Cormac McCarthy's The Road (to what it means to be human)

Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic tale The Road compels you to travel to places you might not want to go. The slow moving story traces the agonizing journey of a boy and his father who walk across a barren, hellish landscape toward the death of all things. Along the way, they struggle to remember and to act as the "good guys" in a landscape haunted with roving bands of "bad guys" who threaten their survival (and the survival of their identity) at every turn in the tortured road.

"You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay."

(P. 77 - the man has just killed one of the bad guys)

The Road cuts life to the bone in search of the essence of life - that which survives until the bitter end - perhaps the foundation of life and or love and hope. McCarthy's experiment or perhaps parable makes its home among our most terrible fears about the thin veil of modern sophistication straining against a postmodern universe of nihilism and despair. I have been impressed of late at the proliferation of apocalyptic tales that one reviewer theorizes cropped up in the wake of 9-11. All of them seem more to me about our present than some nightmare of a future. The Road journeys through the landscape of our lives, asking the kind of penetrating, uncomfortable questions that we've been too anesthetized (by comfort) to ask.

"They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe into it being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."

(P. 57 - the man's wife leaves them both for death)

McCarthy invites us to explore the ashen barrenscape of life without labels, where the labels have ceased to carry meaning because even the memory of the things the names represented has vanished. The names of people, for instance, relationships between people, the names of dates and years, species of animals long extinct, and plants and foods that have vanished from a burning, cold planet. The Road points to a destiny worse than death - a road that leads to annihilation of existence and memory - of nearly any meaning humanity could have imagined in our sojourn on planet earth.

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of it's referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

(P. 89 - by the fire at camp)

On the Road, we experience only the silent, menacing present - all past and future have been obliterated. Stories of these time frames have been exposed for the lies that could not protect us from our inevitable end - books are good only as fuel for the dying fire. And our beleaguered anti-heroes choose only when they will die - most likely by suicide - as they walk from oblivion into oblivion. Yet on they walk, improbably, as the man blows on the embers of the "fire" he claims the boy, especially, carries within him.

It is not the fire of the scorched earth, but a fire of warmth and light, that keeps the two wanderers alive in body and spirit on each successive, relentless cold night. Like their campfires, the crushing reality of despair mutes this fire within - yet it stubbornly refuses to wink out forever while there is yet one human being to tend it. The man lives only that the fire within the boy will never go out, and we know from early on that there will not be enough fuel for the fire within both of them.

The Road defines humanity as a pilgrim species, forever on the move as we bear this fire. One of my favorite passages reveals the way our life in the present reshapes our past into a future we stride into with each step we take in the present. When we don't know where we are going, we refuse to stop (though some of us do refuse) and continue to put one foot in front of the other. Though we never learn the details of the catastrophe that brought humanity to its knees, The Road renders this memory moot in relation to the task we face in each present moment. McCarthy beckons us to step into the eternity of each unknown moment free of the determination of the past or of the future.

"Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake up from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning and thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

(P. 131 on dreams, reality and memory)

Without spoiling the ending, I mention here only that McCarthy invites us to consider the monstrous cost of attempting to control or to assure our destiny, or the destiny of those we love. The Road paints a monochrome vision of hope and also of grace in a harsh environment that appears to deny both. We cannot know what the end of the road looks like, or where it leads. But the boy, especially, asks the man in us all to count the cost of looking too far down the road.

I was glad to be released from this dark and haunting vision, and yet it remains with me like the smell of smoke in my clothes after sitting by a campfire at night. While there are still fish in the waters, birds in the sky, and cattle on the green earth, a boy and a man whisper relentlessly in my ear to attend carefully to the map of the universe borne by every form of life - including my own - on my leg of the journey. We, too, carry a fragile but relentless fire, capable of ravaging or renewing the earth and others on this journey who wonder whether we are bad or good.

Kevin Roose Finds Friendship at Liberty

I recently read "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University" which describes Kevin Roose's semester "abroad" at Liberty University in an attempt to bridge the gulf that separates evangelical culture from the mainstream. Liberty, the school that the Rev. Dr. Jerry Falwell built in the heyday of leading the Moral Majority movement, stands at Ground Zero of the culture war between Christian Fundamentalism and Secular America. Roose, a sometime Quaker at Brown University who assisted A.J. Jacobs writing "The Year of Living Biblically", spent a semester as a student at Liberty to search beyond the distorting stereotypes of evangelicals to find friendship and understanding.

Roose's ground rules (matriculate incognito and no cheap shots) dictated that this bridge crossed one way from his progressive point of view to the more conservative, dogmatic religious point of view. When Roose came clean and identified himself the following semester (during a return visit to Liberty from Brown) as an undercover writer, his friends at Liberty lamented the lost opportunity to reconsider the ways they might have cleaned up their act if they had related to him as an observer rather than an insider. That said, they trusted what they felt was a genuine friendship with "Rooster" enough to look forward to his book about his experience with them at Liberty.

That, and they grieve that he is not in fact a born again believer in Jesus.

