Am I My Brother's Keeper?

I have been watching post-apocalyptic films again, specifically the nuclear winter of Threads (1984) and viral apocalypse 28 Days Later (2002). I am not sure why but maybe it assures me that someone out there sees the world as I do. I ask myself, in a lonely world, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We know Cain is trying to evade responsibility. I think the best response to this call is within Levinas’ philosophy, which argues that ethics is an obligation. Both films test this premise, because they effectively strip humanity of its pretences, leaving only underneath its ethical core - a Hobbesian "state of nature". Thatcher’s Britain reduced to feudal scavenging, Blair’s “Cool Britannia” merely as militarised survivalism.

Levinas was a philosopher who knew a life of bleak horror. His immediate family were all murdered in the Shoah. And he spent all his life really trying to answer, in this state of sheer unrelenting evil and chaos, does our obligations to others collapse or illuminate? Levinas’ approach begins where systems end. We look at the face of the “Other”, which is the ethical presence of our fellow mortal human. We should draw from them not just the commandment “You shall not kill”, but our innate obligation to our fellow man as unique, vulnerable and irreducible - “it is the very origin of meaning”.

Jane, the new generation of survivors in Threads, is left grunting, unable to express her thoughts, her trials, her virtues, her pains. The education system has completely collapsed, as has the rest of society. All her life she has only known horrors, and she is unable to mourn her dead mother, Ruth. Before this, her mother does her best anyway, despite suffering the ailments of radiation poisoning - scavenging for rats, recognising in the most primal way that “responsibility is love”. This is not mere survivalism, but she is carrying out Levinas’ responsibility to give without return. In 28 Days Later, Selena similarly expresses her love. Before she knows only basic survival, “[i]f you survive alone, you’re doing well”, but through disrupting her ego’s sovereignty, she recognises Jim and Hannah’s agency.

Both films are an indictment of the state. In Threads, the council members executing looters from bunkers are what Levinas warns against when power divorces itself from the face-to-face encounter. Levinas argues that “the tyranny of the Same” is when we objectify the “Other”, and see it as a potential threat. In 28 Days Later, Major West’s compound, draped in the Union Jack, weaponises this fear into fascism. He claims “[w]e’re preserving the future” - yet this reflects Levinas’ warning about the objectification of humanity. Behind survivalism is a failure to recognise a world without responsibility is not a world deserving of humanity.

The films both have ambiguous endings. Thread’s is a mute girl who screams into the corpse of her bloodied child. 28 Days Later ends with the survival of humanity precarious, a frail beacon of redemption as a plane flies over. The inscription of “HELLO” on a farmhouse roof is a reminder of the enduring claim by the “Other” - a silent invitation to responsibility.

Levinas would argue we have a call to humanity in the here and now, “the true life is absent. But we are in the world”. To answer the starting question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” - I would say Hineni, “Here I am” - not with a certain answer, but one that recognises the call to responsibility. Even as the world around us collapses, the face remains as a command to us all.