Source of book: I own this
It is hard to believe I haven’t read any Camus in a decade. In 2014, I read his novel, The Fall, and his collection of short stories, Exile and the Kingdom. The novel in particular made a significant impression on me.
I found this used hardback of some of his essays at a used bookstore, and decided to put it on my list this year.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death is a fairly representative slice of Camus’ writing over a broad period. It starts with his anonymous writing for the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied France, and ends with his vision for the role of the artist in the modern world. Along the way, he addresses some of the key political and moral issues Europe faced in the post-war era: the Algerian independence movement, the ongoing Franco Fascism in Spain, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the suppression and revolutions ongoing in Latin America. And also, there is a 60-page persuasive essay arguing for the abolition of the death penalty in France.
Throughout, Camus argues for his key philosophical ideas - ideas that I find to strongly resonate with my own, despite our differences in religious belief. I might even go so far as to say that William James most closely resembles my personal philosophy, while Camus most closely resembles my political philosophy.
Camus called himself an Absurdist, and distinguished himself from Existentialists such as Sartre and Nihilists. He hated and constantly argues against Nihilism, and he eventually broke with Sarte over the latter’s defense of Communist violence.
Absurdism notes the paradox of human experience: we long to find meaning, but the more we know about the universe, the less meaning - and more absurdity - we find. The author of Ecclesiastes is arguably the first absurdist, and Camus fits well with that book.
Central to Camus’ political philosophy is that of “freedom.” Unlike the modern right wing, which has appropriated the term to mean its opposite, Camus understood that true freedom comes with incredible responsibility.
If one is truly free to act, then one is also fully responsible for one’s actions. And one’s beliefs. This is a heavy responsibility, and, as Camus points out in most of the essays in this book, most people prefer slavery to having to take responsibility for their actions.
I wrote a bit about this recently, in connection to religious authoritarian parenting, which promises parents that they can outsource their moral responsibility.
Camus also contrasts this idea of freedom - people having the ability and responsibility to follow their own consciences - with totalitarianism of all stripes. He was no friend of communism (although he believed strongly in society taking care of everyone - “socialism” to the modern right wing) and castigated the actions of Stalin and Khruschev. But he was also a dogged opponent of fascism in all its forms.
In both cases, he noted that it was necessary to resort to violence and mass murder to force people to adopt beliefs that the authoritarians wish to make universal.
I took a lot of notes, and have a lot of quotes from this book. It really is excellent. Camus’ writing is clearer than most philosophers, perhaps because of his extensive experience as a journalist. He learned to communicate as he taught himself how to think.
The version I have was translated from the French by Justin O’Brien (who also translated the other works I have read), and he also wrote a brief introduction.
In that introduction, O’Brien quotes a speech that Camus gave when accepting an award. It is worth repeating here.
“The writer’s function is not without arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.”
O’Brien notes that all of us are, in a very real sense, “subject to history.” Much of our lives are determined by forces and people too powerful for us. The author has the moral responsibility of using their gifts to oppose those who would oppress, rather than provide propaganda and moral cover on behalf of evil.
Camus certainly lived this principle. He walked his talk. During the Nazi occupation, he ran and wrote for a resistance newspaper. At great risk to himself. Indeed, in this book, he talks about friends of his who were murdered by the Nazis when their role in the Resistance was discovered.
The collection opens with selections from his series of “Letters to a German Friend” - his reply to Nazi propaganda and beliefs.
These are incredibly badass, but also chilling. We are currently up against a modern fascist movement (MAGA), which has appropriated pretty much everything possible from Nazi thought and action.
Later, Camus would write an introduction to a republication of the letters, and in it, he clarifies something.
When the author of these letters says “you,” he means not “you Germans,” but “you Nazis.” When he says “we,” this signifies not always “we Frenchmen,” but sometimes “we free Europeans.” I am contrasting two attitudes, not two nations, even if, at a certain moment in history, these two nations personified two enemy attitudes.” To repeat a remark that is not mine, I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
I agree one hundred percent with this. And I too love my country too much to be a nationalist.
As the letters unfold, Camus examines why nationalism of this kind (Nazi and MAGA) is evil. (This is in contrast to healthy pride in a nation’s virtues and accomplishments, as Ursula Le Guin noted.) The first letter opens as follows, recounting a sort of pre-war conversation that so much resembles conversations I have had with former friends and family in our own time:
You said to me: “The greatness of my country is beyond price. Anything is good that contributes to its greatness. And in a world where everything has lost its meaning, those who, like us young Germans, are lucky enough to find a meaning in the destiny of our nation must sacrifice everything else.” I loved you then, but at that point we diverged. No,” I told you, “I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.” You retorted: “Well, you don’t love your country.”
