"His future was supposed to be a factory floor. Then one teacher noticed him—and twenty years later, he won the Nobel Prize"

 

His teacher gave him books when his home had none. Twenty years later, he won the Nobel Prize and wrote him one letter: "You are why I'm here."      

November 7, 1913. Mondovi, Algeria. Albert Camus was born into the kind of poverty that erases futures before they begin. His father, Lucien, was an illiterate agricultural worker in French colonial Algeria. When World War I broke out, he was conscripted and sent to fight. On October 11, 1914, Lucien Camus was killed at the Battle of the Marne. Albert was eleven months old. He would never remember his father's face.

His mother, Catherine, was left alone with two small boys, no money, and almost no options. She was partially deaf and couldn't read or write. To keep her children from starving, she took the only work available: cleaning houses for wealthy French colonials.

Every day, Catherine scrubbed floors for families who had more books in one room than she'd seen in her entire life. Then she came home to a cramped two-room apartment in Belcourt—one of Algiers' poorest districts—where she lived with her sons, her domineering mother, and her partially paralyzed brother.

No running water. No indoor toilet. No electricity for years. And absolutely no books. Albert Camus grew up in silence. His mother rarely spoke. There was never enough food, never enough space, never enough of anything. By every measure that mattered in 1920s colonial Algeria, Albert Camus had no future.

At ten years old, Albert sat in a crowded classroom at the École Comunale—a public primary school for working-class children. He was quiet. Watchful. Small for his age. He wore the same worn clothes week after week. His classmates were mostly the same: poor French and Arab children whose futures were already factory work, dock work, early death. Education ended at age 14 for children like them. That's when you left school and started earning money. But one teacher noticed something.

Louis Germain was a slim, serious man who believed that intelligence had nothing to do with wealth. He'd spent his career teaching poor children, and he'd learned to spot the ones who could escape if given a chance. Albert Camus was one of them. The boy barely spoke, but when he wrote, his sentences had a clarity that stunned Germain. Germain made a decision: he would save this boy.

Germain tutored Albert for free after school—hours of extra instruction he wasn't paid for. He taught him Latin, French literature, mathematics, everything Albert would need to pass the scholarship exam for lycée—secondary school.

But the real obstacle wasn't Albert's ability. It was his family. Catherine needed her son to work. At 14, Albert could bring in money. His grandmother was even more opposed: "Education? For what? He needs to work." Louis Germain went to their apartment in Belcourt and confronted them. He stood in that tiny, dim apartment—no books, peeling walls, the smell of poverty thick in the air—and made his case to a nearly deaf woman who couldn't read and a hostile grandmother who saw education as a betrayal.

"Your son is brilliant," Germain said. "If he continues school, he can have a different life. Please. Let me help him." Catherine looked at this teacher who had no reason to care about her son. She couldn't understand why he was fighting so hard. She said yes. In 1924, at age 11, Albert took the scholarship examination for the Grand Lycée in Algiers. He passed.

He became one of the very few poor children in colonial Algeria to advance to secondary school. Most of his classmates came from wealthy colonial families. Albert was the cleaning woman's son. He wore secondhand clothes. He couldn't afford books or lunch. But he studied with ferocious intensity because he understood: Louis Germain had given him an escape route, and if he failed, the door would close forever.

Albert didn't fail. He discovered philosophy, literature, theater. He read Gide, Malraux, Dostoevsky—writers who asked the questions he'd been asking his entire childhood: What is justice? Why does suffering exist? How do we live in a world that makes no sense? But he never forgot where he came from. Every day, he went home to Belcourt, to the silent apartment where his mother still scrubbed floors.

At 17, Camus contracted tuberculosis. It nearly killed him. He survived, but the illness left him with permanent lung damage and the knowledge that his time was limited. It changed everything. He became obsessed with the question: If life is short and ultimately meaningless, how do we live with dignity?
These questions would define his career.

In his twenties, Camus became a journalist, then a novelist. He wrote The Stranger, about the absurdity of existence. He wrote The Plague, exploring how humans respond to suffering they can't control. He wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, arguing that life's meaninglessness doesn't justify despair. Camus became famous worldwide. His books sold millions. Intellectuals debated his ideas. And in 1957, at age 44, Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Stockholm, December 10, 1957. Albert Camus stood at the podium, accepting one of the highest honors in literature. He was the second-youngest person ever to win it. The ceremony was grand royalty in attendance, formal dress, speeches in multiple languages.

But when he left the ceremony, the first thing Camus did was write a letter. Not to his publisher. Not to literary critics. He wrote to Louis Germain, his primary school teacher in Belcourt. The letter, dated November 19, 1957, said: "Dear Monsieur Germain, I let the commotion around me subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened. I don't make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart. -Albert Camus"

Louis Germain, now elderly and retired, received the letter and wept. He'd spent his career teaching poor children who disappeared into factories and docks. And one of them—one small, silent boy from Belcourt—had just won the Nobel Prize and credited him as the reason. Albert Camus died three years later, on January 4, 1960, in a car accident at age 46.

He was at the height of his fame. He had more books to write, more ideas to explore. But a rainy French road ended everything. In his coat pocket when he died was an unused train ticket—he'd planned to take the train but accepted a friend's offer to drive instead. A random choice. A meaningless death in an absurd universe—exactly the kind of irony Camus had written about his entire life.

