The Plague and Our Plague
Covid is not the end. But that’s OK.
We always assume that the pandemic will end at some point. Even as cases begin to rise again, we cannot accept the prospect of us contracting Covid-19. ‘Oh, I’m not going to get it,’ ‘we’ll develop a vaccine soon,’ ‘the NHS will save us.’ Just like the people of Oran in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague, we keep making excuses of why it wouldn’t happen to us. We imagine ourselves as ‘civilised’ people with funny little gadgets like phones and smartwatches and robots that can do surgery on grapes. ‘It’s unthinkable,’ one of the characters note, ‘everyone knows [plague]’s ceased to appear in Western Europe.’ But for Camus, there is no progress when it comes to dying. ‘Yes, everyone knows that,’ he said, ‘except the dead men.’
The more religiously-minded, such as Paneloux, the Catholic priest in the novel, may explain the plague as an act of ‘divine punishment’ from God for our moral deprivation under the influence of capitalist materialism. Camus cannot accept this: for him, this was (what he melodramatically called) ‘philosophical suicide’ — to give in to a religious or spiritual framework, because life without a unifying principle is too difficult to accept. The point to be made here is not about religion itself, (nor is it the intention of the author to launch a blasphemous attack on organised religion) but an allusion to Camus’ claim that the universe is inherently irrational despite our longing to rationalise it by reducing it to human terms. This was suggested in the novel through the prolonged agony and eventual death of an innocent child. Suffering, for Camus, is not some ‘divine punishment’. Rather, as Alain de Botton said, it is random — it makes no sense — and that is ‘the kindest thing one can say about it.’
Remember the ‘chaos’ before the pandemic: Australian wildfires, talks of World War III, the global protest wave from Chile to Hong Kong. We know that our ‘normal’ lives can be torpedoed by circumstances at any given moment. Yet as Camus notes, ‘somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.’ The purpose of The Plague is not to panic a future pandemic-stricken audience. Because to panic implies an escape from an immediate but temporary danger. But there is no escape the plague: the one that permanently places us at the whims of our condition that either kills us or render our lives entirely irrelevant, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it — but that’s OK. For once we have accepted this as a fact of life, we begin to realise the delicacy of it. We stop worrying about death, because we know it is the only certainty. We do away with our attachment to the illusion of normality, because we know that nothing is ever constant. Finally, we adopt a newfound passion for life, because we recognise the fragility of the human condition.
Therefore, recognising this ‘absurd’ world, as Camus called it, should not lead to despair. Certainly, our desire for meaning and unity will always be in direct conflict with an inherently meaningless and irrational universe. But we must nonetheless accept our condition, to continue on this endless endeavour with the knowledge that meaning is not possible, at least not in human terms. And to rebel against it, by refusing a ‘philosophical suicide’ and embracing all that life has to offer. Because if all experiences are equally meaningless, then all experiences are equally important. The Plague ends with the citizens of Oran rejoicing in the streets, celebrating the end of suffering. But both Camus and the reader will see that our plague does not end — the plague of the inescapable human condition, of which suffering is a mere arbitrary element. We must, therefore, learn to live with it — not in submission, but in ‘permanent rebellion’, because ‘there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’ We are like Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to a meaningless task sealed only in death. But ‘the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart’, Camus notes. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
This article was first published on the Mon.Mouth, the student paper of the Haberdashers’ Monmouth Schools.
