I hate to do this, but I’m interrupting the regularly scheduled Nietzsche programming (here and here) to talk about loneliness.

And yes, I acknowledge that this is a well-worn topic. I’ve probably done half a dozen pod episodes on the subject — maybe more. Still, I keep returning to it because I think we’ll look back on this period and realize that atomization was the disease that ultimately broke us.

A couple of obligatory data points first: In 2003, Americans spent about 30 hours a month socializing with friends. By 2020, it was down to 10 hours. I suspect it looks far worse when you expand the time horizon.

Now, 2020 was obviously a freak year, so you might reasonably blame Covid. But the decline started long before the pandemic and it definitely didn’t end with it. The latest federal time-use data, released this summer, found that Americans are still socializing less than they were a decade ago. In 2015, 38 percent of people spent at least some time socializing or communicating with others on an typical day. Last year it was 30 percent. Not great.

There are a million billion caveats here, and I don’t want to oversell the “loneliness epidemic” thing. God knows that’s been done already and the data on whether people feel lonelier is surprisingly complicated. But we’re spending significantly less time with friends, less time with neighbors, less time in coffee shops and clubs and all the other dumb little places where human beings used to awkwardly bump into each other. Whether people actually feel lonely is beside the point.

I thought about this recently when I went back and listened to an old The Gray Area episode with Lyndsey Stonebridge about Hannah Arendt.

For my money, Arendt’s the most important political theorist of the 20th century (apologies to the Rawls enthusiasts in here). She’s generally wheeled out whenever someone wants to talk about fascism or totalitarianism or, heaven forbid, the “banality of evil.” I’m afraid I’m going to do a bit of that here, but we’ll stick mainly to the loneliness part.

First, a quick question: If I asked you why it’s bad to be lonely, what springs to mind? I’d wager most answers have to do with mental health. Nothing wrong with that. But Arendt thought loneliness also had a way of loosening our grip on a shared world and for that reason it was a serious political hazard.

She wasn’t talking about loneliness in the ordinary sense of sitting around on Friday night wishing you had someone to see The Odyssey with. Arendt was writing The Origins of Totalitarianism in the late 40s and so she was looking at the mass societies that emerged in Europe. Millions of people had been cut loose from the institutions and communities that gave their lives some semblance of structure. You can think of that as the political soil.

I remember being consumed by similar questions in grad school. For me at least, figuring out how so many otherwise civilized people could be made to do such horrible things was the question of political theory. Arendt talks about how the only thing that people really shared was a vague sense of dislocation, a feeling that they no longer belonged to anything durable. The population gets more fragmented and resentful and eventually that creates a political vacuum.

The concern, for Arendt, was that these sorts of conditions produce a lot of negative solidarity. Not much space for productive politics when the only binding force between people is the things they hate. Plenty of theorists noticed the importance of common enemies. Arendt’s contribution was to map it onto a theory of totalitarianism.

If I had to simplify the political physics and do Arendt’s version of Plato’s theory of regime change, it would look like this: Isolation breeds distrust, distrust breeds cynicism, cynicism breeds a kind of nihilism or resignation. And in that vacuum, authoritarianism looks like a good — maybe the only — answer

The cynicism part is a bit mystifying. Conventional wisdom says that cynics might be assholes, but they’re at least harder to fool. Arendt had the opposite insight. When you decide that everyone lies, that every institution is corrupt, that the media is propaganda and experts are frauds and politics is a scam, it becomes very difficult for any particular lie to bother you. Why would it? It’s all bullshit. So the politician who promises to burn the whole thing down sounds pretty damn appealing.

It’s not like there’s some natural law of politics that says loneliness leads inexorably to totalitarianism. I don’t think that’s the argument here. But a society full of alienated, cynical people who don’t trust each other and lack a shared reality has clearly lost some of its strongest defenses against totalitarian politics.

I think Arendt was right that we need each other, we need a common reality, to establish that the world is actually there. You see something. I see something. We’ll disagree about what it is or what it means. Maybe we’ll bicker about it. But the argument itself presupposes that we’re looking at the same thing. You need that shared ground before you can fight about anything else.

It’s kind of amazing that we have more access to information than any people in human history and somehow we’re less capable of agreeing on the most elementary facts about reality. Two people can live next door to each other and spend ten hours a day inhabiting totally incompatible stories.

There's a very lazy version of this argument where you say phones are making us lonely and social media is destroying democracy and everyone should go touch grass. But the only lazy part of that is the prescription. Your phone is actually bad and the feeds are designed to keep you atomized and reactive and the technologies are learning what pisses you off and what makes you feel clever and what triggers your persecution complex. And then it serves more of it. We all end up alone together, having strong opinions about things we've only ever seen through a screen.

I’m not sure Arendt gives us anything more practical here but she does add a very useful distinction between loneliness and solitude. Solitude is good and necessary. For Arendt, you need solitude to think. Loneliness is different (and worse): You lose your connection to other people and to the shared world that makes judgment possible.

Arendt’s famous New Yorker account of Adolf Eichmann was about this relationship between solitude, thinking, and judgment. When Arendt watched Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, she was struck by how ordinary he seemed. The guy had absorbed the logic of the system around him so thoroughly that he couldn’t stand outside it and reflect on what he was doing.

Worth noting that this portrait hasn't held up all that well. A decent case has been made (probably by many people) that Eichmann was a lot more of a true believer than Arendt realized, and that the mild functionary act was a courtroom performance. Maybe so. But the idea underneath it doesn't depend on Eichmann being the right example.

For Arendt, the act of thinking was like interrupting yourself. It meant creating a little distance between whatever the world was telling you and whatever you were going to do next. Hence the importance of solitude. But this is also why contact with other people is a big deal. You need enough distance from the crowd to think for yourself, and you need enough contact with other people to remember that your view of the world isn’t the only one.

We spend enormous amounts of time alone today. How much time do any of us spend thinking in the Arendtian sense? Being alone with the phone isn’t solitude. You're by yourself and still completely inside the digital crowd. Arendt's version requires that the noise stop for a minute — and it never does anymore. Worse still, we’re communicating constantly but rarely encountering anyone.

This was a point Stonebridge hammered over and over again in our conversation. Arendt thought politics was fundamentally acting with other people in the world. You can post and retweet and shout into the virtual void all you want — none of that shit is a substitute for concrete participation.

And it’s not like people have to agree in order to share a world. This is basically the premise of liberal democracy. But we do need enough solitude to think for ourselves and enough contact with other people to test our judgements against reality. We seem to be getting worse at both. I obviously don’t have a program here. I’m not telling anyone to join a bowling league — although I did that once and it was awesome.

I do, however, take Arendt’s point that a shared world is a practice and we’re quickly losing it. Which doesn’t necessarily mean totalitarianism is around the bend. The word has changed so much that I don’t think 20th century models are all that helpful. My hunch is that the 21st century will be considerably stupider but significantly more consequential because of our increasing technological capacity.

On that happy note … enjoy the rest of your week!

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My last post about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey triggered a lot of reactions. A benefit of being less nichey, I suppose.

First, a quick shout-out to Brad Delong for cross-posting the piece on his site, which brought tons of new eyeballs over here. I jumped into the Substack waters a little late so I’ll take all the help I can get. But it was this response from the always interesting Corey Robin that sent me back to the keyboard:

Throughout the piece, Sean contrasts the disingenuousness of the contemporary right’s defense of Christianity and love of the Homeric world with Nietzsche’s “honesty”: Nietzsche saw that you cannot have both, and he was willing to give up Christianity for the aristocratic radicalism of the Homeric ethic. But what this argument about Nietzsche (and his times) needs to confront is what Nietzsche saw as the major emblem/residue of Christianity in the modern world: it wasn’t the church or religion or anything like that. It was socialism.

Quite a bit to chew on there. I probably tried to do too much in the piece. My excuse, if you’re wondering, is that I was breezing through a few centuries of history so you’ll have to pardon the omissions. All I wanted to do was highlight the incoherent ideological stew on the modern right. Having pagan heroes, a Nietzschean morality, and a Christian identity just doesn’t make any sense.

Yet Nietzsche, the philosopher who said you can’t preserve Christianity and simultaneously resurrect the moral universe it spent two thousand years dismantling, remains a lodestar on the right. That, my friends, is a helluva contradiction no matter how you slice it.

Corey’s beef (if that’s the right word) was that my piece didn’t go far enough because Nietzsche was being “honest” for a very particular reason that I glossed over. The culture he admired (ancient Greece) was dying and the real threat was socialism, not the church. He was convinced (wrongly, as it turned out) that the church had already lost its metaphysical footing.

Dutiful readers of Nietzsche (and this Substack) know Nietzsche’s obsession with Christianity was about the moral revolution it unleashed. Strength, pride, and domination were turned into vices. While the poor, the meek, the suffering, the outcast, and the powerless were placed at the center of the moral universe.

As Corey reminded me, Nietzsche looked at late 19th century socialism and saw the residue of Christian ethics. All that talk of “equality of souls” was translated into concrete demands for material equality. That — more than anything else — was the big political problem. You know how much I adore Nietzsche but this is the stuff I just can’t get behind. There’s a deep, deep contempt for everyday people (“the herd”), which is why he was so committed to destroying the seeds of democracy.

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Anyway, when Camus said that Nietzsche wanted to force a “final decision” about atheism, this is what he was talking about. Europe had a choice to make: restore the Christian worldview, or find some new foundation for Christian morality, or accept the death of God. What it couldn’t do, Nietzsche thought, was reject Christianity while continuing to treat Christian morality as sacred. But that’s exactly what the modern right has pulled off, and that’s what I was trying to parse in the last piece (Side note: Matthew McManus is truly excellent on this topic and you should check out his work and also my podcast episode with him from a couple years ago).

The amusing thing is that right-wing intellectuals love to borrow Nietzsche’s language about decadence and resentment and decline and they love to rant about wokeness, DEI, campus radicals, social justice activists, and whatever the Democratic Socialists of America are doing this week. But none of these things constitute anything like the socialist threat that haunted 19th century Europe. There’s no mass movement in America preparing to abolish private property. Most of what gets called “Marxism” on the right is corporate branding or progressive cultural politics operating inside capitalist institutions.

Shadowboxing with symbolic egalitarianism as though it were a revolutionary material force is completely silly. The balance of forces is clear and everyone knows it. Capital owns the institutions. Wealth is more concentrated than it has been in generations. Whatever else this is, it ain’t a society trembling before socialism.

The right-wingers I wrote about don’t have to make Nietzsche’s final decision — that was the whole point. They can claim Christianity as a cultural identity while rejecting much of Christian morality, and they can celebrate wealth and hierarchy while continuing to invoke Christendom as the foundation of Western civilization. Again, there’s no powerful egalitarian movement forcing the contradiction into the open.

I’m glad Corey pushed me to think a little harder about what I was trying to say in the last post. What I called a misunderstanding of Nietzsche, Homer, and Christianity is more likely a correct — and useful — reading of the political situation.

The right can keep playing with the language of Christianity and Nietzsche while defending late-stage capitalism, even though none of it coheres philosophically. That it works politically is all that matters. No one has to ask too many thorny questions about what Jesus actually taught.

Nietzsche hated this arrangement because he thought Christian morality was still conquering Europe through socialism. Today the right faces no comparable pressure. Its version of Christianity has already been thinned into a civilizational brand and, miraculously, the right gets the authority of Christianity without all the pesky ethical demands.

What a political bargain!

My friend (and former boss) Ezra Klein wrote a great piece this weekend about the right-wing uproar over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Well, “uproar” is maybe the wrong word here. “Confusion” is more on target.

I have to confess, I’ve kind of enjoyed the hysterical overreactions to the film. Anything that pisses off Elon Musk this much has to have some inherent value, right?

At this stage, there’s basically no amount of cultural stupidity that can surprise me. But the discourse around The Odyssey has been a real doozy. We’re talking about a mythic poem about gods and monsters composed centuries before anything resembling our modern conceptions of race or historical representation. Complaining that its cast does not look sufficiently “Greek” is like complaining that the actors in The Lord of the Rings do not look sufficiently Gondorian.

As best I can tell, the more interesting distortion has received much less attention. It’s true that Nolan’s film does take enormous liberties with Homer’s poem. It softens its pagan morality and filters Odysseus’s story through recognizably Christian ideas about guilt, mercy, repentance, forgiveness, and the moral equality of human beings. It’s fine, I suppose, to be annoyed by that. What’s revealing is that the self-appointed defenders of Judeo-Christian civilization seem far more exercised by the racial makeup of the cast than by Nolan’s replacement of Homeric morality with Christian morality.

Watching all this discourse reminds me of when I was covering Trump and the alt-right in my early days with Vox. Back then, the alt-right was deep in its obsession with Nietzsche. And in both cases, the attraction is understandable. Nietzsche and Homer offer visions of a pre-Christian moral universe organized around strength, hierarchy, honor, conquest, glory, and domination rather than humility, charity, pity, or universal human dignity.

