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No Country for Old Men Reflection · Acedra
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No Country for Old Men Reflection
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0:00
I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. I have been thinking a lot about the opening monologue to No Country for Old Men. Through his solemn narration, sheriff Bell reflects on the men that came before him, sensing a great gap between the world as it was back in their time, and the world as it seems to have become in his. You can't help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can't help but
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wonder how they would have operated these times. “The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure,” he says after recounting a particularly unsettling interaction with a criminal. And mind you, that’s before the movie has even properly begun, before Bell has even encountered the case and the man that will truly rattle his cage. It’s not he’s afraid of it, he assures us, but rather that he doesn’t want to push his chips forward and go out and meet something he doesn’t understand,
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doesn’t want to engage with a world that seems increasingly alien and cruel and complex, that feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world." I’ve been thinking a lot about this monologue, much more so now than I did when the movie first released, because in some way I feel like I’ve grown into sheriff Bell myself, feel somewhat discouraged by the time that I live
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in. I’m sure many can relate to this, especially nowadays, it’s not just the sense that things are bad and getting worse, but also that deeper feeling of having lost some understanding and some faith in the world around you. It's the times. These are frightening times. A darker time is coming. The world is gone to the dogs. It’s a world without hope. Keep getting worse. And the hardest part about that is that it puts into question your own presence in this world,
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it gets you to doubt your own philosophy, your own beliefs about the way things are and about how they should be. Because if you’re no longer sure which way is right, where do you go? Who do you become? Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves: will our actions echo across the centuries?
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Movies had always been greatly informative to my personal philosophy, had always shaped my notions of the good and the honorable, probably since long before I was consciously aware of it. What does that say? What man is a man who does not make the world better. In fact, I don’t think it was until I went to college that I first took a more conscious interest in the subject, and that I first started to gain a better understanding of the actual
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philosophies that were driving the movies that I was so inspired by. It was the beginning of a more active pursuit of what it means to be a good person, and of what it means to live a meaningful life. And like every other novice philosopher, I started at the beginning, the very beginning. A king isn't born, Alexander, he is made. By steel and by suffering. The virtue ethics of Aristotle is a moral philosophy that is focused on character.
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It proposes that there are virtuous traits like courage, wisdom, honesty and generosity, and that we can cultivate these through practice and repetition. Wax on, wax off. “We are what we repeatedly do.” – Aristotle famously said, and so – “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” It’s the foundational philosophy of most classically heroic stories that I grew up with; stories that emphasize character development, that show us how we can become good by practicing goodness,
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by being curious, passionate, and determined. You are not what you were born, but what you have it in yourself to be. It ain’t about how hard you hit… Why do we fall? It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. Heroic stories like these also give us role models to live up to, they give us good characters who demonstrate how to separate virtues from vices, how to choose moderation over excess,
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and community over solitude. Now come the days of the king. They are the teleological image at the end of the journey, the aspirational vision of the kind of person we want to become. You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. Whole life have a balance. Embodied within that hope is the fundamental belief the potential of every person to be a force for good. For Frodo. Your compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share.
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That's why it's so important. It separates us from them. I don’t remember exactly when or how it happened, but at some point, my interest turned towards deontological or rule-based ethics. These are the moral philosophies that we find in movies such as The Dark Knight, Kingdom of Heaven, A Hidden Life, Hacksaw Ridge, and A Most Violent Year, movies that feature heroic characters who adhere uncompromisingly to a set of
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moral principles, and for whom the means are always more important than the end. You should know that I have always taken the path that is most right. But I can’t do… The result… … what I believe is wrong. … is never in question for me. It is a kingdom of conscience… Just what path do you take to get there. … or nothing. But I don't know how I'm going to live with myself if I don't stay true to what I believe.
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Despite deontological ethics being categorically different from virtue ethics, for me, on that more personal level, it always felt like they flowed pretty naturally into each other. It felt like I had gained an understanding of the virtues that I wanted to live by, and deontological ethics were just a way to codify those virtues into something more concrete. Speak the truth, always, even if it leads to your death.
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Because the thing about virtue ethics is that it can be a bit nebulous, it doesn’t necessarily force you into action, it doesn’t necessarily force you into making decisive and consequential choices in the way that a rule-based philosophy does do. For if you adhere to concrete, universal rules rather than general virtuous traits, your interaction with the world will inevitably become more specific, more contentious, and therefore also, more difficult.
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When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus." Or that, "Virtue was not convenient at the time." This will not suffice. And this is not only because you might be demanded to make serious sacrifices, to pay a real price for your conscientiousness, but also because this direct confrontation with real world situations and dilemma’s is bound to challenge the very essence of the philosophy you’ve
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committed yourself to, is bound to lay bare all its internal contradictions and impracticalities. What good do you think your defiance is doing anyone? but what do you do when everything you value in this world is under attack? No one will be changed. The world will go on as before. Jerusalem has no need of a perfect knight. Your actions may even have the opposite effect of what you intend. Someone else will take your place.