But here's what survived: His books, which have sold tens of millions of copies and continue to shape how we think about meaning, morality, and rebellion. His ideas about the absurd—that life has no inherent meaning, but we must live as if it does anyway, with dignity and defiance. And that letter to Louis Germain, which became one of the most famous letters in literary history.

Louis Germain gave Albert Camus something more valuable than books. He gave him permission to believe that poverty didn't define potential. That a cleaning woman's son could think, could write, could matter. That intelligence wasn't a privilege reserved for the wealthy but existed everywhere—even in silent boys in crowded classrooms in the poorest districts of colonial Algeria.

Germain died in 1965, five years after Camus. By then, he'd lived long enough to see his student become immortal. His home had no books. His mother couldn't read. His future was supposed to be a factory floor. Then one teacher noticed him—and twenty years later, he won the Nobel Prize.

-Classic Literature 

    

Resistance through Silence in Camus’s The Plague by Matthew Blackman

“The writer and philosopher Albert Camus grew up in a world of silences in a working class suburb in Algiers. His mother, who was partly deaf and spoke so little that people assumed she was mute, was a mysterious figure in his life. The poet and scholar Stephen Watson described her as a Christ-like figure in Camus’ religionless world. 





“Camus’ regular bouts of tuberculosis—contracted when he was 17—placed him, as he struggled for breath, in a ‘monastery’ of ‘silence.’ And then there were, as Camus put it, the ‘silenced and subjugated’ Arabs whom he grew up alongside in Algeria. Given the circumstances of his youth, it is perhaps unsurprising that his last form of political protest was a refusal to speak.

“In Camus’ creative work, silence is everywhere. It often stands in stark opposition to the bureaucratic state, bourgeois rationalism, and ideologies which condone ‘rational murder.’ The silences are set in opposition to dominant discourses that justify oppression, violence, and murder in the name of ‘freedom’ or ‘law and order.’ In Camus’ most famous novel L’Etranger (1942) the main character, Meursault, is condemned to death: not for the murder of an Arab, but because he is silent in the face of the norms of French society and its legal system.

“However, the story of Camus’ famous public silence really begins with the publication of The Plague (1947), a novel that has found a new readership in our COVID-19 period. The chronicle of the plague-infested city of Oran, in northern Algeria reflects stark parallels to our ‘new normal.’ The dogged heroism of the frontline workers, the daily publicized deaths, the incomplete science, the reckless sociopolitical rhetoric, the desperate hope for a vaccine, are all there.

“The chronicle of Oran, besieged by rats, relates the travails of Dr. Rieux, a quiet hardworking medic during a time of a plague in ‘194–.’ As Rieux’s job takes on broader public engagement, he befriends another taciturn man by the name of Tarrou. Together they take on the tasks of fighting the faceless bacterium, caring for the infected, counting the dead, sanitizing the city, and testing a new vaccine.

“Underlying the actions of these two silent men is a greater philosophical point—one that is only made clear when Tarrou suggests to Rieux that ‘suppose we take an hour off—for friendship?’ As they sit, the ‘silence returned’ to the city, Tarrou extends the notion of the plague from a faceless, amoral microbe to the idea that people are its carriers; that in an epidemic, human actions have devastating, and mortal, consequences.

“‘And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves,’ he says to Rieux, ‘lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him… All I maintain,’ Tarrou continues, ‘is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.’

“As Camus would explain after The Plague’s publication, not least in his philosophical work The Rebel (1951), the plague that every person carries with them is transmitted as much in the breath of our words as in a cough or sneeze. Ideological discourse that justifies violence and ‘rational murder,’ as fascism, colonialism, and communism did, is as deadly as any pandemic. The Plague, in this sense, seems to have an even starker relevance not only in our current pandemic, but in a political world where the murderous violence of authority is condoned.

“Camus would be systematically ridiculed, questioned and condemned for these ideas, right up to the present day. His erstwhile friend Jean-Paul Sartre was the first to humiliate Camus, mocking him relentlessly for his naïve, moralizing stance against all political violence. To make an omelette, Sartre and his fellow Marxists argued, you had to break a few eggs. As Ronald Aronson points out, Sartre went further, suggesting that violence had ethical value.

“This philosophical battle between the men, which initially took place in Sartre’s publication Les Temps Modernes, would gather momentum in tandem with the troubles in Algeria. As editor of the French Resistance newspaper Combat, an important voice in postwar France, Camus had called for an end to French colonialism. But, as the scholar John Foley points out, Camus had argued for a ‘one state’ solution for his beloved Algeria, the country federated within France with equal political rights for Arabs and Berbers.

“But Camus’ voice was a marginal one, and much to Camus’ disquiet, the two dominant discourses that emerged from the debate were uncompromisingly bellicose. By the early 1950s many of Camus’ friends on the left had begun to vocally support the militant Arab nationalism of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), while the opposing voice of a combative French establishment was supported by the French colonial pied noirs with whom Camus had grown up.

