Albert Camus - Nobel Laureate, Resistance Fighter and Humanitarian

Keywords : Albert Camus, humanitarian ethics, universal responsibility, conscious engagement, struggle & freedom & redemption.

"Courage for our friends, Merry!"
Eowyn, in film production of Lord of the Rings


Albert Camus was one of the great thinkers and writers of the 20th Century, and made a profound and lasting contribution to the modern understanding of the human condition in terms of basic personal ethical responsibility and broader social relations. His long novel "The Plague" is one of the great modern stories which explores what it means to be a thinking, feeling human being in times of suffering and oppression, and shows through character development and story arc the meaning of life from a humanitarian viewpoint.

In a time when the world was polarized into different camps, Camus emphasized the inherent value of human freedom and conscious choice and shared existential issues. He also spoke and worked against totalitarian regimes and criticized or rejected their proponents in the free societies, such as the Marxist JP Sartre. Camus represented and embodied what is called "L'Homme Engage'", the Committed Man.

Here I reproduce one of his essays on human relations and social conscience, which is just as strikingly clear and relevant as today as when written in the Nineteen Forties.

Along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, and the Dalai Lama, Albert Camus is one of the Great Voices for hope and for a commitment to humanity which is both broad and deep. Like these others he represents and teaches a kind of universal responsibility. His words and actions show people a real alternative to one-party totalitarianism, blind religious belief, mere nihilism and unevolved personal self-obsession.

It's not about belief or dogma, it's not about "god" or money, it's about freedom and responsibility, which is what we all must engage, whatever our paths in life. This is because we are all human beings who must learn to live with ourselves, and with others. The point is to do so consciously, to live as though human life really matters, both our own and that of others.

Camus emphasized that slavery and coercion and lies and propaganda must be rejected on all levels for people to become authentic and conscious and free. This simple idea is one of the most radical and important steppingstones to a more human world and to more broader-based cooperation among the peoples of the world. That's what matters.

As a humanitarian social-change agent and Buddhist teacher, I will tell you that almost no-one has made a more profound difference in my understanding of what it means to be a human being than Albert Camus. This was true thirty years ago and it remains true now.

"The Plague" is a long book about struggle and suffering, it is true, but that's what life is, both for those who do not care for others, and for those who do. The question is how each of us faces struggle and suffering, alone or together. The answer Camus gives is that we have to give a damn.

"Giving a damn" for everyone's sake is one of the great themes in literature, and also for several schools of spiritual practice and classical philosophy. One finds that theme driving other books of existential challenge, war and personal struggle, such as The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. Not surprisingly, these are some of my favorite works. Along with some of the principal documents of the United Nations.

In his song "Passing Through", Leonard Cohen says

"I was at Franklin Roosevelt's side
The night before he died.
He said 'One world must come out of World War II'.
Be you yellow white or tan,
A man is still a man.
We're all on one road and we're only passing through."

Ours is very much a time of accelerating careless or even destructive intent and increasing consequences of same. There are not many effective voices for free and peaceful co-operation, but those who call for blood and highjacking or even tearing down civilization are emboldened. This has severe implications for human societies everywhere and for the planet as a whole. It's why I sometimes make use of a rather unusual prayer, which is

"Pardon me thou bleeding Earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers."

But it is possible to be, as Camus pointed out, someone who is neither a victim nor an executioner, and to be someone who stands fast in the middle, someone who strongly works for balance on our long road to freedom. There are many stories there, both known and unknown.

To me, it's all the same story. It's a truly human story. It's about struggle and freedom and redemption being really pretty much the same thing, and for all of us at the same time. And that is why we say
"For All Our Relations."

Our past is not a binding condition nor is it our potential. We can re-choose to awaken to our own shared humanity, which is indeed no different than awakening to ourselves and our own hopes and our own lives. For better or worse, probably both, we are all in this together. Carpe diem!

Of course I never met Albert Camus in the flesh. Still he is one of my very few and very dear friends. So then, here I have introduced to you one of my friends.