The chief learning of this study involves the transcending power of friendship. If Roose fails to thoroughly explore the impact of some of the negative aspects of evangelical culture (e.g., tolerance for violent language toward homosexual persons and an educational model that stifles inquiry), he takes pains to describe Liberty students as a far more diverse, interesting and sympathetic group of people than their opinions reveal.

From the outset of his experiment, his family and friends fear that he will not be able to hide and will be singled out for ridicule. But their worst fears involve what might happen to him if he converts to evangelicalism - a fear Roose shares. In fact, he does convert to admiration for the power of profound support (love?) in this closed community. So while he refuses to cow to the young earth creationism taught at Liberty (one of only twelve post-secondary schools that teach it in America), he appreciates the depths of analysis involved in his Bible survey and religious and theological history courses. And though he cannot reconcile himself to the casual attitude about hostility directed against homosexual persons, Roose comes to crave the experience of love he feels when a Liberty student or professor prays over him.

During Roose's semester at Liberty, a student at neighboring Virginia Tech went on a killing rampage that prompted Liberty students to pray for healing for the victims (as well as interpreting the killing as a mysterious if troubling aspect of God's will). At the end of the semester, the legendary Dr. Jerry Falwell himself succumbed to a heart attack and died, days after Roose authored the last print interview Falwell granted. And as with the Liberty students themselves, Roose paints a complex picture of Falwell, ultimately praising him for his authenticity, even when that authentic style demonizes others in God's name.
Throughout the book, Roose wonders what will change in his life as a result of his semester "abroad" at Liberty. And though he is unwilling to acknowledge Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior by semester's end, he returns to Brown powerfully affected by his Liberty experience. A Liberty professor articulates for Roose the power he has experienced in prayer by telling him that whatever else prayer accomplishes, prayer changes the one who prays. This change and the experience of being cared for and loved when being prayed over, stand as the most powerful aspects of Roose's experience at Liberty.

The other major impact Liberty has on Roose involves the "liberty" inherent in the many restrictions of the "Liberty Way", a massive code of conduct restricting everything from movie watching to relationships between women and men. On the down side, Roose questions Liberty's hyper focus on sexual morality while ignoring social morality. Yet Roose acknowledges the freedom he experiences as he attempts to live within the confines of the highly restrictive moral code.

At Liberty, Roose enjoys waking up in great physical health on Sunday mornings, refreshed instead of dehydrated and hung over. And the Liberty dating experience, confined to chaste conversation and chivalry, opens up an opportunity to relate on a powerfully intimate level that sexual intimacy ironically circumvents, in his experience. Even the worship experiences, while not convincing Roose of the soundness of the ideology in the sermons, nevertheless draw him into an experience of being cared for by a community that surrounds him with support and calls him to join in their expressions of praise and joy.

When Roose reveals his ruse, his former friends at Liberty express their dismay only that he has refused to receive the gift of salvation in Jesus they have offered and with which they have surrounded him at Liberty. Even so, they encourage him to take the better parts of his experience as to season the "world" outside Liberty with salt and light. And though Roose will never again threaten passers-by with eternal damnation in order to evangelize them (as he did as part of a Spring Break evangelization team in Ft. Lauderdale), he does offer to pray for a friend who travels to a dangerous country.

Perhaps the saddest moment in the book involves a statement a Liberty student makes after a day of "cold call" evangelism. After negative encounters with nearly everyone she approached, the woman tells the group that she has resigned herself to a life isolated from the non-Christian community, whose members will shun and ridicule her for her beliefs.

Roose stakes his semester on the premise that evangelical followers of Christ can enjoy friendship with non-evangelicals and people of other faith traditions, or no faith traditions, setting aside their theological and ideological differences. The fact that he managed to do so only by posing as an evangelical student at Liberty fails to support his thesis. Yet Roose was certainly aware of the divide, and managed to enter into genuine friendships with most of the students at Liberty. And while he did not convert to evangelical Christianity, he returned to Brown having made peace that passes understanding.

Outliers and the Fate We Make That Makes Us

Bo Gordy-Stith's review of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success" (Little, Brown and Company, 2008)

I've just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest study of human behavior, Outliers, about the backstory of success in America and to a lesser degree, in the world. The other books are The Tipping Point and Blink, both of which I enjoyed immensely. Outliers did not disappoint. Gladwell delivers a diverse range of applications of his thesis with humor and the kind of penetrating wisdom you would expect from a poet who can reveal some hidden secret in something you think you know all about but have never really seen.

Someone asked me if Outliers was a religious book, and I told them that it could be a way to understand the more subtle and powerful ways of grace in our world. But while Gladwell prompts an exploration of the road to success (and how we might widen it a bit), his definition of success creates an extraordinary tension he can never resolve.

Stratospheric success, it turns out, according to Gladwell, involves the gift of talent and extraordinary, relentless hours of practice - 10,000 hours of practice. That's the kind of precision Gladwell delivers repeatedly, like the fact that you can recall a series of numbers you can recite in 2 seconds, or how the ability to stay with a math problem for 22 minutes makes the difference between excelling in math and merely surviving. Or if you're a southerner who has just received an insult, you'll walk to within 2 feet of a bouncer before turning aside, rather than 6 feet (for anyone not from the south). All of the numbers, of course, are based on studies Gladwell cites to buttress his argument that reads more like a conversation over a really good meal.