“Neither side would compromise, and a full-scale war of independence began in 1954. A year later, Camus would write that if neither side would listen to one another, Algeria would become a site of plague: ‘a land of ruins and of corpses that no force, no power in the world, will be able to restore in our century.’

“With hundreds of thousands (some say millions) of people killed and a policy of torture adopted by the French government, the Algerian war would be one of the most vicious and devastating Africa would experience. As historian Robert Zaretsky states, Camus’ ‘plague’ prophecy became reality when civilians became not simply collateral damage, but targets for both the French and the FLN.

“In January 1956, Camus attempted to make an intervention into the toxic environment where FLN radicals and French ‘Ultras’ lived and breathed violence. As Zaretsky says, in an attempt to ‘apply Tarrou’s ethic,’ Camus went to Algiers to broker a civilian truce. Walking to the hall in which he would speak he could hear thousands of Ultras at Place du gouvernement shouting for his death [‘Camus to the gallows!’]. As he took to the stage with the future first Arab president of Algeria, Ferhat Abbas, an irascible crowd surrounded the building still calling for Camus’ head.

“Stones smashed the windows as he began his talk, saying: ‘This meeting was supposed to demonstrate that there is still a chance for dialogue’—but this was not the case. Even the moderate Abbas, Camus’ friend and co-organizer of the proposed civilian truce, would join the FLN a few months after their meeting.

“Camus would neither rhetorically join his ‘white tribe,’ nor would he support the FLN. Instead, as the violence in Algeria increased, he resigned from the newspaper L’Express and refused to speak publicly about the matter. Rhetoric, he realized, was part of the problem. ‘When speech can lead to the remorseless disposal of other people’s lives,’ he would go on to say, ‘silence is not a negative position.’

“But his public silence did not mean a failure to act. Until his tragic death in a car accident in 1960, he continued to work via back channels, writing over 150 appeals to government officials on behalf of Arabs facing imprisonment or the death sentence. Despite these efforts, Camus’ silence is still thought to have given consent to the French government’s murderous role in the war. Emily Apter, for example, observes that Camus’ name triggers a “deplorable record on the Algerian War that rightly cost him friendships on the left.”

“His reputation suffered further damage from his position of silence. Edward Said, in his book Culture and Imperialism (1994), delivered a distinctive posthumous literary blow. As John Foley points out, Said finished off the job that Conor Cruise O’Brien began with his famous monograph, Camus (1970). Their position was summed up by Apter when she said that Camus offers in his fiction a “systematic nullification of Arab characters.”

“Much of this criticism is directed at L’Etranger, a novel in which the protagonist kills a nullified, nameless, and silent Arab on a beach. Worse than this, Said and O’Brien continued, was that there was almost no Arab presence in The Plague, despite it being set in Algeria. As O’Brien wrote, raising the rhetorical temperature considerably, Camus’ removal of the Arabs from Oran amounted to an “artistic final solution.”

“David Carroll responded to this argument, pointing out that Camus’ heroes of The Plague fight tirelessly to save human life. To suggest that Camus wished an Arab genocide, even if only as a literary conceit, seems bizarre when one considers Camus’ attitude toward ‘rational murder.’ Camus made it perfectly clear that the allegorical underpinning of The Plague was an attack against the crimes of both Nazism and colonialism.

“As Carroll would point out elsewhere, much was ‘nullified’ in The Plague’s Oran—fascism and communism, for a start. As the narrator states, when looking at a quarantine camp in Oran, there were other ‘camps’ elsewhere but ‘for lack of firsthand information and in deference to veracity, [the narrator] has nothing to add about them.’ There is clearly conscious elision in The Plague: silences that Camus prompts the reader to fill.

“Camus’ biographer Olivier Todd quotes Camus as saying that, writing The Plague with the Second World War hanging over him, the novel would ‘show people who have taken the part of reflection, silence, and moral suffering during the war.’ For O’Brien, Said, and Apter, this makes little sense. For them, silence and absence are an entirely negative position, the marker of exclusion and nullification. This may be so for them, but it certainly was not for Camus.

“This notion of silence would again appear in Camus’ short story ‘The Silent Men’ (1957)—a story unmentioned by O’Brien, Said, or Apter—which tells the tale of barrel coopers who come back to work after a failed strike. These men, both pied noir and Arab, are said to be filled with ‘an anger and helplessness that sometimes hurts so much that you can’t even cry out.’ Yvar, the pied-noir, shares his sandwiches with a character named Said, as they wait for the confrontation with the boss, which takes the form of a refusal to speak. Silence here, as in all of Camus’ work and life, was both a voice and a locus of resistance.

“In our current moment, this notion of the silence of resistance is perhaps worth contemplating: as a response to social media, to polarized political discourses, and to our confusing, inchoate COVID-19 world. It is perhaps a valid response to the claims and counterclaims about what certain scientific data are telling us. Speaking out, as Camus learned, might only harm and offer no solutions. But, again, silence did not mean a failure to act. Tarrou and Rieux of The Plague continue to fight the plague, not with words but with the methods available to them—those they knew would do no harm” (JSTOR Daily).

