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Beautiful book and probably the author's most hopeful. Despite the death and despair everyone in Oran is subject to, the heroic actions and words are unambiguously but unsentimentally those of people that choose to act, not cower, escape, or acquiesce.
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.
Nice Summary
Albert Camus - The Plague
Read this one not too long before the pandemic. Fascinating novel. Among other things, it showed me how to react to emerging epidemic concerns - I took all COVID news seriously from the start.
> Tellingly, in the midst of the Tea Party rebellion a decade ago, Newt Gingrich quoted The Plague while on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The former speaker of the House tried to co-opt Camus into his denunciation of “Obamacare” as the mark of a tyrannical, secular, leftist government. Camus was, in fact, a European social democrat who backed universal health care and was deeply skeptical of organized religion. Such disinformation—a prelude to the rise of Trumpism—was precisely among the pitfalls of ideologies that revolted Camus.
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.
I think it will clear up this discussion if everybody knows how exactly Newt Gingrich was quoting Camus. This is what he said:
> 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...)
Thanks for clarifying. This is very different and not quite fitting imaginary narrative of the parent’s post.
I am for one shocked that is the case.
I think people just find it disingenuous to re-purpose a famous quote so that it means something other than what the original author intended.
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 ideas contained in the original work were very anti-authoritarian, regardless of whether Orwell's words can be twisted
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.
That's because both left and right are corralled by professional Democrats and Republicans, who's primary job is to keep their constituents believing that all the tyranny is being caused by the other team. Ergo, they both claim ownership over anti-authoritarian quotes.
(2020 nuance: although one of these parties at least didn't balk at the pandemic)
Not sure why the downvote! Yeah, I've noticed whole gobs of important subjects effectively ignored by politicians. There are really big issues around data rights and privacy that get no focus. The thing that gets me is that this is deeply connected to our nations cyberwarfighting capability, including our ability to control our stuff.
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.
The essay doesn't argue that Gingrich repurposed a quote, or twisted it, or took it out of context. In fact, neither the quote, nor the original context, nor the context in which Gingrich used it is shown at all. It just says that Gingrich used a Camus quote in a speech denouncing Obamacare, and that Camus would have supported Obamacare. That's not disingenuous.
One could argue that the pinnacle of Orewllian authoritarinism is indeed the use of Orwell by an authoritarian regime. Doublespeak and all...
It is an attempt to 'win' an argument by association of popular figure or as a gotcha. People get upset because said popular figures did not endorse those beliefs others are trying to cast.
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 spent some time withing the hard left (including being part of a communist party for some time), and was friends with other hard leftist philosophy authors (sartre being the classic example). The socdem point is far later in his life, and the authors should include his earlier political life in this analysis...
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...
You're talking past me. I'm not denying that these people are leftists, I'm saying that it doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong with quoting a leftist in a rightist argument (or vice versa).
This situation reminds me more of like when Bruce Springsteen objected to Trump using the song Born in the USA. Springsteen is alive to object. Camus isn’t alive to object, but looking at his past thinking, it’s not far fetched to presume that he would object to use of his art and writing to reinforce the arguments of political figures with opposing viewpoints.
Except it isn’t about quoting. Many on the right claim that Orwell, Camus, etc were in-fact right wing and hated the left because they disagreed with extremist Stalinists and such.
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.
It is very much about quoting. Gingrich did not say that Camus was right wing. Nor have I ever heard that claim.
Camus was a leftist who was against Stalinism, I am pretty sure he would have abhorred the Cultural Revolution in China and the woke brigade now.
So, Maoism and ‘the woke brigade’ are the same thing? This is exactly my point. Thanks.
If you dont like vanilla and you dont like chocolate are both those the same thing? This your standard of debate.
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.
I'm a bit uncertain by what you call the "hard left". I don't know how one can read the "The Rebel" and come out with the idea that the author is a hardliner, when he's advocating for temperance and common sense even in the pursuit of freedom. It's true that Camus and Sartre shared some seminal ideas about religion, absurdism, and the freedom that burdens humanity. Those ideas may have formed the basis of their initial friendship, but as their respective philosophical views developed a rift also formed, with Camus rejecting the more radical notions that Sartre embraced. Again "The Rebel", which Sartre deeply disapproved of, is one such example.
Aren't anarchists different than leftists? I don't think an anarchist would support Obamacare, given that it forces people to pay/join.
Anarchists are part of the left. I think you're thinking of anarcho-capitalists who reject that sort of coercion. Which is not to say anarchists aren't against Obamacare, but it tends to be [0] more on the grounds that it's corporatist incrementalism. They're against "pay or die" coercion in general, and the capitalist healthcare systems as built on that premise.
[0] weasel words used as I am not an anarchist nor have I read a substantial amount of anarchist theory
I'm a little fuzzy, also. I assume anachists would not be in favor of a law like Obamacare because it was imposed on the 49% of the population who were strongly against it. I would assume acarcho-capitalists would have the same conclusion.
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 read The Plague this summer.
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...