The issue is that many of the people drawn to this vision also insist that they’re defending Christianity. They want the warrior ethic of Achilles and Odysseus, the aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche, and the civilizational authority of Christianity. Because they don’t take any of these things seriously, they don’t confront the obvious contradictions among them.

If you recall, the once-famous white nationalist goober Richard Spencer told the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood back in 2017 that he was “red-pilled by Nietzsche.” “Red-pilled” is a common term for that “eureka moment” one experiences when first encountering some dark and previously buried truth. For Spencer and other alt-right enthusiasts of Nietzsche, that dark truth is that all the modern pieties about race, peace, equality, justice, civility, and universal suffrage are bullshit.

For people primed to believe this sort of thing, Nietzsche is a breath of fresh air. He’s the guy who tells you there are no capital-T truths, that the world is forever in flux. In his clearest and most straightforward piece of writing, The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche shreds the intellectual justifications for Christian morality, calling it a “slave morality” developed by peasants to subdue the strong.

There is, of course, much more to Nietzsche than this. But if you read him like a freshman cramming for a midterm, this is the exciting stuff you inhale and it’s just enough metaphysical dynamite to clear a path for your dormant prejudices.

Readers of this Substack will know that my dissertation was largely about Nietzsche, which means I have the privilege of constantly detecting recycled versions of his arguments from a century ago.

If you haven’t read The Genealogy, the story Nietzsche tells is that Christianity overturned classical Roman values like strength, will, nobility of spirit. These were replaced with egalitarianism, community, humility, charity, and pity. Nietzsche saw this shift as the beginning of a sweeping democratic movement in Western civilization, one that championed the weak over the strong, the masses over the individual, etc.

The “post-liberal” right, like the alt-right before them, seems infatuated with this strain of Nietzsche’s thought, probably because of the emphasis on “decline.” I think this is what gives the current fascination with Homer its political charge. The ancient epics offer up a world before liberalism, feminism, egalitarianism, and Christianity. Men fight wars, seize kingdoms, take slaves, chase glory, all that jazz.

But the intoxicating thing is the pre-Christian morality, where human beings aren’t equal and the strong unapologetically dominate the weak. There’s no trace of what people now call “suicidal empathy.”

Homer’s world, in other words, isn’t even remotely Christian. The moral universe of The Odyssey is hierarchical, aristocratic, violent, governed by reciprocal obligations rather than universal duties. Odysseus is admirable because he’s cunning, powerful, resilient. His greatness doesn’t consist in loving his enemies or caring for the meek. When he returns to Ithaca, he slaughters the suitors. He also orders the execution of the enslaved women who slept with them.

Nolan’s film can’t fully accept this morality, or at least Nolan clearly doesn’t think a modern audience will accept it. So the story is recast as a meditation on guilt and civilizational trauma. Odysseus is forced to confront what he has done and his heroism is purified through remorse. That, to me, is the real modernization of The Odyssey. The stupid casting controversy is a distraction from it.

Which brings us back to Richard Spencer. In his interview with the Atlantic, Spencer surprised Wood with a peculiar defense of Christianity: that the religion is false but it “bound together the civilizations of Europe.”

This view is more commonplace on the modern right than many people seem to think. While they don’t actually have any interest in Christ, they see the whole edifice of white European civilization as built on a framework of Christian beliefs. Christendom is the force that united the European continent and forged white identity.

Surely you can see the paradox: They believe the West has grown degenerate and weak because it internalized Christian values, but they find themselves defending Christendom because it’s the glue that binds European culture together.

But the moral legacy of Christianity is part of the plague they’re rejecting. Christ’s identification with the poor, the weak, the stranger, the prisoner, and the outcast is hard to reconcile with a politics organized around domination and exclusion. So are the injunctions to love one’s enemies, forgive wrongdoing, renounce vengeance, distrust wealth, and treat the least powerful members of society as bearers of divine worth. It goes without saying that these are not trivial contradictions. This is the moral center of Christianity.

Which is what makes the response to The Odyssey so amusing. The people complaining about its betrayal of Western civilization are mostly indifferent to the film’s actual betrayal of Homer. Nolan replaces the pagan warrior ethic with a moral vocabulary shaped by Christianity. This goes unnoticed by these critics because what they want from the ancient world isn’t historical or philosophical fidelity. They want an aesthetic of strength and they want Christianity to linger in the background as some vague container of order.

Nietzsche, to his credit, accepted that Christianity was central to the development of Western civilization, and his whole philosophy was focused on convincing people that the West had to move beyond Christianity. When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he meant that science and reason had progressed to the point where we could no longer justify belief in God, and that meant that we could no longer justify the values rooted in that belief.

A big chunk of the contemporary right wants to live after Christianity while continuing to wield Christianity as an authority. It wants a politics of power, hierarchy, vengeance, and domination, but it also wants to call that politics “Christian.”

Nietzsche, at least, was honest about the conflict. He understood that Christianity had transformed the moral language of the West. He also understood that rejecting Christian theology while preserving Christian morality was unsustainable. You can’t just kill God and keep everything else.

The people raging about The Odyssey want to kill Christian morality and keep Christian identity. They want Christendom without Christ.

Nietzsche will always be our most punk rock philosopher, the guy who “philosophized with a hammer.” In the end, though, people find in his work what they went into it already believing. If you’re seeking a reason to reject a world you don’t like, you can find it anywhere, especially in Nietzsche.

You can read The Odyssey as a repudiation of the modern world, a story about masculine strength, natural hierarchy, heroic violence, the defense of home, and the restoration of order. All of that is definitely in the poem. What you can’t do is pretend that this ethic is indistinguishable from Christianity. Love it or hate it, Christianity introduced a moral revolution that privileged the weak over the strong, mercy over vengeance, and the equal value of souls over the natural hierarchy of the ancient world. Nietzsche hated Christianity precisely because he understood this.

The most interesting thing about the conservative response to The Odyssey is that it exposes a confusion about Christianity that the American right has never resolved because it’s not resolvable. Their heroes are pagan. Their morality is Nietzschean. Their identity is Christian.

Good luck with all that!

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Usually by the time one of my podcast episodes comes out, I’m already thinking about something else. That’s just the rhythm of the thing. I read the book. Talk to the author. Listen to the cuts. Record the intro. Maybe record a few videos. Then move on to the next guest because there’s … always … another … guest.

I confess it’s a strange way to consume ideas. You spend a week immersed in someone’s work and then, almost overnight, you have to abandon it for somebody else’s.

By the time an episode lands in your podcast feed, I’ve usually lived with it long enough that it feels finished. I felt good about this one, but I also knew, because of the subject, people were going to react strongly. That’s how it goes with God talk. And also Liz, for reasons that escape me, seems to trigger a certain type of online person in the worst way.

So in the days after the taping, things kept popping into my head. Mostly random exchanges with Liz. Whenever that happens, it means something was incomplete or there’s some thread I didn’t pursue. To some degree, that’s always the case, but it was especially true for this one.

Then the emails and reviews started coming in. A lot of them. More than I expected. I don’t have any actual data on this, but it’s probably the most feedback I’ve gotten on a Gray Area episode. Some people absolutely loved it. Some people absolutely hated it. That’s not unusual.

What was unusual was that the criticism all seemed to orbit the same complaint. Why didn’t you challenge her? Or maybe a better way to put it is ... Why didn’t you challenge her the right way?

A lot of listeners wanted me to treat Liz’s religious beliefs the way I’d treat someone making empirical claims about the world. If she says God exists, ask for evidence. If she says she had an experience of the divine at a bus stop, ask why she assumes it wasn’t just brain chemistry or delusional pattern-seeking. If she says beauty points toward God, tell her that evolution can explain awe just fine. Basically, they wanted me to prosecute the case. And I did, in my own way, raise those sorts of counterpoints.

I get the impulse behind all of these these complaints. Not that long ago, I would’ve wanted the exact same interview. Something more debate-y. There was actually a stretch in my twenties when I was a full-blown New Atheist bro. I could do without Dawkins, but Hitch, Harris, and Dennett were my guys. I read all of them. Loved them.

They made religion feel obviously false. Like humanity had finally outgrown a particularly embarrassing stage of its development. Hitchens, especially, was as good as anyone has ever been at this kind of thing.

But what I remember most from that period wasn’t any of the arguments. It was this feeling that the religious question was settled in my mind. People believed what they believed because they were raised that way. Because we’re meaning-making mammals who evolved to see agency where none existed. I’m not saying this isn’t a big part of the religious phenomenon.

At some point, though, this wasn’t a satisfying perspective for me. It’s not like there was some flash bang moment where things changed. Life experiences definitely scrambled my own sense of certainty. Taking a heroic dose of psychedelics did a number on me for sure. Also becoming a dad. The podcast itself has been a huge factor.

When you spend years talking to thoughtful people — people you disagree with, people you admire, people you find maddening, people with totally different life experiences — it opens you up in surprising ways. None of my conversations are debates. I’m not trying to “win” so much as understand another point of view on its own terms.

That's become much more important to me. When I was younger, I always wanted to corner someone intellectually. Find the contradiction. Push until something slips. I still enjoy a good argument, but I've also realized you can spend an hour deconstructing somebody's worldview and come away understanding them less than when you started. Which is boring and useless.

And I think that’s what some listeners found frustrating about my conversation with Liz. They wanted to me determine whether she was “right.” I had no interest in that. Which doesn’t mean I think she is right. I just wanted to know how she came to her faith and how it moves her through the world. You can think someone is completely wrong about the meaning of an experience and still be fascinated by the experience itself.

When Liz told the story about standing at a bus stop in college, watching a gust of wind lift a spiral of leaves into the air and feeling God’s presence, I knew lots of listeners thought it was nonsense. It’s the kind of thing that can be explained away fairly easily if that’s what you’re looking to do.

But again, I wasn’t trying to figure out whether she’d misinterpreted the experience. It’s more interesting to me as an existential event. And we’ve all had experiences that chop our lives into a before and an after. Falling in love. Becoming a parent. Losing someone. Inhaling four cups of ayahuasca in a night. Whatever happened to Liz at that bus stop, it was somewhere in that bucket.

So much of this comes back to one’s relationship to certainty. There’s something super satisfying about believing you’ve finally seen through all the metaphysical bullshit. And the world gets a lot simpler once you’ve decided religion is just one more story people tell themselves because they can’t tolerate uncertainty or mortality or the fact that the universe doesn’t owe us meaning.

I’m still sympathetic to a lot of those arguments. I don’t think the New Atheists were crazy, and I certainly don’t think religion should be insulated from criticism. It has been, and remains, an enormous source of needless suffering and judgement. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without the New Atheists and the skeptical tradition.

But somewhere along the way I started noticing that I was applying the same explanatory instinct to almost everything. Somebody falls in love? Brain chemistry. Somebody has a mystical experience? Pattern recognition. Somebody feels overwhelmed by beauty? Evolutionary adaptation.

Again, maybe all of those explanations are true as far as they go. But it’s one thing to explain how an experience happens. It’s another thing entirely to explain what it’s like to actually have it.

That’s probably the biggest way I’ve changed over the last decade. I’ve become less interested in reducing experiences than describing them. Maybe that’s what the podcast has done to me. Every week I sit down with someone whose life has unfolded differently than mine. Sometimes I think they’re wrong or misguided or deliberately full of shit. But if the conversation is any good, I walk away feeling like I got to inhabit another worldview for an hour. I don’t know how to do that if I’m treating every conversation like a cross-examination.

Liz wasn’t trying to convince me of anything. She wasn’t trying to prove God. The point of her Atlantic essay was to say that trying to prove God is a category mistake. Faith isn’t the kind of thing that stands or falls on empirical evidence. That’s precisely what makes it faith.

The funny thing is that Liz ended up turning the tables on me. She wanted to know about my psychedelic experiences. She wanted to know about becoming a father. She wanted to know why I don’t really call myself an atheist anymore.

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I realized after listening back that I wasn’t talking about religion. I was mostly talking about cynicism, which is so easily mistaken for intelligence. Cynicism always felt like an inoculation against disappointment for me. If you assume everything is bullshit, you’re never surprised when it is. The problem is that cynicism gives you an explanation for everything before you’ve really experienced anything. It can become, if you’re not careful, a way of standing just outside your own life.

I’ve talked about this before, but reading The Brothers Karamazov was the first time I encountered a religious imagination that didn’t ask me to suspend my intelligence. Dostoevsky understood every argument against God. He puts some of the strongest versions of those arguments into the mouths of his own characters, and so many of those passages are devastating if you’re a believer. But he was a master psychologist and his most cynical characters are the ones who think themselves straight into the abyss. I’m not sure anyone in the history of Western literature captured this trap better than him.