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Camus versus Sartre: The Unresolved Conflict

By: Ronald Aronson

Sartre Studies International, Vol. 11, No. 1/2, Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration (2005), pp. 302-310

Berghahn Books

A Postcolonial Fiction: Conor Cruise O'Brien's Camus

By: John Foley

The Irish Review (Cork), No. 36/37 (Winter, 2007), pp. 1-13

Cork University Press

Silence Follows: ALBERT CAMUS IN ALGERIA

By: Robert Zaretsky

The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 86, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: North Africa (WINTER 2010), pp. 214-222

University of Virginia

Out of Character: Camus's French Algerian Subjects

By: Emily Apter

MLN, Vol. 112, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1997), pp. 499-516

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Camus's Algeria: Birthrights, Colonial Injustice, and the Fiction of a French-Algerian People

By: David Carroll

MLN, Vol. 112, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1997), pp. 517-549

The Johns Hopkins University Press

From Albert Camus’ 1947 Essay Offering Advice to Doctors Fighting Epidemics

“The narrator is perfectly aware how unfortunate it is that he cannot here describe something truly spectacular, for example some reassuring hero or an impressive action … The dreadful days of the plague do not seem like vast flames, cruel and magnificent, but rather like an endless trampling that flattens everything in its path.” - Albert Camus

“Since the start of lock down in March, one book has emerged as an indispensable companion to our strange times: Albert Camus’ classic 1947 novel The Plague. The novel charts the progress of an epidemic in the Algerian city of Oran, its arrival heralded by a proliferation of dead rats. Officials dither initially, but eventually the city locks down and its inhabitants either resign themselves to their fate or attempt to fight against it in various ways.

“Reading the book in 2020 is an uncanny experience. Almost every page contains some jolting insight that speaks precisely to our situation today. In cool, dispassionate prose, Camus’s narrator analyses the psychology of citizens under quarantine, the behaviour of bureaucrats, the monotony of ‘aimless days and sterile memories,’ and the despair of grieving families.

“It’s also a book about heroism, even while it argues that there can be no ‘reassuring hero or impressive action’ in an epidemic. The book’s real heroes are the ordinary citizens – the doctors and other front line health workers – who continue visiting the sick and tending to the dying, despite their own fears and grief. As with all his writing, Camus’s belief in everyday humanity burnishes every page of the novel.

“A few years earlier, when The Plague was still germinating in Camus’s mind, he wrote an imaginative essay that prefigured his great novel, and which is translated into English for the first time below. Moving from the practical to the ineffable, the essay offers advice to doctors fighting epidemics and acknowledges the terrible strain they are under – a strain that may eventually become unbearable. When that day comes, Camus says, he will have no more words or insights to offer, but only his compassion. It’s a sentiment that speaks movingly across the years to our own time.” -Jessica Harrison

from Albert Camus’ Essay Offering Advice to Doctors Fighting Epidemics:

“Good writers do not know whether the plague is contagious. But they have their suspicions. That is why they advise you to open the bedroom windows when you visit a sick person. But we must simply remember that the plague might also be in the streets, and can infect you in the same way, whether the windows are open or not.

“The same writers also advise you to wear a face mask and eye covering… It would also be desirable to be entirely dressed in a protective covering of protective material. But these measures could be modified. However, there are no compromises over the conditions that both good and bad writers agree on. The first is that you doctors must not take the pulse of a sick person without having first soaked your fingers in vinegar [disinfectant]. You can guess the reason for this. But the best thing would perhaps be for you not take the pulse at all. Because if the sick person has the plague, that ritual won’t make it go away. And if he were immune to the plague, he wouldn’t have called for you. In times of an epidemic, we take care of ourselves by ourselves, to make sure there are no mistakes.

“The second condition is that you must never place your face opposite the face of a sick person [social distancing], so you are not in the direct line of the patient’s breath. In the same way, if you have opened the window, despite the uncertainty we have about the usefulness of doing so, it would be better not to stand in the direction of the wind, which risks carrying the dying gasps of the sick person directly to you…

“When all of these recommendations have more or less been followed, you mustn’t think you are safe. For there are other conditions, and very necessary ones, for the safety of your body, even though they relate more to the tendencies of your soul. ‘No person,’ said an old author, ‘can allow themselves to touch anything that has been contaminated in a country where there is a plague.’

“This is good advice. And we must purify every portion of ourselves [wash your hands], even the most secretive place in our hearts, so we can grasp the few chances left to us. This is especially true for you, the doctors, who more likely come closer to the illness, and which makes you potentially contagious. You must, therefore, become exemplary models.

“The most important thing is that you never be afraid. We have seen people carry out their profession as soldiers very well, despite being afraid of cannons. Yet the cannonball kills both the courageous and the fearful. Luck is a part of war, while there is very little luck with the plague. Fear taints the blood and inflames the spirit – all the books say so. Fear therefore disposes us to accept the impact of the disease, and, for the body to triumph over the infection, it is necessary to have a strong soul.

“Now, since pain is temporary, there is no fear greater than the fear of death. So you, the doctors fighting the plague, must stand strong in facing the idea of death and reconcile yourselves to it, before entering the kingdom prepared by the plague. If you are victorious in this respect, you will be victorious everywhere, and you will be seen to smile in the midst of this terror. The conclusion: you need a belief system.