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Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? In this sense, rule-based ethics only highlight the fact that a moral philosophy isn’t a resolution, it is a problem definition. The path forward may seem obvious with certain major conflicts where it is relatively easy to say do not do this, or do not do that. But how about the countless little ones we encounter every day? Now more than ever,
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we can see just how overwhelmingly interconnected we really are, how even the most insignificant of decisions have far-reaching moral consequences, and how absolutely paralyzing it would be to consider all of them, let alone act decisively towards them without committing some form of hypocrisy or compromise, or better yet, without erasing ourselves as moral agents altogether. Because by this logic, if we were to maintain a truly clean conscience in our modern society,
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wouldn’t we just end up severing ties until we’re no longer connected to anything at all? Wouldn’t that whole effort just be a misguided fantasy? It won't be hard, it'll be impossible. You know whatever beliefs you have in your crazy head now, they won't ever play out. It don't work that way. Of course, there is a logic to the idea that even if we only do a little good, that’s still better than nothing. If it lives only for a while,
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Tiberias, it still has lived. But still, it makes you wonder to what extent your moral ambitions are actually serving a greater good, or if they are just feeding your own vanity. It does feel like there is a fine line between taking a decisive moral stance on a matter, and just drawing a small protective circle, like a narrow zone of interest, that allows you to cling to a simple and, all too often, a convenient notion of goodness, which can then be used it to
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ignore the actually demanding aspects of life’s difficulties, or perhaps even, to look away from your culpability in other, greater evils. Do you know he’s never once said he regrets Hiroshima? Are you better than the rest? Are you alone wise? When you really think about it, there is something kind of self-centered about putting your own conscience, your own moral purity, before anything else. It encourages a certain reactionary passiveness, a certain reflexive retreat into the self,
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especially in those complicated situations that may have benefitted from more active engagement, where more good could have been achieved if only we had been less rigid about how to go about it. There will be a day when you will wish you had done a little evil to do a greater good. Perhaps diametrically opposed to deontological ethics we find consequentialism; the philosophies that judge moral value based on the consequences of an action,
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more so than its intention, and that generally focus on maximalizing the best possible outcomes. Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Consequentialist characters tend to be more goal-oriented, and tend to more actively assert themselves and their ideas of what is right and just into the world, even if those ideas are achieved through more questionable means. You violated the only absolutely inviolate
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rule of international relations… Violence can be used for good. I thought one less bomb maker in the world would be a good thing. What are you talking about? Justice. The time for half-measures and talk is over. What do we do, Rust? Fuck him, good to see you commit to something. The most immediately appealing quality about consequentialist ethics is that it feels like it offers a palpable reward. It is after all specifically focused on
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achieving concrete results, and such results tend to be more visceral and measurable. You hit them and they get back up. I hit them and they stay down! But on a deeper, almost subconscious level, what I feel like is often overlooked here is that there is also just something strangely noble about the idea of compromising our own conscience to achieve a greater good. World needs bad men, we keep the other men from the door. After all, if our conscience is more sacred
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than our life, then wouldn’t that be the ultimate offer we can make? That instead of dying for what we believe in, we instead sacrifice our integrity, our soul, to safeguard something beyond ourselves. I burn my decency for someone else’s future… Because sometimes the truth isn’t good enough… I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. Sometimes people deserve more. And yet, as tempting as consequentialism can be,
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I had always been somewhat wary of this category of ethics, mostly because of the obvious and very real slippery slope that arises when we lose sight of the means too much, when we let ourselves believe that the world would be better if only we alone were in command of its direction. If I go south, all my visions lead to horror. A world united and at peace... The hardest choices require the strongest wills. There had to be sacrifice. Because you lose control? Because I gain it.
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This is especially true when you consider how consequentialism can also have a significant reactionary element; how its internal logic and self-justifications can also be but a mask hiding a more irrational driving force that has nothing to do with scaling the balance between right and wrong, and everything with just exerting your own anger and frustration. My parents taught me a different lesson… That's how it starts… They taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to.
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The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men... cruel. In this sense, the shortcomings in both deontological and consequentialist ethics actually seem to arise from a shared problem, a problem that seems to drive all moral philosophy, and that is the problem of control. Because looking back at the rule-based ethics, is that retreat into one’s own private kingdom of conscience not just an attempt at finding some
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moral security? And do the consequentialists not do the same but outwards, by forcefully reclaiming some kind of lost dominance in a world that otherwise feels beyond their control? It exposes what might just be the most fundamental obstacle in our pursuit of the good. It’s the one that got me thinking about that opening monologue from sheriff Bell, and which is also explored in more detail by another movie from the same writer as No Country for Old Men, and that is The Counselor.