Towards the end of the episode, I told Liz that becoming a dad made it feel almost irresponsible to indulge my own cynicism. I hadn’t really thought about it that way before, but it’s true. Kids arrive in the world with this astonishing openness to everything. They’re amazed by things I’ve stopped noticing. They ask questions I’d never think to ask anymore. My job isn’t to preserve that innocence forever. But I also don’t want to rush them toward the defensive posture that I spent so many years mistaking for wisdom.

I don’t really know where all this leaves me, religiously speaking. Do I believe in God? It depends what we mean by God? If it’s the God of Einstein or Spinoza, sure. If it’s a personal God who intervenes in the affairs of individual humans, I can’t make myself believe in that — and frankly I don’t want to. And my contempt for religious entrepreneurs is as intense as it’s ever been. They are — and I cannot overstate this — the worst among us.

But I have come to believe that the universe is much stranger than we can imagine. I think we should be more humble in the face of creation. If I’m sure of anything, it’s that I will never have any of this figured out. Camus once said that “It’s true that I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist.” I basically agree with that, even though I’m not exactly sure what it means. I have a sincere respect for the religious experience. I admire people who live fuller and richer lives because of their faith and I take no delight in poking holes in that.

As for Liz, I can’t say that whatever she saw in those swirling leaves was God. It probably wasn’t. Maybe the experience was entirely contained within her own consciousness and reveals nothing else about the world. What I do know is that if I’d had this conversation fifteen years ago, I would’ve walked away feeling pretty pleased with myself for dismantling someone else’s beliefs. I just don’t have have that instinct anymore.

What that says about me probably depends on who I’m asking, so I’ll leave that to you!

It’s been just about a month since the flood happened. We’re doing okay. The house is still being repaired. The floors and drywall have finally been removed and replaced. The furniture is still resting in a giant storage pod in the driveway, but, hopefully, it’s mostly salvageable and can be put back in whenever the work’s done.

Meanwhile, we’re renting a condo nearby with the pets in a boarding facility. The thinking at the moment is that we might possibly be back in our home sometime next week. But, as they say, shit happens. We shall see.

Yes, this sucks. Yes, it’s absurdly expensive. But one rather endearing fact is how situations like this become opportunities for adventure in the minds of children.

We’ve tried to shield the kids from the reality of the situation as best we can, with mixed results. Ultimately, there’s only so much you can hide. Kids are almost pathologically discerning. But they’re also so resilient and adaptable. Somehow what should’ve been, on paper, the worst imaginable summer break for my oldest has become an unplanned staycation.

After I wrote the last post, people reached out and asked whether there was some way to help. I never quite know how to respond to that. Of course, there are always things people can help with, but what’s reasonable here? Do I absolutely need help? Not in the sense that we won’t recover without it. This isn’t an extinction event. But this was a financial bomb blast. And I definitely don’t make enough money to easily absorb a $50,000 bill out of nowhere.

A few asked if we had started a GoFundMe. We had not. I’ve never done anything like that and had no intention of doing it now.

This is partly because I know there are people dealing with much worse. We’re safe. We have somewhere to stay. The house is fucked, but it’s still standing and is being repaired. That’s not nothing.

But it’s also because I have a strong aversion to asking for help. It feels inexplicably icky. I wish there were a more flattering way to put that, but there probably isn’t. Vulnerability makes me uncomfortable. So when people asked, I mostly said some version of: We’ll figure it out.

However, an old colleague of mine from the Salon days, who I haven’t heard from in years, apparently decided that this was nonsense and started a GoFundMe for us anyway.

I’ve been trying to decide whether to share it here. My first instinct was not to. My second instinct was also not to. And yet here we are.

There’s an irony in all of this that is not lost on me.

This Substack began with a long series on one of my philosophy heroes, Albert Camus. At the center of Camus’s humanism is a very simple recognition: beneath all our abstractions and arguments, we share the same basic vulnerability.

Our bodies are fragile. We suffer. We lose people. We get sick. We die. We’re all mortal creatures exposed to pain and misfortune. For Camus, this is the bedrock of solidarity. It’s the one reality no ideology or identity can erase. But my god is it easy to forget this fact, especially if you live a charmed existence.

Anyway, I’ve always found Camus’s argument persuasive. Or at least I’ve always found it moving. But it seems I’m much more comfortable with vulnerability as a philosophical principle than as a personal experience.

There’s something slightly humiliating about needing help. Or maybe it only feels humiliating because I spent so much of my life pretending that self-sufficiency is a real thing. It isn’t, obviously. None of us gets through a life alone. We’re carried by other people constantly, usually in ways we barely notice.

The flood made a whole lot of shit visible, like how arbitrary the border is between ordinary life and catastrophe. Or how much money it costs to put walls and floors back where they were. Or how little control any of us really has, despite the elaborate systems we build to convince ourselves otherwise.

But another thing that’s been made visible is how incredibly generous so many people in our lives are. Often it’s not the people you might expect this from. Sure, family and close friends step up. Then there are people you barely know, or people you used to know, who raise their hands. For a recovering cynic like me, this is the stuff that overwhelms me in the best possible way.

So here I am sharing the GoFundMe that my friend created. I still feel strange about it. I will continue to feel strange about it. But people have asked for a way to help, and this is now one way to do that.

There is, it goes without saying, zero pressure to contribute. In fact, just reading — and, dare I say, subscribing — to this here Substack is more than enough.

But refusing to share the link simply because accepting help makes me uncomfortable would be its own kind of vanity. So I’m trying, for once, to get over myself.

I’m eternally grateful that I’m just old enough to have escaped certain modern horrors. I was fully formed by the time smartphones conquered the world. Which means I was spared the uniquely deranging experience of becoming a person on the internet.

One of those horrors is “looksmaxxing,” a term that should not exist in a remotely sane culture. But this is very much not a sane culture. Thus we have lots of ideas and words that only a committee of disturbed 14 year-olds and venture capitalists could possibly invent.

So why even talk about this?

Well, I had Christine Emba on The Gray Area recently to talk about this bizarro subculture. Christine writes about sex, dating, loneliness, gender, religion, basically all the moral anxieties of modern life. I brought her on because I find this phenomenon, weird and disturbing though it is, incredibly revealing.

If you’re fortunate enough not to know what looksmaxxing is, the short version is that it’s an online male subculture, emerging out of the incel world, organized around the idea that your appearance is the decisive fact of your life and therefore must be optimized at all costs.

“Optimized” is the thing here. I suppose in its softer forms, this can mean the usual stuff: working out, skincare, clothes, maybe a fancy non-DIY hair cut from time to time. Nothing shameful there. Self-improvement is a fine endeavor.

However, to say that looksmaxxing is the most extreme, pathological iteration of this impulse does not quite do it justice. We’re talking about young men taking steroids, experimental supplements, obsessing over jawlines and facial proportions, watching influencers rank faces like they’re evaluating livestock. Dudes are literally smashing their faces with hammers to alter their bone structure, a lovely hobby they call “bone smashing.” Apparently even hell has a glossary now.

It’s tempting to dismiss all of this as another freak-show internet thing, and believe me I get the impulse. The internet produces a lot of freak-show internet things.

But looksmaxxing is not just some grotesque corner of online male pathology. Or maybe it is that, but it’s not only that. That something like this is even possible should give us pause. It’s definitely not surprising, however. A culture in which more and more people experience themselves from the outside, as objects to be ranked, upgraded, displayed, rejected, optimized, is going to produce some very peculiar forms of spiritual rot.

Even the language of this world is cold and weirdly economic. Everything is status, ranking, value, leverage, body count, market position. It sounds like people talking about commodities on CNBC. Not a trace of humanity in any of it. It’s base male energy redirected inward and toward performative self-modification.

At the risk of “handing” it to the incels, they at least cared about human contact. They wanted to have sex and their resentment came from not succeeding. There’s an intelligible human wound there.

Looksmaxxers have dispensed with relationships altogether. It’s essentially post-sexual. For these guys, simply knowing they could have sex with someone is better than actually having sex with them. It’s about the status of being desirable, not the experience of being with another person.

Maybe on a deeper level, that kind of sentiment is just masking the profound social anxiety the digital era has created. More streaming, more screen time, more alone time means less human contact and that generates more anxiety about human contact, which fuels the impulse to … avoid human contact.

In any case, we appear to have a generation of young men who’ve absorbed a picture of the world in which love and intimacy are no longer goods in themselves. They’re more like evidence that the market has validated you (or something like that).

And the internet, such as it is, seems designed to solve this problem by removing the person from the equation. Porn instead of sex. Dating apps instead of courtship. The list goes on. All of these things mimic some piece of human connection while stripping away the friction that makes connection real.

And yeah, friction sucks. Encountering the other is awkward and bumpy. Being seen by another person is terrifying because they might not like what they see. But that’s how we become capable of intimacy. There’s no frictionless path to becoming a human person.

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A lot of young people have been denied the ordinary conditions for acquiring those skills. And it’s not really their fault. These are kids who marinated in Trump-era nihilism while also getting severely under-socialized because of Covid. That part of the story probably gets underplayed. Covid threw a generation into deeper isolation at precisely the wrong time.

I’ve been writing more about being a dad on this Substack because that’s where I am in life right now. Well, at this very moment, I’m still living out of a bag after being flooded out of my home, but I digress…

I have two sons and all of this lands differently than it would have 10 years ago. One of them just turned seven. The other is barely two months old. They’re at wildly different stages of life, obviously, but I look at both of them and wonder what kind of world they’re going to come of age in? I feel almost guilty for throwing them into this vortex.

Every generation of parents thinks the world is going straight to hell in some special way. But man the trend lines here are not great. The phones are getting more immersive. The algorithms are getting better. AI companions are becoming more plausible.

If you asked the aliens on whose supercomputer our current simulation is running to build a social environment most likely to destroy the conditions of human connection, this is the program they’d write.

What scares me is how difficult it may be to give my kids a healthy, sustainable relationship to themselves and to other people in a culture engineered to interrupt that relationship. I want them to know how to be around people. I want them to not turn their bodies into an endless project of public evaluation.

But who doesn’t want that for their kids? The reality is that there are limits to what parents can do. You cannot ask kids to be in the world without, on some level, being of the world. That’s always been the case.

Part of the reason I had Christine on the show was to talk about the gender dynamics with Gen Z, which, unsurprisingly, are deeply disturbing. The anti-social, post-sexual dimension is bad enough. But there’s also a doom loop at work.

Gen Z men and women are unrecognizable to each other and you can see how the digital machinery keeps pushing them apart. Men are fed grievance, status panic, various pseudo-scientific bullshit about what women supposedly want. Women are fed a steady diet of warnings about male danger, narcissism, and misogyny. It’s not like these are complete hallucinations. The point is that online life turns real problems into totalizing caricatures.

Men end up talking to other men about women they don’t know or understand. Women end up talking to other women about men they increasingly distrust. Everyone’s shadowboxing with a cartoon version of the other sex.

An underrated perk of everyday contact is that it shatters your bullshit theories. A real person is always more complicated than your ideology about them. But if you mostly encounter the other sex through clips, posts, screenshots, horror stories, dating profiles, your theories never make contact with reality.

Which is why going outside and talking to people and risking awkwardness and letting yourself fumble through the world is a good and necessary thing.

I can’t control the world my sons are going to inherit and I can’t make the internet less insane by force of paternal anxiety. What I can do is help them feel at home in the real world before the virtual one gets its hooks too deep into them. Again, there are limits. It’s mostly small things. But if you’re a parent, small is probably the only scale at which this problem can really be fought.

And if you’re just a person navigating this on your own, then sure, go out and touch some grass. But maybe also talk to the other person standing on it

I’ve tried writing this a few different ways and I keep making it sound tidier than it feels.

So I’ll just say it plainly: my home was flooded last Friday night, pretty badly, and we had to leave. We live in Gulfport, Mississippi, and over a couple of days we got something like 15 inches of rain. Just a completely insane number. And the wild thing is that this is what we expect with a mega storm like Katrina or anything remotely comparable. But this was not that. This wasn’t even a direct hit by a major hurricane. It was the remnants of a relatively weak and disorganized Tropical Storm.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around that number. At some point, the street we live on — really the whole neighborhood — was deluged with a river of rain water.

Water came into the house and we ended up with about three inches across the entire first floor. Which maybe doesn’t sound catastrophic if you haven’t lived through it. Three inches feels almost modest, in the abstract. But I promise you three inches is more than enough to destroy basically everything.

All the flooring has to be ripped out. All the drywall up to 2 feet has to be ripped out because the insulation acts like a wick and pulls the moisture up. Everything has to be given a thorough antimicrobrial treatment to kill the mold. It’s a total gut job for half the house.

So we’re out for at least three or four weeks, maybe longer. We’re in Louisiana now, staying with family, which is about as good a situation as we could ask for under the circumstances. But the circumstances are, of course, monumentally fucked.

The house is a wreck. There’s water damage everywhere. A lot of our stuff is gone or going. The financial picture is bleak. We have home insurance but not flood insurance (which is a separate thing) because we don’t live in a flood zone and it isn’t required and we were told it wasn’t needed. So as best I can tell, we’re footing the bill, and I won’t bore you with the numbers, but they’re enough to give me a mild panic attack.