“You also need to be restrained in all things, which does not at all mean you must be chaste, which would be a different kind of excess… Nemesis was not at all the goddess of vengeance, despite what you were told in school, but rather the goddess of equilibrium. And her terrible blows only struck people when they threw themselves into disorder and instability. The plague is born of excess. It is excess itself, and has no limits.

“You must know this if you want to fight it with clear-sightedness. Do not prove Thucydides [trump] right, who, when speaking of the plague in Athens, said that the doctors were of no help at all because, in principle, they were trying to cure the disease without knowing what it was. The plague loves to hide away in secret lairs. Shed the light of intelligence…

“Finally, you must become your own masters. And, for example, know how to respect the laws that you will have chosen, like the ones pertaining to blockades and quarantine… Armed with these remedies and virtues, all you must then do is fight your exhaustion and keep your imagination alert. You must not, you must never, get used to seeing people die… the way they are now, and the way they have always done ever since the plague received its name in Athens.

“You will never cease to be filled with dismay by the black throats Thucydides described, throats producing a flow of blood and a hoarse cough that barely produces any phlegm, thin, salty and the colour of saffron. You will never get used to the cadavers that even birds of prey flee from to avoid getting infected. And you will continue to fight against the terrible confusion in which those who refuse to care for others die in solitude while those who make the sacrifice die in great numbers.

“The kind of confusion that means that pleasure no longer brings its natural consequences, where merit has no place, where people dance beside gravestones, where we push our lovers away so as not to pass on the disease, where the weight of a crime is never carried by the criminal, but by the scapegoat chosen blindly during the confusion of a terrifying moment.

“The soul remains the strongest when it has been soothed. You doctors will remain strong in the face of this strange tyranny. You will not serve that religion that is as old as the most ancient sects. That was what killed Pericles, when he wanted no glory other than to not have brought mourning to any citizen, and it has not ceased since that famous murder until the day when it came to strike our innocent city, to slaughter people and demand we sacrifice our children [by opening schools too early].

“And if that religion came to us from heaven, we must then say that heaven is unjust. If you reach that conclusion, you will not, however, find any pride in it. On the contrary: you will often think about your ignorance, so you are sure to maintain an equilibrium, which is the only way to become the master over any plague.

“The fact remains that none of this is easy. Despite your masks… and the protective clothing, despite the calmness of your courage and tireless effort, the day will come when you can no longer bear… dying people, the crowd that turns in circles along its dusty, scorching hot streets, their cries, their terror that knows no future. The day will come when you will want to shout out your disgust in the face of everyone’s pain and fear [and American’s stupidity]. When that day comes, there will no longer be any solution I can offer, other than compassion, which is the sister of ignorance” (Albert Camus: An appeal to doctors fighting the plague).

© Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, 1947; Œuvres Complètes, II. Éditions Gallimard, 2006.  Translated by Sandra Smith. 

The Rebel by Albert Camus

The Rebel by Albert Camus is an examination of metaphysical, historical and literary rebellion. In creating and validating relative principles through rebellion, the rebel creates values for mankind. The only real value is to mitigate suffering through moral revolt, the means by which man transcends the absurdity of his existence and affirms life for all. -Glen Brown

“[T]he movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel’s mind, is more precisely the impression that he ‘has the right to…’” (13).

“Rebellion… is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended” (19).

“Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil” (24).

“From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes ‘responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.’ It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order” (70).

“Human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest against death, a violent accusation against the universal death penalty. In every case that we come across, the protest is always directed at everything in creation which is dissonant, opaque, or promises the solution of continuity. Essentially, then, we are dealing with a perpetual demand for unity. The rejection of death, the desire for immortality and for clarity, are the mainsprings of all these extravagances, whether sublime or puerile. Is it only a cowardly and personal refusal to die? No, for many of these rebels have paid the ultimate price in order to live up to their own demands. The rebel does not ask for life, but for reasons for living. He rejects the consequences implied by death. If nothing lasts, then nothing is justified; everything that dies is deprived of meaning. To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has meaning, to fighting for order and for unity” (100-101).

“In the eyes of the rebel, what is missing from the misery of the world, a well as from its moments of happiness, is some principle by which they can be explained. The insurrection against evil is, above all, a demand for unity. The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without knowing it, a moral philosophy or a religion. Rebellion, even though it is blind, is a form of asceticism. Therefore, if the rebel blasphemes, it is in the hope of finding a new god” (101).

“’I rebel, therefore we exist’… ‘And we are alone’” (104). “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being… The revolutionary spirit thus undertakes the defense of that part of man which refuses to submit” (105).

“From the moment that eternal principles are out in doubt simultaneously with formal virtue, and when every value is discredited, reason will start to act without reference to anything but its own successes… The regicides of the nineteenth century are succeeded by the decides of the twentieth century, who draw the ultimate conclusions from the logic of rebellion and want to make the earth a kingdom where man is God. The reign of history begins and, identifying himself only with his history, man, unfaithful to his real rebellion, will henceforth devote himself to the nihilistic revolution of the twentieth century, which denies all forms of morality and desperately attempts to achieve the unity of the human race by means of a ruinous series of crimes and wars” (132).

“Apparently, the world today can no longer be anything other than a world of masters and slaves because contemporary ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and slave.” (134). “The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist” (139).

