“Dune,” Zombies, and Emotion, Oh My!

Paul Atreides wins the hearts of the Fremen of Dune by shedding a tear for his dead father, an act of emotion that defied all rational instinct. (The Fremen lived in the heart of the desert, on a planet where water was more precious than individual life.) This act of emotional excess wins Paul the religious and political allegiance of the Fremen. Earlier in the book Paul undergoes the test of the Gom Jabber, the test to determine whether he is an animal or human. He must place his hand in a box that produces indescribable pain. If he is merely an animal he will instinctively pull out his hand and be killed by the poisoned Gom Jabber held at his neck. If he is human he will control his instinctual reaction, leave his hand in the box, and endure in order to live. How does this relate to the readings on emotion for this week? In the first example, Paul’s display of emotion serves as a tool for reaffirming his religious and political authority. Corrigan says: “Persons do not form judgments based solely on their understanding of social norms, but actually feel the pain of shame or remorse in their moral orientations.” (Corrigan, p. 22) Choices, especially moral choices, involve emotion as well as reason. Religious and political conviction can be just as much an emotional choice as a rational one. I will come back to this in a moment. In the second example Paul must assert rationality over emotion/instinct. It is the ability to reason past instinctual emotions that separates humans from animals. In the book this incident comes before his tears for his father. If we take the Gom Jabber incident to be indicative of his realization that rationality sets boundaries for and reigns in emotion, what can be considered theoretical understanding, then the act of him shedding tears for his dead father, using emotion to gain the further devotion and zeal of the Fremen, is the practical application of this understanding. In what follows I argue that the rational use and manipulation of emotion helps to create religious and moral individuals. (In this entry I will assume that religion, in its ideal form, is necessarily concerned with creating moral perfection.)

However, before application can be discussed, general theory must be understood. The key to understanding emotion versus reason, at least in the context of the readings, is the “dichotomy” between rhetoric and philosophy. Shuger says that: “Rhetoric differed from philosophy in being a popular and practical art, more concerned with right action than speculative inquiry, but both disciplines, in the still largely Christian cultures of the Renaissance, assumed and expounded the same Truth.” (Shuger, p. 120) So while rhetoric is used to stir people into action, appealing to the emotions, philosophy is the speculative abstraction of the tenants of rhetorical action. Simply put, while rhetorical spurs individuals to act of certain truth, philosophy is the intellectual abstraction of these truths. Now, let us assume that religion is equivalent with rhetoric. (Equivalent in the sense that if we define religion to be primarily concerned with morality, making individual’s act rightly, and rhetoric’s goal is to produce right action then both religion and rhetoric are tools used to create moral individuals.) Thus religion/rhetoric relies on appeal to emotion, while philosophy, strictly speaking, does not. If an individual, such as Paul or any philosopher, understands this relationship he/she can manipulate the emotions of the masses in order for them to act in a certain way.

Now this action that is spawned can be either good or bad, however since the philosopher would be an individual who has reached Truth through abstraction and speculation, it is generally believed by philosophers that he/she will act rightly. (For a detailed argument for this and for the relationship between religion and philosophy see al-Farabi’s “One Religion” and/or Plato’s “Republic.”) Leaving political implications aside, I want to deal now with issues of morality. So far I have been implying that moral action relies on emotion. I want to construct this argument further by analyzing the concept of philosophical zombies. I have to acknowledge my debit to Dale Jacquette for his brilliant article “Zombie Gladiators” in “The Undead And Philosophy,” who first brought this argument to my attention. Let us assume that there are zombies living among us. They look exactly like us, behave exactly like us, except they have no consciousness. In short while they exhibit emotion they feel none (and feel nothing for that matter). Perhaps they have a small marking somewhere on their body that distinguishes them as zombies, in order not to be bogged down in details let us willingly suspend our disbelief and assume society has an infallible way of marking them. Because these zombies are undead society has permitted them to be killed in sport and to be used for scientific experimentation. However, because they look and act like humans, they have meaningful personal relationships and they present reactions to pain and loss. Is what society allows to be done to them morally wrong?

Appealing to reason the argument might be constructed like this: If something exhibits signs of pain then it is wrong to kill it because it might, in fact, be like us. Therefore, it is wrong to kill zombies. Yet how many people act morally merely due to rationality? What about this argument: Imagine that your brother/sister/lover/child was born with a marking similar to the one that distinguishes zombies. He/she is mistakenly taken and killed. Did his/her death look any different from a zombie death? Is there anyway of proving that he/she was not a zombie? Why would the appeal to emotion work better then the appeal to reason? Does this signify that, although rationality is superior to pure emotion, most moral arguments have to be constructed with an appeal to emotion because most individuals have not refined their intellect? What is the significance between sinner/saved, imperfect/perfect in relation to religious rhetoric and morality?