There are insurance people and contractors and mitigation crews and forms and estimates and phone calls and all the other little bureaucratic humiliations that come with your life being suddenly rearranged by water.

I’m still sort of stunned by it.

The day itself was almost comically normal until it wasn’t. Actually, it was much better than that. It was kind of perfect. Quality time with the family early in the day. Spent the afternoon watching USA beat Australia in the World Cup. Had a few cocktails. I had no idea more rain was coming that night. It just blew in around 9 pm and by 11 pm I was on my deck in a rain jacket and snowboarding pants helplessly dropping sandbags outside my back door. A few minutes later, water was oozing under the door and a few minutes after that the first floor of my house was a giant kiddie pool.

Life, as they say, comes at you fast. You move through a day thinking you’re inside one story and then, very quickly, you’re inside another one. And there isn’t some dramatic transition. No narrator steps in to warn you that the next several weeks of your life are going to be a nightmare.

One minute the house is just the house, with all the usual shit just out of place. The next minute you’re looking at the same rooms differently, because now the objects in them have become questions. Can this be saved? Is that ruined? What was in that drawer? Where did we put the baby stuff? How much is this going to cost? Who do we call? What do we do first?

I know this is not unique. Plenty of people go through this, and plenty of people go through much worse. And my family is probably better positioned to absorb this than many of the people around us.

I keep telling myself that because it’s true. Also because reminding yourself that other people have suffered more is one of those things you do when you’re trying to maintain perspective and maybe also punish yourself a little for feeling bad. Very healthy, obviously.

The money part, for everyone in this situation, is pretty overwhelming. You try hard to not think about it every minute of the day, but you invariably think about it every minute of the day.

There’s a particular kind of stress that comes from not knowing how expensive a disaster is going to be. Really it’s the open-endedness of it. Every answer creates another question. Every person you talk to tells you to talk to another person. Every form of help comes with an asterisk. You start doing the math in your head and then stop because the math is making things worse.

Mostly I’ve been trying to keep moving. That seems to be the only useful thing. Make the call. Take the photo. Save the receipt. Feed the baby. Keep the seven-year-old occupied. Try not to be a complete maniac around your wife, who is also trying not to be a complete maniac around you.

Parenting during a crisis is clarifying in the same way parenting is always clarifying, except more so and worse. You don’t really have the luxury of collapsing because someone still needs a snack or a nap or they just need you to feign normality for 5 minutes so they believe everything will be cool in the end.

You don’t want your kids to carry anymore than they need to carry. I feel that in my bones. Which is why a lot of my energy the last few days has been devoted to pretending to be more composed than I am. I think they’re buying it for the most part and I’ll take that.

But we will actually be OK. This will pass. We’ll get back to our home, a little poorer but still fine. And everyone is alive and healthy. I’m pissed about the things we lost. And I know it’s just “stuff” but what is that supposed to mean? Not all “stuff” is just stuff. Some of it was important to me and it was part of my life and it feels pretty shitty to have it washed away. So I don’t pretend to not care about the stuff but I also understand the difference.

Everything that truly matters is still intact. I’m genuinely grateful for that. Tomorrow there will still be calls to make and damage to assess and bills to worry about and a house we can’t live in. There will still be a lot of bullshit, basically.

But everyone I love is here. That’s the whole thing. All the squishy cliches are 100 percent true.

I don’t know what the next few weeks are going to look like. For now I mostly wanted to say what happened, partly because some of you have been following along with my life here, and partly because writing it down helps me believe it happened.

Until next time…

What the hell is “awe”?

It’s such a squishy word. We all vaguely know what it’s supposed to mean and most of the time we use it interchangeably with other words like “wonder” or “reverence.” I use it when I don’t really know what I’m trying to describe, like some kind of poetic umbrella.

I recently had the Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner on The Gray Area to talk about his new book on awe and it changed how I think about it.

One thing Keltner says we should do is realize how familiar the experience actually is. Awe is what happens anytime your normal sense of self gets interrupted. It could be almost anything. A piece of music. A sunset. A cathedral. Watching Alex Honnold climb a gigantic skyscraper in Taiwan, which I found weirdly moving in a way that goes beyond the physical excellence.

But Keltner’s argument is that awe isn’t just a nice feeling. It’s an important psychological and social experience precisely because it quiets the ego. By “ego” he just means the normal everyday self that is constantly narrating your life. The voice that worries about status and productivity and whether people like you and whether you’re falling behind and whether you said the wrong thing three hours ago in the elevator with your co-worker whose name you awkwardly forgot.

Modern life traps us inside that pestering voice. We’re constantly evaluating ourselves, branding ourselves, optimizing ourselves, comparing ourselves. And after a while you start experiencing reality primarily in relation to yourself. A moment of awe shakes you out of that.

Another thing Keltner said is that some of the most profound experiences of awe come from witnessing moral courage.

We talked about why certain acts of courage feel spiritually significant. Like Iranian women removing their hijabs in public knowing full well what might happen to them. Or a soldier jumping on a grenade to save his buddies. These moments show what human beings are capable of at our absolute best.

But I think it’s also because courage like that briefly dissolves the normal logic of self-interest that organizes so much of life. Even witnessing someone else do something extraordinary is still a bridge to self-transcendence.

That was probably the biggest shift for me in talking to Keltner. I’d always thought of awe as this private, almost mystical experience. You alone with the sunset. You alone with the song. You alone dissolving into the cosmos after that heroic dose of homegrown mushrooms.

But Keltner’s research found that one of the biggest sources of awe across cultures isn’t nature. It’s other people. Their courage. Their kindness. Their talent. Their willingness to sacrifice themselves.

Some of the most intense experiences of awe I’ve had were at concerts. Not because I was appreciating the technical excellence of the musicians or something. I don’t even understand music at that level. For most people, it’s a visceral thing. That moment where thousands of strangers collapse into the same emotional reality. Everyone swaying together, singing together, crying together, completely locked into the same feeling. Your normal psychological armor just sort of falls away for a minute.

Keltner studies this physiologically too, which is fascinating. Awe apparently activates parts of the nervous system associated with connection and openness rather than fear or stress. Your body literally shifts states, which makes intuitive sense to me.

When I’m anxious or depressed or trapped in my own head, my world becomes very small. Everything bends back toward me and my problems and my thoughts. Awe, mercifully, reverses that.

One of the more lovely parts of Keltner’s book is when he talks about working with prisoners at San Quentin. He asked them where they found awe in prison. All of the answers came down to something relational. People experienced awe through their relationship with their children or fellow inmates or through their relationship with music or scripture or through restorative justice, which is all about moral repair.

Human beings seem to need experiences that pull them outside themselves. If we don’t get that, we’re miserable and become resentful creatures who are deeply confused about the roots of our resentment. I think that’s part of why modern life feels so exhausting and empty. There’s just too much self in it. Too much performance. Too much optimization. Too much attention directed inward. Even our supposedly spiritual practices are thinly veiled self-improvement projects.

Keltner’s point is not that we should all become mystics or abandon reason or spend our lives chasing grand transcendent experiences. I think the idea is to just slow down a little bit. Put the phone away. Listen to music that actually means something to you. Go outside. Pay attention to things that are bigger than yourself.

A few minutes of that every week might genuinely change your life.

When you have kids, you spend a lot of time trying to teach them how to be in the world. What you quickly discover, however, is that they’re constantly reminding you how little of the world you actually see.

Kids obviously have less knowledge than adults. But knowledge and intelligence aren’t necessarily the same thing. They’re not totally unrelated, but hopefully you take the point.

Part of the problem is that we tend to view the minds of children as unfinished versions of ours, waiting to become properly rational and useful. But that’s just not what they’re doing in the world. On a purely phenomenological level, they’re playing a completely different sport.

I recently had the Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik on The Gray Area (here on YouTube), which got me thinking about all this. Her work has changed the way I see kids, including my own. I didn’t need any help finding reasons to love my kids. I do think I needed help taking their minds more seriously.

Adults are built for competence (to varying degrees, obviously). We use what we know. We make plans, solve problems, organize time, manage obligations, try to keep the machinery of life from breaking down. Civilization more or less depends on us doing these things.

Children are built more for exploration. They test the world. They poke at it, misread it, reinvent it. They treat reality like a wide open field of possibilities. To me, a stick on the sidewalk is a stick on the sidewalk. To my 6 year-old son, it’s a musket, a wand, a sword, a fishing pole, a bazooka.

Gopnik uses a distinction I love between spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness. Adult attention is like a spotlight. It narrows the field. It makes action possible by excluding almost everything else. Children have something more like a lantern. Their attention spills outward. They’re not bad at paying attention so much as they are bad at not paying attention. The airplane overhead, the dust on the floor, the garbage truck outside, the strange crack in the sidewalk, all of it enters the scene.

Anyone who has walked with a child knows this. You’re trying to get somewhere. They’re trying to be where they are. You’ve got stuff to do. They’re hyper-attuned to literally everything in front of them.

There is, of course, a cost to both modes. Childhood openness comes with helplessness. Adult focus comes with blindness. We learn how to function and part of functioning means learning how not to notice. We stop seeing the garbage truck because the garbage truck isn’t relevant. We stop seeing the stick because we already know what sticks are.

But for kids, the world just hasn’t hardened like that. They haven’t condemned sticks to stickness. Objects are still unstable and everything is kind of up for grabs.

Gopnik’s argument is that children aren’t hallucinating significance. They’re seeing what adults have trained themselves to ignore. The garbage truck really is kind of amazing. The remote control really is bizarre. A stick really does contain many possible worlds.

I don’t want to make childhood into some pure state of wisdom. Their openness can be maddening. The same mind that sees a universe in a stick also melts down over a wet sock or cold milk. There’s a reason children need adults.

That was another interesting thread in the conversation. The freedom of childhood depends on care. Children can explore because adults are keeping watch. Someone has to remember the meal, the nap, the street, the outlet, the appointment, the bill.

All of that is part of the work of care-giving. And I’ve honestly come to love it. We tend to think we care for the people we love. Gopnik says it often runs the other way. We love the people we care for. Thinking that way has helped me reframe some of the more frustrating experiences that come with parenting. Not always. There are tons of moments that are just objectively annoying. But it does help to remember that the work is not merely what interrupts the relationship. The work is also the thing.

The same is true of attention. Kids drag us back toward the visible world. A lot of adult life is essentially a routine-induced trance and kids shake us out of that and force us to slow down.

None of this is to say that adults should become more like children. Again, civilization would implode rather quickly. But it would probably be better (and wiser) if we at least tried to recapture that child-like mode of being whenever it’s possible.

A good life is going to involve some movement between the spotlight and the lantern. We need the adult’s capacity to get things done in the world and the child’s capacity to let the world appear again as strange and unfinished.

If you’re a parent, though, Gopnik’s idea have some practical significance. It’s a mistake to see children as problems to be solved. Well, to be fair, it’s a mistake to only see them that way. The point is that they’re also forms of intelligence to be protected.

So maybe let them be weird and distracted and oblivious to time. You might be a few minutes late to that appointment, but who gives a shit?

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So … it’s been a few weeks (maybe more like a month) since I wrapped up the Camus series and I’ve been meaning to check back in, but life has studiously intervened.

The short version is that I’m still here. The longer version is that I’m here, but in a slightly different mode than I was a month or two ago.

We just had our second child, a son, and things have been a little hectic. Most importantly, everyone is happy and healthy, despite some unexpected complications. That’s the main thing.

But my god life is strange with a newborn. Time is weirdly elliptical. You find yourself moving through these tiny cycles of chaos and calm alongside random bursts of clarity. It’s a tad disorienting.

I’m also spending a lot of time on my podcast right now. Which, by the way, if you’re not a subscriber, you simply must remedy that. No hard feelings.

If you dig what I’ve done here so far, you’ll dig the show. I do a lot of philosophy content, as much as I can. And I’m actually thinking that will be the next thing I do on this Substack. Reflecting on podcast conversations, books I’m reading, that sort of stuff.

Anyway, The Gray Area has been taking up most of my working energy, partly because I love doing it and partly because I’m trying to get ahead of things before taking some parental leave.

So that’s the practical update.

Mostly what’s on my mind at the moment is fatherhood. Becoming a father again at this stage of my life (I’ll just say I’m north of 40 and leave it there) has landed differently than it did the first time. Not in some cheesy philosophical way. I think I’m just more aware now of what’s actually being asked of me.

When you’re younger, or at least when I was younger, there’s still a part of you that thinks you can sort of absorb parenthood into your existing life. You make adjustments, of course, but you still imagine yourself at the center of your own story. It’s not like you stop living when you have a kid, but the center of gravity does shift and how you deal with that goes a long way in determining what kind of parent you are and what kind of kid(s) you raise.

