Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Meditation on Psycopathy

Oates reminds her readers that there are people who cannot be considered human. They lack something essential, some ‘wetware’ without which they never fit comfortably among others. This implies a scale of humanness. Some are more human than others. This is the implication of Oates’s journey inside the mind of a fictional psychopath.

Psychopathy is not something that any society confronts comfortably. These people are defective, not mad. How can they be identified? By what criteria can we make a judgment to treat them as the sub-humans that they are?

Terrorists, school-shooters, racist skinheads, violent political activists - most of these are technically sane yet something is missing. There may be understandable genetic or environmental reasons for their behaviour but the fact that they are immune to reason suggests that they cannot be considered as full members of human society.

But no one, it can be argued, is quite sure what constitutes human reason. Nonetheless, whatever it is must start from the premise that argument, that is to say language, is the tool for conducting and, with luck, resolving disputes. It is skill in the use of language, therefore, which is the distinguishing mark of the more human.

How to measure such skill? The very narrow skill of the scientist’s exposition among like-minded colleagues? The rhetorical skill of a lawyer presenting an emotional appeal to a jury? The manipulatively mendacious skill of a Trump addressing one of his populist rallies? These are all highly skilled in their way.

In fact many are so skilled in language that they can provoke precisely the inhuman behaviour that language should permit us to avoid. Their skill can promote revolution, which is necessarily violent, by using language against itself. Language does not exist on its own. It is contained and expressed in institutions - courts, professions, political parties - which have strict rules for how language can be used. Skill in employing these rules is often more important than the skill of language itself.

These institutions define the language that may be used and the reasons which are admissible in argument. The likelihood of revolution is proportional to the seriousness of the reasons excluded as invalid. Expanding the base of valid reasons in institutional argumentation has been the real achievement of liberal democracy. Anyone who seeks to reduce the reasons available for institutionalised argument (which is the equivalent of restricting democratic participation) is a psychopath.

The psychopath does not argue with reasons; he states opinions as they occur to him - particularly about institutions involving language. Giving reasons is precisely what the psychopath does not do. The psychopath has no reasons, only urges. The psychopath doesn’t want to extend the range of reasons acceptable in debate. The psychopath detests all reasons in deference to his urges.

The psychopath is frightening precisely because he has no reasons for what he does. There is no goal except the scratching of the itch that drives him. He is not a revolutionary but a nihilist who has no hesitation in destroying all institutions of language, and with those the civilisation they enact. “My whole body is a numb tongue,” says Quentin, Oates’s psychopath. His every utterance is a destructive distortion of language.

These are the thoughts that dominate my life as I anticipate the state visit of the psychopath, Donald Trump, to this green and pleasant land. Oates, it seems to me, knew the man without having met him - a creature of the slime who is something less than a human being.

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