Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89. He was the most prestigious novelist in America, and since the ‘90s, his novels have sold well and won him major awards—Pulitzer, National Book Award, and so on. Perhaps millions of people have read one of his novels and might remember his name. His novels have been taught in colleges and adapted in Hollywood, and some might make it to streaming TV.

Of course, the nation does not mourn novelists and only a very small number of our notable artists are celebrities. But McCarthy has more claim to be remembered, because his 2005 novel, No Country For Old Men, was adapted in 2007 by the Coen Brothers, and won the Best Picture Award, along with three other Oscars, and grossed more than $160 million worldwide, as well as more than $50 million in discs alone. It’s a remarkable movie people are likely to watch and remember, because it forces them to think about evil. We turn to the movies to adjudicate popularity, and in this case, a prestigious artist became part of the pop culture with a Western, of all things.

McCarthy wanted his readers, perhaps Americans in general, to face up to their curiosity about those rare moments when middle-class life is suspended, or perhaps transcended; we sometimes call them do-or-die moments, but I guess most of the men we admire are those who do something noble and thereby come to their deaths. We don’t know that we’re worthy of sacrifice, and McCarthy does not push his artistic talent in that direction, but he forces us to face up to our noble aspirations by showing us the fascination and repugnance of evil men and evil deeds, and therefore what it would take for us to face them down. Reading and thinking about his novels is a fitting way to remember a man who wanted to investigate seriously the origin of our beliefs.

The Moral Collapse of America

No Country For Old Men is a fairly simple crime story. A young Vietnam veteran, Moss, finds heroin and money in the desert, in 1980, and some dead people. He’s out hunting, he surveys the slaughter and takes the money, but then the cartels send assassins to retrieve it, and so a chase begins. Moss is at home in the desert and knows how to make his way around Texas, so he has a chance, but he is up against something quite terrifying. He is more impressive than most Americans were then or are now; you could call him a man without lying. But he is tempted by the sight of millions and you have to ask yourself, would most people be any different? The question in the story would then be, would any of us be able to get away with it? This great desire to be as rich and therefore as free as America connects him and us to a terror that has made the story famous.

There are, however, two complications. One is structural: each chapter of the novel starts with a speech by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, from Terrell County, Texas, a place on the Mexican border. He’s an old Southern man. There is even a touch of the noble about him, having served his people in a paternal way, facing evil so they don’t have to do so. He also discovers the scene of the drug cartel slaughter, then learns Moss is on the run and tries to save him and his young wife, Carla Jean. Sheriff Bell is also a kind of narrator, he talks about his service in WWII and the way the country changed in the ‘60s, what he has seen of evil, and how he is slowly losing hope that anything but Christ can change the way crime, drugs, and money are ruining American morality.

The other complication may be as connected to America’s future as Ed Tom is to her past: Anton Chigurh, a ruthless assassin who goes around killing people with an airgun used in slaughterhouses on cattle. People have come to see him as embodying evil. If you have figured out that he is the most famous figure in the story, and in the movie, you know the American audience, perhaps the modern audience quite well. If you worry that this fascination with evil is mostly a taste for caricature, as with the monsters in horror movies—Chigurh could become another internet meme, like Freddy Kruger or Michael Myers—you know the audience even better. We’re not serious people, I’m afraid.

So McCarthy gives Moss as close to an angel and a devil to change his fate as a novel can allow while retaining some plausibility. One cannot ignore or belittle morality when one sees the strength of the beliefs on which it is based, and nothing reminds us that we are somehow pious, even religious, like the confrontation with evil. Much of the modern jargon, the abstraction, the endless indecision or frivolity or dishonesty falls away and we begin to take justice seriously. Somehow, Moss is not just a free man of the West in the fight of his life; he forces us to ask both whether he deserves his fate and what kind of country America is in which his fate plays out.

Humble Endurance and Might

I recommend the novel, it’s much better prose than most of what we have available, and it reminds readers how difficult it is to be serious, and how difficult to do lasting good. McCarthy tries to reveal a connection between our modern science and our religion. The evil Anton Chigurh suggests he models himself on God, that he judges mankind, and, indeed, that he has the power to create by his speech. Part of the horror is that he makes not men, but corpses. Evil is a hard thing to bear, and I regret even having to talk about it, but there it is.

The idea of a false messiah or anti-Christ is not, I think, entirely unknown to people, but perhaps now largely unintelligible. The novel is written with that in mind and works around to something of an explanation near the end. A novel is not theology, but this one is an attempt to show how we even understand ourselves as human beings such that we might get theological notions. Perhaps the scene where Chigurh and Carla Jean meet makes this most obvious. The question for us is not just why bad things happen to us, but why do things happen at all? For there to be a cause of our evils, which we do not deserve, we think, there has to be such a thing as a cause in the first place. In those do-or-die moments, our beliefs about the cosmos are revealed.

The evil Chigurh explains his refutation of our ordinary ideas of morality by his very being, not just by his actions. He is an agent of destruction, killing people because they’re in the way—as though cluelessness were a crime. He executes people, which proves that they deserve it, since everything they do leads them to their end. But the very fact that he acts for a purpose seems to him to put him in a different category than everyone else. Obviously, this mockery of divine wrath is very limited: Chigurh does not believe that everyone he does not murder deserves life, much less blessedness. One could almost say that he changes the command of love into one of hatred, just like he turns the honorable ideal of being a man of one’s word into reducing mankind to a curse that he enacts.

I guess everything about this evil man could be understood as a radicalization of an ordinary opinion. McCarthy points out that Chigurh is astonishingly modern in his desire to conquer chance. He seems angry with people for disobeying his will, and therefore becomes murderous; he conceals his lack of self-control as inescapable fate. His remarkable power, and his power to fascinate and horrify, is not knowledge, however. After one of his executions, he gets hit by a car. That, too, is in some sense necessity or determinism, since after all, a collision can be described by the science of physics; but it’s also an accident, a failure of human intention, even Chigurh experiences it as such. Just because it’s inescapable doesn’t make it an act of will. He tosses coins to decide people’s fate sometimes, an attempt to include chance into his will. There are limits to that.

These evil actions might be understood as a radicalization of freedom to mean might makes right; they suggest a desire to abandon all delusions or any belief that might prove incorrect in the face of the facts, and that’s somehow alike the desire to be scientific. Determinism would seem to deny that morality is possible, since there is no choice. Chigurh keeps saying that much. He seems also bent on acting on that belief, which we almost never do. It seems that once the boundaries of the law are surpassed, the competition between armed men or the desires that make for a drug business, that’s all that’s left.

The old sheriff fears this evil, but faces it manfully; he has no theoretical interests, but insists on distinguishing right from wrong and choosing to do his duty. In a way, his very example proves Chigurh is wrong, not just wicked, but then the surprising thing is, how little anyone listens to him or learns from him. A young wife of 19 asks Sheriff Bell, in an early scene, whether she can smoke. They’re in a café somewhere in Southern Texas and he says, “I think we’re still in America.” But today, or when the novel was written, this was no longer true. American freedom must involve quite a bit of trouble, but what does it even mean to be American without it? Where would the modest, but sturdy kind of virtue available to us in moments of serious political turmoil come from?