What’s struck me most this time is how clarifying it is to have people in your life who matter more than you do. I don’t really mean that in a performative, moral sense. I mean it in a very concrete, daily way. You wake up and your priorities are already set for you. Not much deliberation required. There is simply shit to be done and you know you have to do it. You know what your role is.

And I’ve realized, maybe more than I did before, how much I actually need that. Perhaps “need” is the wrong word. Better to say that it’s been good for me. Left to my own devices, I get lost in my own head. I overthink, sometimes spiral.

Parenthood cuts through so much of that bullshit. It forces you into a different relationship with yourself. You still have your inner life, clearly, but it can’t be the whole show anymore. It has to coexist with these real obligations to other human beings who are depending on you in very non-abstract ways.

I don’t want to romanticize it. There are moments, plenty of them, where it absolutely sucks beyond measure. But the moments of suck are so instructive because you get these little tests of your character and you find out if you actually value what you say you value and if you’re actually the kind of dad you say you are. I like that, even though the answers are sometimes not great.

I think I’ll have more to say about this later.

As for this space, I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do next. I already mentioned using this as a space to reflect on the books I’m reading and the conversations I’m having on The Gray Area. I’m curious what some of you think about that. Good idea? Let me know.

I’ve also gotten a lot of thoughtful feedback on the Camus series, which I’m still processing. Some people want more philosophy, some want more political writing, some want something looser and more personal.

Part of me wants to pick another thinker and do a similar deep dive. I don’t know if I have the time for that. I’m fairly certain that I don’t. So there’s that.

Part of me wants to write about broader themes that cut across different traditions. And part of me wants to keep it a bit messier than that, more like this, just writing when something feels worth saying.

I suspect the answer will be some combination of those things.

For now, I’m going to give myself a little space to figure it out. The podcast is demanding a lot of my attention, the newborn is demanding the rest, and I don’t feel a huge urgency to force anything.

But I do want to keep this alive. And I’m going to get back to more frequent posting. So consider this a check in more than anything else.

I’m here. I’m thinking. I’m probably more tired than usual but also feeling vaguely motivated. And I’m still interested in hearing from you.

If you’ve got thoughts about where this should go, or what you’d like to see more of, let me know. This thing is still flexible, which is part of what makes it worth doing.

More soon. Or at least soonish.

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I hope you’re sitting down for this, but we’ve arrived at the final post in this Camus series. I know that’s a lot to process this early in the day.

But honestly, it’s been a great ride. I think we’re somewhere around 17 or 18 essays now, which is way more than I originally planned, and definitely more than I expected people to stick with.

So first of all, THANK YOU. Seriously. If you’ve read even a handful of these, let alone all of them, I appreciate it more than I can really say, and if I try to say it, it’ll sound canned and mushy. So let’s not do that.

And I don’t want to use this final entry to summarize everything we’ve covered. If you’ve made it this far, you already know the terrain. We’ve spent a lot of time with the ideas, probably more than enough. Rehashing it all again would feel like going back over ground we’ve already criss-crossed.

What I’d rather do is say something simpler about why I keep returning to Camus in the first place. And why I’ll always return to him.

For me, it’s not mainly about the philosophy, at least not in the narrow sense. It’s not that I think he “solved” anything, or that his framework is somehow airtight. In so many ways it’s not. There are gaps everywhere you look. There are contradictions.

But none of that has ever bothered me much.

What has always stuck with me is the sense, reading him, that you’re encountering a real person who was trying very hard to remain morally decent in a world that made that more difficult than it needed to be.

Camus lived through a period when it became very easy, even fashionable, to justify almost anything in the name of History, or Justice, or necessity. You could tell a story about the future and use that story to explain away the present. You could talk yourself into believing that certain forms of violence weren’t really violence, or that they didn’t count in the same way, or that they were regrettable but required.

A lot — and I mean a lot — of very smart people did exactly that. Camus didn’t and I admire the hell out of him for that.

Not that he always got it right, but that he resisted the pull. He kept coming back to the same basic intuition, that there are limits, and that once you cross them, something important is lost, even if you win, even if you achieve what you set out to achieve.

But he didn’t express that as a system or a doctrine. What you got from Camus was a way of standing in relation to the world. I guess you could call it a posture, but that almost sounds like a dig, and I clearly don’t mean it that way.

It’s true, though, that all of this left Camus in a strange place politically.

He wasn’t a conservative, but he couldn’t go where a lot of the revolutionary left wanted him to go. He wasn’t apolitical, but he was wary of politics when it became bullshit moral theater. He didn’t retreat into private life, but he also refused to let public causes override everything else.

So he ends up in this space that’s hard to occupy and even harder to defend. To be slightly cliche here, he was in a no man’s land. That’s where he was during the Algerian War, and it’s probably the clearest example of what I mean.

He wouldn’t side cleanly with France, because he understood what colonialism had done. But he also wouldn’t endorse the tactics of the FLN when those tactics included targeting civilians. That refusal made him look, to a lot of people, like he was evading the real choice.

As you know by now, I don’t think he was. I think he saw something that others didn’t want to see, or didn’t want to acknowledge. That once you start justifying certain kinds of violence, it becomes too hard to stop.

And so he kept insisting on limits, even when it cost him friends and left him isolated. Say what you will of him, he willingly paid a price for his commitments, which is more than can be said for many of his contemporaries.

His break with Sartre is the most obvious example, but it’s bigger than that. He lost a kind of intellectual home in the French intellectual scene and became an outsider to the circles that had once embraced him.

And yet, his writing has held up better than a lot of the writing that was more confident, more certain, more historically grounded in the way people wanted at the time.

I would say that’s because there’s moral durability to that kind of caution. It often looks weak or insufficient compared to more forceful, more totalizing visions. But over time, it tends to age much better.

Maybe that’s a cop out. Maybe it’s supine moderation. The younger me was more sympathetic to that view. Now, I just think it’s honest and humane.

A lot of people love humanity in the abstract, but they can’t stand actual people. I think Camus cared about concrete human beings. Not humanity as an abstraction, not the future of mankind, but the people in front of him, the ones who would actually bear the cost of whatever decisions were made.

At this point, I’m not sure what else I can say. Camus is a moral hero of mine and I’ve tried to make the case for that in this series.

You don’t have to love the guy the way that I do, but I hope I’ve at least made you more interested in his work.

More than anything, I just want to say thanks again for reading, for following along, for engaging with this series. It’s been a lot of fun to write, and honestly, it’s helped me clarify my own thinking more than I expected.

Now I’m curious what you think.

If you’ve been reading these posts, I’d love to hear from you. Where should this go next? Philosophically, politically, culturally, whatever direction feels interesting to you. We can do whatever we want here.

Are there thinkers you’d want to see explored in a similar way? Themes that feel worth digging into? Questions that this series raised that you’d like to see pushed further?

Leave some comments. Send me a message. I’m genuinely interested.

I plan to keep this Substack alive, but I’m not clear on what it will look like. So help me figure it out.

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[This is the eighteenth entry in my Camus series, adapted from my dissertation. The level of revision is evolving, so feel free to share thoughts or merciless pushback in the comments.]

We’ve reached the point of this journey where I must now answer a completely fair question: What does any of this actually tell us to do? What’s the practical cash value of Camus’s political thought?

We’ve been living inside Camus’s conceptual world. I’ve written a ton about how Camus insisted, again and again, that the human condition doesn’t give us final answers, that history doesn’t provide moral absolution, that the hunger for certainty is itself one of the great dangers of modern politics. That’s all good and important stuff. But at some point the conversation has to become concrete and offer some kind of guidance for the choices we make in the political arena. Or at least it has to do this if it’s going to be useful outside the library.

So if revolt doesn’t give us definitive rules for action, if it resists clear standards and refuses ultimate justifications, then what kind of ethics can it really support in the world as it is? And if revolt is said to create value rather than discover it, why should anyone else feel bound by the values I affirm?

These are the questions that decide whether Camus’s political thought is a living resource or just a collection of very pretty thoughts.

It seems a lot of people think it’s the latter. His refusal to take sides, his skepticism toward ideology, his reluctance to endorse programs or movements can all start to look like evasiveness. It’s a fair reaction. If you need someone to declare himself in that way, or pick a team, or announce a final moral stance, Camus will disappoint you. He doesn’t offer a blueprint. He doesn’t tell you which revolutions to support or which regimes to overthrow.

And look, we can just admit that this is kind of annoying. But I do think there are reasons why Camus does this and I’ll try to walk through them in this post.

The complaint that Camus won’t give us a guide

A common objection is that Camus’s thought is too vague or too unsystematic to guide action. Ronald Srigley has argued that Camus’s “methodological skepticism” constrained his analysis because it prevented him from exploring experiences that went beyond the limits his presuppositions prescribed.

There’s no doubt a kernel of truth there. Camus really does refuse to go beyond those limits. But I don’t think that refusal is a failure of courage. I actually think it’s what makes his political thought coherent.

Camus does not go beyond the bounds of his presuppositions because that would exceed the limits marked by absurdity. Absurdity is like an epistemological boundary in Camus’s world. It’s the recognition that we do not have access to ultimate knowledge about reality, purpose, destiny, the direction of history, or the ultimate meaning of suffering.

If you accept that recognition (and I think you should), you can’t then build politics on metaphysical certainty. You can’t take refuge in a grand narrative and pretend that your actions are sanctified by history. You can’t claim to know what the future demands from the present.

Camus advocates skepticism for a very specific reason. Ideas, especially big ones, give intellectual cover to violence. Ideas about God, about history, about human nature. Ideas that claim to see the whole. They make it possible to do terrible things while feeling morally clean.

That’s why Camus resists claims to ultimate truth. Not because he thinks truth doesn’t exist, and not because he wants to live in permanent uncertainty for its own sake. He resists the kind of truth claims that turn politics into a religion.

That doesn’t mean Camus is closed to experiential truth. It means he wants truth tethered to experience, not floating above it. And that’s why he increasingly turns to art and fiction. It’s the medium through which he can reinvigorate experiential truths that can’t be systematized.

The complaint that Camus won’t commit politically

There’s another critique that’s more political in tone. The idea that Camus’s unwillingness to commit rendered his thought practically insignificant.

Tony Judt makes a version of this argument in The Burden of Responsibility. He treats Camus as important, but largely unpolitical. “Not unconcerned with public affairs or uncaring about political choices,” Judt writes, Camus was nevertheless “by instinct and temperament an unaffiliated person.”

So the story becomes, Camus cared but couldn’t commit. He felt the moral pull but wouldn’t get his hands dirty. He was too ambiguous to be politically useful.

Sartre, of course, took the same basic charge and went even harder on Camus, who up to that point was a close friend. After The Rebel was published, Sartre dismissed Camus as unclear and ahistorical. He thought Camus’s political philosophy failed to address historical conditions amounted to “an abstract, introspective search for principles to solace our metaphysical unhappiness.” So Sartre accused Camus of mistaking metaphysical discomfort for politics.

Sartre approached revolt from the perspective of the worker. Revolt, for him, is a response to material conditions. It emerges from exploitation, from inequality, from economic and political transformations. That’s why he insists, against Camus, that “The circumstances which bring about the crystallization of the masses into revolutionary mobs can with good reason be called historical.”

To Sartre, Camus’s focus on metaphysical revolt is a dodge. It isn’t that Camus is wrong to care about suffering. It’s that he’s wrong to begin there.

And then you get Andre Breton’s critique, which is less philosophical and even more contemptuous:

What is this phantom of revolt that Camus is trying to credit, and behind which he takes shelter, a form of revolt into which moderation has been introduced? Once the revolt has been emptied of its passionate substance, what could possibly remain? I have no doubt that many people will be duped by this artifice: it is a case of keeping the word and eliminating the thing itself.

Breton is essentially saying that Camus is selling a harmless revolt that lets readers feel morally serious without requiring any serious action.

Even if you think Breton is being unfair, the question underneath the sarcasm is real.

Without a willingness to take extraordinary action, what becomes of revolt? Is it possible to impose limits retroactively on something that, in practice, often arrives as excess? Can revolt remain revolt if it’s moderated?

Camus understood this question. He also knew that his answer would never satisfy the people who wanted revolution to be a moral absolute.

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What Camus was trying to stop

This is where I think Camus’s intentions are often misunderstood, sometimes deliberately.

Camus’s first concern was not to design a revolutionary ethics. It was to undermine the theoretical justifications for violence that were everywhere in his intellectual environment. He was disturbed by the capacity of intellectuals to justify crime on ideological grounds and treat murder as a historical necessity.

That’s a pretty big point.

If you read The Rebel as a political program, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not what it is. It’s an intervention against the metaphysical and historical alibis that make limitless violence possible.

Camus was drawn to figures like Ivan Karamazov for a reason. Ivan’s revolt begins as a moral protest. It refuses to accept a world in which innocent people suffer. But Camus also understood that metaphysical revolt can become a negation of reality. It can become a refusal not only of injustice but of the world as it is. And once you refuse the world, it becomes easier to destroy it in the name of a better one.

