It's probably not escaped your notice that American culture, at least (I don't know how vampires are portrayed on other continents), has given vampires a major public relations makeover in recent decades so that now novels, comic books, movies and television series regularly portray at least some vampire characters sympathetically. It's not uncommon for the blonde American heroine to want to bed a vampire lover these days, because vampires display a high degree of what evolutionary psychologists consider signs of reproductive fitness.
After all, vampires instantiate what a lot of youth-obsessed Americans want: They don't age; they often look fabulous (as if they've gotten a "queer eye" treatment); very often they are very smart and articulate; they don't really have to work; they can party all night and not get tired; they are powerful, sexy and competent; very often they have immigrated to the area and have the allure of the foreign and sophisticated; etc.
I would also add that cryonics has an oblique relationship to the vampire myth: The cryonaut, like the person becoming a vampire, has his blood removed in a process that ideally leads to a dispensation from mortality.
Considering the rehabilitation of the vampire, why can't we Immortalists similarly co-opt the myth of Victor Frankenstein? After all, bio-Luddites like Leon Kass seem fixated on Frankenstein as a "warning" of some imagined catastrophe if we push the boundaries of the human condition with biotechnology, especially to overcome aging and death. Frankenstein is just as fictional as Harry Potter, so what if we took Frankenstein away from Kass and his fellow Blue Pill people, and turned him into a hero representing our values?
I was rather hoping we could recruit Neo to our side as well, but it looks like the Matrix sequels have failed to live up to their implicit Transhumanist potential. Frankenstein is better known any way, and I would find it delicious if we could take him away (or even back?) from the frightened old men in the "bioethics" fraud, so that "Frankensteinian" becomes a positive adjective. In the future young women would find Frankensteinian men as sexy as they find rock stars now. And one day people would accept as self-evident that "Of course scientists can create life! What do you think life is -- some kind of miracle?"
Edited by advancedatheist, 09 December 2003 - 04:41 PM.