K T

"Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people…"
- Albert Camus

From another web site -
Dr. Rieux of La Peste (The Plague), 1947, who tirelessly attends the plague-stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of injustice, and confirms Camus's words:
"We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them".

From Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus

Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher who won the Nobel prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, although Camus refused this label; as he wrote in his essay The Rebel, his whole life was devoted against the philosophy of nihilism. His most important phrase for the future was: "All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it".


www.spunk.org/texts/write...sp001174.txt

Neither Victims Nor Executioners (French: Ni Victimes, ni bourreaux) was a series of essays by Albert Camus that were serialized in Combat, the daily newspaper of the French Resistance, in November 1946. In the essays he discusses violence and murder and the impact these have on those that perpetrate, suffer and observe them.

NEITHER VICTIMS NOR EXECUTIONERS by Albert Camus

Yes, we must raise our voices. Up to this point, I have refrained from appealing to emotion. We are being torn apart by a logic of history which we have elaborated in every detail--a net which threatens to strangle us.

It is not emotion which can cut through the web of a logic which has gone to irrational lengths, but only reason which can meet logic on its own ground. But I should not want to leave the impression... that any program for the future can get along without our powers of love and indignation.

I am well aware that it takes a powerful prime mover to get men into motion and that it is hard to throw one's self into a struggle whose objectives are so modest and where hope has only a rational basis-- and hardly even that. But the problem is not how to carry men away; it is essential, on the contrary, that they not be carried away but rather that they be made to understand clearly what they are doing.

To save what can be saved so as to open up some kind of future--that is the prime mover, the passion and the sacrifice that is required. It demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly, whether humanity's lot must be made still more miserable in order to achieve far-off and shadowy ends, whether we should accept a world bristling with arms where brother kills brother; or whether, on the contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped than we are.

For my part, I am fairly sure that I have made the choice. And, having chosen, I think that I must speak out, that I must state that I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder, and that I must take the consequences of such a decision. The thing is done, and that is as far as I can go at present....

However, I want to make clear the spirit in which this article is written. We are asked to love or to hate such and such a country and such and such a people. But some of us feel too strongly our common humanity to make such a choice.

Those who really love the Russian people, in gratitude for what they have never ceased to be--that world leaven which Tolstoy and Gorky speak of--do not wish for them success in power politics, but rather want to spare them, after the ordeals of the past, a new and even more terrible bloodletting. So, too, with the American people, and with the peoples of unhappy Europe.

This is the kind of elementary truth we are likely to forget amidst the furious passions of our time. Yes, it is fear and silence and the spiritual isolation they cause that must be fought today. And it is sociability and the universal inter- communication of men that must be defended. Slavery, injustice, and lies destroy this intercourse and forbid this sociability; and so we must reject them.

But these evils are today the very stuff of history, so that many consider them necessary evils. It is true that we cannot "escape history," since we are in it up to our necks. But one may propose to fight within history to preserve from history that part of man which is not its proper province. That is all I have to say here.

The "point" of this article may be summed up as follows: Modern nations are driven by powerful forces along the roads of power and domination. I will not say that these forces should be furthered or that they should be obstructed. They hardly need our help and, for the moment, they laugh at attempts to hinder them. They will, then, continue.

But I will ask only this simple question: What if these forces wind up in a dead end, what if that logic of history on which so many now rely turns out to be a will o' the wisp? What if, despite two or three world wars, despite the sacrifice of several generations and a whole system of values, our grandchildren--supposing they survive-- find themselves no closer to a world society?

It may well be that the survivors of such an experience will be too weak to understand their own sufferings. Since these forces are working themselves out and since it is inevitable that they continue to do so,there is no reason why some of us should not take on the job of keeping alive, through the apocalyptic historical vista that stretches before us, a modest thoughtfulness which, without pretending to solve everything, will constantly be prepared to give some human meaning to everyday life.

The essential thing is that people should carefully weight the price they must pay.... All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice.

After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked.

Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.

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