To Camus, one of the disadvantages that the decent people of the world have against the evil proponents of violence and hate is that we have so much self-doubt. We lack the will to act without thinking, without conscience. And, for Camus, this is why France (and the Allies) were caught flat-footed by Hitler. And those who love their country but love justice more can never have that pure tribalism that drove the Nazis.
In order to keep faith in ourselves, we are obliged to respect in you what you do not respect in others. For a long time that was your great advantage since you kill more easily than we do. And to the very end of time that will be the advantage of those who resemble you. But to the very end of time, we, who do not resemble you, shall have to bear witness so that mankind, despite its worst errors, may have its justification and its proof of innocence.
Here is another brilliant passage:
We had formed an idea of our country that put her in her proper place, amid other great concepts - friendship, mankind, happiness, our desire for justice. This led us to be severe with her. But, in the long run, we were the ones who were right. We didn’t bring her any slaves, and we debased nothing for her sake. We waited patiently until we saw clearly, and, in poverty and suffering, we had the joy of fighting at the same time for all we loved. You, on the other hand, are fighting against everything in man that does not belong to the mother country. Your sacrifices are inconsequential because your hierarchy is not the right one and because your values have no place. The heart is not all you betray. The intelligence takes its revenge. You have not paid the price it asks, not made the heavy contribution intelligence must may to lucidity. From the depths of defeat, I can tell you that that is your downfall.
There is also an interesting passage in a later letter that has fascinated me. One of the things I have said that my former religious tribe has furiously hated was that Evangelicals do not believe in absolute truth, or absolute morality. Ultimately, neither truth nor morality matters to them - as evidenced by the way they have sacrificed both to follow Trump - what really matters is absolute authority. And the values of power and violence, and “winning.” Camus noted this same phenomenon. The Nazis claimed to be fighting for traditional, Christian, German values and culture. But in reality, it was just about power and violence and “winning.”
You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world - in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his only morality, the realism of conquests.
Again, this is the accusation made by Evangelicals against atheists - and, like everything the Right Wing says, it was just projection. Every accusation is a confession. It turns out, it is (and always has been) the religious right that believes in power at any cost, winning no matter who is killed or oppressed, and in the naked exercise of power without ethics.
These letters are pretty rough reading, in a lot of ways. They were written during the midnight of Europe, when the chances of defeating the Nazis seemed low, and it was genuinely possible that Camus and his generation would pass before France was again free. With it still a possibility that democracy in America will end with another Trump administration, it isn’t easy reading. But Camus’ defiance and hope in the face of appalling and powerful evil is inspiring.
Much more triumphant are the essays Camus wrote after the liberation of Paris. For so many like him, to see the dawn come after such a dark night, was cause indeed for celebration. And for mourning, because so much was lost and destroyed and so many good people slaughtered in the name of Aryan supremacy. Camus knew all this, and yet dared to hope.
Nothing is given to men, and the little they can conquer is paid for with unjust deaths. But man’s greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself. Our truth of this evening, which hovers overhead in this August sky, is just what consoles man. And our hearts are at peace, just as the hearts of our dead comrades are at peace, because we can say as victory returns, without any spirit of revenge or spite: “We did what was necessary.”
Camus was not religious - he was openly atheistic - and yet he had a deep respect for true Christians - that is, the ones who fought against evil, rather than embracing it, as most German Protestants did. (And as MAGA “Christians” do now.) In writing about the murder of his friend Rene Leynaud, killed by the Nazis for his work in the Resistance, he had this to say about him.
Everything that constituted his moral life, Christianity and respect for one’s promise, had urged him to take his place silently in that battle of shadows.
And later:
It was probably during the years before the war that he came to understand his love of poetry and his profound Christianity.
One of the lies I was told when I was a child, both by my parents and by my subculture, is that atheists hate Christians. Actually, no, they generally don’t. What they hate are bigots, self-righteous assholes, theocrats, and fascists. I have generally been respected by the atheists I have encountered, and even been told “you aren’t like most religious people I meet.”
Exactly. I am not out to convert you, to use our acquaintance as my own MLM recruitment opportunity. I believe in science, in rationality, and in empathy. Because of this, I doubt any doctrine that appears to bring harm to other humans.
