The Road

Human society has undergone mass death and disaster in the past, yet the Earth abided such human disaster as a mere blip in its ecological record, continuing to provide the materials for abundant water, food and, shelter. It is only under the chokehold of human despotism, totalitarianism, or oligarchy that such abundance is cut off from the bulk of humanity and either piled at the feet of its worst elements or destroyed outright. The fantasy of an Earth which no longer provides food or water or shelter, then, is not so much an environmental metaphor as a political and economic one.

One might be inclined to think of the world painted by The Road as one that reveals humankind’s truest nature, in which tooth-and-claw survival hones the human organism into its sharpest and most clarifying form, one without confusing art or philosophy. Tight competition for food and resources ensures that only the very fittest survive in such a world, and that the only moral code is the one in which the individual survives and passes on evolutionary strength to their strongest scions. This is social Darwinism, the notion that fitness is measured through physical strength or cunning, and that mere survival has a moral dimension.

This is, of course, neither how evolution works biologically, nor how human society has worked historically when shorn of its modern or even of its medieval tools. Overall, humankind and many other forms of animalia thrive under multitudinous—though sometimes despotic—forms of cooperation. Furthermore, social Darwinism a poor way to describe even the most unempathetic and competitive forms of modern economic systems, which, though competitive at the highest level, rely upon a massive bulwark of intellectual and social cooperation in order to extract enough wealth to bother fighting over. Yet the metaphor of the social Darwinist wasteland is a powerful one to the leaders of such competitive economic systems, who find in the image of clean and frugal landscape one that congratulates them for having survived within it. It has also traditionally been attractive to novelists, who find in such stories an easy source of melodramatic action.

McCarthy undermines the idea of the social Darwinist hero throughout his story. The man survives by means of his cunning and strength, but he is not fit. From the time the story begins, he is stoking a cancer within himself that will kill him by the end of the book. Most of his victories are performed through dumb luck, and the lessons he learns from them are negligible.