PREVIEW-Episode 63: Existentialist Heroes in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men”

0:08 Dylan: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 63 is something like, what does morality look like after the death of God? Along the way, we'll also consider what philosophical work literature can do that might not be available to the typical philosophical essay or treatise. For this discussion, we read Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, no country for Old Men. You can join the discussion, get the text, and read loads of supplemental material@partiallyexaminedlife.com I'm Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:44 Mark: This is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:51 Eric: And this is Eric Petrie in Lansing, Michigan.

0:54 Seth: Welcome, Eric.

0:55 Wes: Welcome.

0:56 Dylan: Good to have you.

0:56 Eric: Thanks. This is fun and challenging. I mean, the electronics.

1:04 Mark: Yes. We got to know Eric by dealing with technical issues for 10 minutes. We'll save the listeners that experience.

1:11 Eric: Yeah.

1:11 Wes: Yes. This podcast has actually been going for an hour already. It's just not recorded.

1:18 Mark: This is no podcast for old men, Eric.

1:26 Eric: Hey, I took a nap before I took it to start the day. I made sure I had a nap in the afternoon so I could handle your late night recordings.

1:35 Seth: You guys are making it sound like Eric's in a retirement home. We wheeled him out after the four o' clock buffet.

1:43 Eric: Yeah, that's right.

1:45 Dylan: Eric, I don't think that you're actually all that much older than we are.

1:49 Eric: No, I'm probably not.

1:50 Dylan: Were you in your first year at Michigan State? In 75? Well, that was when you were a student, right?

1:57 Eric: Oh, yeah, right. As an undergraduate, yeah.

1:59 Dylan: Yeah. But when you were started on the faculty there, your first year, was. Was it 91?

2:04 Eric: Yeah, 91, that's right.

2:05 Dylan: I had you in class for one of your first classes. Yeah, one of my last classes.

2:09 Wes: You had him as a.

2:11 Mark: You were a TA or the associate professor or something at the time.

2:14 Dylan: I was a professor, yeah. And I had him. It was a Kant's Political Philosophy, the class that I had.

2:20 Mark: Oh, that's not a part of Kant that is often tackled.

2:23 Eric: Yeah. Oh, well, sorry.

2:24 Wes: And you guys stayed in touch?

2:26 Eric: Not as much as we should have, but yeah. I mean, you know, considering that most of the people I know from then I never hear from. Dylan and I have kept in really good catch.

2:33 Dylan: That's because anything divided by zero is infinity, right?

2:37 Eric: Something like that.

2:38 Wes: So it wasn't like after 10 years of hearing nothing, he contacted you about

2:41 Dylan: the podcast I came to talk to Erica a little bit about when I was looking at St. John's I was at Michigan State for four years as a postdoc, and we would talk periodically then, and I visited a few times to James Madison College, which is a residential college that I went to at Michigan State. And that's where Eric teaches.

3:01 Eric: Yeah, but we saw each other.

3:03 Mark: It's a James Madison environment that is. Breeds closeness, that weird residential something, as opposed to the vast Michigan State apparatus, the faceless, giant educational institution that's in

3:15 Dylan: the promo material for James Madison College.

3:17 Eric: Right. Yeah, that sounds just right.

3:19 Mark: And so how did that work? That's just anybody that wants to sign up for it, or did you have to apply separately or how did that work, Dylan?

3:25 Dylan: Well, James Madison College was always first come, first serve. So if you applied to Michigan State, you could get in. The problem is, over the years that it's become desirable. So you have to apply early, I guess, and as an undergrad. And then once you get in, to make a transfer into James Madison is really hard. The enrollment's capped, like at 1100 students. One of the coolest things about James Madison was the writing program, which Eric's now teaching in a little bit, too.

3:53 Wes: Right.

3:53 Mark: So, Eric, Dylan said you were actually using this book to teach some. Right. Like having him look at the techniques and say, you don't have to use punctuation.

4:03 Wes: Wasn't. Doesn't need an apostrophe.

4:06 Mark: That's right. You don't need quotation marks.

4:10 Eric: Right. That's a good point. Yeah, he's not a good model in that respect. No apostrophes. He doesn't like that. You have a hard time figuring out in a McCarthy novel who's talking. I often have to try to figure it out, you know, which speaker in the dialogue is whom.

4:24 Wes: It's a mess.

4:24 Eric: Yeah, but, yeah, I've used. Actually, I've taught this book for four or five years, actually. Not in a writing class, in a course on Nietzsche and Kant and contemporary political philosophy. And it's a fantastic book for discussion.

4:39 Mark: Well, and in contrast, we just did Voltaire's Candide last time, which. That is a philosopher who also writes literature. And he's not so subtle about the way that he puts the philosophy in there. Whereas McCarthy, like, at least I look for interviews of him, and he doesn't like to talk about his work. He doesn't sound very philosophical when you talk to him. He just is kind of like, I'm a person, you know, kind of one of Nietzsche's ideals, of somebody that works by instinct. Like I don't read other current literature now, some of those classics, I don't understand them, but he, you know, has developed this unique style that he's very famous for and yeah, obviously has a great attention to detail and skill and you know, I don't know how much philosophy background he has, but he certainly smuggles in, into the mouths of characters and in some of the situations, you know, stuff at least as philosophical as what was going on in Candide, which is a lot of bad things are happening, but it's the best possible world, but bad things are happening.

5:33 Eric: You know, he looks to me to be very well read. Partly I think that's just the subtlety of the situations he sets up. Knowing the moral dilemmas of say, Kant and Nietzsche and a little bit of Heidegger. When I teach no country for Old Men, it looks like this was a story that was written to explore those issues. And it's so crafted that way that I suspect he's well read and just makes it a habit of putting that all into everyday common speech when it's there at least.

6:08 Mark: Yeah, it did strike me as a lot like some of the existentialist novels, but Americanized or Texanized?

6:14 Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the most obvious cases in the novel no country for Old Men is when Moss the welder is Talking to the 16 year old runaway and trying to explain to her why it is that she's making a mistake, thinking that going to California she can start over. There's a kind of extended conversation that I think is kind of straight out of Nietzsche, talking about what it means, what your life is made out of. It's made out of the days, it's made out of. That to me, without using philosophy speak is I think, very serious philosophically.

6:49 Wes: And even if he hasn't read Nietzsche, he may be just converging on the same sorts of themes. Right. He's obviously reflecting on something in this novel.

6:58 Eric: Right, absolutely.

6:59 Mark: And that should be the test of sometimes, I think, should be the test of good philosophy. Can you put it in regular terms that people can understand? Whereas, you know, I could spend a lot of time with, with Hegel and the master slave relationship and things of this. And then I might find six months later, like I don't know if I actually can explain that or even know what the hell was going on.

7:18 Wes: Exactly.

7:19 Mark: At some level there's some interaction, but that's not an actual historical fact and it's not a psychological description. So Something that can seem very profound, can float away when. When it's in that language. But when you put it in a concrete situation like this, one of the powers of this is that even with these ethical dilemmas, it's much different. If you're giving an abstract, there's a guy on the train track and you can save him by pushing another guy on the train track, that kind of thing. As opposed to this is a real character that you know the person's situation, you can put yourself in the person's place and then ask the ethical dilemma from that perspective.

7:51 Eric: I think that's completely right. I think he's the kind of guy who is well read. I don't exactly know what he's read because he won't tell anybody and he doesn't quote except in the. At the epigrams and the beginnings of his books. There are some interesting ones, but I think he's someone who completely agrees with what you just said. That philosophy, to be truthful, has to be on the street. And so he quotes people that he listens to in the bars in El Paso.

8:14 Wes: Yeah, and the point of departure for this novel is a very everyday concern. You know, you have this character Belle, who's concerned about aging and regret. And that's sort of the initial surface theme. And of course it goes deeper.

8:31 Dylan: Do we want to give a quick synopsis or do we want to expect that everybody's at least read the book or probably seen the movie?

8:37 Seth: I'd give a synopsis because if you've seen the movie, you haven't exactly read the book, right?

8:42 Eric: Well, the book, I think is made up of two parts. There is Sheriff Bell's italicized introduction to each of the 13 chapters. And that's one monologue that's continuous, it looks like, but that's been broken up. An introduction, usually just a couple of pages long, to each of the chapters. Then a separate story told in the third person. Of course, the monologue is first person. The story is told in third person of this drug deal gone bad in the Texas desert. And the consequences of a 36 year old welder named Moss. The consequences of his finding the money, $2.4 million which he picks up. Or actually that's one of the first dilemmas. Will he pick it up? And when he picks it up, his life changes because he's chased by the people of both sides of the failed drug deal. And the story is the consequences of that, which happened pretty quickly.

9:36 Mark: And did I hear that this was written as a screenplay? I Saw that as like a comment by somebody on a board somewhere.

9:43 Wes: And I was, I don't think so.

9:45 Mark: Okay, all right.

9:46 Eric: It has the quality of a novel, but it's clearly. It was written with the screen in mind, it seems, Madam.

9:51 Wes: Okay.

9:52 Mark: I mean, that's not unusual for McCarthy's work. It's not a stream of consciousness in terms of the consciousness of the characters. There are lots of authors that will then throw in backstory, flashbacky kind of things in it, and then the character is jerked back to the present moment as if everything that was being said, which is not all in one space, is going on in the mind of the character. It just seems in the other McCarthy novels that I had read, there's not a lot of dwelling on what characters are thinking at the moment. It might be descriptions of what they're seeing, but that would be the same thing you would see if you're standing there.

And then it's descriptions of what they're actually doing with their hands. And that is just completely all over this. That, yes, Bell is talking at the beginning, and so that's kind of what's going on in his mind. But even that, that's him talking to somebody, presumably, or his memoir or something like that. It's all external. And this could be just, you know, an existentialist kind of approach, that everybody is this closed, unknowable unit. And so, as a storyteller, I'm not going to pretend I can put you in somebody's head, because I can't do that.

I'm going to let you sort of look at them and see what they're doing and what people are saying around, and that's it.

10:57 Eric: I like that. I like the idea that what's inside is definitely a puzzle. But the only problem I have with, if I understood what you said about existentialism, is I think a good bit of the novel is meant for you to figure out what's in their head. That's part of the puzzling way in which he writes, as opposed to it being something you can never reach. He's trying to set up the issue of answering the question. For instance, in the case of the, you know, the real villain hero of the book, Chigurh, what makes him who he is? What's in his mind? How does he understand the world? So that's the only thing I would add, that it's not that it's a blank, that nobody can reach their inner thoughts. I think he wants you to try to put it together.

11:35 Mark: Yeah. So we should say that the secondary Text that is all lurking here in our understanding is Eric's essay on this.

11:43 Eric: But Yeah, I think two years ago I gave it as a lecture in St. John's out in Santa Fe. And then I also gave it a few months later as a lecture in a political theory colloquium here on campus at Michigan State.

11:56 Mark: It's a promise keeping after the death of God, no country for old men.

12:00 Eric: Right. By the way, if we're giving a synopsis, there would be at least two things. One should add that story of the failed drug deal could be just a pedestrian detective story or shoot em up. But I think what makes it especially interesting is two additional things. That one side of the drug deal, the American side, has this loose cannon, Anton Chigurh. And he I think is an extremely interesting character who rises above anything that would just be part of the regular drug scene. And so trying to figure him out is I think really one of the big purposes of this book.

