Albert Camus La Peste (The Plague) 1947

There are more things to admire in men than to despise

The Plague kills off many citizens in an Algerian port-town, and Camus makes many observations about the reactions of the people there to it.  He emphasizes the need to give people a chance, seeing that the actions of a priest are not so bad as what he says about the need for suffering in the struggle of humanity.  “The just man need have no fear, but the evildoer has good cause to tremble... Repentance was enough, men thought; nothing was forbidden” said the priest, which does make one think in terms of authentic living vs. Not, and what the role of repentance does for humanity; it allows them to carry on with inauthentic living (which, might be evolutionarily more adaptable).  In a back and forth with Tarrou, Rieux says, “’I’m glad to know he’s better than his sermon.’ ‘Most people are like that,’ Tarrou replied.  ‘It’s only a matter of giving them a chance.’ He smiled and winked at Rieux. ‘That’s my job in life-giving people chances.’”  Actions vs. Deeds, and giving people a fair shake.  Camus thinks that we should do everything we can to lessen human suffering.  His protagonist, Dr. Rieux, is somewhat stoic in his views of what is going on.  Camus concludes, though, that humans are more good than bad, in aggregate.  He also likes to write about sea bathing, apparently a favorite thing of his; if there can be no happiness, even in the face of disaster, what then is the point of existence? “Go for a swim.  It’s one of those harmless pleasures that even a saint-to-be can indulge in... Really it’s too damn silly living only in and for the plague. Of course, a man should fight for the victims, but if he ceases caring for anything outside that, what’s the use of his fighting?’ Rieux and Camus call for telling what is, with detachment “He had put the question solely to find out if Rambert could or couldn’t state the facts without paltering with the truth.”  Camus exhibits the disdain of a traditional leftist for work, and perhaps people ought more to ask the question, “what is all of this for?”, however, he dismisses the demands of reality, and that plenty and being able to provide for one’s and ones family do not simply fall from trees.  But, he nonetheless points out a society that does not care for one another's members, of the suicidal man, “What struck me as queer was that he always seemed to want to start a conversation.  But he should have seen I was busy with my work.”  Cottard, after attempting to kill himself, asks to be left in peace, and the police point out to him, “that just now it’s you who’re troubling the peace of others.”  Cottard wants to nurse his bruised ego; the police are there to make sure he does not kill himself, and want to make sure he won’t “have another go at it.”  Thus, the assumption is that all life is good, suicide is bad, but there is no deeper thought to what existence might be for.  On the lack of awareness exhibited by many, “Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”  This me-first way of thinking, what does this say about me, what do they think of me, etc., shows the inability to move beyond and see “what is;” “With the result that we went on focusing our attention on our personal feelings.”  This recalls War & Peace, and the learning that we can attempt to focus our thoughts to where we would like.  Grand, one of Rieux’s co-citizens who helps him to fight the plague, had “The courage of their good feelings.  What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.”  He does not feel the need to constantly parakeet his “good deeds.”  On a steady action and what it does for man, “The only thing gained by all this expenditure of energy [on his reporting work], Rambert told Rieux with a hint of bitterness, was that it served to keep his mind off his predicament.”  Camus points out about government and disasters, “Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic.”  On good and evil and the binding power of disaster, “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well.  It helps men to rise above themselves.  All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.”  Things may be bleak, but there is nothing to be done except to try to fight the “never ending defeat”.  Rieux says of the priest, “Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar.  He hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth—with a capital T.  But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man grasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do.  He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to pint out its excellence.”  This, in contrast to Pierre in War & Peace, who would re-live his suffering a million times over for the growth experience it gave him.  We do not throw our extended family to the wolves; we recognize their shortcomings, and offer help, even if we see there is no growth.  For Tarrou, he says he fights plague because of his “code of morals” which is “Comprehension.”  Is it within the grasp of the normal person to comprehend?  Echoing Tolstoy, “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance; and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.  On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point.  But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we cal vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.”  “But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two makes four is punished with death.  The schoolteacher is well aware of this.  And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation.  The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four.”  Do you trust your ability to make your own determinations?  Or do you make determinations whether or not you will be stoned to death?  “...this good will of theirs [of Tarrou and the citizens] was shared by the schoolmaster and by all who have the same feelings as the schoolmaster, and be it said to the credit of mankind, they are more numerous than one would think—such, anyhow, is the narrator’s conviction..”  SO, despite this stoning to death of heretics, Camus thinks  there are more good people than you think, when you go outside and turn off Facebook.  Camus makes a good dig at theatre, “... felling that are neither demonstrably bad nor overcharged with emotion in the ugly manner of a stage-play.”  Camus points out the difficulty of modern civilization, that we want to be good, but “kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering he cannot see... ‘They’re too remote.’”  