As a general rule the smarter people are, and the more they think, the more pessimistic they become, culminating in Robert Oppenheimer’s “I am death, destroyer of worlds.” (As the inventor of the A-bomb, he could lay claim to such a title.)
Now the world is brimming over with turbocharged nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them anywhere within minutes, and the nihilist who controls the largest single stockpile has said, “If there is no Russia, why does the planet need to exist?”
And then you have fossil fuels, our dependence on them, and what they’re doing to the climate; the destruction of the Amazon rainforest being superintended by a rightwing anti-environmentalist (i.e., Brazil’s political leader); the abuse and potential demise of the oceans, and so on. As a general proposition, animals that foul their own nests don’t survive.
Some would argue government and corporate bureaucracy is an even worse plague. Worse than Covid-19 even. For example, French philosopher Albert Camus (photo, right) experienced Nazi brutality, so you’d expect him to take a dark view of human nature and humanity’s prospects.
He came close during a America in March 1946 when he said, “With so much paper, so many offices and functionaries, we are creating a world in which human warmth has disappeared. Where no one can come into contact with anyone else except across a maze of what we call formalities,” a condition with which Amber Heard and Johnny Depp are no doubt very familiar (Camus didn’t mention “lawyers” for some unexplained reason).
Camus was a French citizen who grew up in Algeria, then a French colony, where he was a young reporter for a leftwing newspaper. His experiences made him “wary of either-or approaches to politics,” Vox says (read article here). “Having witnessed the extremism on both sides — French occupiers and their Arab resisters — and the cycles of violence and retaliation, he was determined to find a space for dialogue, or at least impose limits on the killing.”
Vox says Camus was “widely mocked” for saying no one “had a monopoly on truth or justice.” (It’s hard to persuade the self-righteous otherwise.)
Rejected for military service when Germany invaded France in 1940 for health reasons, Camus became the editor of the French Resistance’s newspaper (called “Combat”), and “produced some of his best work as a columnist there.” He viewed rigid political ideologies as destructive. During the Cold War, he criticized excesses on both sides.
Camus is relevant today because of his attempts to “understand a peculiar form of nihilism that had come to dominate the 20th century.” As he saw it, “killing in service to some idea is just as nihilistic as believing that nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted.”
At the time of his 1946 American speech, the “human tendency toward nihilism was on Camus’s mind,” and the upshot of what he said then was “to take all the anguish over the atrocities of World War II and turn it into something ennobling. … Camus asks us to reflect on that common outrage, realize what it says about the value of human life, and commit to being a more engaged human being.”
That sure sounds like a call to activism, whether it be for abolishing nuclear weapons, saving the Amazon or oceans, climate activism, or whatever.
Activism, the Vox article says, brings people together. But then, when the sense of emergency fades, that solidarity “often slips away in the mechanics of everyday life.” People have to make a living, raise their families, hire mechanics who won’t rip them off, etc. And of all the parents in America today, not that many have to collect the bodies of their children at the morgue after the school day, although some have to.
How can you be optimistic in a world where all this crap keeps happening?
“Camus always said that he was pessimistic about the human condition and optimistic about humankind. Maybe that’s a contradiction. But,” the author of the Vox article says, “I always thought the deeper point was much simpler: We’re born into a world that doesn’t seem to have any purpose, that we know will end, and yet we go on living anyway. For Camus, that meant that there is something in humanity that transcends the fact of our condition. That’s the source of our collective dignity — and it’s the part of humanity that always has to be defended.”
“This can all sound a bit abstract from a distance. What’s the average person supposed to do about all the horrors in the world? You can look anywhere — from the conflicts in Ukraine and Yemen and Syria to the barbarity of mass shootings in places like Uvalde, Texas — and be horrified by the suffering, but you can’t do anything about it. That outrage you feel, though — that’s the spark of common humanity that Camus was always affirming. At the end of his speech, he told the audience that their job was to take that spark and commit to being a more attentive human being. That meant seeing people as people, not as abstractions or obstacles. It meant not letting our ideas about the world become more important than our experience of the world.”
“Camus always returned to the myth of Sisyphus as the model of human defiance. The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone. His point was that we’re all rolling our boulders up a hill, and that life is most meaningful when we push together.” (Actually, I’d make Trump push it by himself.)
In America today, Democrats call that “community,” and Republicans call it “communism.” One of America’s most enduring cultural myths is that of rugged individualism. Nobody who’s served in the military subscribes to that in real life; the military is all about teamwork. So are baseball, football, and basketball, our three iconic sports. (“Yeah,” the Republican says, “but what about golf?”) Activism brings people together to work for a better world. Maybe that’s why Republicans don’t like activists and protesters — that, and the fact that saving the world is incompatible with exploiting it for personal gain.
Camus probably was onto something. At the very least, he offered a path out of cynicism, pessimism, and despair — even when the world doesn’t seem to get any better.