On the value of Camus

Kevin Moss | 11:54, 30th May 2020

Recently, I had the pleasure of interacting with Dr. Chris Watkin (Monash University, Melbourne) on the subject of Albert Camus' The Plague. This took the form of a webinar, hosted by Christian Heritage Cambridge, the content of which has been recorded. The webinar includes an excellent introductory video, created by Chris specially for this event, which helps one to appreciate the value of literature, as well as the specific significance of Camus' 1947 novel.

Good literature ... holds up a mirror which reflects more than one alternative perspective.

There has been a huge resurgence of interest in this remarkable book. Forbes Magazine reported in April that La Peste is at the top of the sales charts, despite a pronounced fall in the consumption of fiction. The Times reports much the same thing, an intriguing phenomenon because it would be difficult to describe this work as 'escapism' for a time such as this, dominated by pandemic and national angst. Good literature does not function as a distraction from the harsh realities of the human condition, but holds up a mirror which reflects more than one alternative perspective. Camus delivers the goods in abundance in that respect.

Intriguingly, the publication of The Plague was, in a way, foreshadowed by Camus' only visit to New York in 1946, where he delivered his speech The Human Crisis, at Columbia University on March 28th. This is such an important address, that Viggo Mortensen redelivered it (in English) on the 70th anniversary of the original event, at the same venue.

Camus catalogues the rejection of nationalism, religion and morality

Camus speaks personally and articulately of the worldview of his own generation, highlighting the 'absurd world' it had inherited from its elders, the absence of any kind of belief, the revolt 'against lucidity, against narrative' and the growing obsession with abstraction within the arts, based upon a fundamental rejection of 'figurativism, realism, and simple harmony'. He catalogues the rejection of nationalism, religion and morality which had become the hallmarks of his own generation, certainly in France. These are certainly themes which you will find him exploring in this most relevant of fictions, The Plague, which appeared the following year.

At this point in his story, Camus did not profess to have any answers. He observes with an almost forensic intensity, but the tools which had been rejected by the nihilistic atheism which framed the intellectual landscape at that time (Max Weber, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean François Lyotard, Marcel Gauchet et al) were not available to him.

It is impossible to be sure where Camus' thinking may have taken him, due to his premature death in a car crash in 1960, and it's likely that his later focus on 'resistance' would have taken him down increasingly political avenues, as was the case with Sartre. But his diagnosis of The Human Crisis is clear – the inexorable rise of bureaucracy as a direct correlate with the eradication of common belief, allowing human beings to live morally hollow lives, driven by the diktats of compliance rather than by purpose or values. Camus could easily be describing my professional life in 2020.

whatever you may think of the content, it has the key advantage of being clear, distinct, comprehensible and quotable

Viggo Mortensen is quite correct to see this speech as being important, and it remains no less relevant after the passage of some 74 years. And, whatever you may think of the content, it has the key advantage of being clear, distinct, comprehensible and quotable. That is a lot more than may be said for many (or most) of Camus' contemporaries, who seemed to rejoice in turgid opacity – Knox Peden comments on this pathology in his insightful paper The Politics of Disenchantment: Marcel Gauchet and the French Struggle with Secularism (Peter Harrison (Ed), Narratives of Secularisation (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2018)).

Lyotard might well have instructed Westerners to treat all meta-narratives with 'incredulity', but the language he confects for that purpose is characterised primarily by incomprehensibility – effectively wrenching the capacity to understand our own existence out of the hands of the populace, and privatising that possibility within the hands of the elite which tends to dominate our institutions.

Reading Peden's paper, with its extensive quotations from French atheist philosophers, I was struck again at the contrasting plainness of Jesus Christ's teachings. If we struggle with them now, it is only because the scorched-earth policies of the secular elite have leached from our consciousness all remnants of context.

Jesus repeatedly uses jargon-free narrative models to convey key truths about God, man and the human condition

The Gospel narratives demonstrate how Christ democratises spirituality, rather than hiving such vital matters off into a private world, accessible only to the few. In John's narrative (chapter 6), Peter (a fisherman, not an ivory tower academic), articulates the view of Jesus' followers when he says, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life..." Indeed, Jesus repeatedly uses jargon-free narrative models to convey key truths about God, man and the human condition. His listeners are invited into a story, one constructed within an entirely familiar social context, and enabled to look at the key issues from this character's perspective, or that.

This is not that different to what Camus sets out to achieve in The Plague – although whilst Camus has no answers, Christ himself is the answer. However, in a secular age, whilst people may not be prepared to listen to Jesus, they're certainly reading Camus!

[Originally appeared as blog post on 23rd May 2020 on the theobloggie website]