Camus says when, in response to disaster or unpleasant realities, one shuts their eyes, “...one could always refuse to face this disagreeable fact, shut one’s eyes to it, or thrust it out of mind, but there is a terrible cogency in the self-evident; ultimately it breaks down all defenses.”  This may be true for Camus, but I think this may not be true for many, that staring into the belly of the beast and admitting how terrible it is will lead to the breakdown of defenses and excuses and looking away.  Channeling Dostoevsky’s man can get used to anything, “...they had retained the attitudes of sadness and suffering, but they had ceased to feel their sting... this precisely was the most disheartening thing: that the habit of despair is worse than despair itself. Hitherto those who were parted had not been utterly unhappy; there was always a gleam of hope in the night of their distress; but that gleam had now died out. You could see them at street corners, in cafes or friends’ houses, listless, indifferent, and looking so bored that, because of them, the whole town seemed like a railway waiting-room.”  Thus, despair become a mindset, hope dies, and then you die spiritually.  “You could see, for instance, even the most intelligent among them making a show like all the rest of studying the newspapers or listening to the radio, in the hope apparently of finding some reason to believe the plague would shortly end.  They seemed to derive fantastic hopes or equally exaggerated fears from reading the lines that some journalist had scribbled at random, yawning with boredom at his desk... In other words, they had ceased to choose for themselves; plague had leveled out discrimination.”  They looked outward constantly, grasping at straws, and stopped choosing how to respond to life on their own.  People blame the messenger, but Rieux was a good man trying to fight the good fight.  “But he wasn’t there for saving life; he was there to order a sick man’s evacuation. How futile was the hatred he saw on faces then! ‘You haven’t a heart!’ a woman told him on one occasion. She was wrong; he had one: It saw him through his twenty-hour day, when he hourly watched men dying who were meant to live. It enabled him to start anew each morning. He had just enough heart for that, as things were now. How could that heart have sufficed for saving life?” “Yes, it was quite true that men can’t do without their fellow men; that he was as helpless as these unhappy people and he, too, deserved the same faint thrill of pity that he allowed himself once he had left them.”  The Dr’s job was hard, and he deserved pity as well as the family of the dead.  Camus also points out, echoing Dostoevsky, one cannot withdraw form society.  Cottard, the suicidal man, liked the new state of affairs, it drew people together, which he craved, “...he’d rather be one of a beleaguered crowd than a prisoner alone...”  Tarrou thinks, “the surest way of not being cut off from others was having a clean conscience...’, authentic living.  Tarrou continues, talking about the lack of trust experienced by many in others because of their fear of being hurt (Vivek Murthy), “...though they have an instinctive craving for human contacts, can’t bring themselves to yield to it, because of the mistrust that keeps them apart.  For it’s common knowledge that you can’t trust your neighbor; he may pass the disease to you without your knowing it, and take advantage of a moment of inadvertence on your part to infect you. When one has spent one’s days, as Cottard has, seeing a possible police spy in everyone, even in persons he feels drawn to, it’s easy to understand this reaction... since he, personally, has learned what it is to live in a state of constant fear, he finds it normal that others should come to know this state.  Or perhaps it should be put like this: fear seems to him more bearable under these conditions than it was when he had to bear its burden alone.” Thus, Cottard, who had always lived with mistrust and fear, liked the new state of affairs, because he was both no longer alone (as people were drawn together), but also, was no longer alone as one who had to live in fear, because now all lived in fear.  Tarrou makes a good comment on wisdom gained with time, “At my age one’s got to be sincere.  Lying’s too much effort.”  Rambert tries to decide whether to try to escape the town to meet his wife, whom he was estranged from by the lockdown, or if he will stay and help, and forsake his love.  Tarrou says “... if Rambert whished to take a share in other people’s unhappiness, he’d have no time left for happiness.”  But, Rambert chooses to stay, because that is what he feels inside of him; he trusts his inner dictates.  “This business is everybody's business.”  Rieux chimes in, “For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves.  Yet that is what I’m doing; though why I do not know.”  Paneloux and Rieux need to join hands in a come-to-Jesus (no pun intended) moment, in a uniting of the good people, regardless of for what reason, when they are in the room where tons of people are dying, even children.  Rieux says, “What does it matter? [salvation] What I Hate is death and disease, as you well know. And whether you wish it or not, we’re allies, facing them and fighting them together... so you see...God Himself can’t part us now.”  Channeling his inner Matt Taibbi, the news is a consumer product, The local printing firms were quick to realize the profit to be made by pandering to this new craze and printed large numbers of the prophecies [of all descriptions] that had been going round in manuscript. Finding that the public appetite for this type of literature was still unsated, they had researches made in the municipal libraries for all the mental pabulum of the kind available in old chronicles, memoirs, and the like.”  Of Paneloux and what he thought of it all, “It was wrong to say: ‘This I understand, but that I cannot accept’; we must go straight to the heart of that which is unacceptable, precisely because it is thus that we are constrained to make our choice.”  The “constrained” vision of Sowell; life has constraints.  We must, “try to do what good lay in our power” and not despair even with “deaths of little children” as that is reality.  Tarrou dies, and Rieux realizes of him, the bleak sterility of a life without illusions” even if that illusion was hope.  In closing, “...what we learn in times of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”