The Plague

"Camus's exploration of human nature and resilience in the face of an uncontrollable force fits Lex Fridman's interest in existentialism and the philosophical implications of societal challenges. It's an expected read for someone exploring the human condition under duress."

"The second book is The Plague . Yes. I’m reading it for the third time now, as we all shelter in place to deal with this global pandemic. I really liked it the first time that I read it, obviously enough to read it a second time. But on this third reading, actually sitting through this and having experiences that are similar to what’s happening to the characters in the book, it really brings home just how powerful his insights were into human nature and the way that we respond to the contradiction between simultaneously feeling isolated and separated from everyone we know and yet also exiled because of the way that that separation makes us feel. Yes, and I think he does that on purpose. He also sets it up in a town that he describes as utterly bleak and ugly. He’s not particularly kind to the townsfolk and he describes them as going through their lives without thinking and without really living either. I think that’s the contrast that he’s setting up, to make a point about how important it is to make use of our lives instead of just thoughtlessly wasting them away. Yes, I think that’s all right. The book is meant to be jarring and is drawing our attention to how much of our lives is superficial and meaningless and yet somehow still takes up most of our energy. He’s got a line in The Plague where he talks about people thinking of freedom as a right, rather than a duty. They’ve got this mercantile understanding of our relationships to others in which the ability to make money is paramount at the expense of all else. And I think that is just so important when talking about this, because he’s drawing attention to the fact that freedom doesn’t really make sense without others and freedom isn’t meant to be this sort of limitless thing where you get to do whatever you want, particularly in pursuit of money and business, which he’s generally suspicious of. Rather, freedom is this recognition that we are bound to one another and that what really matters in life, when we’re really doing something meaningful, is when we’re acting in solidarity, even, and perhaps especially, if that means putting ourselves at risk. No. The bourgeoisie are never really going to get much sympathy from Camus because he sees them as largely complicit in the perpetuation of human suffering. He was very much affected by his own poverty, and the effect that poverty had on the life of his mother, whom he absolutely adored. He was always aware of the role that social classes played. Part of that was just a baked-in disdain for the oppression that contributed to human suffering. But, more importantly, I don’t think Camus would be particularly judgmental of individuals acting in their way. I think he was much more invested in criticizing the larger system. He says in The Plague that most people aren’t bad, they just misunderstand what’s important and that far more can be accomplished by understanding human behaviour that way. It has been said that he did extensive research for The Plague . The ‘plague’ is generally taken to be a metaphor or meta-commentary on Nazism during World War II. I’m not necessarily sold on that as the exclusive interpretation of the novel. Other people have argued that he was reading about plagues during the time that he was writing this. But one thing that’s really interesting in the background is that, for at least a period of time while writing the novel, Camus was trying to recover from a bout of tuberculosis and he was staying in a village in southern France in the Free Zone (Vichy). The remarkable events that took place there were the basis for the book called Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Paul Hallie. In this small, poor, rural village they banded together and pooled their resources to save somewhere between three and five thousand Jews from the Nazis. Camus was in this village as this was happening, as people were hiding, as they were separated from their loved ones, while he himself was separated from his loved ones. So, I’m not sure to what degree the astute nature of his writing can be attributed to his reading about previous plagues, or to his first-hand experience of being bedridden with an illness, embedded in a town where people were hiding from a much more militaristic and malignant sort of ‘plague’. Yes. He was also there for a time."