This is why Camus is wary of Sartre’s insistence on historicizing action. To historicize action is to separate it from immediate experience. It divorces the rebel from absurdity and forces him into a position in which his rebellion depends on his non-recognition of reality. He has to live in and constantly reorder the false world he has created.

That’s a consequential mistake for Camus. It sets up a conflict between reality and the system claiming to explain it, and too often, Camus believes, it’s reality that must give way. The living, the concrete, the particular are sacrificed to preserve the coherence of the theory.

And that’s the moment Camus is describing when he writes that “rebellion, forgetful of its origins… denies life, dashes toward destruction, and raises up the grimacing cohorts of petty rebels.”

So Camus is not primarily interested in defining revolt. He starts from the observation that revolt, whatever its origins, can lead either to solidarity or suffering. He’s trying to defend the former against the latter.

And once you see that, his refusal to offer clear standards looks more like an attempt to make politics answerable to human limits.

A different kind of politics

This is where Jeffrey Isaac’s reading becomes helpful, because it captures what Camus is trying to do without forcing him into categories he never wanted.

Isaac argues that it’s a mistake to accuse Camus of ignoring history or treating revolt as purely metaphysical:

They correctly saw that the rebellion depicted in The Plague is not a class struggle, that it involves no political parties or mass movements and has neither grandiose ideological ambitions nor any deep interest in state power. But they were wrong to conclude that it therefore represents a kind of pristine and moralistic political withdrawal. Rather, it depicts new kind of politics… In no way does it abandon history. But it refuses any kind of grand historical justification like that found in Marxism… Rieux lives thoroughly in the present. This does not make him indifferent to consequences. It is just that he chooses his ends and means soberly, and justifies them not in terms of a grand narrative but in terms of an active solidarity.

This is the heart of Camusian revolt. It’s politics without metaphysical guarantees. Politics grounded in the present tense.

Dr. Rieux doesn’t pretend he knows how history ends. He doesn’t claim that suffering is meaningful in some larger story. He acts because people are suffering now and because their suffering makes a claim on him.

From an ethical perspective, Camus is not giving us rules. He’s trying to establish a pluralistic framework within which actions can be measured and judged. It lacks the certainty of metaphysical systems because life with others demands that uncertainty.

Values are self-constituted products of a political community. To be binding, they must emerge from dialogue and experience. And they must remain provisional, not because they are arbitrary, but because the only way they stay alive is through continual reaffirmation.

All of that sounds lovely and maybe even reasonable in the abstract. But the real test comes when we turn to violence.

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The Just Assassins

In The Just Assassins, one of Camus’s plays, revolt is seen from the perspective of the revolutionary. Camus draws on historical events to show that even under extreme circumstances, we can’t speak of purely just or unjust action. We can only speak of action that recognizes limits.

And just to be clear, this is not a paean to pacifism. Camus does not pretend violence can always be avoided. Violence is accepted here as a necessary and indefensible reality.

Performed in 1949, the play follows an insurrectionist group planning to assassinate the Russian Grand Duke. Camus gives us a small cast, but each character is designed to embody a moral attitude.

Stephan is the absolutist. He refuses to impose limits on action. Kaliayev is the compassionate rebel, the one Camus wants us to take seriously. He opposes all attempts to rationalize murder. Dora is the conscience. She’s constantly reminding the others that there are moral limits that cannot be transgressed without destroying the meaning of their struggle.

The tension among these characters reflects the dynamic between rebellion and revolution. It highlights the balance the rebel must strike between a demand for justice and a refusal to justify murder.

Stephan and Kaliayev represent opposing moral universes.

Stephan is the revolutionary as Camus fears him. He’s completely certain. He has no patience for doubt. When the group hesitates about sacrificing children, Stephan erupts:

There are no limits! The truth is that you don’t believe in the revolution, any of you. No, you don’t believe in it. If you did believe in it sincerely, with all your hearts; if you felt sure that, by dint of our struggles and sacrifices, some day we shall build up a new Russia, redeemed from despotism, a land of freedom that will gradually spread out over the whole earth; and if you felt convinced that then and only then, freed from his masters, and his superstitions, man will at last look up toward the sky, a god in his own right – how, I ask you, could the deaths of two children be weighed in the balance against such a faith? Surely you would claim for yourselves the right to do anything and everything that might bring that day nearer!

When Camus calls revolutionary ideologies “frustrated religions,” this is what he means. Stephan rejects God but cannot let go of transcendence. He simply relocates transcendence into history.

For him, “the future is the only transcendent value.” Once the future becomes sacred, the present becomes expendable. And once the present becomes expendable, anything becomes possible.

Stephan also rejects limits. He’s the pseudo-humanist Camus associates with certain forms of socialism, the one who “rejects the man of today in the name of the man of the future.”

And his aspirations are totally utopian. Against absolute despotism he seeks absolute freedom. This the “all or nothing” attitude Camus condemns in The Rebel.

Stephan’s mindset resembles Verkhovensky in The Possessed, who offers a defense of unlimited action in the name of a future freedom:

I ask you which you prefer: the slow way, which consists in the composition of socialistic romances and the academic ordering of the destinies of humanity a thousand years hence, while despotism will swallow the savory morsels which would almost fly into your mouths of themselves if you’d take a little trouble; or do you, whatever it may imply, prefer a quicker way which will at last untie your hands, and will not let humanity make its own social organization in freedom and in action, not on paper.

The logic is the same. The future justifies the present. Limitless action becomes not only permissible but morally necessary.

Kaliayev, on the other hand, is defined by doubt. But it’s the doubt of someone who acts while knowing he might be wrong. Here’s what he says to Stephan:

Quite likely you are right. But those I love are the men who are alive today, and walk this same earth. It’s they whom I hail, it is for them I am fighting, for them I am ready to lay down my life. But I shall not strike my brothers in the face for the sake of some far-off city, which, for all I know, may not exist. I refuse to add to the living injustice all around me for the sake of a dead justice… Killing children is a crime against a man’s honor. And if one day the revolution thinks fit to break with honor, well, I’m through with revolution.

Kaliayev recognizes injustice and he’s prepared to die, but he won’t sever his action from the living people it’s supposed to serve. That’s basically Camus’s political sensibility. Kaliayev’s revolution is not a transcendent end. It’s a means, to justice, to peace, to life. And because it is only a means, it can’t justify anything and everything.

Camus writes that “Kaliayev doubted to the end, but this doubt did not prevent him from acting; it is for that reason that he is the purest image of rebellion.” We often think purity belongs to the uncompromising but Camus thinks it belongs to the one who refuses to lie to himself.

The third character, Dora, mediates the struggle between Stephan and Kaliayev and worries that what they are doing will ultimately prove self-defeating.

“Nobody,” she worries, “will want to look justice in the face again.”

Dora is willing to adopt violence, but only up to a point. She believes that to go too far is to betray the people in whose name they fight. Just as Ivan thinks suffering is too high a price for salvation, Dora thinks murder is too high a price for justice. If you accept it, she says, it means “you have gone about it too fast… you are no longer men.”

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Imposing limits on violence

This brings us to Camus’s conception of political violence, which is a tad controversial. He distinguishes between two accounts of violence, bourgeois and revolutionary.

Bourgeois violence is, in John Foley’s formulation, “the refusal to recognize one of the terms of the dilemma highlighted by political violence.” It involves condemning direct violence while sanctioning “that diffuse form of violence which takes place on the scale of world history.”

This is the violence of clean hands. The violence of intellectuals who can justify killing as necessity while never leaving their armchairs. Camus has in mind figures like Sartre, who were prepared to endorse violence in theory, but who would never have to carry out that violence themselves.

Revolutionary violence is the opposite error. It’s the categorical embrace of violence as a political instrument. Those who adopt this account, Camus argues, “console themselves, in the name of history, with the thought that violence is necessary, and will add murder to murder, to the point of making of history nothing but a continuous violation of everything in man which protests against injustice.”

Revolutionary violence is murder theoretically excused. The Machiavellian realism that separates moral considerations from political calculation.

In The Just Assassins, Camus tries to offer up a different moral calculus.

What distinguishes Kaliayev and Dora from more nihilistic revolutionaries is that “from their earliest days they were incapable of justifying what they nevertheless found necessary, and conceived the idea of offering themselves as a justification and of replaying by personal sacrifice.”

This is the origin of Camus’s life for a life thesis, the idea that a rebel must be willing to die if he is willing to kill.

Self-sacrifice is the thing. It limits action in the present and preserves the value of life in the future, because it refuses to let killing become easy or morally normalized.

“I fear for the future,” Dora says, “others, perhaps, will come who’ll quote our authority for killing; and will not pay with their lives.” That’s the fear that moral seriousness will be replaced by moral convenience and that violence will become a habit.

Now, we have to acknowledge that the life for a life thesis is muddled. As a practical matter, what does it mean to offer your life as justification for killing? Critics charge Camus with advocating an incoherent and impracticable solution to political violence. Others argue that he rejects all recourse to violence in the name of abstract humanism.

But those critiques misunderstand his intention. Camus is not laying down a blueprint for revolutionary action. He’s trying — and I emphasize “trying” — to cultivate a rebellious attitude that values life more than ideas.

The life for a life thesis is not a literal policy. It’s a reminder that murder and rebellion are fundamentally incompatible, and that any act of killing is a rupture that must be paid for, not rationalized away.

Legitimate violence in Camus’s fiction

Camus gives us examples of what he considers legitimate violence.

Kaliayev kills only after the strictest self-examination. He refuses to kill when children are present. But what makes him the “purest image of rebellion” is what he does afterward.

He’s arrested immediately. And once captured, he doesn’t try to escape. He accepts responsibility, even refusing a pardon.

“I am ready to pay the price of what I’ve done,” he says.

Kaliayev knows he has committed an indefensible crime. He admits his guilt and endures what he must. But he refuses to repent because he believes his act was made in service of a higher value.

“I threw the bomb at your tyranny, not a man.”

The problem here is that he’s trying to separate the person from what he represents as if that makes it more clean. Camus thinks it doesn’t, which is why Kaliayev pays for his uncertainty with his life. He affirms a value, but refuses to treat his judgment as final.

The second example is Caligula.

Cherea explains his decision to assassinate Caligula in a passage that captures as well as anything what tyranny does to ordinary life.

I’ve told you why; because I regard you as noxious, a constant menace. I like, and need, to feel secure. So do most men. They resent living in a world where the most preposterous fancy may at any moment become a reality, and the absurd transfix their lives, like a dagger in the heart… I’ll be no party to your logic. I’ve a very different notion of my duties as a man… I don’t hate you. I understand, and, to a point, agree with you. But you’re pernicious, and you’ve got to go.

Cherea is hardly a romantic revolutionary. He wants a world in which life is not constantly threatened by the arbitrary power of one person.

Caligula’s madness makes it impossible for others to live. His actions are an affront to dignity. Cherea decides it’s worth risking his life to end them. But he also knows that an assassination is not just an act. It is a symbol that communicates something about what’s permissible.

That’s why he tries to convince honorable men to join him. It’s the only way the act can be creative of value and ensure others will take his place if he fails.

I think Camus’s criteria for legitimate violence are pretty clear in these examples. First, they accept death. Kaliayev dies. Cherea and Scipio are willing to die. That willingness matters more than the outcome because it signals that they don’t treat killing as a morally cost-free act.

Second, the violence is not done at a distance. Kaliayev throws the bomb himself. Cherea and Scipio kill with their own hands. They don’t delegate murder. They don’t hide behind abstraction.

Third, they target a tyrant and take real pains to spare innocents. Kaliayev aborts the attempt when children are present. Cherea and Scipio strike when Caligula is alone.

Finally, they kill as a last resort. Extreme measures come only after other options have been exhausted. This does not justify the act, but it at least reflects moral seriousness.

What Camus is really trying to build

Camus wants a philosophy of politics that imposes limits and remains consistent with the demands of absurdity.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, he invokes absurdity to establish the impossibility of absolute knowledge. He discovers “the means to proceed beyond nihilism” by rejecting suicide. Life has value if it’s lived within the limits of the human condition.

Camus’s absurdism nullifies the epistemological basis of ideologies. It’s also a declaration of human innocence, in the sense that the absurd defines a condition shared by all. That shared condition becomes a source of communion and an imperative to serve those with whom it is shared.

In The Rebel, Camus transfers the limits marked by absurdity into the political realm. Action is constrained by experiential factors. Foundations must remain relative and provisional because they exist only insofar as they are continually reaffirmed in experience.

So the critique that Camus fails to offer a guide to revolutionary action misses his intention. He’s responding to the plague of nihilism.

“The world that people like me are after,” Camus wrote, “is not a world in which people don’t kill each other… but a world in which murder is not legitimized.”

Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and the pendulum of Camus’s thought

We can wrap this up by returning to our old friends, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

In the revolt period, Camus is both converging with them and trying to move beyond them. The worldliness of Nietzsche becomes, in Camus, an experiential ground. Revolt tries to realize itself “from bottom to top.” Experience remains the primary thing.