The last tidbit exemplifies the thesis that gives the book title an ironic twist: in addition to talent and determination, outliers are inevitably products of their families and the larger communities (living and dead) and even history - in other words, they're not really outliers at all - they're inescapably woven into the human social fabric. And though Gladwell spends much more time exploring this thesis than suggesting ways to capitalize on it in society, he repeatedly asserts that taking the social environment part of the success equation far more seriously would result in far more opportunity for success.

Near the end of the book, he cites an inner city school program that closes the well-known learning gap between rich and poor students by extending the classroom hours and nixing a three-month summer break (where studies Gladwell cites demonstrate the real reason for the learning gap between rich and poor occurs). Earlier in the book, Gladwell writes about a group of geniuses followed by a sociologist whose success or failure correlated well with the income and education levels of their parents. The extended hours school program recognizes this cultural reality and then mitigates it essentially by removing the kids from their unsupportive home environment.

Another example of what Gladwell refers to as taking cultural factors seriously involves the retraining of Korean pilots in the wake of a series of accidents. Recognizing that a Korean culture of deference to superiors made it difficult for co-pilots to correct pilot errors, an (American) consultant banished the Korean language from the cockpits, essentially creating a competing cockpit culture that would allow the egalitarian cooperation necessary to safely fly commercial jets. And of course it worked.

But this is just where Gladwell's highly entertaining book leaves me unsettled. The author shifts between the draconian social re-engineering I mention above on the one hand and a resignation to the fate of (for instance) being born in 1835, 1917, 1951, or on January 1, which would give you a much better chance to be one of the richest persons in the history of the world, a highly successful Jewish lawyer in New York, an architect of the PC revolution, or a professional Canadian hockey player, respectively.

Radical social reengineering (or, more to the point, eradication, as in the Korean Airline cockpits) to level the playing field for far more people to succeed and "luck" (to use Bill Gates' words) form opposite poles of Gladwell's study of success. But I can find no middle ground - no spectrum of what I have come to call Grace in between the harsh poles of Make and Fate. In the end, Gladwell refuses a "bloom where you're planted" ethic for a success standard imposed by a non-existent patchwork culture he forms from Asian rice paddies to European tailors and obnoxious air traffic controllers from the Bronx - all with the goal of getting into a mythical house on a hill, via a road marked with 10,000 hours of unrelenting toil for greatness.

His epilogue is a colorful description of his own patchwork Jamaican/English/African cultural history, which makes a kind of sense, given the thrust of his thesis. The view from his house on a hill must be marvelous, and he justly recognizes that it is built literally on the foundation of the backs of his tireless and blessed forebears (blessed by fortune in ironic ways).

As it happens, I'm also reading Tom Sawyer to my 12 year old son and 11 year old foster son, each night as they go to bed. They boys love the hero of the quintessentially American tale, and strive to emulate him in their lives. They look forward to a golden summer of delights at the helm of a mountain bike, in the pool, surrounded by budding beauty they (like Tom) are beginning more and more to appreciate, and at the computer screen, where they live out a heroic existence Tom would not have been able to imagine. My son is gifted with extraordinary intelligence in math and science. My foster son is a whiz on the basketball court and skating rink - and is remarkably observant. My daughter already dreams of putting her considerable empathy and music talent together into a career in music therapy.

The idea of sending them to a rice paddy this summer to increase their chance at success seems to mock the very idea of success. And grace. No doubt hard work finds its own reward. But the culture that nurtures them and my wife and me encourages us to value other virtues as well, like friendship, sacrifice for others, and Sabbath. And grace. Which promises me and my community that God has indeed gifted us all for a purpose.

In the midst of his discussion of the arduous labor involved in rice farming in China, Gladwell defines what he calls meaningful work. To be meaningful, Gladwell asserts that work must involve (1) a clear relationship between effort and reward; (2) complexity; and (3) autonomy (p. 236). Those sound like the reflections of an entrepreneur - an author, perhaps, from the vantage point of the house on a hill. They are the words of a self-made man (albeit haunted by the injustice of fate that allowed him to make himself on the backs of others).

The words I would use to define meaningful work would be challenge, variety, and value (not merely defined in terms of money, of course). Life work should be stimulating, worthy of the creator and their creativity, and it should make the world a better place. Perhaps that's too much to ask, but in the end, I'd rather not settle for anything less (for myself or for anyone else). Success does not mean masking my cultural impediments, but recognizing in them (and in myself) unique strengths and (as I would label them as a pastor) gifts from God.

Gladwell entertains, surely. And he has collected a stunning amount of data to ponder the meaning of success. But his title dooms his thesis by posing an insoluble dilemma: how to escape the bonds of one's culture in order to achieve “success”. He is right about one thing, certainly. There are no true outliers in the human community. No islands. We are bound together in a shared history and family, and we truly succeed only when we reclaim both our cultural heritage as a gift - and our lives as God's gift to the human family.