Dexter and Philosophy

by Greene, Richard; Reisch, George A. ; Robison, Rachel

  It’s not immediately obvious why Dexter is enjoyable. At first blush, it could be that the Dexter-character is engaging because he is an outlaw-hero, one who goes beyond the law to pursue justice. But the anti-hero who bends the rules for worthy causes has become a hackneyed formula, one followed by almost every contemporary “superhero.” In fact, the anti-hero as model is an old and well-worn idea tracing its lineage to Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819) and through such iconic films as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971) or Charles Bronson’s Death Wish (1974). By itself, the bad-guy-doing-good-narrative would make Dexter more of a cliché than an interesting show. As Rudy explains to his brother Dexter, “You can’t be a killer and a hero. It doesn’t work that way!” (“Born Free,” Season 1).

  Another suggestion for the show’s appeal is Dexter’s lack of authentic emotion or empathy towards other people. As Pinocchio, the puppet who wants to become a little boy; Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, the half alien; and Data, the robot, indicate, the timeless quest to discover our inner humanity is oftentimes revealed best through those who do not have it.

  Here again, we have followed the wrong path. Because of a trauma as a two-year-old in which he watched his mother dismembered by a chain saw and then was trapped amidst the blood and gore for two days, Dexter neither can nor desires to find an inner self. “No wonder I’ve been so disconnected my entire life. If I could feel, I’d have to feel . . . this,” Dexter says to his brother (“Truth Be Told,” Season 1). Rather than trying to become human, Dexter embraces his inhuman Dark Passenger, as he calls his compulsion to kill. Because Dexter does not have inner feelings of pity and remorse he is not psychologically unbalanced by homicidal activities. He’s not like Pinocchio or Data wishing to become human. Even after the most heinous butchery, his emotionless “mechanical” heart allows Dexter “to sleep like a baby” (“Waiting to Exhale,” Season 2).

  Dexter occasionally wonders what it would be like to be like the people around him and he even pretends to be normal, but he finds it impossible to be like other normal folks.

  I find people around me are all making some kind of connection. Like friendship, or romance. But human bonds always lead to messy complications. Commitment, sharing, driving people to the airport. Besides, if I let someone get that close they’ll see who I really am—and I can’t let that happen. So time to put on my mask. (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1)

  Despite his emptiness, Dexter is not unbalanced. Rather, he is extraordinarily intelligent, as we learn from the suspicious Sergeant Doakes, who finds out that Dexter finished at the top of his class in pre-med but decided against life as a physician in order to become a forensic blood-spatter expert. We learn from Dexter’s monologues that his chosen profession enables him to discreetly uncover the criminals he longs to slaughter. Dexter says that he “can kill a man, dismember his body, and be home in time for Letterman. But knowing what to say when my girlfriend is feeling insecure—I’m totally lost” (“Crocodile,” Season 1).

  Dexter’s soliloquies confirm that he is rational in everything he does. He has no inner feelings, but he does have an inner voice, one that carefully weighs and assesses his actions. If Dexter has been damaged by his past, his infirmity is not derangement, untidiness, or carelessness, but rather cold, meticulous ferocity.

  Dexter’s most absorbing characteristic is the absence of an inner life. He does not truly experience love, pity, guilt, or remorse—although he sometimes identifies with and admires those with skills on a par with his own. Dexter is amoral, but what sets him apart from ordinary sadistic killers is that he follows strict ethical rules set down by Harry Morgan, the policeman father who adopted him. Dexter kills only when he has unquestionable proof that the victim is guilty of reprehensible crimes—ones that are unlikely to be punished by the legal authorities. Dexter gratifies his blood lust in a grotesque, yet socially responsible way—he follows the “Code of Harry.” As Dexter explains that “there were so many lessons in the Code of Harry. Twisted commandments handed down from the only God I ever worshipped” (“Our Father,” Season 3).

  Nietzsche’s Bay Harbor Beast

  Harry Morgan recognizes the killer in Dexter when he is just a boy. The policeman knows that people with Dexter’s urges can never be changed or cured. Instead of trying to make Dexter normal, Harry teaches the boy skills necessary for survival: stealth, concealment, and disguise. Dexter learns to carefully pick his victims. Not only must they be culpable of odious misdeeds, ones they are likely to repeat, they must also be the kind of people who won’t be missed by friends or relatives. Harry shows Dexter how to kill and dispose of the remains without leaving behind incriminating evidence. Harry’s Number One rule is: “Don’t get caught,” a lesson he hammers home by taking the eager teenage Dexter to witness an execution in the electric chair.

  Harry can’t make Dexter normal, so instead he teaches the boy to fit in. Harry insists that Dexter behave as if he were the product of an average suburban upbringing. He smiles during family photos, plays sports without resorting to confrontation or violence, appropriately teases his younger sister without really hurting her, and pretends to be having a good time at school outings, all the while silently imagining how best to slaughter those he is with. Dexter even passes a psychological exam by thinking about the answer that first enters his head and responding in exactly the opposite way. “People fake a lot of human interaction, but I feel like I fake them all” (“Dexter,” Season 1). Harry’s so successful at making Dexter average that he would outscore Supermen’s Clark Kent on the Geek meter.

