As I was writing this review, news arrived that Cormac McCarthy died. He was rightly celebrated as one of the giants of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. Only a master could treat characters who commit acts of shocking violence with something that approaches tenderness. I do not know another author who could arouse sympathy for a murderous necrophiliac, but McCarthy does just that in Child of God. Without ever excusing the character’s crimes, he manages to make us resonate with the feeling that no one deserves to be reduced to the status of a hunted animal, and that there is as much evil in the righteous lynch mob as there is in the guilty criminal that they pursue. One shudders to think of the crime against art that “sensitivity readers” would have perpetrated on McCarthy’s excavations deep into the human heart of violent darkness had his manuscripts been subjected to such an abomination. These are not children’s books for moralistic minds nourished on platitudes.
However, at the risk committing a crime myself– disciplinary chauvinism– even authors as outstanding as McCarthy can sound naive when they draw general philosophical principles from the behavior of the characters of their novels.
In one of the rare interviews that he granted, McCarthy articulated the philosophical conviction that he explored throughout his literary career.
“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the paper. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
Anyone with a even a passing understanding of history would agree that there has been no such thing as life without bloodshed, but one cannot infer from that historical fact that future harmony is impossible. Even if it is true that the causes of violence are psychological as much as social, it is not the case that life is nothing but bloodshed. If there were no harmony there would be no life.
One of the main duties of literature is to explore the terrifying motivations which lurk deep in everyone’s character. One of the main duties of philosophy (and history, to which it is allied) is to study the conditions in which our potential for brutality and violence becomes actual. Even if the ideal conditions in which peace and harmony universally prevail can never be achieved, we must struggle for them, because the goods of life presuppose them.
McCarthy was not a gunslinger, robber, or necrophiliac murderer. He invented his characters in the (more or less) quiet, peaceful repose of his study (or wherever it was that he felt inspired to write). While some have written in the trenches (David Jones, for example), art is typically created far from the battlefield. To be sure, as Hegel said, history is the slaughterhouse of nations, but before we can kill each other, we must grow to maturity: we must eat and learn; someone must cared for us. If we are to eat and learn and be cared for, we must build and maintain institutions that satisfy our needs. If we are lucky, we will also have been loved before we are sent off to kill. Beneath episodes of explosive violence, therefore, is what John McMurtry calls the “life-ground of value.”
The main problem of human history, when it comes to dealing with the causes of mass violence, is to universalize the feelings which allow the members of smaller groups to work together cooperatively and to care for one another’s well-being. Thus far, practical successes have been partial at best and few and far between. Ideologically, there are many universalist and humanist philosophies and religions, but none have been successfully translated into stable political institutions. Notwithstanding this failure, the belief in peace and harmony are certainly not the cause– as McCarthy suggests– of the loss of soul and freedom. On the contrary: people lose their freedom to conquerors and dominating classes and nations, and they lose their soul when they desire to become conquerors and members of dominating classes and nations. The desire for peace and harmony is the opposite: a desire to globalize the conditions for free self-creation, collaboration, mutual learning, and collective development.
My thoughts have been drawn repeatedly to problems of war and peace this past year because of the war in Ukraine. There seems little prospect for peace in the coming year. As with all wars, this one too will end, but as with most regional conflicts between adversaries incapable of landing a crushing blow on the opponent, its outcome will most likely return the combatants to some version of the status quo ante. This likelihood is morally criminal and irrational: had all parties exercized more patience and took each others concerns serious, the most probable outcome would have been achieved without military violence.
However it ultimately turns out, this war was hardly necessary. NATO had no reason to attack Russia, Russia was no threat to Europe as a whole, and Ukraine, like every nation, can decide for itself with whom it will ally economically and politically. Had NATO been disbanded when it should have been– at the end of the Cold War– Ukraine’s membersship would not have become a causus belli. But like a ball rolling down a hill political and ideological mindsets move with inertial force without worrying about the damage they will causes when they run into an obstacle. Had anachronistic Cold War calculation given way to a more rational assessment of respective national interests, the civil war in Ukraine could have been resolved by the federal solution envisaged in Minsk accords, Russian security concerns addressed by the negotiations that Russia requested and the West rejected, and Ukraine left to negotiate what relationships it desired with Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world. The current conflict is neither the noble crusade against Western imperialism that Russia’s supporters fantasize it to be nor a heroic struggle for self-determination. Ukraine is being cynically used to weaken Russia while Russia appeals to the historic borders of the Tsarist empire– the one denounced by Lenin, recall– as justification for its annexations. Coherent anti-imperialism must condemn all sides and demand negotiations to end the violence. Nothing hardens reactionary nationalist sentiment than war.
In other words, the conflict could have been avoided had decision makers thought rationally about the causes of the tensions and addressed them with constructive policy. The importance of rational understanding connects the themes of war and peace to the second focus of the past year’s posts: the continuing precarity of philosophy and the humanities and the growing threats to academic freedom that plague the university system in Canada, the US, and the UK. Just when the world needs comprehensive intelligence most, the institutional future of the discipline that takes its cultivation as its primary focus– is threatened. I worry that a vicious circle has set it: demographic and economic forces continue to cause enrollments in the humanities to drop; falling enrollments lead to program cuts, program cuts make recruitment more difficult, enrollments continue to fall, and administrators make more cuts.
My concerns are partially self-interested– I make my living as a philosophy professor. However, beyond my own career needs I remain convinced that the fundamental problems that the world faces today, from climate change, to armed conflict, to growing material inequality, to the general malaise that has seized the populations of the liberal-democratic world, and the economic and cultural dislocations that developing artificial intelligence technologies are already causing cannot be solved without a radical transformation of values and goals. I respect the achievements of my scientific colleagues and am awe-struck by the insights of the natural sciences, but only philosophy and the humanities generally can discover and defend the universal human values that alone can motivate and shape solutions to any of those defining problems.
I seem to have settled in to a pattern of publishing about 2 posts a month. As I have said before, I do not want to write to a schedule but only when the spirit moves me and I think that I have something to say. I also think that the world could benefit from less writing and more thinking and listening.
I was in Killarney on Georgian Bay at the beginning of June and spent an afternoon by the water reading a novel. I love painting and music, but if some demon were to force me to choose between them and literature I think that I would choose literature. Books were my internet as a boy: no pictures save the one’s I imagined of alien planets and distant cities. In the silent interior dialogue with the poem or novel the mind becomes wonderfully open to imaginary worlds. The stream of consciousness is enriched in unpredictable ways. When you read you have to be quiet, sit still, and keep yourself receptively open to what unfolds– dying arts in our hyperactive world.
Because I like to collect things and because I think I occasionally hit on an argument or image that might be worth preserving I have, as in years passed, collected last years posts here. Thank you for reading and I look forward to the next year: lucky thirteen for the blog.