This has led, of course, to my being labeled as a liberal heretic by authoritarian fundamentalists. Just like Leynaud and Bonhoeffer were labeled as liberal heretics by the theofascists of their day. As Salman Rushdie pithily put it, “Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it is about power.”
What atheists object to most strenuously is the use of religion in the name of power. Which is exactly the opposite of what Christ taught.
More on Camus and Christianity later…
Another essay series that I found fascinating was the one on pessimism. Camus and others were accused by others as being “pessimistic” in outlook - and by seeing the world as not particularly good, to be susceptible to tyranny.
Camus argued the opposite - that optimism tends to lead to utopianism, and in turn to the kind of totalitarianism to force utopia on everyone else. (Actually, even the first Utopia, by Sir Thomas More, was marred by advocacy for a thought police state that even the Soviets would have envied.)
Not that Camus argued for the status quo: in fact, he argued that Europe would need to create a new civilization or it would perish. There are numerous places in his writing where he envisions an arrangement much like the current European Union - which indeed has been a dramatic change from the centuries of bloodshed that came before.
But civilizations are not built by rapping people on the knuckles. They are built up by the confrontation of ideas, by the blood of the spirit, by suffering and courage.
To this end, Camus encourages intelligent engagement of ideas, and a kind of friendship that will take work to rebuild after the Nazis. As he notes (and again, super relevant to our time) that rebuilding a society after a portion has chosen evil that strongly is really difficult. He notes that it is entirely appropriate that men of goodwill distrust Nazis and their sympathizers. But now that the threat was over, there was the need to rebuild - but on a better foundation. He notes in pretty graphic detail the violence of the Nazis, but calls for truth and justice, rather than revenge.
We shall indeed not accomplish anything for French friendship if we cannot get rid of falsehood and hatred…For years now, this world has been subjected to an unparalleled outbreak of hatred….Our poisoned hearts must be cured. And the most difficult battle to be won against the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice. Not giving in to hatred, not making any concessions to violence, not allowing our passions to become blind - these are the things we can still do for friendship and against Hitlerism.
This is indeed the higher calling we have as decent humans - we cannot give into the same hatred and appetite for violence that MAGA has subjected us to, but to deal with justice, with truth, and with love.
On a related note, the next essay is a fragment of an address that Camus made at a monastery, entitled “The Unbeliever and the Christian.” Honestly, I wish I could reproduce the entire thing. Wait! It is online. Read the whole damn thing, I beg you, particular if you claim to be a Christian.
He starts by noting the intellectual generosity of inviting a nonbeliever to speak. He also notes that it is not for him to specifically address their failures to live up to their religion. (That task is for people like me and others who have first-hand experience in Christianity.)
I believe indeed that the Christian has many obligations but that it is not up to the man who rejects them himself to recall their existence to anyone who has already accepted them. If there is anyone who can ask anything of the Christian, it is the Christian himself.
But don’t think he is letting them off the hook.
The conclusion is that if I allowed myself at the end of this statement to demand of you certain duties, these could only be duties that it is essential to ask of any man today, whether he is or is not a Christian.
Exactly.
What the decent people of the world - atheists included - are demanding of those who go by the name of Christian are simply the duties that we need to ask of any person - what we might call “basic human decency.” Which is the polar opposite of MAGA values.
He next establishes his goodwill:
I wish to declare also that, not feeling that I possess any absolute truth or message, I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.
But there does need to be honesty and goodwill.
I shall not try to change anything that I think or anything that you thing (insofar as I can judge of it) in order to reach a reconciliation that would be agreeable to all. On the contrary, what I feel like telling you today is that the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds. This is tantamount to saying that the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians.
Oh, and there is more:
Hence I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass off myself as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.
And this ties back in with that issue of honesty. Do you really share my revulsion from evil? Or do you embrace it. Do you approve of children locked in cages because they have the “wrong” skin color or national origin? And if you disapprove, why have you been silent - or defended that evil?
And why shouldn’t I say here what I have written elsewhere? For a long time during those frightful years I waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome. I, an unbeliever? Precisely. For I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force.
Camus notes that even though a few voices spoke up, they were quiet and not universal. And the executions continued to pile up without action from the Church. He also notes that the Church seems too preoccupied with seeing atheists like him as the enemy, as if he were the pessimist.