But Nietzsche’s rejection of idealism and his exaltation of becoming can lead to action without limits. That’s where Camus exits the Nietzsche train. Deprived of a moral counter-force, Nietzsche’s world is propelled by affirmations of power and will. In the political realm, that logic can become a kind of circularity without direction.

Camus says that Revolution retains the meaning it has in astronomy. A movement that describes a complete circle. Revolt, by contrast, reverses the movement. It leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas.

And then Dostoevsky. One of the core claims in my dissertation is that Camus moves pendulously between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Nowhere is that clearer than here.

In The Rebel, Camus’s divergence from Nietzsche is almost inversely proportional to his convergence with Dostoevsky. He invokes Ivan’s “everything is permitted” to highlight the danger of Nietzschean logic, or at least the danger of a world in which value collapses into power.

Dostoevsky’s arguments about values and foundations influence Camus’s mounting concern with limits. Camus can’t preserve Dostoevsky’s Christ-ideal and he can’t accept transcendence. But he does attempt to preserve the sense that without limits, politics becomes inhuman.

So he posits an experiential basis for limits, values, and solidarity. It’s not a perfect substitute for transcendence. It is, in view of absurdity, the most his political thought could hope to accomplish.

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[This is the seventeenth entry in my Camus series, adapted from my dissertation. The level of revision is evolving, so feel free to share thoughts or merciless pushback in the comments.]

Revolt as Tension

One of the easiest mistakes to make when reading Camus is to turn revolt into a firm position. Something you adopt. Something you defend. Something you can systematize and apply, like an ideology. Camus himself spent a good deal of his life pushing back against exactly that impulse. Revolt, as he understood it, was never meant to harden into doctrine. It was a posture toward the world, a way of living permanently inside contradiction.

Absurdity was intended to name the rupture between our longing for meaning and the world’s refusal to supply it. I would say that revolt is what happens when we refuse both despair and false consolation. But revolt cannot be a clean solution to that rupture. It doesn’t heal it. It preserves it. And that preservation is very much the point.

To see this more clearly, you have to take seriously something that runs quietly but persistently through all of Camus’s work: tension. Not tension as anxiety or stress, but tension as a condition of life. It’s the feeling that settles in when you’re fully alive to the world and also aware that it doesn’t bend to your hopes. Or when you stop distorting reality to make it fit your priors. Camus doesn’t rush past this sensation or try to explain it away. He stays with it. He treats that strain between desire and reality as something you learn to carry, hopefully with some dignity.

From his earliest sensualist essays to his last unfinished manuscripts, Camus is obsessed with contradiction. Life and death. Joy and suffering. Thought and action. Freedom and justice. Immanence and transcendence. Being and becoming. He never stops circling these pairs, and he never allows one side to cancel out the other. The temptation to resolve them is always there.

Revolt, for Camus, is what it looks like to live honestly inside these tensions without collapsing them into absolutes. It’s a refusal of excess in both directions. And it’s precisely this refusal that distinguishes revolt from revolution.

The danger of resolution

Camus insists that reconciliation between the competing demands of human life is impossible. Freedom pulls against justice. Justice constrains freedom. The desire to affirm life runs up against the brute fact of death. Thought longs for clarity while action unfolds in uncertainty. There’s no final synthesis waiting on the other side of these tensions. Any attempt to force one only produces more distortion.

The only way to achieve unity is through the suppression of all contradiction. And that’s exactly what revolt refuses to do.

Which is why revolt is always precarious. You’re always walking this narrow path between extremes. Drift too far toward freedom and you justify cruelty in the name of liberation. Drift too far toward justice and you sacrifice living people to abstract ideals. Lose the tension and revolt mutates into revolution, into the kind of totalizing logic that Camus spends The Rebel (and virtually all of his political writing) dismantling.

What he fears most is not rebellion itself, but rebellion that forgets its limits. That’s the road to mass graves.

Late in The Rebel, Camus describes revolt as an irregular pendulum, swinging in an erratic arc because it’s searching for its most perfect rhythm. That’s a pretty useful image. Revolt is not balance in the sense of equilibrium. It’s rhythmic. It moves. It corrects itself. It lives in motion because life itself is neither pure stability nor pure flux.

The world is not fixed, but it’s not chaos either. It’s both movement and stability. Being and becoming at the same time.

Revolt mirrors this structure. It’s born from the tension between a human being who asserts value and a world that refuses to confirm it. The assertion is significant. So is the refusal. Remove either and revolt loses its meaning.

This is why Camus insists that there are no absolutes. There are only limits.

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The absurd binds, it doesn’t liberate

This insistence sets Camus apart from both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. All three confront the collapse of traditional foundations. All three take seriously what it means to live in a world without guaranteed meaning. But they draw very different conclusions.

For Nietzsche, the absence of absolutes is liberating. In a world of pure becoming, values are human creations and therefore provisional. The task is not to obey limits but to overcome them. Creation replaces restraint. Power replaces prohibition.

Dostoevsky sees the same condition and recoils. If values are relative, if there’s no transcendent source of order, then everything is permitted. Without God, there’s no stable ground for morality, only chaos and cruelty disguised as freedom.

Camus accepts the diagnosis but rejects both prescriptions. In fact, Camus’s entire project is about negotiating this debate with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

Against Nietzsche, he argues that relativity does not free us from limits. Against Dostoevsky, he refuses to ground limits in transcendence. Once again, his claim is that the absurd does not liberate, it binds.

Absurdity reveals the tension between our demand for meaning and the world’s indifference. That revelation does not authorize anything. It does the opposite. It forces us to choose carefully because nothing guarantees our choices for us.

If anything, absurdity intensifies responsibility. If you decide to live, it’s because you have judged life to be valuable. And if you decide to rebel, it’s because you’ve judged that a human society has some positive value worth defending.

Revolt emerges naturally from absurdity, but it doesn’t resolve it. It universalizes the individual’s affirmation of life without turning that affirmation into a law of History or a moral absolute. Revolt marks a boundary. It says yes to life and no to its negation, without pretending that this yes and no can be made final.

Which brings us back to the title of the post: To revolt is to agree to live in tension. To reaffirm, again and again, the dignity of human life without claiming the authority to define it once and for all.

Exile, judgment, kingdom

Seen this way, revolt really does crown Camus’s thought. It doesn’t complete it any tidy sense. But it does gather together the insights of his earlier work without betraying them.

Camus thought of his writing as unfolding in stages, each one a step toward what he called an unrewarded perfection. One helpful way of tracking that movement is through the symbols he repeatedly returns to.

Exile. Judgment. Kingdom.

Exile names the experience of absurdity. The feeling of being cut off from meaning, from God, from a coherent world. Judgment names revolt. The moment when a human being says no to injustice and, in saying no, implicitly says yes to a shared standard. Kingdom names limits. Not a utopia, not a final harmony, but a human space built within the boundaries of what we can know and sustain.

Camus is always careful not to abandon anything as he moves forward. His early sensualism doesn’t disappear when he writes about the absurd. And his absurdism doesn’t evaporate when he turns to revolt. Its epistemological humility sets the terms for what revolt can and cannot claim.

Because absurdity exposes the limits of reason, Camus never tries to ground revolt in certainty. He turns instead to common experience. To what human beings recognize in one another without needing proof. And because abstraction so easily detaches values from life, he increasingly relies on symbols, myths, and stories to communicate truths that resist systematization.

A Mediterranean sensibility

Camus’s demand for moderation and limits is cultural as much as philosophical. He understood himself as divided between worlds, and he never tried to resolve that division.

Born in Algeria, shaped by Mediterranean culture, Camus felt alienated from much of French intellectual life, which he associated with German abstraction and high-brow metaphysics. He once said that Plato mattered more to him than Hegel, a comment that reveals more than it might seem.

This tension between German dreams and Mediterranean traditions runs through his work. On one side, the longing for transcendence, system, total explanation. On the other, an active love of life, of the body, of the present moment.

Camus knew these traditions didn’t fit neatly together, but he also knew that he needed both.

He read Nietzsche and Dostoevsky obsessively. He absorbed their insights. But his thought is always — and sometimes awkwardly — suspended between them, which, again, is very much the point.

Nietzsche gives Camus a language of becoming, of plurality, of resistance to false permanence. Dostoevsky gives him a profound understanding of moral limits and the dangers of nihilism. Camus wants the energy of the first without the excess. He wants he seriousness of the second without transcendence.

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Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and Nemesis

The ancient figure who helps Camus articulate this balance is Heraclitus. Near the end of The Rebel, Camus turns to him as a guide for how to embrace contradiction.

If you’ve never read any Heraclitus, he’s really worth your time. Also very fun to read. Camus loved his insistence that everything flows, that reality is defined by change. But he also insisted on measure. Change itself had limits. This limit was symbolized by Nemesis, the goddess of moderation and the enemy of excess.

Camus urges modern rebellion to take inspiration from her.

I don’t think this was an accident. Camus almost certainly encountered Heraclitus through Nietzsche, whose early writings on the Greeks left a deep impression on him. Nietzsche admired Heraclitus for rejecting static being in favor of perpetual becoming, and for exposing the illusion of unity and permanence.

Camus inherits this emphasis on plurality and change. He shares Nietzsche’s suspicion of reason’s pretensions. He shares his refusal to conjure away contradiction. But where Nietzsche moves toward affirmation without restraint, Camus pulls way back.

The world may be unintelligible. Values may be human creations. But that does not license excess. On the contrary, it demands measure.

Nemesis becomes Camus’s way of symbolizing this demand. She’s not just moderation personified. She’s a warning. Those who overstep the limit will be destroyed, not by divine command but by the consequences of their own excess.

For Camus, myth does what argument cannot. It preserves ambiguity while still conveying truth. Nemesis allows him to speak about limits without invoking transcendence or law.

Between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

So Nietzsche gives Camus a metaphysics of becoming and Dostoevsky gives him an ethics of danger. Camus never stops returning to Dostoevsky’s exploration of nihilism, especially in Notes from Underground, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoevsky traced political nihilism back to the human soul. So much of his fiction is about how the rejection of limits gives way to cruelty. This lesson reshaped Camus’s political thinking and it sharpened his critique of revolutionary violence.

Yet Camus could not accept Dostoevsky’s solution. He would not ground limits in God. He would not trade one form of metaphysical certainty for another. He tried to reconstruct the experience of limits from within human life itself. To show that moderation is not imposed from above but discovered in the shared vulnerability of finite beings.

Revolt, grounded in tension, becomes his answer. It holds open the space between Nietzsche’s affirmation and Dostoevsky’s warning. It refuses transcendence without embracing license. It preserves contradiction without sanctifying chaos.

In that sense, revolt really does crown Camus’s early thought.

Living without resolution

So how does all this cash out? As you know, Camus doesn’t offer a doctrine. What he does offer is something closer to a discipline. A way of resisting the urge to resolve what should remain tense. A way of saying yes to life without saying yes to everything.

This is harder than it sounds. We love absolutes. We love clarity and certainty and final answers. Tension feels unstable and unfinished.

But for Camus, that unfinished quality is what keeps revolt human. The moment we resolve the tension, we stop listening. We stop judging. We stop caring about the limits that make solidarity possible.

Revolt asks us to live without appeal. To affirm human dignity without trying to define it exhaustively. To resist injustice without becoming unjust. To accept contradiction as the price of honesty.

There is, I’m sorry to say, no reward waiting at the end of this path. There’s no final kingdom. All we have is the work itself. And the strange rhythm of refusal and affirmation. It’s that pendulum swinging and searching for its imperfect balance.

That, for Camus, is not a failure of philosophy. It is its most faithful expression.

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We’re now six months into this little experiment and the end of year feels like an appropriate moment to pause and take stock.

When I started publishing revised sections of my dissertation here, I pretty clearly didn’t have a grand plan. I’d like to say I was following a hunch, but even that’s not quite right. My dissertation was written in a different life, under very different constraints, and for a very specific audience. But I kept returning to it over the years because the questions at its center kept nagging at me. If anything, those questions feel more pressing now than they did when I wrote the damn thing more than a decade ago.

I wanted to see if I could take that old academic work, strip away some of the stiffness, and turn it into something readable, human, and maybe even useful. The thought was that it could live outside the narrow world it was written for. Could it speak to people who aren’t looking for theory as such, but who are trying to make sense of the moral and political atmosphere we’re all living in?

In many ways, the answer has been yes. The responses I’ve gotten, especially the emails from readers who have been quietly following along, have meant a great deal to me. There are not a whole lot of you (to be totally honest here) but there are some and it’s been rewarding. Knowing that people are reading these long(ish) reflections on Camus, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, and actually sitting with them, is not something I take for granted. Attention is super scarce. Thoughtful attention even more so. I’m truly grateful for it.

At the same time, I gotta keep it real about something.

This hasn’t quite gained the traction I hoped it might.