Trying to present Chigurh's new way of thinking in the world. And then secondly, Sheriff Bell, who represents the World War II generation, he's the guy doing the monologue that introduces each chapter. He's also a character in the story and he never really accomplishes anything very much. He's always on the scene, too late to make a difference. And at the end of the story he chooses to quit. And I think the monologue is an explanation of why he chose to quit. So then just to finish the story is the failed drug deal, the 36 year old welder Moss, and his decision to take the money from the drug site that he found in the desert and the consequences for his life.

But it's also trying to figure out who this Anton Chigurh is as a new man in the new world after the death of God. And it's also some reflection on Sheriff Bell and the old world that's passing away and why he quit. At least those things.

13:31 Mark: So we're not going to make you give your whole essay here.

13:34 Eric: Yeah.

13:34 Mark: So yeah, this paper of yours, Eric, we can make available. I understand it's not been published yet, so we can't just link to it on the web. And you're seeking publications. We can't actually publish it ourselves, but we can make it available on the member portion of our site. Yet another reason for people to go sign up for that.

13:50 Eric: Right.

13:51 Mark: I did find it very interesting looking at that, just the way that you oriented it. I knew this was taking place somewhere in the early 80s, late 70s. Right.

13:59 Eric: It's actually 1980.

14:00 Mark: 1980. Is that actually stated or how did you know?

14:02 Eric: Yeah, because Chigurh throws the coin in the air when he runs into that proprietor at the gas station. And he says, this coin has been traveling 26 years to get here. And he gives the date of the coin.

14:14 Dylan: The coin is 1958.

14:16 Mark: So it's not like at the very beginning of the book, it says it's 1980. And here's things that are going on. Like, that's not the style of the book.

14:23 Eric: That is not the style.

14:24 Mark: It just, here's some action. Here's some people doing some stuff, but they refer a couple times to, like, oh, were you in Vietnam? Or something? And I was trying to figure out from them there what the timeline was. But according to your paper here, that all the three younger main characters are Vietnam vets. And that explains really what the death of God is for. That that's such a horrible part of the American experience, and especially the experience of the people that had been there. And that explains quite a bit why they act the way they do. Whereas Sheriff Bell from the previous generation was a World War II guy. And, you know, so just knowing that since those have such iconic meanings for us, you know, World War II is the good war. It was the morally clear war that we knew what we were supposed to be doing. And Vietnam was not. So.

15:03 Eric: Right. There's a very interesting orientation that comes from the Bell monologue. And that's where Sheriff Bell tells a story about his being in World War II. So that's his experience. He's dealing with all these Vietnam vets, both Chigurh and then Carson Wells, the hitman sent to get Chigurh, the hitman, and then also the welder, Moss. Those three are all Vietnam veterans. And then Bell talks about, I think, his grandfather. Actually, I haven't figured this out. There's somebody in World War I who died as a young man. He talks about that guy in even higher terms. So the farther you go back in American history, the more God there is, the more solid the belief.

15:43 Wes: One of the things that Bell is reflecting on is his disappointment, right? And regret over his performance in World War II. He gets an award for heroism. But the true story that he tells his uncle is that, right, it's his uncle, is that he actually ended up running from the Germans. And he's regretted that all his life. I think that's one of the sort of motivating features of this ongoing reflection of Bell. And then the other related one is his being disconcerted and afraid of, for one thing, the kind of new level of violence that people are seeing in the American Southwest with these drug cartels and this horrible violence, but also just the typical concerns of someone who is aging and seeing younger generations and the sense that they have no regard for tradition.

So he mentions kids with green hair and wearing bones in their noses. In a way, he values the old tradition. But he comes to the conclusion that he's one of these newer people because I guess he failed to live up to his obligations towards his when he cut and run from the Germans. And on the one hand he wants to live up to these older ideals, but he has this sense that he's failed to do that.

16:54 Dylan: Doesn't he, in the end have a kind of self loathing that neither Moss, neither the other three guys do? least self disappointment. Maybe self loathing is too high.

17:05 Eric: Right. Because remember, he's still married, really happily married to someone who he considers his soul. So it can't be that bad to be in retirement with Loretta. But yeah, he's really disappointed, deeply disappointed. I think he concludes that he should have died staying with his men in Germany.

17:20 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

17:20 Dylan: I mean, that would have been the proper, honorable thing to have done.

17:26 Seth: That's what he thinks his grandfather would have done.

17:28 Eric: Exactly.

17:29 Dylan: So you would say that he wouldn't disagree that that's what he should have done, given his own soul, but that he's disappointed in that characteristic of himself because he thinks he ought to be more like his grandfather.

17:41 Seth: Well, I would say like many things in the book, it's ambiguous. He says, people think that I'm a man of a different time, but I'm a man of this time, I think, in that section. And he's basically saying grandfather lived during a different time. He had a different way of dealing with things. And you might look back and think that I'm from a different generation, but I'm not. I'm of this world now and not of some former world or some hypothetical world.

18:08 Wes: And part of what he's doing there, he's reflecting, right, on his failure to pursue Chigurh. And he retires and gives up on that instead of trying to pursue him to the bitter end.

18:18 Dylan: And he's sort of afraid of that in a way that echoes his fear in the dark in World War II while he was waiting for the Germans, thinking that all of his men had already died.

18:29 Wes: Right.

18:29 Eric: He's repeating, yeah, that shows you how strange the moral principle is. Because what Bell is struggling with is they had been defeated and he had every reason to believe all his squad, they were dead. But he felt he had the obligation to stay there and die with them. So it's this weird thing. Not just that he'd risk his life because Bel is willing to risk his life like the best of them, but in this particular case, he expected they were all dead and he left them. That's what upset.

18:59 Wes: He does say. Yeah, it's ambiguous to think about the dead because he says, and in my book, this is page 121, he says, I could hear some of our men groaning and I sure didn't know what I was going to do come dark. He stays with him until dark and then he runs.

19:15 Eric: Yeah, that's good.

19:16 Wes: And it's. I mean, he has the right to. Presumably they're all close to death, but I think there's that uncertainty about whether he could have saved people may be part of his regret.

19:26 Eric: Yeah. I think just to try to give some more precise definition to the death of God phrase, which is a Nietzschean phrase and probably doesn't really, strictly speaking fit. The main thing is a loss of faith. He sees what's happening with each generation. This is Bell and himself as well, is a loss of faith in God and therefore an inability to make promises that they keep to their death. And that's what he sees. All this strange stuff coming up which makes the world worse. He, I think, sees as a consequence of that loss of faith, which I

19:59 Mark: liked how this dovetail the way it was described, I think, in your paper, from what we were reading about in Candide, that Voltaire was a deist, that at least at that point, of course, everybody believed in God. You know, atheism was a hard to even conceive position. So deism was kind of as liberal as the mainstream intellectuals got at that point, because they didn't have necessarily Darwinist explanations and things to rule out those traditional teleological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. So there's echoes of deism in here, where Bell is talking to his uncle and they say something about, of course, you know, there is a God and created this, but why isn't God doing anything about this suffering? Well, I don't think he really can. Like, God is hands off.

20:42 Eric: Yeah.

20:42 Mark: And the fact that it's just then one step from that. So what you characterize, I think, is that that's how the people of that older generation, they still were raised with religion, and so they have to believe something like that and just be sort of disappointed by the fact that bad things are happening. But for the generation after that, that wasn't as thoroughly inculcated with a religious background, then it's just much easier for them to say, oh, I don't see the effects of God. There's all the suffering in the world, therefore there's no God. Why prevaricate and use apologetics and say, oh, there is a God, but he has to have all these limitations or something? Just cut it right off.

21:13 Wes: Yeah. And religion is important here because for Nietzsche, it was really the primary mechanism of getting people to keep their promises. And promise is an important concept. For Nietzsche, it's really about something that critically distinguishes human beings from animals, this ability. In a sense, it's something like will, which is to say, you can say, I will do this, and then end up actually doing it in the future, which requires having a memory. People can go back and listen to our Genealogy of Morals podcast. He talks a lot about this at the very beginning of the first essay in Genealogy of Morality.

So the idea is that you need some way to get human beings who are sort of instinctively forgetful, which is another important word for Nietzsche, but to remember enough to be able to keep their promises, to have a will, and that requires punishment, discipline. It requires all sorts of horrible things, torture and bloodshed. Nietzsche talks all about that. Religion is one of those mechanisms for doing that. And so when you lose God and you lose religion, that ability to make promises begins to fade. And then the question is, what could possibly ground that ability to make promises in the absence of God?

22:24 Eric: Yeah, I really like that formulation.

22:26 Dylan: This prompt's exactly talking about when Chigurh kills Carla Jean.

22:30 Seth: Right.

22:30 Dylan: This is where he's explicitly saying, I made a promise I to your dead husband that I would kill you if he didn't give me the money. He didn't give me the money and I killed him. Or, no, he died. Chigurh didn't kill him. He died and I'm going to kill you.

22:45 Eric: That's right.

22:46 Mark: Spoilers. Well, go back in time the episode, stop and watch the movie.

22:55 Wes: At least.

22:57 Eric: At least. But the movie's only good for the book.

23:00 Mark: Yeah, the movie was very faithful in terms of the actual actions that went on, if I remember correctly, until it

23:05 Wes: gets to the end. It does alter quite a few important things at the end, but, yeah, it's

23:09 Mark: been a long time since I saw it. I don't remember.

23:11 Eric: There are two important things that are goofed up or missing in the movie. There's no teenage runaway. It's a woman in the hotel. And I think it implies that he slept with a woman in the hotel. And the book, he does not sleep with the runaway. And there's something else, too. I forgot. The second one.

23:28 Dylan: Well, the way in which the narrative or the monologue from Bell works in the book is just not there in the movie. It sort of tells the part of the book that doesn't include that narrative.

23:39 Eric: It's just a little bit of voiceover.

23:40 Wes: There's some voiceover and then some of it's turned into dialogue. Right. Of course, not all of it is there.

23:46 Eric: Yeah, right, exactly.

23:48 Mark: There was one. Since you were talking earlier, Eric, about the time periods in the World War II and Vietnam perspective. I know toward the end, I think it's when Bell's talking with his uncle where they bring up McCarthy's favored time, you know, where they bring up some horrible bit of violence in cowboy times by the Indians or something like that.

24:05 Eric: Right. Yeah, right.

24:06 Mark: And I was a little unclear. I mean, it's just if overall the emphasis is supposed to be on how horrible 1980 with the death of God and the Vietnam experience is compared to the previous generations. You know, I don't know if he was just trying to put it in perspective to say, oh, but I also wrote Blood Meridian and these other books taking place in cowboy times where everything was much, much worse than any of this. Or at least maybe that's the natural state of chaos to which things are returning.

24:30 Eric: I like that idea. I think definitely McCarthy's point has got to be it was no less chaotic, at least in the west, in Texas. It was no less chaotic in the past than it is for Bell's time. That point, I think, is made in the book.

24:44 Dylan: Well, would you think that the origin of violence and the kinds of problems there have to do with the same kind of loss of God that were saying is permeating this book, or loss of faith?

24:56 Eric: You know, I don't think so. One of the difficulties of this book is you get Bell's account, and Bell's account is simpler, I think, in a lot of important ways than whatever would be McCarthy's view. And Bell's memory doesn't go back. I don't think he knows anything about Blood Meridian, though. He knew the borderlands have always been tough.

25:15 Wes: Yeah. And I think Bell, his position is something that you could easily make fun of. Right. He's complaining about the younger generation, and he's taking the kinds of drug cartel violence that he's seeing as sort of emblematic of something really sinister. You know, a prophet of destruction is coming. And if there weren't this other story of a drug deal gone bad, you would just have Bell with his regret and his fear of the younger generation. And it might look like, you know, you could have written a novel that was basically very mournful and reflective.

