Cormac McCarthy: Conservative or Moralist?

 From today's reading, Is Cormac McCarthy “Based”? (Jacobin) seems to be in dialog with The case for a conservative canon (Engelsberg Ideas) discussed in my post, "Foreign Writers & An American Conservative Canon (Nathaniel Hawthorne)".

I am picking on this paragraph for bringing to mind The Scarlet Letter.

McCarthy ruminates about how true evil is characterized by a tendency to think in absolutes. Absolute good and bad, natural and unnatural, them vs. us are the simplifying bifurcations that provide a certainty that occludes the truth. Absolutism offers the clarity needed to make it easier to do whatever we think we must in order to obtain our ends. At its worst, this yearning for certainty completely swallows the substance. McCarthy’s two archetypal villains, Judge Holden from Blood Meridian and Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, represent different aspects of this tendency to subordinate all the world to a singular purpose.

After all these decades, more than half my life since reading Hawthorne's novel, it strikes me that Dimmesdale is a character who thinks in absolutes. Other characters from Hawthorne strike me as having this same flaw. Too bad, I am tired to go looking for names and titles.

However, I think this apprehension of absolute moralists has always been more attributable to liberals. Is it not the core of equality to not champion absolutes? Puritans burn Quakers and Baptists as readily as The Spanish Inquisition burnt Jews and Muslims. Auschwitz was the product of moral absolutism.

Isn't humility a virtue for Christianity? One is not to judge others, therefore moral absolutism cannot be claimed by Christians - only by Christ.

Chew on this bone, as I will be:

.... Human beings cannot be ethically perfected as a species. Yet a community that appreciated the variety of its members and saw the value their unique identities and approaches to life brought others merely through being would be one where it was easier to cultivate virtues and resist the temptations of domination.

And I will close with this quote, for there is nothing I can say better than this call to action:

 Ethical universalism imposes enormous demands on us to treat everyone we can as brother and sister; so great, in fact, that we’ve yet to truly figure out how to live humanely with one another. What McCarthy teaches the Left is the necessary importance of the human soul for this project, which is easy to dismiss with vulgar materialism. Reactionary thinking goes too far in the other direction — by marginalizing the materiality of the other and his or her suffering, it mutilates the soul by hardening it and turning it inward in the name of egoism and nationalist chauvinism.

True morality is not conservative or liberal. Ethics is its own politics that eschews a dominating absolutism. Human beings are not predestined to salvation - Hawthorne knew this. Every moral philosopher, every religious leader of a true religion, has always known human being are a mixture of good and bad. Those who turn this mixture of good and bad into the tyrannical formula of either absolute good or absolute evil are those who history shows causing the greatest crimes against humanity.

sch 8/16