I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction. I was not the one to shout Nemo bonus or the damnation of unbaptized children.
He concludes with a call to action - a call to oppose evil, and specifically totalitarianism and authoritarianism.
It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively. Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that case, Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the others will in fact pay for the sacrifice.
After the war, Europe rapidly secularized. I firmly believe that the moral abdication of the Church, which chose to compromise with Hitler - and in many cases cheer him on - is what led to that secularization. Just like I believe MAGA will be the coup de grace for American Christianity in another generation.
The failure to speak out against the greatest evil of my lifetime will not be forgotten, or forgiven.
Once upon a time, Christ stood against Empire and the religion that fed off of it, worshiping the rich and successful, and grinding the faces of the poor and downtrodden. Christianity in America has abdicated that spirit of “revolt and indignation” that Camus understood it was founded on, in favor of comfort, security, and privilege at the expense of others.
I don’t have any quotes from it, but I will mention that Camus’ essay on Spain and Franco is excellent. And it is a stern rebuke to the right wing of his day, who did the whole “but what about Stalin and Communism?” play, telling Camus he should shut up about Spain and just talk about the USSR. Camus, of course, spoke out about both forms of totalitarianism.
And about other authoritarian states. In one speech, he praised Eduardo Santos, who was driven out of Columbia for his journalism.
The entire essay is worth reading, but here are what I see as some of Camus’ most powerful lines in defense of freedom and responsibility:
"It is not so easy as people think to be a free man. In truth, the only ones who assert that it is easy are those who have decided to forego freedom. For freedom is refused not because of its privileges, as some would have us believe, but because of its exhausting tasks”
“Liberty has sons who are not all legitimate or to be admired. Those who applaud it only when it justifies their privileges and shout nothing but censorship when it threatens them are not on our side.”
“In short, all flee real responsibility, the effort of being consistent or of having an opinion of one's own, in order to take refuge in the parties or groups that will think for them, express their anger for them, and make their plans for them."
“Tyrants indulge in monologues over millions of solitudes.”
This is literally what we are seeing today, particularly from MAGA. This re-defining of “freedom” to mean justification of privileges at the expense of others, and the determination to censor anything that challenges that privilege. (See: banning of books addressing systemic racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry…) And refusing to take responsibility for their actions and beliefs, while outsourcing them to the political and religious groups that think for them, express their anger toward others, and tell them what to do.
Also included in this book are some of Camus’ writing about the situation in Algeria. As I noted in my previous post about him, he was born in Algeria, and of French descent. I think he is able to give a unique and personal perspective on colonialism that very much resonates for me.
Camus points out that the settlers around the world may have been part of the colonialist project, but they were usually not the wealthy. The wealthy instead sent the deeply impoverished to other lands, reaping the wealth at home. While in some cases - the United States is an example - the destitute of Europe was able to rise economically in subsequent generations, this has never been universal.
In any case, blaming the poor for settling is ethically problematic. Camus’ own parents were poor, and he grew up in poverty. His father was killed in action during World War One when he was a toddler, and his mother struggled to survive - she was deaf and illiterate in addition to being widowed.
Thus, for Camus, the tendency of the Arab faction to accuse the French Algerians of “colonialism” seemed grossly unfair. And he has a point.
This is similar to how working-class white Americans find accusations that they benefited from slavery to be offensive. In the case of my own ancestors, we all came over a generation after the Civil War ended, were poor in our home countries, and only ended up middle class in the 1950s.
Now, to be clear, all white people in the United States do benefit from the legacy of slavery - and continue to benefit from systemic white supremacy. But. But many of us also come from poverty and marginalization ourselves.
So, for Camus, the best solution, imperfect as it was, was to learn to live together, and seek a more equal and mutual society.
In this series of essays, he castigates both the left and right, both the French and Arab positions, as being too extreme, and more importantly, too zero-sum. In that sense, both sides were more alike than different - they both saw elimination of the other as the only solution.
“Go ahead and die; that’s what you deserve” or else “Kill them; that’s what they deserve.” That makes two different policies and a single abdication, for the question is not how to die separately but rather how to live together.
This certainly brought to mind a current situation, where the terrorist organization of Hamas and the terrorist state of Israel under Netanyahu both see Palestine as a zero-sum game, with elimination of the other as the only solution. Dying separately rather than living together.
This is where Camus’ insight that human migration is more complicated than any bipolar story of good and evil is so important. Indeed, human migration and settlement has been the norm, literally the history of humanity, and can be found everywhere and at all times in history. And yes, this often resulted in horrible things happening to the resident group.