And instead, this is a novel about aging and regret, which is violent and raucous in many ways. So it's an interesting contrast between those two things. But I think Bell is not an entirely reliable narrator thematically. He's having his own specific reactions to what all of this stuff means. But I don't think we should take that as McCarthy's thesis about what it means. Right.

26:10 Mark: Well, a lot of some of his introductions relate a couple of kind of cranky, conservative anecdotes that he talks about abortion. You know, some woman on the plane was talking to me about how we need abortions, we need abortions. And I said to her, well, you don't worry about that. The way things are going, you'll be able to have abortions and your kids will be able to put you to sleep, too, when you're old.

26:30 Unknown speaker: Ah.

26:32 Mark: And there's another one I had here. This is A. Page 195 in mine had this questionnaire about what was the problem in teaching in the schools. They came across these forms, these surveys. They'd been filled out and sent in across the country, answering the questions. The biggest problem you could name was talking in class and running in the hallways, chewing gum, copying, homework, things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank, printed up a bunch of them, and sent them out to the same schools 40 years later. Here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder, drug suicide.

27:00 Wes: Yeah, here's another one at the very end, and I've mentioned this before, but these old people I talked to, if you could have told them that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, speaking a language they couldn't even understand. Well, they just flat out wouldn't have believed you. What if you told them that it was their own grandchildren? Well, all of that is signs and wonders and so on. I think it's a chance to write a novel about an old man who is not content with the newer ways without making him seem like a ridiculous, cranky old man just complaining about stuff. Right.

27:35 Mark: He does try to connect the dots that he says, you know, the reason for the drug trade and why all this violence is happening is because they're consumers. And so that has to do with just the basic ennui, the basic dissatisfaction of the American teens and other folks that are consuming these things. And that is a direct cause of all this, facilitating the horrible violence of amoral men, even if those recreational drug users are not themselves the amoral beasts.

28:03 Wes: Right. I'm saying McCarthy is successful in not portraying a character who's not simply a grumpy old man, even though he could have easily become that. And I like the way, you know that one of the. He calls it a breakdown in mercantile ethics when he's referring to Bell, at times lapses into a more sophisticated way of speaking, which is always very interesting. And when he. So he's talking about the drug deal gone wrong. And that I thought was a great phrase to put in Bell's mouth. Breakdown in mercantile ethics.

28:32 Seth: I like that phrase, but it seemed totally out of character to me. It really. It struck me. I remember it because it doesn't sound like his voice in any of the rest of the things that he's saying.

28:43 Dylan: You thought it was too sardonic or something?

28:45 Seth: Not sardonic. It just seemed like a turn of phrase that was very out of step with his way of speaking in the rest of both his first person and third person rhetoric.

28:55 Wes: Yeah, it's a little bit more sophisticated than he's usually speaking.

28:58 Eric: In another conversation with somebody, he asks about mammon from the Bible, and he says. I think he says something like, I need to read up about mammon because he thinks money is ruining the world. That seems more in character on this point.

29:11 Wes: Yeah. I mean here in that when he talks about the breakdown in mercantile ethics, that's near where he's talking about the green hair and the nose bones. And he's talking about how when sir and ma'am go out the window. And I think, Mark, you already mentioned this, but that basic discourtesies and little smaller cultural failures will pave the way for something far more sinister? Which is another interesting idea there. You could call that a very grumpy old man thesis. Or you could say, well, actually, there's a lot of truth to that, because when people stop saying sir and ma' am and little courtesies aren't observed, you could call it a failure of cultural transmission, or the newer generation no longer respects or is beholden to older generations or to tradition.

So in a way that widens the problem from simply death of God to a lack of respect for one's elders or ancestors, which I think is a broader and more, let's say, primitive notion.

30:04 Seth: So to go back to Mark's point earlier about how violent times were even before that, are we to take away from that, that as long as courtesy is Maintained, if we have the simple common courtesies of language and social interaction, the death of God is irrelevant. Or how do I put those two things together?

30:22 Dylan: I think that Bell is sort of blind on this point. There may be a way, which he's right, with the primary drug dealers about this, but those kinds of little niceties seem to be all over Moss, Chigurh and Carson Wells, all three of them are actually pretty polite, even though they're shooting each other all the time.

30:43 Eric: Yeah, I think that's a good point.

30:44 Wes: Yeah.

30:45 Eric: When Chigurh kills the guy at the opening of the novel, when he puts the pneumatic cattle gun to the head of the guy whose car he wants, he says, sir, would you please step away from your car? And then he kills him.

30:58 Dylan: Yeah.

30:59 Eric: And then he explains, I just didn't want you to get blood on the car.

31:02 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

31:02 Eric: So he's plenty polite.

31:04 Wes: Well, he's impersonating a police officer, so that's part of it.

31:06 Eric: But, yeah, that's true. I think that's right. But there are other cases in which he at least is. He's quite. Chigurh here is quite interested in respect and dignity. And so I would say one thing that Bell does not understand, and his account of the world as just a world of losing faith, I think the novel shows pretty clearly, does not encompass the new characters, at least Moss and Chigurh. He doesn't understand them, which is not to say he doesn't understand anything, but he doesn't. See, these guys are making blood oath promises stronger than Bell was able to keep. They outdo him on that.

31:42 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

31:43 Seth: But nobody understands Chigurh either, though.

31:46 Wes: But one thing we do understand about Chigurh is that he's principled. Right, right. So I think that goes to your point, Eric.

31:52 Mark: Yeah. I mean, this is the second half of Nietzsche's account of promises that Wes gave the first half, which is the negative account that historically promising had to be enforced. Just the whole notion was driven into us through a long process of not just abstract morality, but the concrete apparatus of society coming down on people and torturing them and, you know, sort of

32:11 Wes: using pain and religion especially.

32:13 Mark: Yes, but then the second part of that, of the. You know, so you ask the question, how can this persist after the death of God? Is through this sort of making your will your own. So Chigurh having principles, you know, is at least in line with an interpretation of Nietzsche that he is. He doesn't need society or religion to tell him what his principles are. He is the law unto himself.

32:36 Eric: Right.

32:36 Mark: I like that. We're looking at this, and we're talking about maybe looking at Ayn Rand in a couple episodes from now. There's these different versions of how easy it is to get something that is stated in Nietzsche. You know, that morality is the herd mentality and so we need to gain this independence but then come away with something monstrous. You know, that couldn't have been what Nietzsche meant. That's not what good Nietzsche scholarship tells you. Now that's, you know, as misguided as with the Nazis thought. So here, you know, we have in Chigurh a character that could have been a Nietzsche reader who didn't read Walter Kaufmann's commentary.

33:11 Eric: Right? Absolutely no. Kaufman.

33:13 Wes: Well, Moss and Chigurh are both equally emblematic. Right. And this is part of the point you make in your talk, Eric. They're equally emblematic of people who are principled and keep their promises.

33:25 Eric: Yeah, and that's, I think, Bell's own concern with promise keeping and feeling that he somehow was untrue to himself. As he says to his Uncle Ellis, he didn't know he could steal his own life. Yeah, by failing to live up to his blood oath. He doesn't. See, I don't think that both Moss and especially Chigurh are living in accordance with principles by which they live and die.

33:49 Dylan: We've been talking about Bel most of this whole time. And it's true that his monologue frames each of the chapters, but he is utterly a bystander following the action afterwards all the time.

34:02 Eric: Yeah, that's right.

34:04 Dylan: He never meets Chigurh. In fact, I don't even think he meets Moss. He knows him from town. He knows who the guy is, but he never interacts with him. He's always one step behind and he never has any personal confrontation with any of those characters.

34:20 Eric: That's right.

34:20 Mark: Only Moss Wife is the only person that he.

34:23 Dylan: Yes, yes, that's right. Moss's wife. And in fact, the action of the book, the driving force that Belle is following behind on, is initiated by Moss, which drags in Chigurh as a kind of. He would understand it as a defined moment that as soon as it had happened, then Chigurh was on in the situation. But maybe we could talk a little bit about, you know, that point, the stealing of the. Or the appropriating of the case and how it happens and the fact that Moss could have gotten away with this in the first place if he hadn't gone back with the damn water.

34:57 Eric: Yeah, that's right.

34:58 Wes: Well, there's the water and then there's the tracker. Right.

35:02 Dylan: There's Water and the tracker.

35:03 Wes: You're right.

35:03 Eric: What do you mean by the tracker? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

35:06 Mark: The tracker that's in the money.

35:07 Wes: Yeah. The transponder or the. So, I mean, it is an excruciating part of the novel to see him take this water back. I mean, it's like watching a horror movie and you're telling the person not to go into the room with the killer.

35:20 Seth: What I love about the book that didn't come across quite as strongly in the movie is that he's got that own dialogue with himself.

35:25 Dylan: Yes.

35:26 Seth: There's. There's really fantastic. Him talking to himself about what terrible he's like. He knows when he picks up the. Actually, I think is it before he picks up the case, when he goes to check that for the last man standing, he says he knows it's a decision that's going to change his life. Right. That this is not just an activity or an excursion that this is. And when he goes back out there, he's talking to himself about what a stupid decision it is.

35:51 Mark: Yeah.

35:51 Eric: He said, he says his whole life is boiled down into 40 pounds of paper right in front of him.

35:56 Wes: Yeah. And then when he's going out to take the water to the guy, he says, you know, to Carla Jean, I think he says, I'm about to do something dumber than hell.

36:05 Eric: Yeah, there you go.

36:06 Mark: Yeah. Eric, you had read that being boiled down to 40 pounds of paper in there as some recognition of fatalism or something. Whereas I saw this as, oh, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. This is my ticket. I don't have to do anything. I mean, at that point in the book.

36:20 Eric: Yeah. You know, I think it's both. I think he knows that. I think he knows if he takes it, he doesn't know that he's going to ruin his life, but he knows he's gonna change it dramatically. Both, I think you're right. Absolutely, positively. But also in other ways when he's

36:34 Wes: looking at the money and he's looking at the rest of his life. I mean, there's two dangers there. One is the sense in which money can actually ruin your life. Like in many cases of people who've won the lottery and then self destructed and then there's just of course, the danger that he's going to put himself in by taking that money. So I think he knows he's. Whatever the case, even though he doesn't know about the transponder at that point, the taking of the money is to put himself in grave peril. And it's to put his ability to be a principal person in grave, grave peril, but he does it anyway. I'm not sure if taking the money is itself a violation of principle, but it certainly imperils his ability to maintain his integrity.

37:14 Eric: Right.

37:15 Seth: I mean, if we're talking about sort of Bell's character and then talking a little bit about Moss, one of the things that I thought's really interesting about him is that his internal dialogue. Well, we don't. He doesn't really have an internal dialogue, as Mark pointed out, but the dialogue suggests that he's very consciously aware of the potential ramifications of everything that he's doing, and yet he does it anyway. So there's a point at which the. One of the deputies says to the sheriff, do you think Moss knows what kind of people he's gotten involved with here?

And the sheriff says, he better. He saw the same thing that I did, and it certainly had an impact on me. And I think when Moss picks up that money and he's talking not just about his life, I think he knows that he's putting his wife's life in jeopardy. I think he knows that he's doing all of those things, and yet he does it anyway. And the reason he. We have to kind of take into account why do we think it is that he. He does that. And I think it's because he thinks that he can get away with it.

38:15 Dylan: He thinks he's stronger than that situation or what.

38:18 Seth: Yeah. I think that he thinks that he can pick up this money and he can walk away from the scene and whatever the consequences are, he'll be able to deal with them. And that's either a terrible misjudgment.

