Albert Camus
This image was created by Richard Bryant with the assistance of DALL·E 2.
The world is absurd, and the crazy runs deep. There are famines in Gaza and Sudan. America is in the middle of a pickleball craze. The bipolarity at the heart of modernity is difficult to ignore. Despite experiencing cultural road rage most days, we must address serious issues.
Hard questions dominate the news, society, politics, and our lives. Will democracy continue to exist? Is climate change irreversible? Will the ongoing economic upheaval ease the struggle of people around the world? What are the possibilities for peace in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine in the coming months? These are all hard, seemingly unanswerable questions. Any possible answers to these questions are not abstract or theoretical. Each question (and its given answer) impacts the lives of millions of people. Wrong answers will cost human lives. Any answer must be measured, considered, and objective. We are mistaken if we think a quick fix will solve these complex questions. A "do this and do it now" solution will, ultimately, kill us all. We are morally obligated to answer the difficult questions despite life's absurdities. We must take the hard questions seriously. It is suicide to do otherwise.
In this famous passage from Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tells the reader it is possible to choose life (the moral obligation to exist and embrace the challenges that accompany life) despite the world's absurdity. Life isn't something to abandon in the face of absurdity or humanity's immense challenges.
"One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living; that is certainly a truth — yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged, come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide — this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an "objective" mind can always introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this passion. It calls simply for an unjust — in other words, logical — thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end."
"Go straight to the real problem," Camus teaches. Absurdity is unavoidable. The existence of absurdity isn't a reason to give up on life, whether immediately or as a long-term proposition. The benign neglect of ignorance (he calls it the "disinterested mind") or individuals in desperation and depression can find meaning beyond absurdity and the hardest of the hard questions. The world is dark. Camus is hopeful. The world moves through cycles of despair and hopelessness. Inevitably, these times come to an end and hope returns. When the world is in these moments, individuals must commit to answering the hard questions despite the brutal absurdities competing for our attention.
Again, from The Myth of Sisyphus, he writes:
In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body's judgment is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
Camus says the will to live is stronger than the world's famines, wars, and political dramas. Humanity is bigger than the problems we create. Our imagination can both manufacture and solve crises. As such, Camus finds a means to capture hope from the clutches of despair.
Here is a twenty-seven-year-old Camus describing what appears irrational:
"We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls."
-Alber Camus, The Almond Tree
In this long, polarized political summer marked by danger and despair, Camus asks his readers to acknowledge absurdity and confront life's complex realities. It is possible, even for an existentialist, to walk and chew gum at the same time. If we do so, we will learn that within us lies an invincible life worth living.