“Mediocre minds… are content, in the name of formal principles, to find all direct violence inexcusable and then to sanction that diffuse form of violence which takes place on the scale of world history. Or they will console themselves, in the name of history nothing but a continuous violation of everything in man which protest against justice. This defines the two aspects of contemporary nihilism, the bourgeois and the revolutionary” (169).

“All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler… [T]he strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time” (177).

“The will to power came to take the place of the will to justice, pretending at first to be identified with it then relegating it to a place somewhere at the end of history, waiting until such time as nothing remains on earth to dominate. Thus, the ideological consequence has triumphed over the economic consequence: the history of Russian Communism gives the lie to every one of its principles. Once more we find, at the end of this long journey, metaphysical rebellion, which, this time, advances to the clash of arms and the whispering passwords, but forgetful of its real principles, burying its solitude in the bosom of armed masses, covering the emptiness of its negations with obstinate scholasticism, still directed toward the future, which has its only god, but separated from it by a multitude of nations that must be overthrown and continents that must be dominated” (225-6).

“’I rebel; therefore, we exist’ and the ‘We are alone’ of metaphysical rebellion: rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are” (252). “It is not sufficient to live, there must be a destiny that does not have to wait for death” (262).

“Every rebel solely by the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, [and] undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror…” (284). “The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness” (285). “His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good” (286).

“We all carry within our places of exile our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world, it is to fight them in ourselves and in others” (301). “[T]he only rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god” (306).

Camus, Albert. The Rebel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956

“Out of Control: Taking Liberties with Autonomy During a Pandemic” by Alfie Kohn

“Warren Buffett famously commented that when the tide goes out, we can finally see who has been swimming naked. By the same token, when a pandemic arrives, we are confronted with a vivid display of just what kind of society we’ve really had all along:

“We see the implications of having lacked a robust public health system or national health care. We truly understand the impact of extreme economic inequality: Even many in the middle-class have been skating close to the edge, just a paycheck or two away from penury. And we get a really good look at our culture’s belief systems: the virtually theological devotion to the free market and abhorrence of the public sector, the tendency to worship individual ‘liberty’ and slight the common good.

“From a worldwide perspective, the United States is an outlier in its fixation on self-sufficiency. Our ethical code seems to begin and end with noninterference and personal choice. Our suspicion of collective enterprises was apparent to Tocqueville nearly two hundred years ago. Our popular entertainments celebrate heroes acting independently rather than interdependently.

“In contrast even with other Western societies, America is defined by an absence of commitment to shared values and to the value of what is shared. We are divided from each other, cast back upon ourselves to the point that it is profoundly unsettling to acknowledge our alienation. Yet we insist this is not a predicament but a choice, evidence not of crisis but of an advanced set of values.

“This is the context in which to make sense of today’s protesters who angrily demand the right to shop and socialize as they please — even as thousands of people continue to die from a spreading virus. Most people tell pollsters they understand the importance of maintaining social distance until it’s safe to resume our lives. But the protesters are a reflection, albeit the sort glimpsed in a fun-house mirror, of our society’s entrenched individualism — much as Donald Trump’s desperate need to triumph over other people represents an exaggerated version of the American worship of winning.

“What matters most in this country is each person’s freedom to do whatever he wants whenever he wants; this tends to trump community and concern for the welfare of others. As one commentator recently observed, our insistence on ‘freedom from,’ rather than ‘freedom to,’ makes Americans look preposterous and pathological to people around the globe.

“What is not preposterous or pathological, however, is a desire to experience ourselves as self-determining agents who have a meaningful impact on the things that affect us. In fact, that’s what psychologists affiliated with self-determination theory, a framework for understanding motivation,¹ identify as ‘autonomy,’ one of three fundamental human needs. (The others are relatedness [connection to others] and competence [a sense of efficacy as we find or create answers to personally significant questions].)

“When, as one early researcher put it, we feel like ‘pawns’ rather than ‘origins’ in our lives, our psychological — and even physical — health is likely to suffer. Thus, the anxiety and depression that many people are reporting these days result not only from financial insecurity, fear of illness, and isolation, but also from our powerlessness over the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And if we’re parents, that powerlessness can affect how we treat our children.²

“Autonomous people experience their actions as authentic, integrated, willingly enacted. But that doesn’t mean they see themselves as separate from others or in opposition to the larger culture. This critical but often-overlooked distinction helps us to make sense of the finding that a need for autonomy is experienced even by people in collectivist societies.³ Selfish individualism, by contrast, is not an ineluctable feature of ‘human nature.’ Rather, it represents a corruption of our need to have some say over what happens to us.

“In fact, when people are raised without support for their autonomy — overcontrolled by parents and teachers — two things may happen. They may, upon growing up and finding themselves in positions of authority, try to deny others their autonomy.⁴ And they may insist on a warped version of self-determination that looks more like selfishness.

“If they have grown up feeling powerless, they might come to rage against any person who tells them no. They might see any restriction on their personal freedom, even to benefit a larger community, as tantamount to ‘tyranny.’ They might insist that their convenience takes precedence over other people’s immune-compromised vulnerability.⁵ ‘The hell with their safety; I want to go bowling and get a haircut right now!’