"It’s an amazing book, considering Camus probably never personally experienced a plague. In his novel, Camus captured everything that we were dealing with in the Aids epidemic without Aids existing at that time. Without his knowing what the consequences of the HIV plague were going to be, he seems to have gotten all the actors in there and the myriad of things that you wrestle with. For example, there’s the researcher, there’s the research subject, there’s even the opportunist who takes advantage of the terrible things happening. There’s the journalist—which reminds me of a book we’ll talk about later, And the Band Played On . Journalists were critical in calling attention to the Aids epidemic. Camus describes that in The Plague as well. Then there are the volunteers—the people who just happened to be there at the time of the plague. Instead of running away from it—as many people do—Camus goes into how a volunteer gets deeply involved in it and what they can do. Camus seems to have understood the many other components of a plague—the fear, the discrimination, the hopefulness and the hopelessness—and he also wrestles with, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ I have read that the book could be an allegory of war, especially his dealing with what happened in France with the Nazis. That’s not quite the same as a plague that comes on you from an infectious source. Even though there’s suffering and death there, it’s psychologically and emotionally dealing with the question of human evil. Plagues are not inherently evil, although they create profound and extensive pain and suffering. How did Camus know all of this? Did he live through a plague? Not that I or anyone else knows of. But he did live through a terrible time with war, and war is integral to the spread of disease. Somehow he managed to put all that together in this very well-written book. The one that hit me first was where he writes that, “…the plague had lost its fleshy substance.” It’s such a simple phrase. At the beginning, the people we saw had names. We knew them personally and we saw them getting sicker and we saw some of them dying. Then, as the HIV epidemic continued, we started getting into confidentiality and reporting HIV infected patients anonymously. You didn’t use the names because of the fear of discrimination. So, what was reported was that the epidemic had so many thousands of cases. In the process, people forgot the suffering of individuals. It didn’t seem real anymore. People were overwhelmed by the numbers and began talking about, for example, 500,000 plus or minus 30,000 individuals. They didn’t want to think about the real numbers. We got used to things. That’s very true of the Aids epidemic now. I started writing my book about the time there seemed to be a mounting indifference to HIV. The report last year was that there were 1.5 million new infections in women and children, and another million in men. Then we wait for the next year’s report. We get shaken by the Ebola virus because it has caused 8,000 deaths in one year. In that same year, HIV caused a million deaths. One of the reasons I wrote my book was because I did think the epidemic was losing its “fleshy substance.” People were forgetting—especially about the women and children in poor countries. They were being talked about in terms of how bad the epidemic had become but very little was being done to help them. I end my book with Camus’s conclusion, where he reveals who wrote the book. He says, “the chronicle is drawing to an end and it seems to be the moment for Dr. Bernard Rieux to confess that he is the narrator”. Then he goes on to say, “he was well placed for giving a true account of all that he saw and heard” and “following the dictates of his heart, he has deliberately taken the victim’s side and tried to share with his fellow citizens the only certitudes they had in common—love, exile, and suffering. Thus he can truly say there was not one of these anxieties in which he did not share, no predicament of theirs that was not his.” I wanted to end my book that way because he captured it in his novel. I’m deliberately taking the side of the women and children, as if they’re people that I know personally. I want to defend them. I don’t want them to lose their dignity by being diminished or becoming less valuable. They have a right to health, they have a right not to remain in poverty, they have a right to the same medicines that we have and that have changed this epidemic in wealthy countries. It’s absolutely characteristic. I refer to it as ‘denialism’. The most well-known denialist in the Aids epidemic is Peter Duesberg, a tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who says that HIV is not the cause of Aids. Other, more subtle, forms of denialism exist. In 1981/82, we would go to meetings, present to the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health, submit articles to journals. People said we were exaggerating, that this was not going to be a major epidemic, that this was confined to a small group of gay men who were having multiple sexual partners. Even as we were talking about it, the epidemic was affecting hundreds of thousands of people. It certainly existed before 1981. Nobody was aware of it because there was nobody to diagnose it early on. Individuals with Aids were misdiagnosed as having advanced tuberculosis or malnutrition. People think that scientists look at the data, and then make conclusions that are evidence-based. But scientists can also be denialists. If you look through the history of medicine, and discovery, there’s always a period of denialism where people and scientists say, ‘That’s not true!’ Often they don’t change their mind until it becomes so obvious and by that time it has caused irreversible damage. In the HIV epidemic, denialism led to irreversible damage in the form of advanced disease and death. So, yes, denialism is a serious problem. That was prominent early on and I don’t think it’s gone away. I still find people placing blame on those that suffer from HIV for what has happened. Part of it has to do with not understanding that we all have behaviours that can be damaging. It’s a repeat of history, just like the spread of syphilis was blamed on prostitutes and not on the clients. I had to deal with it early in the epidemic. As Camus describes in the book, there’s a physician who is thrown into this plague and reasons, ‘I’m a doctor—I have to respond to this. I can’t and won’t make a moral judgement.’ I used to tell people that if someone came in after a terrible automobile accident and it was because they were intoxicated, I would not place blame on them. As a physician, my duty, my moral obligation, is to treat the person no matter what."

"Albert Camus’s The Plague probably remains the best-known novel on the topic of epidemic disease. It tells the story of those involved in an epidemic in a North African setting. It is very interested in the details about how quarantines are enforced and the role not just of the government, but of individuals who band together into groups to manage the epidemic. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Published in 1947, shortly after World War Two , The Plague is, in some ways, primarily an allegory for the spread of fascism. It works well both at the allegorical and the literal level. This book is very vivid in conveying what it feels like to be in a city hit by an epidemic and what it feels like to be in quarantine. It also conveys how important it is to retain our humanity and our sense of connection to others in times when so much is at stake."

"Because it really speaks to my generation. I grew up during World War II. Though I was a young child, I can still remember blackout shades coming down in San Francisco because people were worried about an invasion. My wife is English. We just saw a documentary about Churchill , and in it there were lots of English women carrying their babies into Tube [metro] stations during air raids. I thought maybe one of those babies is [my wife] Joanna. That was the world that we were born into. Camus, in The Plague, writes about that world. Although the story takes place in Algeria, he’s really writing about the Nazi occupation of France. He talks about the plague . Well, the plague is that part of a human being which can be very evil. That germ, he says at the end, never dies, it simply goes into remission. It lurks. It lurks in the cupboards, it lurks in the hallways, it lurks in the filing cabinets. It lurks throughout the house, perhaps one day to reawaken and once again send forth its pestilence into what was once a happy city. All over the world, people are trying to stop that plague because it’s still there, in the hearts of people. To keep the plague away, we build institutions including independent judiciaries to interpret constitutions that contain words, which are protective of human beings’ basic rights. That’s true in Europe, it’s true in the United States, and it’s more and more true throughout the world. I have a job that is one small part of the effort to build a barrier against another epidemic of evil like what we saw in World War II."

"Finally, it may seem a cliché to pick this book, but Albert Camus’s The Plague has justifiably become a bestseller this year. Camus is startlingly perceptive about the psychology of those in lockdown, and the ways in which different people cope with the fear of contagion. Previously most of us were told to read this novel as an oblique commentary on the Nazi occupation of Europe. Now we can appreciate it at a literal level too. Editor’s note: If you’ve enjoyed our 2020 philosophy summer reading list and are looking for similar recommendations, here is Nigel’s 2019 summer reading list ."