38:29 Wes: Yeah.

38:30 Seth: The other people involved. Or a terrible misjudgment of his own abilities. Of course, he could have no idea that Anton would be involved in what kind of person he would be.

38:38 Dylan: But still, is it that much of a misjudgment, or is it just that it's really, really hard and that it's extraordinarily risky, no matter how you slice it? Even if he is a hunter and sniper. Yeah. He's calm, under duress. I mean, he thinks very clearly when he's in great pain and in great peril. He has this terrible mistake with the water, but he sorts out the tracker pretty amazingly.

39:04 Wes: He also lets Chigurh go, though. It's a much harder task if you're bringing people water and then letting Chigurh go than if you were just ruthless.

39:14 Dylan: No, that's Right. The kind of misjudgment of himself is not one of inability to do the task sort of professionally or physically.

39:25 Wes: Yeah.

39:26 Dylan: It's a kind of ethical failure.

39:28 Seth: Well, I think if we're going to stick to the interpretation that Moss is principled in some way and is acting according to some set of principles, let's try to viscerally put ourselves in the situation that he finds himself in. You come across, what is it, four or five trucks in the desert, There are machine guns everywhere, dead guys, dead dogs, a whole truckload pounds and pounds of heroin and then a bag of money. And for you to be in a situation where you think, you know what, I just happened upon this and I can take this stuff and walk away from here, and whoever's involved in this is not going to be sending many of similar kinds of people to try to figure out where that money went or where that heroin went or whatever.

I think it's just exercising bad judgment, particularly for somebody who'd been in combat or overstating over judging his own capability. I just think if you were in yourself in that situation, even if you were an army veteran or whatever, you would say, this is not good, no good can come of this or it will be extremely unlikely.

40:31 Wes: There's also the ethical lapse, Right. Of leaving someone who's dying from a gunshot wound to die. Why not call the police? Why not call an ambulance? You could take the money and do that, which is what I imagine myself doing in that situation.

40:44 Eric: But you take the money, take the

40:47 Wes: money going to a pay phone.

40:49 Eric: Don't take the money. Oh, my God, of course I would.

40:53 Wes: I would have had the chance to immediately check for a tracker because I can control all contingencies. I can make it happen, man.

41:03 Mark: Or take the money and hide it

41:05 Dylan: somewhere, or leave the case and take, you know, four or five stacks. I mean, there's $2.4 million in there, right?

41:11 Eric: Yeah, that's right, 2.4.

41:13 Wes: I can't live my lifestyle on just a million dollars, man.

41:17 Eric: One thing I think you know about taking the money was I think he certainly knew the danger. And one sign of that in the book is he says right after he picks the case up that he thought about going back to get the machine pistol. I think that's what it was. Or maybe it was the machines, the rapid fire. He thought of going back to one of the really powerful guns. He said he believed in that. Well, I think it was a rapid fire shotgun. And that's a state of his belief. He believes in Guns. So there's a side of him that is really a risk taker, which means, I think, he's not making life choices related to how long he can live.

41:54 Wes: Right.

41:55 Eric: But how well he can live.

41:56 Seth: That's interesting.

41:57 Eric: That's part of the decision. He wants to take Carla Jean and himself and live the high life. And if it's a short high life, he's willing to take that risk.

42:05 Seth: No, that's a good point, Eric. And the Carla Jean, her discussions with the sheriff suggest that she was ready to take that ride with him.

42:12 Eric: Yeah.

42:12 Wes: There is the implication, though. Right. There's a lot in this book about people thinking that they can predict the future and they can't. In some ways, Chigurh seems like the sort of incarnation of the law of unintended consequences. So early on, Wendell says when he's looking at this car that's burned with the guy that Chigurh killed, wasn't what the old boy had in mind when he left Dallas, I don't reckon, was it? And then you get a kind of echo of that later with Wells finding the old woman who's been killed. And he says, not what you had in mind at all, was it, darling?

Oh. Huh. And then Carla Jean when she's facing Chigurh, you know, everything I've ever thought has turned out different. And then Chigurh himself, I think he says it when he's talking to one of these corporate guys. You know, people, when there's the prospect of outsized profits, people get the idea that they can control all the contingencies more than they can.

43:05 Eric: Right.

43:05 Wes: If there's any lapse in judgment here for Moss, I'm not sure if it's a lapse in judgment, whether he thinks he can control all the unintended consequences of what he's doing, he's certainly going to give it a shot. He's willing to take that risk. So maybe he understands that risks and still accepts it. Because, of course, there's a chance he could have succeeded. Right. There's a chance it could have worked out.

43:26 Eric: One of the best things, I think, on Moss's side is that he survives his first encounter with Chigurh. He surprised Chigurh. He actually, by all accounts, had Chigurh dead to rice. He could have killed Chigurh. And that I don't think had ever happened in Chigurh's life.

43:42 Wes: Right, right.

43:43 Mark: And Chigurh, when he's talking to a couple of the characters, is pretty much, look, I'm about to kill you. You're about to reach a bad end. That means choices you made in the past led you to this point. People you listen to led you to this point. There's been something wrong with the way you've been doing things. You know, the fact that there's no such thing as luck, seemingly for him, because it's all. It's your fault. Or maybe a better way of thinking of it as is part of his version of the existential ideal here, which maybe Moss, we could say also exemplifies, is that you take on the risk, that you take responsibility for it, even though it's an unknown.

44:19 Eric: Yeah, yeah.

44:19 Wes: You take responsibility even for all those unpredictable consequences that are going to causally emanate from your action. You don't know what's going to happen when you choose any particular path. It's probably not going to be what you think is going to happen. All you really can choose is that particular action that you take in entering that path. But the idea is that, yeah, you take responsibility for everything that emanates from that.

44:43 Dylan: This is exactly how Chigurh talks to Wells when he meets him. And it ultimately kills Wells. They're talking about it and Chigurh says to Wells, you think as long as you keep talking at me, you can put it off. Wells, I don't think that. Yes, you do. You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it. I'm trying to help you.

45:03 Eric: That's a great dialogue.

45:04 Wes: Yeah.

45:05 Dylan: Wells replies, you son of a bitch. You think you won't close your eyes, but you will. Wells didn't answer. Chigurh watched him. I know what else you think he said. You don't know what I think. You think I'm like you. That is just greed. But I'm not like you. I live a simple life. Just do it. You wouldn't understand. A man like you. He goes on, dylan, you do a

45:26 Eric: good Carson Wells,

45:30 Wes: you son of a bitch.

45:33 Dylan: Here's where it is. Wells is just telling him, just kill me. Just kill me. And Chigurh says, you think I'm afraid to die? Yes. Just do it. Goddamn him. It's not the same. Chigurh says, you've been giving up things for years to get here. I don't think I even understood that. How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? We're in the same line of work. Up to a point. Did you hold me in such contempt? Why would you do that? How did you let yourself get in this situation? So from Chigurh's perspective, Wells just has no dignity whatsoever?

46:05 Seth: Yeah.

46:06 Wes: Eric, you make this point about Sacrificing for something you wouldn't be willing to die for in your talk. Right?

46:12 Eric: Yeah, right.

46:13 Wes: Which is a way of saying that the way to make a decision about doing something is to say I could die at any moment and this could be the thing that I'm doing while I die. It could be the last thing that I do. That's the new test of moral action. Not whether it's permitted by God or something like that, but just that I would really choose this thing as my. My last action that I authentically wanted, let's say.

46:35 Eric: Yeah, yeah. I was trying to bring out a common thread, at least for Chigurh and I think also for Moss, that they more or less live their lives as if the day they're living could be their last or is their last. And if they were going to die doing what they're doing, that would be okay. And one sign of that for me in the case of Chigurh is when Moss has him dead to rights with a shotgun to his back in the hotel room in Eagle Pass. When he asks Chigurh to turn and look at him, the eyes are described as serene. Chigurh's mood is completely serene. And he, I believe Chigurh expects to die.

47:15 Wes: The alternative way to live your life is as a radical consequentialist. Right. You say, well, I'm making this sacrifice. This isn't exactly what I want, but it'll lead to something. I hate being a lawyer, but it's going to lead to something good in the future when you really don't know what the future holds and you don't have as much control over the consequences as you think. So this principle sort of focuses you on now and doing what it's important to you now. In a way. It's like I started to think of Chigurh as the ultimate anti consequentialist for moral action. Right. And he's going to punish you for living that way.

47:58 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

47:58 Eric: I wonder if there's some relationship for that principle to why it is that Chigurh doesn't take the money. That simple life. Is there some way in which living in accordance with every step could be your last? That therefore money doesn't mean the same thing to me because you can't take it with you.

48:14 Wes: I don't know.

48:14 Eric: But there's something going on there in the novel.

48:17 Wes: It's hard to do that in a McMansion with everything you want.

48:23 Mark: And if he has that sort of being unto death, to use the Heideggerian phrase, then you can understand why he would not care about killing other people. And in fact take some pleasure and watching the light go out of their eyes because we're all going to die at some point. I would impose some of the attitude. It's expressed more directly in Blood Meridian by the main villain in there, that life is a game, life is a contest, that it's a test of your own will. So Chigurh talks about that a little and why he let himself get arrested apparently at the beginning of the book and then kill the cop. To get away was just to show that he can. And that's maybe what the simple life to him is, is that we're all gonna die.

49:00 Dylan: But he considers that vain in the end, right?

49:03 Eric: Yeah, right. He broke away from that. He criticized himself on that point. But you're right, that's also part of the simple life.

49:08 Mark: But certainly, yeah, if you think that everybody's gonna die regardless, so it's sort of meaningless or I don't know exactly what he thinks of. Like, but aren't you cheating that person of another 20 or 30 years? Like, he doesn't seem to see that as a serious mortal consideration. That's something outweighed by his own victory in the contest or his status, how he doesn't allow his enemies, really anybody who disrespects him to continue to exist. That is a very self focused morality. But yeah, so he seems to project when he's giving these speeches like to Wells and then later to Mas's wife about how they.

They should have been living unto death throughout and now should recognize that their own actions led them to that point. Not blame Chigurh, even though Chigurh is the one who's actually going to be killing them. He's imposing this being unto death onto them that everybody should be living this way. And basically people shouldn't really care that much about their lives. They should be willing to put their lives on the line for whatever it is the thing that they are really focused on.

50:06 Wes: Yeah, it's tempting on that interpretation to see him as something like an ancient Greek fury. Right. Because they were the punishers of those who didn't keep their oaths. I wonder if Chigurh really. Is he punishing people for not keeping oaths? That doesn't really fit Moss. Or at least you seem to have decided that Moss isn't one of those people who doesn't keep their oaths. And yet he's locked in this battle with Chigurh. The alternative is to say, well, he's the kind of person who in a godless world makes oath making possible. He renews the possibility of oath making by giving you a new reason to keep your promises, which is that you could get killed otherwise.

50:49 Eric: Well, I think that's exactly, I think what the Vietnam vets are all representative of, at least in part. They have to find a different way to make sense of their lives by some kind of principle. And I mean, I haven't been able to figure it out, but somehow Chigurh and Moss are similar in the way that they have found another way to blood oaths, but then they're not exactly the same. I have this suggestion. Chigurh thinks everything is fated, everything is happening for a reason. And Moss thinks that there's no point, that nothing happens for a reason beyond your own actions and taking responsibility for them.

He says to the runaway, Moss does that there's no point. And Chigurh, on the other hand, in these interviews always implies that this is a fated moment where their life is coming to a crucial either death or you'll, in the case like of that one proprietor, now he got to live. That coin is his lucky coin and he should give us some special treatment that coin because it saved him from being killed by Chigurh. So Chigurh's view is everything is fated and Moss is that nothing has any sense apart from the sense you give it.

