'THE BENIGN INDIFFERENCE OF THE UNIVERSE'.

Albert Camus and Covid-19

‘L’Étranger’ [1942]. One of my ‘Book-Paintings’. Acrylic on canvas. 35x35cm.

I’m not the only person to be turning to Albert Camus  in these extraordinary times. We have been made horribly aware of  what Camus in L’Étranger [The Outsider]  calls the ‘benign indifference of the universe’.[1]    His 1947  novel La Peste  [The Plague] uses the quarantining of an Algerian city during an outbreak of  the plague as an allegory for the human condition. A bacteriological  contagion becomes a metaphor for the dilemma  of moral contagion.  These are the last lines of the novel, spoken by Dr. Bernard Rieux, a physician who is witness and chronicler of the plague in his town: "He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and  that perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city."  

Confronted by Covid-19, the scientific mind, which we have come to trust above all others, seems helpless. We are reduced to the extraordinary primitive practices of of social distancing and self-isolation.  Even the greatest   superpower in the world is completely helpless.  In such circumstances, Camus’s concept of the absurd  seems highly relevant. At the corner of any street, he famously declared,  the absurd can strike us suddenly in the face. This unmasking experience, Camus argued, is born when our needs are confronted by  the  indifferent silence of the world, when the ‘human’ encounters the in- or non-human, and feels lost.  The sense of the absurd is  therefore a consequence of the  perceived divorce between our idea of who we are and the actual shape of our lives,  between us as actors and the scenery we inhabit.  In a world suddenly deprived of comforting  illusions, we become strangers, exiled from the consoling beliefs, memories, and hopes of our neighbours and ancestors.

A sense of the absurd amounts to seeing life from death’s point of view – from the perspective of oblivion, and Camus argued that there is one clear solution:  suicide.  We can respond with  an act of self-destruction based on  the conscious  recognition that our life is not intrinsically worth living, or not worth living in accordance with the conditions imposed by society. But Camus also argued that the absurd could supply new grounds for hope, a hope that grew from deep within a sense of life’s fundamental meaninglessness.

In  Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), published in 1942,  Camus took the hapless  Sisyphus as his  personification of the human condition -   a man who rolls a huge rock up a hill only to see it roll down again, and then calmly repeats the task for all eternity. This, Camus argued, was  a fitting image of humanity, one we should carry with us when we confront  the absurdity of existence. The struggle to reach the summit is enough to fill our hearts, Camus write, and we should imagine that Sisyphus is happy. As another connoisseur of the absurd,  the Romanian  philosopher and essayist  Emil Cioran (1911-1995), wrote in the 1980s:  ‘When all the current reasons – moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on – no longer guide one’s  life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life.’ [2]

A crisis like the current one helps us recognize that  the cultural system through which life is justified   rests on reflex actions, habits, deceptions, and economic interests  that must be questioned. Its values  no longer serve as a guide to  life. But    here’s the rub:  we also know that after Covid-19 is no longer a mortal threat to our society we will all probably continue to adhere to this system,   even after it has been called into question and seen to be absurd.

Camus  believed that  if   the world could be made     different through revolt and ethical refusal,  it might still satisfy our demands for  real meaning.  Today,   however, we are more likely to recognize the  far more sobering truth: there exists  no conceivable world  about which fundamental  doubts cannot be raised. In other words, the  absurdity of our situation comes not from a collision between our expectations of the world  and the world as it  is, which is what  Camus believed, but  rather  from a  collision taking place deep within  the structure of our existential being.

[1] Albert Camus, The Outsider, p. 120.

[2] Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, p.10.