“And, sadly, they won’t be alone. Elsewhere, their behavior would likely be condemned as infantile and depraved. But it may attract likes and views and retweets in a country with a history of privileging libertarian self-interest and individual financial gain over social connection and collective well-being. Hence a recent Onion headline: ‘Dr. Fauci Warns of Needless Suffering and Death If America Allowed to Continue.’

                                                         *           

“If our first challenge is to distinguish between autonomy and selfish individualism, our second is to figure out how to negotiate a depressing situation where we feel powerless for good reason. As I write this, in May 2020, more than a third of a million deaths⁶ have been officially attributed to Covid-19, and experts tell us the actual number is far higher. This creates a temptation to displace our anxiety by blaming the officials and scientists who are trying to protect us.

“More generally, during prolonged crises, psychiatrist Sim King says people ‘feel torn between wanting to resist their new reality [and adapting] to it. They may torment themselves trying to preserve normalcy [and] counting down the days to its return — as many are now.’

“Or, alternatively, they may come to accept their lack of control, make plans only provisionally (resigned to the possibility that expectations will be shattered), and just live in the moment. The latter posture — making one’s peace with what seems to be beyond one’s control — sounds adaptive and wise. But it also calls to mind the reaction that Martin Seligman famously called ‘learned helplessness’: Once we conclude that nothing we do matters, we give up and lapse into self-defeating depression.

“Remember Sisyphus, condemned for all eternity to muscle his rock up the mountain only to have it slip from his grasp and roll back down so he must begin again? In Camus’ reimagining of that myth, Sisyphus’s challenge — and his triumph — consists of facing the absurd futility of his plight rather than clinging to the hope that either his endless futile labor would end at some point or that it wasn’t actually futile after all. He understood that it contained no hidden meaning and would yield no satisfying resolution. And in this sense, the ‘absence of hope… has nothing to do with despair,’ Camus argued; rather, it bespeaks ‘alert awareness’ and a refusal to lie to oneself.

“Camus’s essay focused on what he called metaphysical rebellion. It wasn’t about taking a stand against a political foe or an oppressive institution where success was possible. The Sisyphean situation he had in mind was the human condition itself: the finality of death and the awful truth that all meanings and values are humanly created and therefore fallible, much as we might want to believe otherwise (out of desperation, not evidence). Still, Camus’s point also pertains to certain realities within our lives: the importance of seeing clearly and rejecting facile invocations of ‘hope.’

“Think about it this way: The word accept has two very different meanings. It can refer either to acknowledging that something is true or to endorsing it as desirable. Camus is reminding us that we need to ‘accept’ unpleasant realities in the first sense (resisting the urge to wish them away) but not in the second sense (because we should never stop being outraged by what is outrageous).⁷

“During this devastating pandemic, we need to somehow steer a course between denial, on the one hand, and passivity, on the other — or at least figure out how to make sure that a sense of helplessness doesn’t spill into other parts of our lives. That starts with a commitment to Camus’s ‘alert awareness’: doing our best to accurately understand where things stand and what can be reasonably expected rather than allowing our vision to be distorted by despair…. or by hope.⁸ 

“And perhaps we then move on to collective effort — political activism — in response to avoidable deaths. To do so is to follow the evolution of Camus’s own thinking, from the lone rebel of The Myth of Sisyphus to what he later described (in The Plague and his lengthy nonfiction essay The Rebel) as participation in a community, taking action with and for others against an implacable foe.

“Freedom is about empowering us, fulfilling our (not just my) need for autonomy. To be sure, it is clearly an uphill struggle to feel a sense of control at a time like this. But at least we can take care not to confuse that concept with either selfishness or self-deception.”

NOTES

1. Even as you read this, SDT is serving as the basis for new research to help make sense of how people function in a pandemic.

2. SDT-affiliated researchers have shown (in a 2019 Belgian study) that when parents feel “pressured, inadequate, and isolated,” they have less energy for their child and are more likely to “impose their own agenda on their child” rather than supporting his or her autonomy. And a 2020 Canadian study demonstrated that “when parents perceive threats in their children’s current and future environment, they can feel pressured to become involved with their children in a more controlling way,” which “can negatively affect children’s motivation.”

3. A 2018 review of three dozen studies confirmed that the correlation between autonomy and happiness is just as strong in the East as in the West; earlier research, meanwhile, showed that being pressured or controlled “frustrates individuals’ universal need for volitional functioning” — and that was no less true in non-Western societies.

4. Researchers have discovered that “individuals who are unsure of their own power, when placed in a position of nominal authority, are the ones who are most likely to rely on coercive control tactics” (Daphne Blunt Bugental et al., “Who’s the Boss?”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 [1997], p. 1298).

5. I don’t mean to suggest that this is all that’s going on now. Protests against shutdowns and social-distancing orders are motivated by more than an individualism and selfishness. On the one hand, there are strong currents of understandable fear and financial desperation. On the other hand, these public demonstrations also have ugly crosscurrents of racism, demands for unrestricted access to guns, and far-right conspiratorial fantasies. Featuring overwhelmingly white crowds, they began right around the time that it became clear those succumbing to the virus are disproportionately people of color.