52:05 Mark: I didn't know how to exactly take the thing with the coin. So Chigurh is in some ways trying to be the Nietzschean hero. You're responsible for everything that happens, including the chance events that arise from your own decisions. Yet he then with the coin, when he's thinking about killing somebody in two different occasions, he says, well, I'll just flip a coin and you have to call it. It's important, for it's not just chance, it's you calling it. You are taking responsibility for this chance as to whether you will live or die. But in some ways that's ceding power on his part.

52:36 Wes: And then he says, I got here the same way as the coin did. So he makes himself part of that chance process, or the fated process, however you want to look at it.

52:45 Eric: He says to Carla Jean, when he's explaining why he has to be true to his word and killer, that he can't second say the world. That's the phrase. He can't second say the world. And that implies that there's like a God, but there's no God, but there's like a God. And I don't think Moss has that opinion. Moss is godless.

53:04 Mark: What else does he say about imitating God?

53:07 Wes: He said it could be very useful for someone, right?

53:09 Dylan: Yes. To model himself after God.

53:12 Eric: That's, I think, when he explains keeping his word.

53:13 Mark: Let's explain that a little bit.

53:15 Eric: Well, he's explaining why it is that he has to keep his word. Carla Jean says, my husband's dead. And then he says, but I made this promise and I'm not dead. So he has to be true, Chigurh, to his own word.

53:28 Wes: And he says, his word is not dead.

53:30 Eric: Right? His word is not dead. That's right. And in that context, he says, an unbeliever would find it very useful to, I think, is it imitate God or something like that?

53:39 Wes: Model himself after God? This is on page 112, by the

53:41 Dylan: way, in a paperback. It's on page 255 to 256.

53:46 Mark: Originally I'd read that as he is actually saying that he is a believer of a sort, but he's telling the other person, even if you don't believe you should model yourself onto God this way. It is useful, but it's unclear to me.

53:57 Dylan: This whole thing starts about with him saying that he made this oath to kill her in a discussion with her husband. He gave her husband his word that he would kill her. And then he says, we're at the mercy of the dead here. In this case, your husband. That don't make no sense. I'm afraid it does. I don't have the money. You know I ain't got it. I know. You give your word to my husband to kill me? Yes. He's dead. My husband is dead. Yes, but I'm not. You don't owe nothing to dead people. Chigurh cocked his head slightly. No, he said. How can you? How can you not? They're dead. Yes, but my word is not dead. Nothing can change that. You can change it. I don't think so. Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

54:44 Eric: That's a real confession.

54:46 Wes: How do you mean, confession?

54:47 Eric: Well, Chigurh is saying. I think that's how he understands himself. He's an unbeliever who has modeled himself on God. This is a world where people, like, become their own gods. They have to kind of imitate God and become a kind of God. Because the God of the world is gone.

55:02 Seth: Right?

55:02 Mark: That's the Nietzschean.

55:03 Seth: Yep.

55:03 Eric: I think both Moss and Chigurh in different ways are following that path.

55:07 Mark: You know, I admired in your essay the interpretation that you gave for Chigurh's actions. On the other hand, I think maybe you are making him too consistent and rational and knowable that I Feel like the way Bel describes him as this avenging angel and how crazy everybody seems to think his actions are, that maybe that's, you know, like Wes was saying about the Furies, except sort of even ignorance of the details of the Greek myths, that he's just a force of nature, that we're not supposed to understand him. He's just fucking crazy. And it's just the symptomatic of the way things are now. And, you know, so we don't really get to hear what's going on in his head in any sort of detail. It's just he's supposed to present a puzzle to us, that it is not really solvable.

55:51 Eric: Well, that could be. I mean, that's not how I took it.

55:53 Seth: And.

55:53 Eric: But, I mean, I think what you just said makes a lot of sense. People who say that, like Bell early on in the book. Later in the book, Ed Tom says he's a goddamn lunatic, and Bell, by that time in the novel is saying, no, he's not. And then similarly, Carson Wells says to him, you know, you're just a psychopath. Your account is certainly in the book. It's held by a number of the characters. But I think at the deepest level, I think there are too many impressive speeches that Chigurh himself makes that show that he's got a lot of thought in his head.

I mean, for instance, just talking to that proprietor of the gas station early in the first parts of the book, why he's talking to this guy, I have no idea. But he says, oh, you think it's funny that a coin could be an instrument? But that's exactly the problem. And he's talking some goofy distinction between history and the instrument of history, and how can the two be separable? And can they be separable? He's got that in a little paragraph speech. He makes these speeches, and I think they are the iceberg tips of a more coherent account of him that McCarthy is asking the reader to put together.

56:58 Wes: One way of reading him is as a. Well, you could see him as sort of what arises in the vacuum left by the decline of tradition or the ability of people to make promises. Right. In other words, as an externalization of conscience, which seems paradoxical because he's a psychopath with no conscience. But the point is that if you were to personify conscience and externalize it and put it out there in the world, it would look a lot like a psychopath. And in fact, the way people's conscience often works, if it's harsh or particularly punitive, it simply attacks in this sort of relentless way that is completely lacking in self empathy.

So then you could read that this externalization of this harsh conscience as a sort of lamentable result of the loss of tradition, which is what Bell seems to see it as. Or you could just see it as something necessary or a necessary example of this new way that you have to approach promise keeping in a world devoid of a God.

58:04 Dylan: Something like that is Chigurh. Let's say that he is self knowledgeable and this kind of new man in the death of God, but making promises. The other feature of him is that he is extraordinarily violent and has chosen an extraordinarily violent profession. One might ask, is that the only way one would be or could be in this world in which you keep your promises? And it makes me think a little bit of Moss. I mean, in the end he definitely is less of a violent man than Chigurh is. And he ends up getting killed not by Chigurh, but by other people in some ways because of the choices that he made.

But he has also, you know, embody this sort of living and making promises and keeping your promises. There's a tendency, I think maybe it's because it's a McCarthy novel and there's always lots of blood in it, to expect that there's a claim that this is the only way for one to be and be like Chigurh. And I wonder if that, I mean, is that implied in there or is that just an example in the story that happens to work?

59:12 Mark: I don't get that at all. I mean, you got Wells right there who's in virtually the same situation, who's not like Chigurh. So no, I don't see that as that's the only coherent response to the situation.

59:22 Wes: And then Moss is supposed to be principled and compassionate. So obviously you can.

59:26 Eric: I do think that Moss is meant to be someone who has chosen a less violent path. In fact, I'm a little bit inclined to say therefore, that you have in this book two options. The one that you've described well, Dylan of Chigurh, who is, you know, he's like a Grim reaper character, he's a horror character. And then on the other hand, Moss, who is trying as much as he can not to hurt anyone and in fact goes out of his way to help the people who cross his path, who he knows he can help. They're very different characters in that respect, you know. So Moss lays his gun down.

He dies because he lays his gun down hoping that that will lead to a Better outcome with respect to the hitchhiker. So, you know, he dies gunless and then admittedly he does shoot back, but that's only after he's been mortally wounded. So there's something that's not just violence as one of the alternatives in this new age where belief in a God who runs the cosmos seems to have died out.

1:00:27 Seth: So, Eric, are you suggesting that we can contrast Moss with Chigurh as two kind of archetypes in this new model? Early on, I thought we were talking about how Chigurh is characterized as the new man. I mean, is there a way to see Moss as somehow a transition character between, say, Bel and Chigurh as opposed to an equal archetype?

1:00:50 Eric: Well, I like that. I actually haven't thought too much about that. So I think that's a real possibility that's worth thinking through. You make me think of something that would be more evidence for your point. What Moss doesn't seem to realize is that once he picks up the money and takes himself back into that kind of combat hunter world in which Chigurh is the king, he is completely vulnerable if he shows that he loves somebody. And one of the tests it seems to me that Chigurh makes of Moss is on the phone when he says, this is the best deal I'll give you.

You bring the money and set it at my feet. And I won't hold your wife accountable, but if you don't, then she's accountable too. So he's given there a choice by Chigurh, which I think is a very calculated one. And Moss's response to that is, well, I'm going to make a special project out of you. And Chigurh says, good, you are beginning to disappoint me. That is to say that Moss makes what I would call the hunter, the combat choice to continue the fight. But then he puts his wife into play. And I think Chigurh means it when he says to Carla Jean at the end of the novel, after Moss is dead, he says to her, he wanted you dead.

And I've been trying to figure out why the heck does he say that to her, since I don't think it's true. But it might be that Chigurh thinks that Moss did wish her dead when he chose to go into combat with Chigurh. And Chigurh's just the kind of guy who realizes, well, that's incompatible with love. If you take that step, you essentially kill all your loved ones. So once you said Seth, it seems that makes some sense, is Chigurh may well understand how love is incompatible with a certain kind of violent hunting and Combat in the New age.

1:02:46 Seth: I think we're in agreement, and I think a way I would kind of expand on it and just phrase it slightly differently, is if the world that we're talking about, which is, by the way, not just a world without God. So it's not just that God is dead and that we lack all things are permitted or whatever hyperbolic Nietzschean reading you want to give it. As Mark pointed out, the violence has existed prior to this time. There's something specific in the book, this theme about the degeneracy of community because of drugs. And in this new world, the only character that can survive is Chigurh.

And the sheriff's retirement, which is simultaneously his failure to take on the task of trying to match Chigurh, is because he says, I don't want to become what I would have to become to do this right. In other words, I don't want to become like him. And in a sense, Moss thinks of himself as being up to the task, as a being, you want to say amoral or a psychopath or whatever the right term is for Chigurh, and there isn't a good one, which is why he's such an interesting character. But Moss isn't up to it. And it's exactly what you pointed out, that he has a soft spot for the hitchhiker.

He has vulnerability because he loves his wife, and he doesn't see himself as this sort of actor in the grander scheme of helping people meet their destiny, if you will. If Moss was like Chigurh, if Chigurh was in the situation where the girl was going to be shot, he would have just said, go ahead. Right, Right. And he would have accepted the possibility that he might have been shot as well. That's how I think. There's kind of this interesting continuum between the three characters and it weirdly inverts the moral ranking where we typically. At least in, if you take, say, Aristotle and you're looking at virtue and lack of virtue is somehow a degenerate form, you know, it's a lack somewhere of virtuous character.

In this case, the figure of Chigurh, who is amoral in this weird sense, is the stick by which everybody else is measured.

1:04:51 Eric: Yeah, I don't want to altogether agree with that. I mean, that could well be that Moss is meant to be seen as on the way and hasn't really seen all that's at stake in this world when you make promises. And the only qualification that would suggest an alternative way that I can think of is it hasn't Moss figured out how to live principally in the new age? Or does he have a different principle? And he states several times that he lives in accordance with the principle that everybody is something which is about as close as you can get to the categorical imperative.

You know, everybody's an end in themselves. I think there's an argument to be said that he dies living in accordance with that principle. I think that's why he was almost killed by Chigurh running away. He holds back from firing on Chigurh on the balustrade of the hotel at Eagle Pass. He's shot at four times and hit, I think, at least twice before he finally turns around and uses his shotgun. And he thinks, Moss, when he fires his shotgun, that he's killed Chigurh. So that means he's holding back from firing on this hitman. And why is that? I have a suspicion that as a sniper in Vietnam and seeing the horrors he saw there as a hitman for the US Government, the US army, he made some kind of promise to himself that he wasn't going to kill again.

