“The Road” and Other Thoughts. Scattered Notes on Apocalypse

The world is burned, devastated, plundered. The land has become unrecognizable. The rain and ash are so great that gray and black have replaced the green and blue of our globe. But above all, it’s a world, in which people are almost no longer human. Of those who remained, most became murderers, cannibals, and rapists. In 2007, Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for an anti-utopian novel. Its name is The Road. The story is set in America, where ten years earlier an atomic bomb changed everything, splitting civilization in two. The recently deceased great writer takes, so to speak, seriously, Albert Einstein’s famous phrase after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” A post-atomic stone age of empty and abandoned department stores in ghost towns is told through the desperate and dangerous journey of two men, a father and son, who don’t even have a name in the novel. A journey from north to south, from the cold and snow to the gray sea of California. A journey for the preservation of the human race. A journey in the name of fire and good people.

Why did McCarthy choose this topic almost 20 years ago? The artists’ choices are mysterious and often not dictated by rational analysis. The fact remains that this novel has become a must-read today, apart from its aesthetic and literary merits. A nuclear apocalypse is among the current possible scenarios today. Along with the risk of a world war, which until now has been “gradual,” according to Pope Francis’s insight, but today risks escalating into a dangerous World War III. The World War has now been unbanned and given a “green street.” The ban has been lifted in the language of politicians’ speeches, in the editorials of commentators, and in the very concrete reality of galloping prices of safe haven assets, such as gold, in all world markets, and the boom in military spending that in the last year sets new records among the most diverse countries. We leave the explanation of what is happening by analyzing the diplomatic factors and causes of the crisis to geopolitics and its financial and strategic analysts here at Pluralia. Instead, let’s try to reason in terms of thought, following Cormac McCarthy’s literary suggestion and trying to add a few more bits of awareness.

“What I do know is that we live in a unique moment when there is an urgency to think. Our era is not an era of peace.” This phrase, perfect for our argument, belongs to Slavoj Žižek, an American philosopher of Slovenian origin, who wrote it in his last essay published a year ago in Italy. It’s entitled “Freedom: a disease without cure.” In it, Žižek considers the concept of freedom, which we often take for granted and shared, and analyzes its meaning, highlighting all of our contradictions. If digital technologies today subject society to an unprecedented level of control, what will be left of free will? What about the idea of the individual being able to build his own destiny, so dear to liberal individualism? How will we, “free” people, who are increasingly isolated, face new wars, famines, epidemics, migrations, climate change? As is often the case with him, Žižek is acutely aware of the crucial problems and false idols of modern man. At the end of the essay, his suggestion of a way out is less convincing. A suggestion coming from psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who saw the murder of the Father as the root of the modern crisis. In fact, Žižek argues (giving a Hegelian-Marxist reading of Lacanian sentiments) that today’s man must restore the right balance between his freedom and the freedom of others through his relationship with the Master, with the State. To avoid empty cynicism and thereby to save our freedom, he believes it is necessary to move to the position of the new Master, as he writes: “In the collapse of two overlapping needs, only one will be implemented: in either case, medical history will be (was) necessary. No democratic debate can lead us to the right solution: only the new Master can push us towards it.”

A position perhaps not shared, but reminiscent of poetic innuendo The Road. Even McCarthy’s novel, as the Italian Lacanist Massimo Recalcati has pointed out, is a novel about the disappearance of the father. Or, rather, about fatherhood as the last lifeline in a world ravaged by nuclear apocalypse. What is striking is that Žižek points to the voluntary autonomous subordination of the individual (while despising populism, Western democracies, and many autocracies) to a strong power that imposes itself on human coexistence. McCarthy is a writer, and The Road does not indicate whether and how the proponents of “goodness” will reclaim the Earth. Of course, in his vision, unlike the views of the Slovenian philosopher, Good and Evil still exist, just as North and South exist.

Žižek’s use of the term “Master” (knowing it to be provocative) is reminiscent of another great classic of Apocalypse literature – Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson. Written in 1907, long before the nuclear threat and just seven years before World War I, Benson’s novel imagines a very technologically advanced world dominated by one great international and humanitarian power with a Masonic flavor, where religions are outlawed. The novel’s protagonist, Giuliano Felsemburgh, is the leader of this global regime under the banner of humanism. The mechanisms described are the mechanisms of political power at all times, “augmented” by technological power. Masonic, as well as socialist and communist utopias, run through Benson’s Catholic mind, and signs of that global power of money and wealth, which will find fulfillment in the “new power,” to quote Pier Paolo Pasolini, can also be clearly seen where the consumer society is being traced. Today, Lord of the World (also quoted repeatedly by Pope Francis) seems very relevant in the age of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and the big data accumulated about each of us.

The last part of our reflections is a dialog between philosopher Noam Chomsky and former Uruguayan rebel president Pepe Mujica. The title represents a kind of goal to be achieved: to survive in the 21st century. In a dialog that has now been turned into a book, they confess: “Wherever you look, you point straight at disaster.” The pessimism of people of other times? Let’s hope so. Yet it is in the tension between the Scandinavian thinker and the Southern leader that vitality and positivity can be found. Here too, as in The Road, the tension between North and South, in this case between North and South of the world, can turn into an unexpected resource, as long as communication remains active, dialog and relationships remain open. Pepe Mujica speaks at a certain point in the conversation: “We tend to think in terms of condition and don’t make decisions in terms of species, and that’s why we do one stupid thing after another. On the one hand, we see the invasion in Ukraine, and on the other hand, we see what the West is doing. I am convinced that there is no ecological or nuclear crisis, there is a political crisis. We have created a civilization that has no political leadership, it is ruled by market interests. Politics was subdued to market interests. And so, we continue to sail irresponsibly.”

Can politics rule the world again? Or will we really need a new Master? Meanwhile, the first freedom required to exercise is freedom of thought.