Reading Camus in Time of Plague and Polarization
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
To me The Stranger felt like an indictment of the world as arbitrary, with everything that brings. The Plague discovers nobility in defying the arbitrary because we have the power to lessen others' suffering and it is cruel and cowardly not to do so.
I highly recommend the book, I read the Gilbert translation. I wish Matthew Ward had lived to take on La Peste as well.
Albert Camus - The Plague
I've seen this kind of thinking before, with Orwell, and I don't understand it. The quotes and ideas of these people are not some kind of intellectual property that the left collectively inherited and that the right isn't allowed to use.
EDIT: Quoting people is about giving them credit, and pointing your readers and listeners to further material, not about implying that they would have agreed with you.
> So as the Polish people were struggling with the Soviet empire, they came up with a slogan: "Two plus two equals four." They printed it up. They put it on signs. They put it in the front door. And the Soviets knew it was somehow treasonous, but they couldn't -- how do you walk in a store and say, "You can't have 'Two plus two equals four' in the window"?
It came from two places. One was Camus' novel, "The Plague," in which Camus says there are times when a man can be killed for saying two plus two equals four, because the authorities can't stand the truth. I think you'll find more than enough occasion in Washington, in Sacramento, in Albany, in city hall, in county commissions, that they can't stand the truth.
(source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?292185-11/newt-gingrich-remark...)
To reuse your example: does the idea of an authoritarian figure quoting 1984 not seem shady and manipulative to you? Clearly the ideas contained in the original work were very anti-authoritarian, regardless of whether Orwell's words can be twisted or taken out of context to imply something else.
The left and the right disagree on who is authoritarian here, and who then inherits the privilege of using Orwell to lambast the other side for it.
(2020 nuance: although one of these parties at least didn't balk at the pandemic)
If your whole society is riddled through with ignorance, delusional thinking, lazy consumerism, and privacy holes, eventually an adversary will put together enough information to blackmail someone powerful into putting their finger on the scale, just a little bit. The more this happens, the more corrupt the system becomes, and the more cynical the population. The adversary has won.
No, we need defense-in-depth, and for that we need citizens willing to learn more about computers in general. Now would be a great time to start a National Guard but for cyberwarfare, and open to anyone with a browser.
Even right now I've seen on reddit r/Republicans, George Orwell quoted to describe democrat policies that would have been moderate or even right wing to Orwell.
Ive seen it more with Americans and I think part has been the lack of comparable strife in US. Here in Europe we had the devastion of ww2 and the soviet Union on our doorstep. My own homeland was in effective civil war up till the 90s and still suffers from its lingering effect. To us, Orwell isnt describing a universal health care which he supported. They are in response to the literal death squads that would kill at random. US simply doesn't understand actual tyranny. Moderation looks like extremism when you have such a narrow field of view of politics.
Camus is without a doubt a part of the leftist cannon. Just read "The rebel" if you don't believe that Camus has anarchist sensibilities.
Orwell literally joined a red brigade in the spanish civil war and killed fascists for left-wing political reasons. He's also a leftist, even if he ended up disillusioned with the soviet form of it by the end...
It is much like religious people claiming Einstein was religious.
It seems to be a common tactic to rebrand people as believing in the opposite of what they did.
Camus, a free-thinker, womanizer, pied-noir,who reached across the aisle during the war writing to a German friend, it is the antithesis of the current woke, liberal,sex-repressed,pro-foreign-intervention, cancel-everybody-who-dares-to-think-different-to-me woke crowd so common in Twitter and here.
[0] weasel words used as I am not an anarchist nor have I read a substantial amount of anarchist theory
I understand the historical relation between anarchy and other leftist politics like socialism and communism. But since anarchists seem to be opposed coercive top-down hierarchies, idealogical or otherwise, I found it interesting that they are considered to be on the left and not outside of left/right politics.
As I'm typing here, headed towards looking up the differences between left and right, I found this: "In both its social and individualist forms, anarchism is usually considered an anti-capitalist and radical left-wing or far-left" [0]
That jives with the overlap I've noticed between anarchists and a subset of libertarians.
I enjoy world literature. I'm a fan of existentialism. But that book. It was just too bland for me.
I keep thinking back at the feeling it gave me while reading. And sometimes I feel like that I may only understand its genius after this pandemic ends. Who knows...