The Plague and Our Plague

Nicholas Miao

We always assume that the pandemic will end at some point. Even as cases
begin to rise again, we cannot accept the prospect of us contracting Covid-19. ‘Oh,
I’m not going to get it,’ ‘we’ll develop a vaccine soon,’ ‘the NHS will save us.’ Just like
the people of Oran in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague, we keep making
excuses of why it wouldn’t happen to us. We imagine ourselves as ‘civilised’ people
with funny little gadgets like phones and smartwatches and robots that can do
surgery on grapes. ‘It’s unthinkable,’ one of the characters note, ‘everyone knows
[plague]’s ceased to appear in Western Europe.’ But for Camus, there is no progress
when it comes to dying. ‘Yes, everyone knows that,’ he said, ‘except the dead men.’

The more religiously-minded, such as Paneloux, the Catholic priest in the

novel, may explain the plague as an act of ‘divine punishment’ from God for our
moral depravation under the influence of capitalist materialism. Camus cannot
accept this: for him, this was (what he melodramatically called) ‘philosophical suicide’
– to give in to a religious or spiritual framework, because life without a unified
principle is too difficult to accept. The point to be made here is not about religion
itself, (nor is it the intention of the author to launch a blasphemous attack on
organised religion) but an allusion to Camus’ claim that the universe is inherently
irrational despite our longing to rationalise it by reducing it to human terms. This was
suggested in the novel through the prolonged agony and eventual death of an
innocent child. Suffering, for Camus, is not some ‘divine punishment’. Rather, as
Alain de Botton said, it is random – it makes no sense – and that is ‘the kindest thing
one can say about it.’

Remember the ‘chaos’ before the pandemic: Australian wildfires, talks of

World War III, the global protest wave from Chile to Hong Kong. We know that our
‘normal’ lives can be torpedoed by circumstances at any given moment. Yet as
Camus notes, ‘somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our
heads from a blue sky.’ The purpose of The Plague is not to panic a future
pandemic-stricken audience. Because to panic implies an escape from an immediate
but temporary danger. But there is no escape the plague: the one that permanently
places us at the whims of our condition that either kills us or render our lives entirely
irrelevant, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it – but that’s OK. For
once we have accepted this as a fact of life, we begin to realise the delicacy of it. We
stop worrying about death, because we know it is the only certainty. We do away
with our attachment to the illusion of normality, because we know that nothing is ever
constant. Finally, we adopt a newfound passion for life, because we recognise the
fragility of the human condition.

Therefore, recognising this ‘absurd’ world, as Camus called it, should not lead
to despair. Certainly, our desire for meaning and unity will always be in direct conflict
with an inherently meaningless and irrational universe. But we must nonetheless
accept our condition, to continue on this endless endeavour with the knowledge that
meaning is not possible, at least not in human terms. And to rebel against it, by
refusing a ‘philosophical suicide’ and embracing all that life has to offer. Because if
all experiences are equally meaningless, then all experiences are equally important.
The Plague ends with the citizens of Oran rejoicing in the streets, celebrating the end
of suffering. But both Camus and the reader will see that our plague does not end –
the plague of the inescapable human condition, of which suffering is a mere arbitrary
element. We must, therefore, learn to live with it – not in submission, but in
‘permanent rebellion’, because ‘there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’
We are like Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to a meaningless task sealed only in
death. But ‘the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart’,
Camus notes. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’