See No Evil

I was thinking about what's wrong with vampire fiction, and I decided, a big factor (leaving the Laurell K. Hamilton and Stephanie Meyer crap to one side) is neglecting what 2nd Edition D&D would call the "ecology" of the beasties. Namely, vaskania. Vaskania, the Greek name for the evil eye—related to the Latin root of "fascinate"—has this meaning in Eastern Orthodoxy:

Vaskania is recognized by the Church as the jealousy and envy of some people for things they do not possess, such as beauty, youth, courage or any other blessing. The Church essentially rejected Vaskania as contradicting the concept of divine providence. The prayers of the Church to avert the evil eye are, however, a silent recognition of this phenomenon as a morbid feeling of envy.

Vampires have always been associated with the evil eye, resentment, or despair—even the suicide-origin has an air of "what good is (anything you've got to be alive to experience, really) while (some other thing is around)". That's pretty much the evil eye in a nutshell; go read up on resentful-ghost beliefs in India, Korea, or Japan (where the evil eye-type beliefs are just one of the many, many types of grudge-pollution).

But it occurred to me as having a broader implication in life. For instance, politics. Pretty much every bad political idea, from racism to class-warfare, has its origins in those self-same resentments; you could call every single one of them "vampirocratic" policy.

Take segregation. It's very satisfying to describe segregation as arising from prejudice, but it's actually factually correct (which is not without its benefits) to describe it as arising from resentments over Reconstruction. After all, ascribing it to "prejudice" implies that the white southerners had nothing to say for themselves. This is not the case; Reconstruction-era Republicans deliberately made it impossible to prosecute the newly-freed slaves, even for rape and murder, because they thought white southerners (most of whom, remember, had never owned slaves) "deserved it". Those white southerners then turned around and did the exact same thing—vampirocratically legislating from their resentments—by deliberately oppressing those slaves' descendents. And now modern race politics has swung back the other way, because of segregation—vampires, remember, live forever, as long as they have resentment and the shedding of blood to maintain them.

There is, quite simply, no way out of that vicious cycle; the daughters (or, more usually, neighbors) of slave-owners no more deserved to suffer during Reconstruction than did the descendents of slaves under Jim Crow than do the descendents of Dixiecrats in modern race-war politics. You can't escape it by talking about whose irrational, unclean resentments are more justified. I mean, I'm a Catholic, of Irish and New England Acadian descent, and my relatives live where they do because of the largest forced famine prior to the 20th Century, and the 2nd largest forced relocation in the New World's history. If one's ancestors having been wronged entitles one to revenge on the perpetrators' descendents, then I, quite literally, own the life of every Protestant, black or white, on this continent.

Except that I don't. Not because of individualism—which is false, unless patriotism and pride in the achievements of your country are false—but because I, too, would come under the same opprobrium. I mean, I'm sure some of my French ancestors helped round up the Templars or followed Peter the Hermit or fought for Arianism against Clovis or massacred Roman settlers in Gaul; I'm sure some of my Irish ancestors acquitted themselves less than honorably in the perpetual clan warfare that's a convenient summary of Irish history. I mean, we're from Connacht—our kingdom was the unjust aggressor Cu Chulainn died defending against. Where, precisely, would you set the statute of limitations on it? And as the Eternal and Unchanging Logos once said, "Let him among you who is without sin, cast the first stone."

Which, however, is interesting. The only two value systems, after all, that have a way out of that perpetual resentment cycle, are Christianity and Buddhism—and once again it's caritas or karuna, because there is more rejoicing in Heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine righteous men; all are alike worthy to hear the message of enlightenment, even the wicked.

Blood cries out for blood, in all the other belief systems of mankind; if you're not going to sink your civilization in a welter of feuds then you're going to sink its economy in a pit of wergild. It doesn't even matter if the belief system is secular or not; what, exactly, are those schemes of confiscatory taxation, but forcing the capitalists to pay wergild to the proletariat, to avoid a blood-feud called the class war? It doesn't even matter whether the capitalists actually did anything wrong; it only matters that there is resentment. In the honor society you're forced to live in without Christ or Buddha, to quote medieval Iceland's legal code, "There is no such thing as an accident."