Two questions echoed in my head during the three days it took me to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (at 287 pages, it is an extremely quick read; in part because it is so difficult to put down). First, is there a difference between empathy and morality? Second, where does morality come from? And why has it expanded so successfully over the past few thousand years?

The Road is the most majestic verbal portrayal of ashen barrenness I’ve ever read. The beauty of devastation, of stripping everything away, of forests after fires, life after collapse. I have tried before to make sense of the western enchantment with decay, destruction, and death. Perhaps it has to do with the persistent lure of the apocalypse or our recognition of the ultimate futility in measuring our lives by the materials that surround us.

Despite McCarthy’s transcendent style of writing, The Road still fits firmly within the genre of apocalyptic fiction. We are not told what causes the apocalypse, but a bright pink flash lights up the sky and several years later only a few survivors remain. Father and son – bound by the love of each other – take to the road in search of food, supplies, community, life. What they find are the sick, the enslaved, the roaming bands of bloodthirsty, barbarous gangs. Just like all other apocalyptic works, The Road relies on the assumption that a scarcity of material goods creates a scarcity of empathy.

He could see the tracks of the truck through the wet ash, faint and washed out, but there. He thought that he could smell them. The boy was pulling at his coat. Papa, he said.
What?
I’m afraid for that little boy
I know. But he’ll be all right.
We should go get him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. We could take him and we could take the dog. The dog could catch something to eat.
We can’t.
And I’d give that little boy half of my food.
Stop it. We can’t.
He was crying again. What about the little boy? he sobbed. What about the little boy?

I hear two common explanations for moral behavior. The first strikes me as more secular: that we treat others well with the hope that they will do the same in the future; moral investment as a type of social insurance. This reasoning is used as an explanation for why small town folk are friendlier, and why cities wear a constant frown. The second worldview sees moral behavior as a result of human nature – something we are born with – and this is often tied to religion; the idea that a greater power has endowed humans with a unique, innate sense of ethical justice.

It is clear that Cormac McCarthy subscribes to the latter worldview. The boy is one of the youngest survivors on earth. (He was born just months after the apocalyptic flash.) Yet he is also the emblem of compassion. In a world of death, destruction and distrust, the boy shows constant concern and compassion for every creature they come across. At times the religious symbolism is over the top. There is constant reference to the boy “carrying the fire” (“a binding, metaphysical and ubiquitous power” is how Wikipedia describes The Force), and he is repeatedly described as a prophet and god. For me, all of the biblical allusions took away from the stripped down elegance of the prose.

What is this mysterious “fire” that the boy is carrying? Perhaps it is moral truth, or justice, or even the holy spirit. Or maybe it is simply the will to live. And maybe the will to live depends on believing that there is something – some decency, some inherent value other than selfishness – worth saving.

Like a delicious dessert eaten too quickly, it is difficult to slow down while reading The Road and savor the way it is written. But despite its beauty, I still question its assumption: that the world at large would go to hell without material abundance and that there exist special Jesus-like individuals who live on a higher moral plane than the rest of us. Frans de Waal has shown that there is nothing uniquely modern, or even human, about empathy. Perhaps what I perceive as an expansion of moral rights is actually just better communication of a very basic idea: that we are happier in complementary cooperation than in antagonistic conflict.

Update – Extremely related: New Normal?