainder of the story generates, maintains, and heightens.

Based on their experience (the watchbirds are conscious and rational, but unemotional), the mechanical guardians, which are able both to learn and to think, modify and amend the original definition of both “murder” and “living organism.” Their actions follow from their revisions of these concepts. First, a slaughterhouse employee is knocked out with a high-voltage blast because, as the wingbirds understand the it (and the act), murder occurs whenever any “living organism,” human or animal, is killed. For the same reason, fishermen and a hunter are dealt with, as is a man who attempts to kill a fly. A surgeon is shocked when he starts to operate on his patient, with the result that the patient dies.

A driver is shocked when he tries to turn off his car (an organism's attempt to stop “the functions of a living organism” constitutes murder, and the watchbirds now consider automobiles to be “living organisms”). Thanks to the watchbirds themselves, the murder rate begins to skyrocket. People get the message and begin to modify their behavior so as not to become watchbird targets.

However, life itself is also at risk, as farmers are prevented from plowing the earth, since the watchbirds have come to regard the planet itself as a “living organism.” Farmers cannot cut hay to feed their cattle, which starve to death. Industries are crippled. Even a radio is a living organism and, like cars, may not be turned off, since doing so is the same as murdering the device. Rabbits are slain because they eat vegetables. A butterfly is dispatched for “outraging a rose.” The watchbirds are unable to appreciate, as the narrator states, that there is a close relationship between the living and the dead; nor do the machines comprehend that, for the watchbirds' creators, at least, there is a hierarchy of value where “living organisms” are concerned, with human beings at the top and other life forms on progressively lower levels of significance.

Clearly, something must be done!

The answer is to build a better machine, one that's faster, stronger, and deadlier, one that will be able to hunt and kill the watchbirds. The new mechanical slayer is called the hawk, and, before long, there's a multitude of the ferocious predators in the sky, making short work of their prey. Unfortunately, the engineers didn't learn their lesson from the watchbirds fiasco. Not only do they assign human duties and responsibilities to the new, and improved machines, but their makers deliberately refrain from installing “restricting circuits” that would limit the Hawks' targets. There just wasn't time to include these regulators. Instead, the engineers and manufacturers simply release the hawks.

After killing most of the pesky watchbirds, the hawks decide that humans constitute another type of prey, and the problems that homo sapiens had with the watchbirds pale in comparison to those involving these new predators.

The story's themes seem threefold.

First, death is necessary for life's continuance, but “no one has told the watchbirds that all life depends on carefully balanced murders,” even that of the alpha predator among machines, the hawk, which may need humans to maintain and repair it, as the watchbird had. The watchbirds have thoroughly destroyed the equilibrium between the living and the dead, the consumers and the providers, totally disrupting their fragile relationship.

Second, humans cannot pass on their responsibility to machines, or, as the narrator puts it, “pass a human problem into the hands of a machine” that has been assigned, by humans, to enforce human laws. Robots do not have emotions, nor have they accumulated centuries of human experience (nor are they able to do so). Machines lack human respective and understanding. They cannot perceive, analyze, evaluate, or understand life from any perspective but that which is based upon algorithms and memory and microchips and processing units and programming. Despite their artificial intelligence, which can be brilliant, computers are severely limited. To forget these two simple truths is to be in danger of creating “guardians” like the watchbirds and hawks to police the mechanical police.

Third, neither the watchbirds nor the hawks can understand that the lives of some creatures have a higher value than the lives of other, “lesser” animals. A whale, an impala, a cow, a dog, a cat, a garden slug, even a flea or a cockroach, is all well and good, in its way, but human beings are the species that can remember, through books and databases, the events and circumstances of centuries; can manipulate time and space; can transform the world, building cities and hospitals and prisons and airplanes and automobiles and trains and ships; can put men and women into space and, perhaps some day soon, on other worlds; can plumb the depths of the ocean and climb to the top of mountains; can create art and culture, producing Michelangelo and Leonardo and Shakespeare and Dante; can commune with nature and with God. True, the depths to which humans can fall are just as incredible as the heights they can achieve, as such "accomplishments" as the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and two World Wars, among many others, indicate, but the point is that, whether it is used for good or evil, human beings have these great abilities, abilities that far outstrip those of any other animal. In fact, these abilities are not only remarkable among the creatures of nature, but they are transcendent to nature itself as well. Human abilities reflect not mere animal existence, but also a spark of the divine. Although all men may be created equal, all animals are not. The failure to make such distinctions is, perhaps a form of insanity, for it is madness to equate a maggot with a man, a butterfly with a woman, or an earthworm with a child. Machines, even artificially intelligent ones, by such a measure, are mad—or would be . . . if they were human. Instead, they are merely machines. Their very character as such constitutes their true “restrictive circuits.”

