Adaptation Machines Toward Death: Survival, Time and Moral Decay in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract This article examines the consequences of adaptation as the primary response to social, systemic, and moral crisis. Utilising Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road as a point of analytical departure and return throughout, we develop the idea of humans as ‘adaptation machines’ and situate this within the contextual chaos and brutality of 21st century governance. The article first focuses on individual and interpersonal responses to crisis. Humans exhibit incredible adaptive capacities. Yet when adaptation is asserted or assumed as an ethical end-in-itself, it invites a series of questions. What is the political status of adaptability? How does the status of adaptability change under conditions of authoritarian lawlessness? Can adaptation exacerbate states of social and moral decay? Should we be able to adapt to anything? In grappling with these questions and aided by the novel, we develop a second line of interpretation concerning human adaptation and adaptability as a moral ideal at the collective level in the 21st century. We conclude by questioning forms of governance which place the unbounded pursuit of adaptability at their core. Under forms of contemporary governance characterised by permanent crisis, adaptation becomes a demand placed upon individuals and populations to endure, absorb, and continue to function within systems that normalise insecurity and harm.