6. I think it’s important to keep our attention focused on the worldwide impact of the pandemic; to habitually cite U.S.-specific statistics may imply that the loss of an American life is more of a tragedy than the loss of a life elsewhere.

7. In his later novel, The Plague (translated by Stuart Gilbert, Vintage Books, 1947/1972), Camus tells us that the pestilence killing people is “an absurd situation, but…we’ve got to accept it as it is” (p. 79) — meaning see it clearly — rather than taking refuge in unjustified hope, faith (which is, by definition, belief without evidence), or magical thinking. (News is not “fake” just because you don’t like it; reports of contagion risk and mortality are not “fear-mongering” just because they’re upsetting.) But that doesn’t mean we should “accept” the situation in the other sense of the word: “A fight must be put up” (p. 122) and even the fact that “victories will never be lasting” is “no reason for giving up the struggle” (p. 118). Incidentally, when Camus talks about metaphysical rebellion, he is not proposing that we rage impotently and consign ourselves to lifelong negativity. Rather, he urges us to embrace life — to love, create, affirm, “give the void its colors” — but to do so as a kind of revolt, in defiance of the ultimate meaninglessness of our condition.

8. Elsewhere, I’ve argued for a similar reality-based response as an alternative not only to chronic negativity but also to an unjustified posture of indiscriminate gratitude.

“Out of Control: Taking Liberties with Autonomy During a Pandemic” by Alfie Kohn

"I recognize only one duty, and that is to love"-Albert Camus (by Prof. Jamie Lombardi)

“Albert Camus wrote in his journals that if he ‘had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank’. On the last page he said he would write, ‘I recognize only one duty, and that is to love’. But Camus didn’t tell us (at least not directly) what love is, or how to understand our duty to it. 

“What he did write about was a way of understanding our struggle in an absurd world as an act of rebellion. And what is love if not an act of rebellion? Even the very best of lives will end in death, with no shortage of suffering beforehand. And then there are the rest of us: condemned to death as much as to life. How do we live with this? What makes it worth it? Camus’s answer is rebellion; in art; in beauty, and in love. 

“Unlike Hamlet, for whom ‘to be or not to be’ was the prevailing question, and inaction the prevailing behavior, Camus tells us the ‘whole question’ is ‘whether or not one can live with one’s passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt’. Life for Camus, like art, beauty, and love, is a call to action. 

“It is a way of staring our inevitable annihilation in the face and choosing a life that’s worth the price we pay for it. While revolt and freedom are familiar themes in Camus’s work, passion is the third consequence of the absurd. Negation is not enough. Nihilism is not a victory. 

“On realizing the world has no meaning to give to our lives, it is passion that enables us ‘to take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd’ and create meaning ourselves; to bring into existence something that hasn’t been before. Love is a form of art and, through it, a means of scaffolding a future that does not yet exist, but could. 

“Of course, the possibility remains that we may never see that future. Relationships come to an end. Even perfect unions will be rent apart by death. Sisyphus never rests his bolder on top of that mountain, after all.  The world is neither a fair nor sensible place. But to fail to act, even in the absence of guarantees or the promise of success, is what Camus refers to as philosophical suicide. It is to declare that life is not worth living, that it is not, as Nietzsche says, ‘worth the trouble’.

“But this is the despair that one must not give into. One must instead refuse to look for an escape from one’s ailments in giving up, as much as one must refuse Kierkegaard’s leap into faith for a better or different future. ‘Real generosity toward the future’ Camus claims ‘lies in giving all to the present’. 

“Our lives are now, for the time that we have them, and calamity and catastrophe cannot be avoided by playing it safe. For Camus, love is the conscious choice to see the world in all its terrifying reality and decide that one’s effort ‘will henceforth be unceasing’.

“Naturally, this most readily brings to mind the idea of romantic love. And certainly, Camus threw himself into his love affairs as passionately and as eagerly as he threw his body into the ocean. But romantic love is not the only kind of love. Our connection to our friends, our families, and our children can be just as meaningful and, in many cases, even more demanding. 

“Sisyphus may seem like an unlikely model to follow but that is only if one misunderstands what crowns his victory. Doing our duty is not merely completing the mindless repetition of the tasks assigned to us by fate and suffering in resigned silence; it is the willingness ‘to follow the curve of the great passions, sudden, demanding, and generous’. 

“Love is not just a confrontation with the absurdity of the world; it is a refusal to be broken by it. It is one of the ways we can each of us be stronger than our rocks. There is nothing we can do to change the constraints of our existence. Heartbreak and death await us all. Either we will fail and there will be suffering, or we will succeed but still meet tremendous pain along the way.  

“As Camus wrote, ‘the essential absurdity of this catastrophe does not alter the fact that it exists’. But it is up to us how we live with it. It is our choice whether we shrink from the slings and arrows of fate, or whether we stand in the full light of the sun while it shines above us. It may be true that there’s no light without shadow, but what Camus means when he says that it’s ‘essential to know the night’ is that our consciousness of defeat is what makes the victory of our courage possible: ‘absurdity may be king, but love saves us from it’”.

Jamie Lombardi, Professor of Philosophy at Bergen Community College, New Jersey.