And this book is also about Moss having to face that principle.

1:06:14 Seth: I would read it that Moss doesn't understand the rules of the game that he's entered into.

1:06:18 Eric: But see, what I'm a little inclined to say, Seth, is the rules of the game do not include survival. The fact that you're the last man standing doesn't mean you're the winner in a world where you're living according to principles by which you'll die. In fact, the winner is the one who dies in accordance with his principle. And that could mean, as it happened with Moss, that he died in this very disappointing way. We didn't get the showdown that the novel makes us expect between Moss and Chigurh, but I think that's in part because Moss has a principle that he could die any day for any of the people he is helping, and that's what happens to him.

1:06:56 Seth: That's great. That's a much more subtle reading. I like that.

1:06:59 Mark: Well, one point of subtlety about Chigurh. I mean, did you read the timing on when he kills Moss wife at the end? The wife has been taking care of her mother. He waits right, until the mother dies. She's just come back from the funeral. Now, you could just say it took him a while to track her down, but that's very unlikely because I think he even visited the house earlier in the.

1:07:18 Seth: Mm.

1:07:19 Mark: You know, it's more that I made the promise to kill you, but I didn't. I don't want to Screw with your mother. We'll wait for your mother to die of natural causes and then your purpose is done. You're the thing that you as an excuse to keep you on the earth has been discharged. So now I can finish it up.

1:07:34 Eric: That's pretty cool.

1:07:35 Mark: So he's nice, he's principled. He also, he says when he shoots the one guy with the buckshot, he shoots the one guy with birdshot because he doesn't want to break the glass behind the guy and have it fall out on the people below. And yeah, of course he doesn't want to get caught. That's part of it. But the way he expresses at the time is, you know, I didn't want glass to fall on the people below. Like he's being considerate even though, you know, accidentally kills a woman to get

1:08:01 Wes: blood on the car earlier.

1:08:02 Mark: Yeah, well, if he really doesn't see the difference between people and cars because he's so self oriented, then maybe it is just like that.

1:08:11 Seth: So I watched the movie last night just to compare the movie to the book and to get some visuals associated with it. And it's interesting, that scene you just mentioned, Mark, in the book there's just the businessman, but in the movie, the movie directors, the Coen brothers, decided to add a secondary person who's sitting there talking to him in the chair. And the guy asks Chigurh, are you going to kill me? And Chigurh says, that depends on can you forget what I look like? Right.

1:08:39 Wes: Oh, does he?

1:08:40 Seth: Yeah. It's very similar to the end where he pays the kids 100 bucks to basically forget what he looked like or forget he was there. So on the one hand you might say, well, that's a really bad interpretive move by the, by the movie directors. Or maybe they were trying to make ham handed something that was subtly available in the text. But there's a big difference between consideration for people in that respect. And then like for example, when he steals the police car and he kills that guy just to get his car. I mean, in theory, wouldn't the guy driving the car be just as innocent as the people down on the street? It's about maybe serving a purpose. I don't think it's principled. I think it has something to do with his needs in fulfilling his role, whatever it is that he sees it as.

1:09:26 Dylan: Chigurh has a strange relationship with power where sometimes it seems that he is merely moved by fate or understands himself that way, and other times he understands himself as enacting this willful mode throughout the world. So there's the scene at the beginning of the book which he disavows at the end as being vain, where he allows himself to get arrested and then frees himself. There's also the scene where he's driving down the highway and he shoots the bird while he's driving. And there may be even a couple other kind of capricious acts of will that he makes that indicate that to me.

He considers his life as a kind of monk like ascetic victory over other things and he's testing himself against the world. And I'm not sure how to jive that exactly with his understanding of his life as being kind of fateful, other people's lives being moved by fate, because it's not at all clear how willfulness jives with fatefulness. Exactly.

1:10:28 Wes: Huh.

1:10:29 Mark: Well, it was just the point I was making before that that's how he interprets the existential imperative. Part of your will is to accept the unanticipated is to accept fate is that you are making yourself one with fate. Something like that. This actually made me understand. I felt like, or a little more sympathetic to Sartre's view of freedom. So Sartre emphasized again and again, like, you're completely free. You can make any decision you want. I always reflect on that like, well, the circumstances of your life can be so terrible that all of your decisions are going to be bad.

So to say you are therefore responsible for the situation you are currently in because it was a result of your free choice just seems mean. Like, if that's your political take, then screw you. Like, that's exactly what's wrong with the extreme individualist sort of position that people are putting forward today of denying these sort of prior situations that you're in. But if you interpret Sartre according to the Chigurh law, then, well, when you make a decision, you're not just willing the immediate next thing, which is what you think you're doing.

I want to have a bagel. So the only contents of my decision there is the thought of the bagel going into me. No, actually according to either of these views, what I'm willing is, is an entire future based on this bagel. And in fact it's just irrational for me to desire. You know, maybe it turns out that my choosing the bagel results in the death of the one that I love and that I chose that death. It's pretty counterintuitive. But you could see if you're being a real hardline existentialist badass that you just say, you know, That's. That's the way fate works, and I'm accepting it.

1:12:05 Wes: It better be good. Last moment of your life and the last moment for everyone else, you know,

1:12:14 Mark: and you're going to be eating that bagel again and again throughout recurrent history. I do want to make sure we hit. Eric's interpretation of every moment of your life is based on your past and is fixed forever as mirroring Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

1:12:30 Eric: Yeah. Well, I think you can see that most in Moss's discussion with the runaway, which, again, that's one of the biggest things missing from the movie. I actually agree with you. The movie's pretty faithful. But one of the most important things in the book for understanding Moss as an alternative, as a serious person is the conversation he has with a runaway and what he's trying to do with her. And he's trying to. Rather than sleep with her, though that thought is put in your mind by the novel. What he really is up to is trying to explain to her that she can't escape her past and start again by just moving to California.

And in this conversation, which is, I think, a fantastic conversation, Moss has a number of interesting things, one of which is every step you take is forever. He's telling this to the runaway and you can't escape your past. Your life is made up of the days it's made up of. So by her going to California, nobody in California may know her past, but she knows her past, and he just hammers that home. That your life is your past and you don't escape it. That's again, that's another side of the principled, I would call it moral or whatever. This strange new morality that is being worked out by these Vietnam veterans and how that's eternal return are the same.

You know, one of the obvious parallels would be every step you take will be happen for a reason. It's part of fate, and it will happen again and again. Infinite number of times in a universe where there are infinite time and finite

1:14:00 Wes: possibilities, but also because of character, the way character is persistent. Right. He says, and then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who's laying there?

1:14:09 Eric: Oh, I see.

1:14:10 Wes: You can't escape yourself in that way. And so trying to, wherever you go, there you are. Trying to simply create new circumstances is not enough. And of course, character has a lot to do with will, with the kinds of promises you create and keep, determine what kind of character you have. That's the only Way to alter character. Not by moving to California, but by.

1:14:34 Eric: Yeah, good, I like that.

1:14:35 Wes: Making and keeping promises.

1:14:37 Eric: Yeah, I think that's right. My guess is that somehow in Moss's experience in Vietnam as a hitman for the United States. So in that respect, he's just. He's like Carson Wells and like. In fact, he's a bigger version of Welles and Chigurh, actually. I'm sorry, they were all soldiers in Vietnam, so they all had this experience. But in any event, as a hitman for the federal government, he realized that he had to come up with some way to make sense of his life. And one of those possibilities is to see that his decisions are life and death.

1:15:09 Wes: And being a sniper is much more like being a hitman. You know, we don't know what positions Wells and Chigurh had. Right.

1:15:16 Eric: Yeah. Wells was probably unlikely to be.

1:15:18 Wes: Wells was Special Forces.

1:15:19 Eric: Yeah, we find out about Wells, we never hear about Chigurh.

1:15:22 Wes: Right.

1:15:22 Eric: Wells, Special Forces, whatever that was. Lt. Col. And Wells worked with Chigurh there.

1:15:27 Mark: It was in that patrol with Wolverine and the. Anyway, that's a different.

1:15:36 Eric: You know, these movies, the movie world that kind of messes, you know, the Wolverine origins. Is that right? You know, I don't know this. I used to collect the comic books. Was Wolverine supposed to be a Vietnam vet?

1:15:46 Mark: He's in all the wars. That was.

1:15:48 Eric: Okay.

1:15:48 Wes: All right.

1:15:49 Mark: Back through history.

1:15:52 Eric: Okay.

1:15:53 Dylan: I did want to make sure we got a chance to talk a little bit about why you would read literature and talk about it philosophically. One thing I thought we've done tonight is talk about how the book has philosophical work that it's doing without it being sort of utterly explicit that it's doing philosophical work the way something like Pirsig's book is. Pirsig's book is a treatise dressed up as a novel. And even the way Candide was, where, you know, there's these utterly explicit word for word versions of philosophical controversies going on that take place in the novel. But this novel is different in that way. It's not the only one that's like this.

1:16:31 Mark: Actually, one of the things that Voltaire was doing as well, I think is done to much greater extent in here, which is putting different philosophies in the mouths of his characters without necessarily being entirely clear how much the author agrees or disagrees with them. So we saw, obviously, Pangloss was put as the fake Leibniz character who Voltaire has nothing but disgust for. But what about Martin the Manichean, who's expressing the pessimistic, stoic view it's not clear offhand what the narrator's or what the author's attitude toward that is.

And of course that's a pretty two dimensional, even one dimensional philosophical exploration there. So what literature can do that? Regular philosophy, you know, you would have to use a dialogue form or something. You know, it can go in regular philosophy, but it's very naturally tuned to, is exploring ideas by putting in them in the minds and mouths of characters. So you don't even have to say, this is a position I've entirely worked out or this is a position that actually makes sense. You could just say, I'm going to just take this idea I had and build it into a view and pack it into this character.

And you know, it's funny that this is a deadly serious book, but this is exactly how I described recently on the blog. I had a series of things about irony and how I use humor and how I use irony and how I often see that as used as a way of, you know, if you just joke about something, it's a way of maybe throwing out an idea that, well, maybe, I don't know, maybe there's something to this. But you kind of state it as an ironic, sardonic, sarcastic overstatement as a way of just getting us to reflect on that a little bit. So I mean, just think of most of the most extreme bits of Louis CK Say that he puts forward these crazy.

Well, I don't want to slow us down with examples, but.

1:18:18 Eric: Which is exactly what literature does.

1:18:23 Mark: Should I slow us down with an

1:18:24 Eric: example just being ironic?

1:18:27 Wes: No, I think we're good. We don't need the examples. But that was ironic. Yes.

1:18:34 Mark: Yeah. So, right. This view of Moss is this view of Chigurh. That's why I think that the Chigurh view doesn't even have to be a worked out philosophy necessarily. It can just be almost a mood with some words attached to it and some pieces of thoughts and that becomes, you know, so it's unclear is, is this supposed to be a philosophy that you're going to think about and take seriously as a philosophy? I mean, hardly anybody is going to read this despicable character. And actually that makes you think, maybe I should take some of that advice. Nobody's going to do that. I think it's. He's used as a mood, as a story device. I don't know. That's the only way that I can read it and have any respect for McCarthy.

1:19:13 Eric: So you didn't like it that much, huh?

1:19:14 Mark: Well, it's the same thing. With the judge in Blood Meridian. Right.

1:19:17 Wes: Chigurh is not a role model.