Camus doesn’t sugar coat the evil of colonialism - and he literally calls it evil. But what he does do is point out that past injustice doesn’t justify a reciprocal injustice. In one of the essays, he goes through the demands of each side, and points out the good and bad. Here is an example:
What is legitimate in the Arab demands.
They are right, and every Frenchman knows this, to point out and reject:
Colonialism and its abuses, which are man-made.
The perennial lie of constantly proposed but never realized assimilation, a lie that has compromised every evolution since the establishment of colonialism…
The obvious injustice of the agrarian allocation and of the distribution of income…
The psychological suffering: the often scornful or offhand manner of many French…
I was struck by how closely this parallels our situation in the United States regarding African Americans and social justice. And, as in that case, Camus openly acknowledges the need for reparations and other economic actions.
I won’t quote it, because it is too long and detailed, but his list of things the Arab demands get wrong is also fascinating. Among them is his observation that young, inexperienced revolutionaries tend to be light on policy - lots of big ideas and emotions, but no realism about what actually running a country requires.
Unfortunately, Camus was all too prescient in this case - after independence, Algeria took a huge economic tumble, and fell into political chaos for years. Revolutionaries have their place, but ultimately, what a nation needs are skilled administrators, legislators, and politicians able to use compromise.
Another thing that Camus got right is that the Arab view that Algeria should be part of an Islamic Empire despite being a place with a long history of religious pluralism. He also notes that Russia (the USSR) was simultaneously fomenting Arab imperialism while slaughtering and repressing Muslims in Chechnya and elsewhere. (Hey, some things apparently haven’t changed…trading arms with Iran while brutalizing Chechnya? That’s been in the news…)
Next in line for Camus’ animus is the thugs who turned Hungary into a totalitarian state. As I noted, Camus was no friend of the Communists any more than he was for the Fascists.
Instead, he stood for freedom - freedom of speech, and democracy.
I regret having to play the role of Cassandra once more and having to disappoint the fresh hopes of certain ever hopeful colleagues, but there is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society. Terror does not evolve except toward a worse terror, the scaffold does not become any more liberal, the gallows are not tolerant. Nowhere in the world has there been a party or a man with absolute power who did not use it absolutely.
The first thing to define totalitarian society, whether of the Right or of the Left, is the single party, and the single part has no reason to destroy itself. This is why the only society capable of evolution and liberalization, the only one that deserves both our critical and our active support is the society that involves a plurality of parties as a part of its structure.
I think that I am one among many who mourn the fact that my native California is, for all intents and purposes, a single party state. It isn’t totalitarian by any stretch, but it lacks the necessary interplay of competing ideas and visions.
The reason why California is a single-party state, though, isn’t that other parties have been repressed.
It is that the Republican Party in California has decided to commit suicide by embracing positions that cannot win elections.
It has no solutions to the problems we actually face - just scapegoating. As I see it, the California GOP has very few ideas at all, and what they do have would make things worse - something California voters recognize. Here is what I see from them:
Scapegoating of immigrants (with browner skin, of course) and LGBTQ people (particularly transgender people - including trans children.)
Calls for environmental deregulation. Everything wrong with the state is apparently because we don’t want to poison people or the planet.
Endless tax cuts for the rich.
Book bans. Because we can’t possibly let children learn about the existence of LGBTQ people, sex, or systemic racism.
I mean…that’s the list. No wonder the party can’t win elections. If nothing else, California has too many people who aren’t white to win on racist dog-whistles alone.
Hence, the Democratic Party doesn’t have to suppress opposition (it doesn’t) or even come up with good solutions (although sometimes it does) - just by not being obsessed with bad ideas and scapegoating, it wins.
But the lack of real competition does make it harder for our state to evolve. And believe me, our housing crisis - which is at the root of most of our biggest problems - could stand for some new ideas. Such as statewide elimination of single-family zoning in urban areas, investment in low-income housing, better public transit, and so on. In other words, since the Democratic Party is essentially center-right, we need a real leftist party in this state. One willing to take on the moneyed interests.
But I digress.
There is another line in this series of essays that I consider one of the finest ever written.
If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it. When historical truth is involved, the more anyone claims to possess it the more he lies. In the final analysis, he becomes the murderer of truth.