  Harry seems to have understood Nietzsche’s argument that “the real meaning of culture resides in its power to domesticate man’s savage instincts.”70 But why would Harry permit and even promote such amoral behavior? Perhaps if we comprehended the origin of morals, we would get a better understanding.

  Conscience and Guilt

  Unlike most people, Dexter does not seem to have a moral sense. He does not feel the pangs of conscience when he commits acts of cruelty. Nietzsche would argue that Dexter is not abnormal. The sense of guilt and regret that most contemporary people experience after having done something wrong is certainly not a sentiment imprinted on our souls. Rather, the human experience of guilt developed historically as a consequence of successfully taming our animal instincts.

  Nietzsche begins by asking how it is possible for animals to keep promises. Of course animals cannot keep promises, because they never make any. Human beings need to make promises because their actions are not motivated by pure instinct. They do not have to eat when they are hungry or drink when they are thirsty. They can say one thing and do another. Humans need not behave in a straightforward manner, making it possible for them to mislead. Because humans can deceive, they need to make promises to each other not to deceive. They must swear to keep their word. But in order to keep their promises they must bind their future actions with their present words. To adhere to their words, humans must propel themselves into the future and control their actions in a time that does not yet exist. How then did the peculiarly trait of forethought arise in humans?

  In the beginning, Nietzsche claims, there was no guilt. People just did as they pleased and felt no remorse for stealing, killing, lying, or cheating. They made promises and reneged on them with no second thoughts or regrets. Nietzsche explains the primitive compulsion that is similar to that which overcomes Dexter on those nights when he pursues his victims:

  For these same men who, amongst themselves, are so strictly constrained by custom, . . . tenderness, . . . and friendship, when once they step outside their circle become little better than uncaged beasts of prey. Once abroad in the wilderness, they revel in freedom from social constraint. . . . They revert to the innocence wild animals; we can see them returning from an orgy of murder. . . . and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank. (Genealogy of Morals, p. 174)

  How then
did bad conscience come to be? Unlike the Biblical account, Nietzsche argues, guilt did not arise because the first humans consumed fruit forbidden by the deity. Rather, when people started living together they needed some kind of rules. The regulations were simple and fierce. We can imagine that if thieves were caught they lost a limb, murderers lost their lives, and adulterers suffered equally harsh treatment.

  These conventions were not meant to reform the guilty or even to prevent crime; they simply were ways in which primitive societies compensated the party who had been wronged. What did the aggrieved person receive? According to Nietzsche’s account, the great good of seeing another person suffer was a compensation for the injured party. “My crops are ruined but I will feel better about it after hearing the bandit squeal in pain,” Nietzsche’s archaic people might have thought.

  Those punished felt little guilt for their misdeeds; they accepted their penalty as “if some terrible unforeseen disaster had occurred, if a rock had fallen and crushed” them (p. 215). Dexter is very much like these pre-morality primitives. He does not feel guilt and is surprised that he feels some shame for making a mistake. “A changed man at peace with himself. Maybe only monsters feel no regret.” Dexter wonders to himself, “If erring is human, then remorse must be too. Wait—does that make me human? Huh!” (“Road Kill,” Season 4).

  At some point, Nietzsche argues, people began to engage in cost-benefit analysis. They tried to avoid the pain associated with violating the rules. But what happened to the natural animal instincts? What happened to the desire to take what one pleases—to rape, plunder, and murder? No longer able to inflict these urges outwardly on external foes, civilized humans turned their passions against themselves. Nietzsche explains:

  Hostility, cruelty, the delight in persecution . . . all turned against their begetter. Lacking external enemies and resistances, and confined within an oppressive . . . regularity, man began . . . persecuting, terrifying himself, like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage. This languisher . . . who had to turn himself into an adventure, a torture chamber . . . became the inventor of “bad conscience.” Also the generator of the greatest and most disastrous of maladies, of which humanity has not to this day been cured: his sickness of himself, brought on by the violent severance from his animal past. (p. 215)

  Morality is the unique human capacity to decide what ought to be done. Moral codes guide us in making choices in the present and dictate how we should behave in the future. Morality often inhibits our longings and desires; it tells not to be gluttonous, lascivious, egotistical, or cruel. Since the baser inclinations are powerful, we need a supernatural ally to help tame them. Nietzsche explains:

  The phenomenon of an animal soul . . . taking up arms against itself, was so novel . . . that the whole complexion of the universe was changed thereby. This spectacle . . . required a divine audience to do it justice. It was a spectacle too sublime and paradoxical to pass unnoticed on some trivial planet. (p. 215)

  Nietzsche’s analysis reverses the traditional order of the moral universe. For him, it was not God who provided moral commandments to control the baser aspects of human nature, but the inner compulsion of humans to justify the cooping up of instincts that created both God and the metaphysic of morality. Moreover, there is a clear path from the Genealogy to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the sublimation of the Id for the sake of the Ego and Superego. Dexter, of course, never really learned as a child to sublimate his deepest drives, he only pretended to. Reflecting on his childhood Dexter says, “Role playing—such an important part of growing up. When we were kids, whatever role Deb assigned me: evil monster, treacherous Nazi, horrible alien, I played them to perfection” (“All in the Family,” Season 3).