What would be the likely end of a situation such as that which Sheckley lays out in “Watchbirds”? The author himself suggests the probable outcome: more and more capable machines would be created to eliminate the less-capable previous generation, and the situation, for humans, would get worse and worse until they were completely exterminated. Then, one by one, the machines would fail, for there would be no one to maintain or to repair them or, for that matter, to manufacture them—at least, not yet.

Snake by D. H. Lawrence: Analysis and Commentary, Part I

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

 

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,

Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate;

A pettiness.

Commentary

D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence based this poem on his encounter with a snake at his watering trough during his residence in Sicily in 1920. The speaker of the poem’s description of the snake is wonderfully evocative. The snake trails “his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down,” and sips “with his straight mouth,” drinking “through his straight gums, into his slack long body,” flickering “his two-forked tongue.” These descriptions convey the alien character of the snake. The speaker views the creature as a “he” rather than as an “it,” and, in fact, calls it a “god,” a “king,” and one of the “lords of life.” However, the serpent is no fellow creature; it is “a king in exile,” and it comes from another world, a subterranean realm which, unknown and strange to human beings, is both frightening and rather repulsive. Thus, the speaker has contradictory feelings about the serpent and what it represents. The conflict within himself between his admiration for the godlike serpent and his revulsion toward this creature that lives in the ground moves the poem to its climax, in which the speaker decides whether he will accept (or at least peacefully co-exist with) the snake or reject it. Whichever course of action he takes will suggest something about his own character and, in general, humanity’s, since his actions are based, in part at least, on the “voices” of his “human education.”

There is something mesmerizing, if not frightening, about the snake, this creature from a subterranean world unknown and unseen by human beings. It is a creature that the “voices” within the speaker, the “voice of. . . [his] education” insist that he should kill, and a creature of which, the speaker freely admits, he is afraid:

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

However, mingled with the speaker’s fear of this alien creature from the underworld is his sense of the snake’s having somehow honored him by visiting his water trough. The snake is like an ambassador from the world of nature and an emissary from the world of the unknown. The speaker has ambivalent feelings toward this otherworldly, subterranean creature. He fears the snake, but he also “likes” it and feels “honored” by its presence, even to the point of wishing that he could communicate with this visitor from “the secret earth”:

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The speaker’s admiration for this godlike creature turns to disgust, however, when the snake returns to its hole and begins to slither into the earth. Its utterly alien nature reasserts itself when it returns from whence it came, and the speaker is overcome with horror, now that the snake’s “back was turned”:

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

Without the serpent’s unblinking gaze fixed upon him, the speaker is able to act, in a cowardly fashion, and throws “a clumsy log” in its direction, missing the snake. The serpent flees into the hole with “undignified haste,” leaving the speaker to regret his “paltry. . . vulgar. . . mean act” and to hate himself and the “voices” of his “accursed human education,” which had declared that killing the snake would demonstrate his manliness. Instead, his attempt to kill one of the “lords of life” made him feel “paltry,” “vulgar,” and “mean.” Moreover, the sin of trying to kill the snake makes the speaker think of the “albatross,” an allusion to the seabird that the sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" repented of having killed. Like the snake from the earth, the bird from the sea (another dimension that is largely unknown and strange to human beings) represents realities beyond human knowledge and understanding, represents, perhaps, the mysteries of life and death themselves. The attempt to kill the snake was as wanton an act of cruelty as the ancient mariner‘s slaying of the albatross, and the effect is similar. Whereas the sailor in Coleridge‘s poem is cursed to wander the world and tell his tale as an act of penance, the speaker of Lawrence‘s poem is punished by his realization that his cowardly and petty act has made him less human and less a man. It has made him a sinner against the hidden, mysterious aspects of life itself, giving him “something to expiate;/A pettiness.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The phrase “lords of life” is an allusion to lines in Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Experience," in which Emerson writes of "The lords of life, the lords of life,” whom he has seen “pass/In their own guise" and of which, ironically, “little man,” puzzled by these mutable creatures of the “race” that he has founded, is “least of all.”