1:19:19 Mark: Right, right. That in. In Blood Meridian, which is the book that's more often discussed when in philosophical analyses of McCarthy. You know, it's a lot of characters that don't talk very much and just shoot each other. But then there's this one completely evil character, the Judge, that says a lot of very Nietzschean things and very, you know, things that some of them sound very much like Chigurh. There's a lot of comparisons that you can make there. But at the same time, like, you can't take this as the fact that this is the only character that mouths the philosophy is this is the philosophy of the author. Like, that would be monstrous.

1:19:50 Eric: I completely agree. I certainly wouldn't want to equate McCarthy with any one character, however interesting that character would be, that that seems to be a rule of at least the modern literature that the authors I've seen interviewed, they really insist on that. People like Nabokov and Joyce, they just don't like that. That's a misreading. On the other hand, I think Chigurh is meant to give lessons to those who would study him on the surface of things. You can discard him as a kind of psychopathic mood, but, you know, there are important ways in which he takes seriously life and death.

Again, I'm not that you want to imitate the guy because he's a killer, but one thing that might make his life impressive is he understands that everybody has to die. And you only see your life as a whole. You can see the Heidegger echo here at its end, when he kills people, at least in some cases, in the case of Carla Jean and Carson Wells, when he kills them, he wants them to die with dignity. His speeches are all consistent with their understanding their lives in light of the fact that they have to die and they can't escape it. So I have this guess, one of the reasons why he uses the cattle gun on some people is he just thinks their lives are equivalent to cattle.

They're not really living a life. He doesn't have respect for them.

1:21:12 Wes: The herd.

1:21:13 Eric: Yeah, they're the herd. And that's. You dispose of them most thoughtfully by. In that respect, everybody dies. So Chigurh is one of these people who draws home the question, how are you living your life?

1:21:24 Wes: Live your life as if you were being pursued by a psychopathic killer?

1:21:30 Mark: That's it.

1:21:30 Wes: Every moment to the fullest.

1:21:32 Eric: That'.

1:21:34 Mark: So now I'm thinking, like, is there a Friday the 13th part? Something that is in Fact, an existentialist treatise that somebody took the franchise. Somebody should do that with one of those things.

1:21:45 Eric: I think also, a lot could be said for. We've talked a lot about Nietzsche and a little bit about Heidegger, But Kant also, directly or indirectly, is at play in this. And one of the most effective ways in which this novel works in a class I teach where we read the grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals is it just gives a whole series of cases that are kind of test Kant's theories. One of the tests from this book is that you could be rational and be a killer.

1:22:12 Seth: To get back to your question about literature and philosophy, I see literature in a lot of ways as an antidote to thought experiments. And you guys all know how I feel about thought experiments in philosophy. But there's a sense in which you can just take a piece of literature, a novel, a short story, what have you, and you can see it an elaborate thought experiment and certainly much more sophisticated than anything that would come up through the argumentative process. So, you know, there's a way in which you can kind of say, okay, do the characters represent certain.

In other words, is all literature where people are talking to each other a form of Platonic dialogue? But there's also the sense in which the actions that the characters take are the equivalent of saying, imagine a circumstance where two people are blah, dee blah. You know, what's the right thing to do? I think this particular book is such a rich ground for discussion of right and wrong action. And, you know, you can certainly go in there and read all sorts of stuff about social contract theory, moral sentiment, truth. There's lots of stuff that we can get out of that.

But that really emerges out of reviewing the actions of the characters. That's kind of how literature can work for me philosophically.

1:23:28 Dylan: Do you think it gets to things that are different than what you get to out of philosophy? Like out of a treatise or an essay? Or do you get to the same material just in a different way? If I sat and read a bunch of Heidegger and Nietzsche and stuff, I get to the same place, or do I get to. So it's just illustrative? Or is it actually covering different ground? Even if it's overlapping, there's a section of the ground that isn't included.

1:23:54 Seth: I might have to think about that one. That's a tough question, because I think that literature in that sense can cover ground that isn't typically covered by philosophy. Like we're using old no country for Old Men as a canvas to talk about moral theory or metaphysics or tie it to the genealogy and the history of philosophy. But I'm sure that we could have just spent the last two and a half hours talking about psychology. And not moral psychology, but actual psychology. Right? And definitions of personality types and the way in which war impacts human beings, lives and.

Or we could have used it as a canvas to talk about social policy, political theory. There's lots of different things. So I think that's the strength, that's the virtue of literature, is that you can address many topics simultaneously, whereas philosophy finds itself limiting itself to a specific area of discourse. And for good reason. Right. Because philosophy is an attempt to try to resolve, understand, get clear, penetrate whatever metaphor you want to use about a particular topic. And it's not the aim necessary of literature to leave you with any resolution.

1:25:03 Wes: Right. And it's also more than just those sorts of generalizations we might make. Whether we're trying to use literature as a vehicle for thinking about philosophy or psychology or even doing literary criticism. The experience of the particular work is more than that. I mean, in a way it's an antidote to generalization. And one of the problems with philosophy is that or any discourse like that that's scientific or quasi scientific, that aims at knowledge is that generalizations are always inadequate in some way. And with literature, you get the particulars and you get attention to the particulars.

You might think of it in the sense as a case study, let's say, Although I suppose the case study is a vehicle for generalization. But the other thing you're asked to do in literature is you're exercising, I think, different faculties. You're asked to sort of inhabit the thoughts and minds of other human beings, sometimes horrible human beings. You're asked to engage in this sort of empathetic activity, which I think is often absent from simply doing pure philosophy.

1:26:10 Eric: Yeah, I especially like that last point and the way in which a novel, certainly no country for Old Men, forces you to get in the minds of many characters and as real individuals, as opposed to just arguments or generalizations. It's certainly at least valuable as an illustration and a case study. But it seems to be more like you're suggesting it's somehow getting into the whole of an actual human being and their actions is a bigger thing.

1:26:39 Wes: And if they're a villain, they're not simply a cardboard cutout villain that we're supposed to reject. You know, we're not supposed to. It's not like we empathize or put ourselves in the shoes of the Good characters and sort of mentally flee from the bad ones. And that's, of course, a long tradition in great literature. Milton paints a sympathetic picture of Satan, and Shakespeare paints sympathetic portraits of his villains. His villains are, in fact, meant to charm us. And we're sort of seduced into putting ourselves in their shoes. There's obviously something important about being able to do that.

1:27:13 Mark: It seems to be the downside of using literature as a case study, as a particularity, is that then maybe you can't generalize to get the actual philosophical principle out of it and the fact that the author often wants us to generalize. I thought McCarthy was great in this respect. There was just nothing that bothered me. But. But a lot of other literature that I've read, you know, it seems like I'm trying to argue some point. And so let's say I have a story about somebody that gets an abortion, and then it's such a terrible psychological effect and it haunts her for years.

And that's because. And maybe that it's actually a true story and this is actually how one particular individual would and did react. But still, the fact that there's this underlying purpose that the person is trying to argue that abortion is bad and is going to be the way everybody's going to react just drains it of any possible value.

1:28:00 Wes: Yeah. If it's obviously politically motivated, if there's some obvious message that we're supposed to get that we're hammered over the head with, which is where I'm supposed to be.

1:28:08 Mark: Even if it's true, that's the crazy thing.

1:28:10 Wes: It's a bad sign. If you enjoy literature that's simply propaganda for your own values, you should be confronting other values.

1:28:19 Mark: That's why the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged suck.

1:28:25 Seth: That is one of the many reasons. Yes.

1:28:28 Eric: But, Dylan, on that point, though, just one thing, though, is though, you know, the monologue by the sheriff gets doggone close to that, to being a kind of predictable, conservative Texan complaint about the way the world is going to hell in a handbasket. So I think one of the interesting things about this novel is it doesn't leave you with that feeling. It's so much more complex. Even though your introduction to the action is through Sheriff Bell's lament.

1:28:59 Mark: Yep. Maybe it's just a matter of having sort of a balance between the characters. So it's not like the author is saying, you should agree with this character. This character is saying my voice. And this is what you should come out with. That, you know, that was one of the big strengths of the Brothers Karamazov that's so famous for giving such a persuasive argument in favor of existential atheism. Even though the author Dostoevsky was not that. That was the brother character that represented him, that was the more Christian view, was not that guy. But he argues them all in particular, the position he's opposed to so convincingly.

1:29:33 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we're pointing to is the way in which you can have a dynamics in literature in a novel or story or whatever that you don't get out of a single minded treatise or something, or even bad literature, that you get things happening in the activities between the characters and between the situations that you get a second or third thing that arises out of that that you can't get by being expository about it. The example that you would point to that would do that kind of work in philosophy explicitly would be something like a Platonic dialogue where you have clearly explicit philosophy going on, but you also have things going on in between the characters. Right.

1:30:17 Eric: And the philosophy is connected to the views of the characters, which I think again can take us back to no country for Old Men. Because one of the dynamic and exciting features of the novel is that these people are meant to be real human beings. They may be rare, you may never run into, thank God, an Anton Chigurh, but I think in the mind of McCarthy he's created something that could live and breathe that is embodying certain philosophical principles, but also is a whole human being.

1:30:47 Mark: Seth, you were saying how we. There's so many different ways we could have had a conversation about literature. In fact, when I started reading this or when it was proposed, it was because Dylan said, oh, this guy was my political philosophy teacher. So I was looking at this from a sort of social contract y point of view and looking at pretty much what is keeping civilization away from chaos. The view that it's certainly not law enforcement, it's not governmental action that is keeping things together. It's sort of people's long term conditioning, their consciences.

It's the fact that most of these people were not put in that hellish situation of Vietnam and so have lost their souls essentially for most of these people, and I would even say I was interpreting before I read Eric's essay, at least that Moss was even in that category, that he didn't kill Chigurh and he took water to the guy. Because that's just a basic humanity, what we have been conditioned to do. Whereas it was only the exceptional individuals that were the hitmen and the drug dealers and things that had. Had this worked out of them. And this is the thing that why Bel is saying that this is no country for old men.

Because now things have gotten so that if you want to enter into that, you have to, you know, use the real world morality, where the real world is so horrible that you put your soul at risk. And he doesn't want to play that game. Right?

1:31:59 Eric: He doesn't see that these guys have a soul. So that. That's a partial account that, you know, is. Is the account that McCarthy wants the reader to start with, where he wants him to end up. I don't know, because I think there's more to be said for the souls, especially of Moss and maybe also Chigurh, if that's what you call it.

1:32:18 Mark: Guess we're ready for closings again, reading this as a existentialist ethics text. A few episodes ago, we read Alastair MacIntyre and he had a criticism of existentialist ethics, Kierkegaards in particular, that the position is essentially solipsistic, that if you say the herd morality is not something I'm interested in, I can rise up and be like God and create the morality myself. That there's no internal check on that. So it's like Wittgenstein's private language argument that you can say, I'm gonna be this kind of ideal, but then that can drift.

And since it's just you and no one's checking you on it, you might not be aware of it. Well, I think in this book we get two arguments for how you could have an existentialist ethics that isn't gonna drift like that. Or at least I'm not sure if it works entirely. But one is that the point that was made about every action that you take is forever, that the actions are objective in a way. Everybody can see your actions. In fact, you are, you know, actually much the way that MacIntyre even says you are called to account. You should be able to explain, if there were a God to God, and even if there's not, to other people, to yourself.

You should be able to explain the logic of your life. So there is something that's not purely solipsistic about that. And then also the emphasis on promises, specifically promises, because their language are already externalized, that that's the way that you could make an internal commitment to yourself and have some sort of check on the consistency is that you externalize it in the form of a linguistic promise. And then it's out there. And yeah, maybe there's a sophisticated argument to be made about language or even the past events I was saying, that require interpretation and the interpretation can shift and all this.