And also this one:
[N]one of the evils that totalitarianism (defined by the single party and the suppression of all opposition) claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
This applies to theocracy as well - which fits the definition of totalitarianism perfectly. (Note: Raymond Aron, another brilliant French writer, pointed out in The Opium of the Intellectuals, that Nazism and Communism both fit the definition of religions quite well - funny how that works…)
By far the longest essay in the book is the one on the death penalty, “Reflections on the Guillotine.” While I have been thinking much the same way on the issue for some time, I can’t say that I have ever read as thorough an exploration of the issues, and the same brutal honesty about why the death penalty makes no sense except as bloodthirsty revenge. I’ll just note a few quotes, but encourage readers to check out the whole thing.
Camus, for all that he was an atheist, held some traditionally Christian views. One of them is that “all have sinned.”
There are no just people - merely hearts more or less lacking in justice. Living at least allows us to discover this and to add to the sum of our actions a little of the good that will make up in part for the evil we have added to the world.
For Camus, this means that all - even the worst - should be allowed to have a chance to repent, to try and make amends for the evil we do. Humility about our own faults should lead to grace toward others.
Gee, what a literally Christian concept!
Camus does, however, note that the death penalty mostly makes sense in a religious context - specifically one with a belief in the afterlife. After all, the condemned can repent, and spend eternity in bliss, right? So death isn’t final, just a little bump in the road. That this view justifies great brutality is obvious - as anyone familiar with the Inquisition can attest.
On the other hand, is it really Christian?
The unbeliever cannot keep from thinking that men who have set at the center of their faith the staggering victim of a judicial error ought at least to hesitate before committing legal murder.
Again, I recommend reading the whole essay: he takes on practical as well as philosophical issues, and makes a fact-based case for eliminating the penalty.
As he came to the end of his unfortunately short life, Camus thought a lot about what the post-war generation would look like, and what the solemn duty of artists like himself was to enlighten that generation. His reflections on art and artists are brilliant and insightful. There are a number of quotes that I think are worth repeating here.
Again, like with everything else in life for Camus, he saw art as the conflict between freedom (and thus responsibility) and conformity.
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. There are works of art that tend to make man conform and to convert him to some external rule. Others tend to subject him to whatever is worst in him, to terror or hatred. Such works are valueless to me. No great work has ever been based on hatred or contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
I believe he is telling the truth: no great work of true art has ever been based on hatred or contempt. True art does indeed represent freedom and all the good that humanity can aspire to. Which is why totalitarians feel the need to control and suppress art, whether in the form of words, or music, or any other form. Camus sees a brighter vision:
Unity and diversity, and never one without the other - isn’t this the very secret of our Europe? Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it.
The same might be said about America. Aspirational Europe and Aspirational America do indeed have a lot in common - diversity and unity, always together. So much relevance today as well. Just like this next one:
An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence.
No points for guessing which approach Camus preferred.
There is also a fascinating passage in which Camus addresses “realism.” The Soviets were big on this idea, contrasting it with “formalism,” which became an epithet for “anything Stalin disliked.”
Camus, while acknowledging that realistic writing can be artistic - indeed his own is often very realistic - he questioned the very meaning of “realism.”
No art can ever be fully realistic. Even a photograph lacks the realism of the object itself. To truly realistically portray anyone’s life in film, the film would be the person’s entire life. And thus unwatchable.
The only realistic artist, then, is God, if he exists. All other artists are, ipso facto, unfaithful to reality.
Artists of all sorts, “realistic” or not, therefore select and tell a story. The story is the art, and a true artist tells a good story well.
I’ll end with one final passage, in which Camus encourages artists to rejoice to live in “interesting times.” It applies to day as well, in so many ways.
Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths. Let us rejoice as men because a prolonged hoax has collapsed and we see clearly what threatens us.
There has been a lot of what a friend of mine has called “unveiling.” Camus calls it the collapse of prolonged hoaxes. And boy have we ever seen it.
We are seeing the collapse of corporate capitalism as a viable economic structure - particularly when it comes to the future. We are seeing white Christianity revealed as the Klan successor it apparently always was. We are seeing friends and family revealed as cruel and hateful and bigoted. We are seeing the rise, once again, of fascism in a new, red hatted form.
But were we really better off believing the hoax? Camus asserts that we are not. Now we can see clearly what threatens us, and act to defend ourselves and others. Interesting times indeed.
I’m not sure “enjoyed” is the right word for this book, but I definitely found it compelling and thought provoking.
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