A technocratic age driven by efficiency, productivity, and “expressive individualism” lacks the categories to honor suffering, disability, and vulnerability; it defaults to interventions like abortion and assisted suicide to skirt deeper spiritual wounds. That’s an argument writers like Ross Douthat, O. Carter Snead, and Jim Towey have pursued in recent years, drawing from luminaries like Alasdair MacIntyre, Mother Teresa, and Pope John Paul II, the last of whom described this condition as a “growing culture of death” in his March 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
It’s a theme that also animated the writing of Cormac McCarthy, who died this week at 89. To call McCarthy a nihilist or to say, as the New York Times did this week, that his work “took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre” is to miss the metaphysical point. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road (2006), he tells the story of a father’s tortured mission to protect his son in a post-apocalypse inhospitable to the most fragile human life. With his latest two novels—The Passenger and its “twisted sister,” Stella Maris, both released in 2022—he has not so much provided a reprieve from the culture of death, but instead offered the tragic blueprint of its conception.
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