But there's still something that seems overtly objective about both of these things that might be perfectly sufficient to ground an existentialist ethics. Does someone who is on the MacIntyre discussion want to respond to that or just let it die?

1:34:15 Wes: I'm just amazed that you related the private language argument to No Country for Old Men.

1:34:21 Eric: I do like this point that this is a book that seems to be trying to show that there are ways to have a principled life, even when you no longer have a belief that the universe is ordered by an intelligent being. So I like that. Whether it works is another thing.

1:34:42 Wes: Yeah, I think it's a book about aging and regret, as I mentioned at the beginning, because those are things that Bell is actually confronting. And it goes towards this title that McCarthy uses, no country for Old Men, which he takes from Yeats poem Sailing to Byzantium. And that poem is really about how we confront our own aging and I think more broadly our own mortality. And I think the solution in Yeats poem has something to do with artistic expression or more radically, turning oneself into art, which is another very Nietzschean sounding sort of theme.

And I'm not sure how much of that we see in McCarthy's novel. I think the question of how we deal with our mortality in the novel is much more focused on this idea of a promise, although I think in Nietzsche that is related to taking this sort of aesthetic stance towards oneself. But it's an interesting reflection that you might expect someone who's thinking about mortality and dying and so forth to be thinking about art. But instead we get this novel which is, at least on the surface, about this violence and killing.

1:35:51 Mark: Yeah, it's funny, Wes had just referred us to this Sailing to Byzantium poem right before the podcast, and just what the contrast it starts, that is no country for old men, the young in one another's arms, birds in the trees, you know, these kind of fresh and happy things that the old man can't appreciate. It's sort of exactly the opposite of the problem that is going on in this book.

1:36:12 Wes: Well, no, but I think the point is there. It's a hyper natural country or environment, so you get all these images of nature, but at the end of that stanza, caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unaging intellect. So really the poem is concerned about the same thing that Bell is concerned with. Tradition has no place here because the vehicle for cultural transmission or the transmission of tradition involves monuments, including art. And so the old man in this country, which is, you know, obviously this imaginary place which seems completely devoid of art and artifice and is completely hypernatural, goes on to a country which is just the opposite. It's another kind of extreme where it's not just one that allows him to create monuments or train to be an artist, it's one where he becomes the work of art.

1:37:03 Eric: What you make me think of is a feature of this book, no country. Nobody seems to live anywhere that's beautiful or worth describing or has any past that has survived. So again, just as you had described there, there's no art in anything it looks like, except perhaps the. The people and their characters. So, for instance, no country is just filled with motels and street, highway numbers and deserts or offices. There's nothing in it that has any beauty architecturally or with tradition. So in that respect it fits what

1:37:40 Seth: you say, nothing created by human beings.

1:37:43 Dylan: Yeah. It's not natural in the way the environments of the Crossing is. In other novels that he's done that you have this natural backdrop, maybe sort of the chaos of the natural world.

1:37:55 Wes: Right. I mean, you do get a few exceptions to that. So on page 18 from my book, you know, the raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun, and to the east, the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where rain curtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant, which is really in this book. It's a kind of rare and that. Well, actually, I should continue that. That God lives in silence who scoured the following land with salt and ash.

1:38:19 Seth: Yeah.

1:38:21 Wes: And then the sentence after that, he walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away. I love that contrast. But that's the kind of language you see a lot of in Blood Meridian. Elaborate, poetic, and these very beautiful descriptions of the natural landscape. You don't get a lot of that

1:38:35 Mark: here, all the blood on it.

1:38:37 Wes: Yeah, but I think we're meant to think of a hyper natural environment in the sense of one where tradition is fading or moral authority is fading, or there is no God. Right. That's the sense in which he finds himself in no country for old men. There's nothing for Bel that Belle can use to confront his own mortality. And then the question is what you can do in light of that. And then we get this whole thing about promise keeping and so on and so forth. So for the old man and Yeats poem, his fantasy is to become a work of art. What goes on in this novel. The way under Eric's interpretation, the way we've discussed it tonight, is the idea is to become this keeper of promises, I guess, to render to oneself one's own moral authority instead of taking it from outside to death. Yeah, exactly.

1:39:25 Eric: Promise onto death.

1:39:27 Wes: Yeah. By confronting it, by treating every moment as if it were the last moment. In each of those two things are obviously related. Right. To make oneself as a work of art, to take this aesthetic approach to oneself is related to this new promise keeping approach. But I don't know how to articulate that relationship, so I find that interesting.

1:39:48 Eric: Well, maybe I can add as a last word on my end, one character we haven't talked that much about is Carla Jean. And her death occurs near the end of the novel. So it's one of those big moments, if I follow that. Right. She agrees with Chigurh that this is her time to die. And it has something to do with. She understands that by her love for Moss she had lived and died with him. And so when he was dead, she accepted that it was her time to die. I don't mean that in any kind of traditional sense, but in some other sense that she understood that she was dying because of Moss and the way Moss had lived his life. And as she said, he was the world to her.

1:40:30 Mark: Right. She sets up the story of how they met as one of destiny.

1:40:34 Seth: I'm actually glad, I'm glad you brought that up, Eric, because that's what I was going to touch on a little bit in my closing. What she actually says is not. It's not that she accepts that it's her time to die because Moss died. She accepts that the responsibility that her actions, all the actions she's taken have brought her to this point. You know, she agrees with Chigurh that she's responsible for all the decisions she made. And the most important one being that she tied her life to Mosses. Actually, the interaction between Moss and Carla Jean is way more rich in the book than it came across in the movie. So I was going to encourage people who had only seen the movie to read the book. There's no excuse not to. It's, you know, not hard to read and it's not terribly long.

1:41:21 Mark: Yeah. Just because you've read other McCarthy and couldn't get through it is that this does not have those problems.

1:41:25 Seth: And I've never read any other McCarthy, so I can't judge. But there are a lot of interesting interpretive moves that the directors of the movies movie made that I would question with respect to having lost Some of the aspects of the book that I thought were really interesting. But I would just close by saying if you want to read a philosophical novel, meaning a novel that touches on and addresses lots of philosophical themes, this certainly fits the bill. I mean, there are sections and quotes after quote that will state a position, if you will, by one of the characters or in some respect, about all different types of philosophical questions.

The problem of evil, social contract theory, moral sentiment, lots of different things. That being said, you will be completely dissatisfied if you are expecting this book to take a position and argue it in any way, shape or form. And that's actually one of the things that I thought was it's extremely provocative in that respect. We've been talking about how consistent and kind of like trying to characterize the actors in the book, as, you know, representing positions where I think we could partially. We could have been successful at that, or you can be successful at that.

At the same time, there's a tremendous amount of interpretive space that McCarthy grants you, and there's certainly no dogmatic point of view on any of the subjects we discussed represented in the book. So it's rich. It's very deep and rich and certainly worth further exploring if you haven't to

1:42:56 Mark: do a quick double name drop. I was just today reading some Haruki Murakami, which is a novelist that I cannot recommend highly enough, and one of the characters in that book name drops Chekhov, quoting Chekhov as saying that the function of literature is to raise questions, not to answer them.

1:43:13 Seth: Right on.

1:43:14 Mark: I think that's one of the things that could make literature timeless in a way that some philosophy maybe is not

1:43:19 Dylan: well, and also richly accessible over and over again in a way that you can return to it, even to the same rich book and get new things out of it.

1:43:30 Eric: I want the answers, though. I want the answers.

1:43:34 Mark: Too bad, actually, next time, all the answers will be revealed. We will have special celebrity guest and fan of the show Lucy Lawless, who will talk with us about the phenomenon

1:43:45 Wes: of celebrity, AKA Xena the Warrior Princess.

1:43:49 Mark: To drive our discussion, we'll read some chapters from a book called what the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity by Tom Payne. Not to be confused with Thomas Paine, Common Sense. No, this book is from 2010, which mixes information about, say, Homer with Britney Spears anecdotes. Just something to give us something to talk about so we don't just. Just stare at each other in the emptiness and get all flummoxed in her

1:44:16 Wes: presence in New Zealand, in her virtual presence.

1:44:21 Seth: Yeah, this is going to be an interesting recording. Since she'll be recording in a different day or something. The whole time thing, it's going to be completely weird.

1:44:28 Mark: She will be from the future.

1:44:30 Dylan: That's right.

1:44:31 Seth: Or the past, depending on which character. It's either Battlestar Galactica Lucy. Or is it Spartacus or Xena Lucy. Whether she's from the past or the future or maybe both.

1:44:43 Mark: Hey, some people that have given a lot of money since last time and you want to be just like them. If you want to go to donate and support this effort, you can go to partiallyexaminedlife.com look for the donate button. Some donators since last time are Frederick Peterson, Susan o', Farrell, Walter Williamson, Robt Bram, Jonathan Walgin, James Fuller, Lewis Acosta, Jennifer Dorsey, Preston Haley, Sterling Radliff, Aaron Huang, Scott Benson, Daniel J. Webb, Mark Ariel Bucholzer, Sina salek, Gary Templet Jr. Eric Jensen, Paul Donahue and William Brieger. That is a lot.

1:45:19 Seth: That is a lot.

1:45:20 Mark: Thank you.

1:45:21 Dylan: That's great.

1:45:21 Mark: And those are only the big dollar givers. There were plenty more that bought some of the products or had smaller donations. So really, thanks to all of you.

1:45:28 Eric: That's better than the collection plate in the church I was at today.

1:45:34 Mark: Maybe they would get more responsive. As soon as they pass it around, they pass to the front and then the pastor reads the names off of the people that just came.

1:45:41 Eric: Oh, I like that.

1:45:42 Mark: Thank you.

1:45:42 Eric: And you, and you.

1:45:44 Mark: But not you.

1:45:44 Wes: Your church needs to have more discussions about books involving psychopathic killers.

1:45:48 Seth: There you go.

1:45:51 Wes: Oh, that's the Old Testament. That's right.

1:45:57 Mark: You can get on partiallyexaminedlife.com to participate in the discussion and object to what Wes just said or do so through our Facebook group or tweet at us.

1:46:08 Seth: Follow us on Twitter archelyxlife.

1:46:11 Mark: And I want to point out that the song that you are about to hear after we all say goodnight is written in sung by Dylan, not me. Yay, Dylan. Oh, thank you so much.

1:46:20 Eric: Thank you.

1:46:20 Seth: Thank you.

1:46:21 Eric: This is a nice experience. I enjoyed it a lot.

1:46:23 Dylan: Thanks a lot.

1:46:23 Mark: Well, good night.

1:46:24 Dylan: Good night.

1:46:25 Seth: Good night.

1:46:25 Eric: Good night.

1:46:26 Wes: Good night.

1:46:40 Unknown speaker: My grandfather stood at six foot three When I was a boy I looked up I'd hope to one day be as tall as me My grandfather was

1:46:55 Dylan: a fisherman with stories fit to toe

1:47:00 Unknown speaker: his name was woods had a big family and he loved us well, My grandfather, he believed in God and believed in the place he went to church on every Sunday. His favorite song was Amazing Grace. My grandfather had a type A personality and near as I could tell, all that meant was if he were wrong, he would let you know it. My grandfather had the biggest hands that I ever seen and though my hands are small I'm proud to say his hands help make me My grandfather, he stood 6 foot 3 and my grandfather, he believed in God and my grandfather, he had the biggest hands that. That I ever seen that. That I ever seen. That I ever seen My grandfather stood a six foot three and now that I'm a man I look up I hope to one day be as tall as me. Maybe one day I'll be. As tall as you,

1:49:32 Wes: Sam.