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You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago... The Counselor is about a man who ruined his entire life before the movie even begins, though the chain reaction doesn’t reveal itself until later, at which point, though he desperately seeks to change his fate, the only thing he can do, as soon becomes clear, is accept that it’s already been sealed. You said I was that man... at that crossing.
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Yes. At the understanding that life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created, and when you cease to exist... this world that you have created will also cease to exist. It reveals how the problem of ethics is also, and arguably more so, a problem of metaphysics; a problem not with choices themselves but with the broader structure within which they are made. Because you see, so far, we have talked about
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different moral philosophies assuming that we have some grip on the causality of our decisions, that we can reasonably connect action and reaction. And this is exactly what author Cormac McCarthy problematizes in both of these movies, and which is a recurring theme in his novels as well. “The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part.” – McCarthy writes in
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Blood Meridian – “Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.” For a more straightforward articulation, there is also this great monologue in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York in which a character argues that everything is more complicated than we think, and that we only see a fraction of what is true:
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There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. What these articulations point out is that there is a great existential fog, like some unknowable dimension, that fundamentally complicates moral behavior, that complicates both
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act and consequence, intention and outcome, passive protection and active pursuit. And it’s not just that we don’t have as much control over our choices as we like to imagine, it’s that we lack the capacity to even recognize vital decision points in the first place, and that, to me at least, was the truly disheartening idea, that was what truly challenged whatever moral confidence I had gained over the years. Because if our agency is so limited, if we cannot even fully
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perceive the basic parameters of our existence, then what is the point of all this? Why would we even bother with trying to be moral at all? Why shouldn’t we just pursue our basic self-interests, or let fate govern all of our choices? Call it. Call it? Yes. For what? Just call it. But the more I familiarized myself with Cormac McCarthy, the more I came to understand that his view is not one of resignation, it’s not a cynical commentary arguing against our pursuit of the
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good. It’s quite the opposite in fact. For one, as another character in the Counselor points out, to give up like that, to detach yourself like that, is not even really an option to begin with. If you think, Counselor, that you can live in this world and be no part of it... then all I can say is you're wrong. In some strange way, our existence, our agency, our presence and impact in this world, is not a choice. We are the world we have created,
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and so the idea that you can run away from its many moral conflicts and complications, or abstain from making decisions in some other way, that, ultimately, is just its own form of pretense, one that might be even more insidious than any unintended failure through action. It is our faintness of heart that has driven us to the edge of ruin. Call it. No. Perhaps you won't agree, but… I ain’t gonna call it. … nothing is crueler than a coward.
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The coin don't have no say. It's just you. And more than that, as easy as it might be to blame the time that we live in, to excuse your cynicism, your fatalism, your lack of moral engagement as a natural response to a broader loss of collective values, The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's the times. These are frightening times. A darker time is coming.
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What McCarthy also reminds us of, most notably through this monologue from Ellis, a retired lawman who sheriff Bell visits towards the end of the movie, is that the way things are now, at least on that more fundamental, philosophical level, is the same as it has always been, that there never really was a time of greater moral clarity, that none of this has ever been any easier. What you got ain't nothin' new. This country's
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hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity. And so in the end, this is what I came to understand about the pursuit of the good. What it is, is what is has always been. There is no avoiding or escaping it, no way to abstain from or place yourself above it. Before it is over, you will find yourself in the middle of it without hope or recourse, and you’ll find that there is no all-encompassing solution to save you
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from life’s difficulties, you’ll find that there is no ethics without risk, and that there is no being righteous or evil or being in any form at all without putting yourself in moral peril. This then is the first act of courage, the first and arguably the only principle that truly matters; it’s accepting the hard lesson that no matter what you do, or how you do it, one way or another, you got to push your chips forward and go out and meet something you don’t understand. One way or
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another, you got to put your soul at hazard. You got to say, “okay, I’ll be part of this world.” As mentioned in the beginning, movies have always been greatly informative to my personal philosophy. And this has been especially true ever since I became more conscious in my effort to seek out movies that are actually meaningful, that have something to say, and that really capture something about who we are as human beings. And in the past few years,
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I’ve had the great fortune to find such movies quite easily thanks to friend of the channel and my favorite online cinema, MUBI. MUBI is my personal go-to platform to really explore the riches of cinema. They offer hand-picked movies from around the globe, from timeless masterpieces to hidden gems and festival favorites. There are even curated series and specials that are really fun if you want to explore a specific theme, era or director. For example,
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I’ve recently been diving into the documentaries of Wim Wenders, with Tokyo-Ga in particular being a truly fascinating portrait of Japan in the 80s, which I can imagine was already somewhat of a peculiarity when it first released about 40 years ago, but which now, decades later, just feels all the more wonderfully strange. Anyways, whether you are new to cinema, or a veteran cinephile, with MUBI, you’ll never run out of things to watch, and if you sign up using my
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personal link, that’s mubi.com/likestoriesold, you can try MUBI for free for thirty days. So be sure to claim your extended free trial, to start your free month of great cinema today.
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