  If Nietzsche’s social anthropology of archaic societies is accurate, it is evident why ancestor worship has been so widespread in almost all societies. Those who established the first conventions actually created human consciousness. Without such rules humans would simply do whatever came into their heads. Perhaps it is this realization that makes Dexter so loyal to the Code of Harry. “Harry taught me to lie and keep my darkest secrets from those around me” (“The British Invasion,” Season 2), he says. “He taught me to hide, and that’s what kept me safe” (“Let’s give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1). Without Harry’s Code, Dexter’s Dark Passenger would have gotten him killed.

  But how do we pay back our forbearers for the ability to think in temporal ways? How do we repay the debt of being human? Nietzsche claims that rituals venerating founders become more elaborate, complex, and awe inspiring until ancestors become gods. Yet the capacity of people to stage ever-more sophisticated ceremonies only shows how far civilization has advanced, making the debt to past generations who established civilization’s beginnings even greater. People feel guilt because they can never pay back what is owed to the godlike founders. Civilization’s advances establish an unfunded mandate of guilt.

  Here Christianity developed its most important and powerful principle. Christ the redeemer absolved humans of their sins.

  We come face to face with that paradoxical . . . expedient which brought temporary relief to tortured humanity, that most brilliant stroke of Christianity: God’s sacrifice of himself for man. God makes himself the ransom for what could not otherwise be ransomed; God alone has power to absolve us of a debt we can no longer discharge; the creditor offers himself as a sacrifice for his debtor out of sheer love (can you believe it?), out of love for his debtor. (Genealogy, p. 225)

  Who can repay such a selfless deed as this, who but the almighty? Human beings are driven ever further into guilt and despair. They can never live up to the example of a crucified Christ. They can never rid themselves of the debt and must perpetually submit to humbly obeying divine commands that require the taming of their strongest passions.

  Christianity changed the way people thought about their lives. It turned them inward, making them aware of their inner thoughts, not merely their outer actions. In the New Testament St. Paul denigrates the outer physical self and celebrates the inner spirit which is closer to God.

  For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.

  For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.

  If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good.

  Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

  For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.

  For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. (Romans 7:14–25)

  Dexter is certainly aware that there are standards of good and evil. But since he does not believe in God—in fact doesn’t “believe in anything”—and cannot rid himself of his compunction, he utterly rejects New Testament morality (“The British Invasion,” Season 2). “I’m Dexter. I’m not sure what I am. I just know there’s something dark in me. I hide it. Certainly don’t talk about it, but its there. Always. This Dark Passenger” (“An Inconvenient Lie,” Season 2).

  Nietzsche explains that the psychological and metaphysical effects of Biblical religion both deepen and weaken the human soul. The Biblical God is universal and perfect. Such a doctrine undermines civil religion, as it did the pagan religions of the ancient world. The laws and traditions of a nation no longer define what is right or wrong. Instead, individuals are personally responsible for observing the moral codes commanded by the deity. Biblical religion intensifies anxiety, for people are continually led to wonder whether their actions and even thoughts live up to the example embodied in a perfect being—what was once consciousness become self-consciousness. Humans owe a duty, not just to their family, friends, and country, but—following Christ’s example—to all people.

  As for these Christian virtues of empathy and compassion, Dexter is a man out of season: “Most people have a hard time
dealing with death—but I’m not most people. It’s the grief that makes me uncomfortable. Not because I’m a killer. Really I just don’t understand all that emotion, which makes it hard to fake. In those cases, shades come in handy” (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1). Nor will Dexter have anything to do with the humane principles originated by Christianity and preached by the human rights doctrine of the contemporary era. Peace and pity aren’t high on his to-do list. As he puts it, “I’ve never been great at conflict resolution—not without a blade and several rolls of plastic wrap” (“Easy as Pie,” Season 3).

  What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

  Edward Gibbon became controversial for maintaining that Christianity undermined the martial spirit of Rome, leading ultimately to the collapse of the empire. So formidable were the Roman legions that until the time of the Napoleonic Wars, military historians debated whether they could defeat armies equipped with firearms. Much has been written about the tactics and discipline of perhaps the greatest fighting force in history, but few people have considered the psyche of the legionnaires. Roman soldiers were highly disciplined and well-trained warriors, proud of their ability to dispatch an opponent with a thrust of the Gladius—the short sword that conquered the world.