I recently re-read, as many of us have recently, Albert Camus’ wonderful novel The Plague. There are two things that stay with me above all, and that I would like to use to reflect upon our current situation. The first is the relation between the individual and the community. The second is the tone of Camus’ narrator, of acceptance and non-judgment. Along these lines I want to venture a thesis about our current crisis, which is this: our coming together depends upon our acknowledging, without judgment, the decidedly different ways that each of us is experiencing these times.
There is a sort of loving gentleness with which the narrator in The Plague paints the portraits of a number of people living in this fictional town that is afflicted with the plague. They are so different in their reactions and in their preoccupations and styles of being, that you might imagine they belong to different novels rather than being the cast of characters who find themselves locked down together in a small city that is facing a formidable enemy. When I look around me and speak with my friends and visitors, I also see such a variety of experiences. There are the frontline workers: health-care professionals, grocery store workers, delivery people, and so many others who are facing the threat of this health crisis every day in their work. Then there are people who are stuck at home and experiencing even that in a broad variety of ways: we have seen videos of arias being sung on balconies, and we know there are also people staring at the wall in deep depression. There are people with nothing to do and people with not enough time in the day to work and care for their families. There are people baking and growing vegetables either because they finally have the time or because it makes them feel more in control, or comforted. There are people who are profoundly stressed by the notion of homeschooling their kids, and others who again are happy that they finally have the time to do something they had always fantasized about. There are people paralyzed with fear and anxiety and people being so productive you’d think they’d been given a few weeks to live. There are people living alone and people in large families, and each of those situations can incite various responses. There are people who have never been happier and people who are desperately missing their former lives, their routines and their friends and loved ones. There are people glad of the solitude and others withering away without the social interaction that is a vital part of their existence. I could go on. There are so many different experiences and so many different responses to each situation that I think it is fair to say that each and every one of us is fighting a different battle.
We are always in our own worlds because even when we face a common cause we each confront what is common from our own unique perspective. While we are all humans whose bodies are vulnerable to viruses, and while all of us depend in some way on the world economy, we bring such different histories to this moment that we discover our vulnerabilities to be unlike those of the others around us, even while there is much in common. And it is this that we have to share, because there is no conversation when everyone is the same and has experienced the same. There can only be solidarity where we come together as unique and singular beings, facing an enemy that would reduce us. Camus’ enemy was ostensibly the plague, but his novel was also meant to be read as an account of the Resistance during the Second World War, and that enemy was one that wanted to annihilate or assimilate all that was unlike some proposed ideal. Dictators all over the world right now are using this opportunity to push ahead with their own projects of annihilation and assimilation. To resist in solidarity is to acknowledge diversity and to see the strength in that.
There is no doubt that it is unfortunate to live in a bubble. We need to be aware of the inequities in our current situations, but using these inequities as a way to blame and shame one another for being in the wrong place in this system does two things: it further deepens the suffering of each of us and it gives in to the powers that would exploit our turning against one another. To address the first issue, I would say that many of us are being made to feel that having the experience we are having is something to either be ashamed of or to hide. It might be a sign that you are privileged if right now you are stuck in your home, but that doesn’t mean you are not suffering. You might be happy about what your life looks like right now, but that doesn’t mean you don’t care that others are suffering. Each of us needs to acknowledge where we are, and pay attention to what that experience is and to what it calls for. I would say that even the people protesting in Michigan are the victims of a system that is stacked against them and might be understood as coming from a place of suffering and deficit. I myself have struggled with this one in recent days, have found myself judging in very harsh ways anyone who would go out into the streets right now with a gun to protest being denied what they see as their right to freedom of movement and enterprise. But they are suffering, of that there is no doubt. And that they haven’t been made to understand what a social contract is, or that they might not have gotten out of that social contract the necessary elements of a good life such as a solid education, health care and robust civic participation, among other things, is certainly not their fault as individuals. Blaming even these protestors for getting this wrong is missing the bigger picture, I think.
Camus’ narrator is unblinking in his description of the various characters that populate the plague-ridden town, but never does he judge or criticize their actions (and he himself is a central character in the town). One character who learns to profit from the suffering of the rest, and who seems to clearly represent a collaborator on the other level on which this story can be read, seems to be portrayed simply as more unfortunate than the rest. When he meets his downfall, it’s not because he’s been singled out and judged by anyone else, but because his own well-being is not aligned with the good of the community, with his fellow humans. It’s this that undoes him.
Camus gives us a novel of resistance. Facing a common enemy, be it microbial or political, provides us the opportunity to come together as individuals each suffering in our own private way, but stronger for knowing that our well-being depends upon that of our fellow humans. We can each use this opportunity to look within, to acknowledge that where we’re at is true and important, and that nobody has the right to tell us that our current experience or suffering is not the right kind. It also gives us the opportunity to reach out to others whose situation right now may be very different, and to meet them where they’re at without judgment. Judgment kills the openness within us, kills our willingness to look at the most difficult truths and the most sensitive parts of us. In its power to tear us apart and distract us from our vision of a better world for all, judgment is our enemy now as much as anything.