IN THE STRANGE LAND (via Tom Morin):

The Stranger in Crawford: a review of Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, ed., Camus at Combat: Writing, 1944–1947 Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Michael Mcdonald, Nov/Dec 2006, The American Interest)

The Bush Administration as a “messianic” force imposing its version of democracy willy-nilly on the rest of the world; the Bush Administration as hostile to dissent both at home (the Patriot Act) and to the criticism and advice it receives abroad; the Bush Administration as seeking to promote its brand of justice while at the same time condoning torture (Abu Ghraib). Carroll’s generic warnings seem too close to the specific complaints repeatedly raised against this Administration to be coincidental. Accordingly, one is apt to leave his essay thinking that if Camus were alive and writing today, he would be alternating columns with Andrew Cockburn and Katha Pollitt in The Nation. Put another way, Carroll’s introduction will do much to reinforce the notion that Bush has so little in common with Camus that it is a travesty for him even to have picked up a copy of The Stranger.

Carroll deserves our gratitude for helping to place Camus at Combat before the American reading public, but his own anti-Bush reflexes seem to have prevented him from seeing what Camus understood about some of the same problems Bush has had to face or—heaven forefend!—how alike the two men might actually be. Yes, I know one is prone to scoff, but then there is this from Camus’ most recent biographer, Olivier Todd, who has written that Camus was “a man of gut feelings and intuitions more than a careful reasoner.” Sound like any other “gut reasoner” we know? Then there are the more substantive similarities that a careful reading reveals, all five of which are striking.

First, Camus and Bush are similar in speaking of pre- and post-mentalities. Camus spoke of pre- and post-1940 Occupation mentality, arguing that there was to be no return to the corrupt politics and distorted views of the past that had compromised French life. Bush speaks of pre- and post-9/11 mentalities and likewise warns against a return to reactive thinking.

Second, Camus and Bush similarly believe that the times call for clear moral guidelines: “Tout ce qui n’est pas avec nous est contre nous”, Camus announced in one Combat editorial. “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists”, Bush stated in the days after 9/11. Camus then proceeded to gloss this point better than Bush ever has (Presidential speechwriters please take note): “These are moments when everything becomes clear, when every action constitutes a commitment, when every choice has its price, when nothing is neutral anymore. It is the time of morality, that is, a time when language becomes clear and it is possible to throw it back in the realists’ face.”

Third, Camus was against “political realism”, calling it “a degrading thing.” “Those whom we called leaders”, he wrote, “invented names for this abdication of responsibility. They called it ‘nonintervention’ one day and ‘political realism’ the next. Compared with such imperious language, what could a poor little word like honor count for.” Bush, too, is in principle against the old-style political realism that allowed the United States to continue to ally itself with regimes harboring terrorists, and with observers who maintain that the stability of Middle Eastern dictatorships is a good thing.

Fourth, Camus could be equally as succinct on dissenters as Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney: “It is obvious that words have value and need to be weighed carefully”, Camus editorialized on one occasion, adding: “The Resistance is telling you that we are now at a stage where every word counts, where every word is a commitment.”

And fifth, Camus’ sense of solidarity with oppressed peoples living under tyrannies eerily evokes statements in Bush’s inaugural and State of the Union speeches. “Today we know that the nations of the world share a common destiny”, Camus declared. “We will never achieve victory as long as the cause of freedom continues to be crushed in long-suffering Spain.”

Carroll also overstates the extent to which Camus embraced nonviolence in the postwar period when he writes, “The ultimate limit that Camus will impose on political involvement, the ‘no’ that always [will] be uttered, is the refusal to accept the murder of innocent civilians as a legitimate means to any end.” There is no doubt that Camus had a basic repugnance toward killing and violence, but that repugnance did not prevent him from taking up arms when forced to do so. Moreover, fairly considered, Camus rejected the legitimation of violence (which is one reason why Dwight Macdonald, who embraced pacifism in the 1940s, thought that collaboration with Camus on his journal Politics might be problematic).

Carroll also paints a misleading picture of Camus when he says that he “in fact considered all the ideologies struggling for dominance in the postwar period to be potentially deadly, with each of them in its own way contributing to the creation of a state of terror and the depreciation of life.” Arthur Koestler, a close friend of Camus, once remarked that people like himself who opposed totalitarian ideologies were “fighting a total lie in the name of a half-truth.” Camus himself was even less equivocal: “We know that the cause of the American people is also our cause and will continue to be so as long as freedom is interfered with anywhere in the world.”

One key difference is that, unlike the President and most Americans, Camus sadly lacked the courage of one of his core convictions, Master and Pupil (Robert Royal, July/August 2003, Crisis):

Grenier oversaw Camus's thesis on "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism," a subject that attracted master and pupil alike for its intrinsic interest--a comparison of two high points of the human spirit, one Christian, one pagan--but also because it was a subject that had engaged a great ancient predecessor in the region, St. Augustine. Both were open to a larger horizon than was typical among contemporary intellectuals. Or as Camus was to formulate it later, Grenier "prevented me from being a humanist in the sense that it is understood today--I mean a man blinded by narrow certainties." Contrary to almost the whole of modern French thought, Camus believed that it was better to be "a good bourgeois than a bad intellectual or a mediocre writer," and he and Grenier strove to avoid the vanity and self-deception endemic to French intellectuals.

Both had intermittent attractions to Christianity, especially Catholicism, because, as Grenier put it, it reflected the principle that there is "no truth for man that is not incarnated." And Grenier could be merciless toward what he believed was a "dilettantism of despair" among many French intellectuals. But they were also put off by the harsh tone of many people in the French Church at the time, which seemed particularly offensive because of the Church's historical failings, as they saw it. Camus confesses at one point: "Catholic thought always seems bittersweet to me. It seduces me then offends me. Undoubtedly, I lack what is essential." That may be true, but it is also a sad commentary on Catholic history in France that these two good men, flawed and perhaps blinded as they may have been by certain modern intellectual currents, felt such ambivalence. The sense of guilt (personal and universal) in the later Camus is so palpable and profound that many people believe that had he not died at age 47, he would have eventually become a Christian. It's a pious wish, but I have always thought it ignored certain invincible circumstances. These letters have not changed my mind.

There's an interesting echo of Camus's dilemma in the recent Without Roots, where an Italian atheist, Marcello Pera, argues that Europe's moral relativism is destroying it and must be replaced by a return to Christian morality, but is unable to take the step of believing himself. This inability to recognize that the aesthetic reason for faith trumps the counterarguments of Reason makes tragic figures of such decent men.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2006 7:03 PM