Letter Never Sent

The following is roughly 50-60 percent personal admission. Read at your own risk:

Is it reasonable to want and expect ever increasing happiness and excitement about life? Sometimes I think that I’m fighting against forces beyond my control. Like I’m wading in the Gulf of Mexico and taking swings at the waves. Sometimes I think that life is a trial and that the world is a giant millstone grinding us down into powder to be cast to the four winds, or maybe a meat grinder which sucks up everyone and spits them out in a spray tiny, bloody chunks of flesh and bone. If the course of things is ultimately beyond my control, why do I fight it? I’ve been thinking a lot about this in regards to the current world situation and how it relates to my own personality and worldview.

I long ago made the connection between my essential feelings of rebellion, dueling pessimism/optimism/fatalism, and overwhelming idealism and my early life experiences. I think my world view is almost certainly due to my experiences growing up. My father could be very strict and very authoritarian seemingly without purpose. He seemed to dominate my family just as a matter of course. I don’t mean to suggest that I had an unhappy childhood only that I grew up in an environment where I was told how to think and behave. It could be very chaotic and unpredictable. I never really knew when my father would be angry or if he wasn’t angry how long that would last. Anyway, this and the fact that I grew up believing God was an asshole who wanted people to burn in hell unless they accepted his grace (I was raised a Southern Baptist) caused me to feel rather cynical about power and authority. Anyway it just reminded me of this Camus stuff you might find interesting on the subject of rebellion:

Camus drew three consequences from the existence of the absurd: “my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.” Decision was his, and his love of life led him to defy the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus drew those consequences from a reflection on suicide. In its sequel, The Rebel (1951), Camus expanded on his earlier themes. This time, murder provoked him. The twentieth century was proving that history is a slaughter-bench, drenched with disease, injustice, and especially man-made death. The absurd does not dictate suicide, but, Camus wondered does it legitimize murder?

Again Camus answered emphatically “No!” If the absurd implies that everything is permitted, it does not follow that nothing is forbidden. Building on the insight that the most authentically human response to absurdity is to protest against it, Camus emphasized that such defiance is and should be fundamentally social and communal. Life is fundamentally lived with others. Absurdity enters existence not simply because one’s private needs go unmet, but because so many conditions exist that destroy family and friends, waste our shared experience, and rob human relationships of significance. Hence, far from dictating suicide or legitimating murder, the absurd should lead to rebellion in the name of justice and human solidarity. “I rebel,” wrote Camus, “therefore we exist.”

Here, like Sisyphus, we face an uphill climb, because the rebellion Camus advocated is characterized by moderation. By moderation, Camus did not mean to say that our actions should be hesitant, dispassionate, or weak. But he did not want the rebel to become the revolutionary who so often destroys life under the pretense of saving it. “The logic of the rebel,” asserted Camus, “is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” Camus was no pacifist. He knew that at times the logic of the rebel might even require the rebel to kill. But Camus’s true rebel will never say or do anything “to legitimize murder, because rebellion. in principle, is a protest against death.”

As if the task of rebellion were not difficult enough, Camus once more reminds us that the rebel can never expect to escape the fate of Sisyphus: “Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered,” he wrote. “He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world.” Perhaps things would have been different if the world had been ours to create, but at least “man is not entirely to blame; it was not he who started history.” On the other hand, Camus added, neither “is he entirely innocent, since he continues it.” The task before us, Camus concluded, is “to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2003 at 11:34 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.