I don’t say that dramatically or resentfully. This is the reality of writing on the internet, especially writing that is slow, philosophical, and decidedly not built for virality. If I was on here dropping sizzling political takes, I could build an audience much, much faster. Or even just writing more directly about current events. I get all that.

Still, the audience has grown more slowly than I expected, and the number of paid subscribers, while meaningful to me personally, has not reached a point where this project feels financially sustainable over the long term.

That matters because this work takes a lot of time — way more time than I imagined. That I’m a fairly slow writer doesn’t help. And revising these pieces is not light editing. It often means rethinking arguments, rewriting entire sections, and translating academic prose into something closer to how I actually think and speak. I’m happy to do that work. I try to do it well. But I also need to be realistic about how long I can keep doing it without burning out or crowding out other obligations.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this. I’m genuinely unsure what the next phase of this Substack should look like.

One option is to keep going exactly as I have been. I could continue serializing the dissertation, chapter by chapter, trusting that the right readers will eventually find their way here. Another option is to start expanding the project. That could mean shorter essays alongside the long ones, or more explicitly contemporary pieces that bring Camus into direct conversation with the present moment. It could also mean writing that departs from Camus altogether while staying anchored in the same underlying questions about meaning, moral responsibility, and how to live sanely in a broken world.

I have my own instincts about what might work, but I don’t want this to be a one-way project. If you’ve been reading along, I’d really like to know what you’re getting out of this and what you might want more of.

Are the long, sustained essays the main draw, or would you welcome shorter and more experimental pieces alongside them? Are you here primarily for Camus, or for the broader attempt to think seriously about moral and political life? Is there something you’ve been hoping I’d write about that I haven’t yet touched?

And I want to ask one uncomfortable but honest question. What would make this worth paying for, if it isn’t already?

I don’t want to guilt anyone into subscribing, and I don’t believe that “supporting the work” is some abstract moral duty. If this is going to be financially viable in the long run, it has to be because people find real value here. Value that feels distinct from what they can get elsewhere. If you’re a paid subscriber already, THANK YOU. If you’re not, I’d love to know what would make the jump feel worthwhile to you.

To be clear, this isn’t a prelude to shutting things down. I’m not going anywhere just yet. I care too much about these questions and about the readers who have already invested their time here. But I am approaching a crossroads and I’d rather name that openly than quietly drift or burn out.

If you’re willing, I’d love to hear from you. Email me, leave a comment, or just hit reply and say a few sentences about what’s working, what isn’t, and what you’d like this space to become. I can’t promise I’ll follow every suggestion, but I can promise I’ll take them seriously.

Thanks for reading. Truly. Your attention, your patience, and your engagement mean more to me than you probably realize. Wherever this project goes next, I’m grateful you’ve been part of it so far.

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[This is the sixteenth entry in my Camus series, adapted from my dissertation. The level of revision is evolving, so feel free to share thoughts or merciless pushback in the comments.]

Late in Camus’s career, his philosophy takes a subtle turn toward the ordinary. Not away from the absurd or the tragic, not away from exile or revolt, but toward a deeper question that had been circling his work from the beginning. What happens when all these big ideas have to make contact with life as it’s actually lived? What can solidarity look like when it’s built not on ideology or grand abstractions, but on the everyday experiences of regular people?

That question sits at the center of The Growing Stone, the final story in Camus’s 1957 collection Exile and the Kingdom. (If you haven’t read this collection, I cannot recommend it enough). The story feels like a continuation of the vision he first put forward in The Plague. The exile of absurdity is still there, but the world feels much wider. The community is no longer under threat from an overwhelming crisis. There’s no dramatic battle against pestilence. It’s a remote Brazilian village on a normal day and right from the beginning you can tell this is a place where small gestures matter way more than ideas or arguments.

The hero is D’Arrast, a French civil engineer who has been sent to build a dam. Almost immediately he befriends a young cook, a man with whom he shares no language, culture, or history. They speak in half-broken exchanges that make full understanding nearly impossible. But despite that, they appear get each other in some primitive way. The cook tells him about a recent shipwreck he survived and the strange promise he made in the aftermath. Having escaped death, he vowed to carry a heavy stone to the church at the center of the village. It’s a promise the cook both fears and feels bound to for reasons we don’t quite understand.

Naturally, D’Arrast doesn’t know what to make of it, but he seems to recognizes its human origin. And by the end of this exchange the promise somehow belongs to both of them. There’s a kind of silent pact.

The next day the village prepares for the procession. D’Arrast waits on a balcony overlooking the church. The cook appears carrying the stone, already exhausted. He collapses before making it to the steps. D’Arrast moves instinctively to support him and the two continue together. But the cook collapses again just before reaching the church. So D’Arrast lifts the stone onto his own shoulders and begins walking. The villagers cheer him on, urging him toward the church. He walks up the steps, then suddenly stops. Instead of entering, he turns around and walks away.

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The villagers are stunned. A man named Socrates (not that Socrates) runs after him shouting directions and pointing back toward the church. D’Arrast keeps going. He steadies the stone on his back and heads toward the cook’s small hut. His arms are buckling under the weight and he almost falls several times, but he never stops. When he reaches the hut, he kicks open the door and throws the stone onto the fire burning inside.

The moment is puzzling and Camus leaves it mostly unresolved. Why does D’Arrast refuse to take the stone to the church? Why bring it instead to the cook’s home? What has been accomplished here?

In my dissertation, I argued that we can see this as a shift from ritual to experience. The stone, like all symbols, has a meaning that can be captured by institutions, by traditions, by expectations about what salvation or forgiveness is supposed to look like. The villagers want the stone brought to the church. They want the gesture to affirm the symbolic order. But D’Arrast is responding to something else, something more elemental. He recognizes in the cook’s burden a familiar human weight, the weight of suffering and fear and the desire to remake meaning out of chaos. In other words, I think he understands the movement behind the gesture even if he doesn’t understand the gesture itself.

Like so many of Camus’s stories, The Growing Stone is about solidarity. But not the kind of solidarity built on ideas or abstractions or shared beliefs. It’s solidarity built on shared experience. Irina Kirk made a convincing argument that D’Arrast saves himself from isolation by taking up the burden of a man with whom he can have no possible communion. Their communion is not linguistic or intellectual. It’s experiential. They share exile. They share the need for dignity. They share a desire for redemption, even if the forms of redemption differ.

For better or worse, this is what Camus’s moral philosophy is all about. He refuses the idea that solidarity requires agreement or similarity. The cook and D’Arrast don’t understand each other’s backgrounds, religions, or customs. They don’t share a worldview. Solidarity, for Camus, begins much earlier. It begins when one person sees the suffering of another and refuses to let him carry his stone alone.

And this is why D’Arrast brings the stone not to the church but to the cook’s hut. The hut is the real center of life in the village. It is where the cook lives and works, where he sits with his family, where daily life unfolds. If revolt in Camus’s sense is always for the living, if it always acts on behalf of life rather than abstraction, then the hut is the true destination of the stone. The church is a symbol. The hut is a world.

Camus makes this point explicitly in The Rebel when he writes that revolt relies primarily on the most concrete realities, on occupation, on the village, on the living heart of things. He’s always suspicious of abstract systems that try to impose meaning from above. Revolt belongs to people who are trying to build a life together from below. In The Growing Stone, meaning is not given by the ritual of the church. It’s created through the act of carrying the stone into the space where the cook actually lives.

What’s striking about this story is how quiet the stakes are. Again, there’s no plague. No war. No totalitarian ideology. No overwhelming crisis forcing people into relationship. The solidarity that emerges between D’Arrast and the cook arises out of ordinary life. It’s not the grand heroism of The Plague. It’s something more modest, something that feels closer to the actual texture of human existence. Solidarity becomes possible not in spite of privacy and cultural difference but because human beings share an underlying condition that transcends all of it.

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Camus takes this idea further in The First Man, his final work and arguably the most revealing. The novel was left unfinished when Camus died in a car accident in 1960 and was not published until 1995. It’s unlike anything else he wrote. More personal, more reflective, less concerned with argument than with individual and collective memory. If The Stranger is the zero point of his thought, as Camus once said, and The Plague a step toward greater complexity, then The First Man is the attempt to ground his entire philosophical project in lived experience.

The protagonist is Jacques Cormery, a thinly veiled version of Camus himself. Jacques is a French Algerian who never knew his father. The novel opens with his search for his father’s grave. When he finds it, there’s not a lot of emotion, not a wave of filial love or whatever. Instead he’s filled with something deeper and more universal. He feels compassion for a life cut short, for a man who died young and left behind a world that continued without him. Jacques realizes that he’s older now than his father ever became. In that moment time collapses. The natural order seems violated. Life feels very fragile and arbitrary.

Camus describes Jacques’s reaction in language that echoes his earliest work. There’s a sensation of dizziness, a feeling that the world is disorderly and chaotic, a recognition that death is both universal and scandalous. This is the moment of absurdity, the same recognition that haunts Meursault in The Stranger and Caligula in the play that bears his name. But Jacques does not respond with nihilism or violence. He doesn’t retreat into despair or revolt in directionless anger. He looks outward. He sees the graves of other men who also died too young. He feels connected to them. He understands that absurdity is not his private burden but a common condition.

Camus says in The Rebel that the first step of revolt is awareness that one’s suffering is not unique. Revolt begins when a person recognizes that the feeling of strangeness is something we all experience. Jacques embodies this recognition. The scene at the cemetery becomes a turning point where absurdity opens into a broader solidarity.

This is probably why Camus wrote in his notebooks that every man is the first man and nobody is. The phrase sounds cryptic until you sees how it operates in the novel. Jacques is both himself and a symbol. He stands for humanity in its earliest and most honest state. He’s Camus’s attempt to imagine a human being uncorrupted by ideology, superstition, or systems of power. He’s just a man grounded in experience, attentive to suffering, aware of limits.

The narrative reinforces this reading by shifting from novelistic distance to something closer to memoir. As Jacques reconstructs his father’s life, the story becomes less about a singular person and more about the values he represents. Jacques’s father is portrayed as someone who endured hardship without surrendering his conscience. In one scene a fellow soldier recalls how he reacted to an act of wartime brutality. He refused to join in. He insisted that there were limits even in war, that a man must not allow himself to violate what he knows to be wrong.

This insistence on limits is always at the heart of Camus’s political philosophy. Recall that revolt is not a license for anything. It’s a demand that human beings refuse to cross certain moral boundaries even under pressure. Jacques’s father embodies this. He’s poor, conscripted, far from home, but he holds onto a part of himself that cannot be violated. He submits to what he cannot avoid but protects a space of moral integrity.

The First Man offers a portrait of the rebel before rebellion becomes explicitly political. It’s an exploration of the human qualities that make revolt possible: honesty, compassion, a sense of measure, an instinct for solidarity. Ronald Srigley argues that the novel depicts humanity before the fall, a kind of innocence unspoiled by centuries of dogma. There’s truth in that for sure, but the more compelling reading is that the first man represents the proto rebel, the human being who has not yet been separated from others by ideology or abstraction.

Camus emphasizes this theme of intersubjectivity in his notebooks. Against the individual’s desire for power, he putss the virtues of solidarity and self transcendence. Jacques demonstrates this when he refuses to see others as morally distinct from himself. He views all men as victims of the same condition. And the transcendence he seeks is not spiritual or otherworldly. It occurs in the moment one imagines oneself reborn in the eyes of another person. Camus calls this act of imagination a human judgment, and for him it’s the essential ground of revolt.

If there’s a thread that connects The Stranger, The Plague, The Growing Stone, and The First Man, I think it’s this movement from the isolated individual to a shared humanity. Meursault begins alone and ends alone. Tarrou and Rieux build a community in the midst of crisis. D’Arrast discovers solidarity in a simple act of helping another man carry his burden. Jacques realizes that the absurdity he feels is the same absurdity felt by everyone who has ever lived.

What emerges across these texts is a progression from alienation to connection. The impetus for revolt becomes increasingly ordinary. In The Plague it’s a public catastrophe. In The Growing Stone it is a man struggling with a promise. In The First Man it’s the awareness of death. Yet each moment becomes a door to solidarity. The barriers between people loosen and exile becomes a space where renewal is possible.

Camus’s great insight is that solidarity cannot wait for perfect understanding or shared belief. It begins in the simple recognition that no one should carry their stone alone. That recognition is the seed of revolt. And from that seed an entire kingdom becomes possible.

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[This is the fifteenth entry in my Camus series, adapted from my dissertation. The level of revision is evolving, so feel free to share thoughts or merciless pushback in the comments.]

“Compared to The Stranger, The Plague does beyond any possible discussion represent the transition from an attitude of solitary revolt to the recognition of a community whose struggles must be shared. If there is an evolution from The Stranger to The Plague, it is in the direction of solidarity and participation.” – Albert Camus

In the last post, we talked about revolt as something personal, almost private. A person slowly comes around to the view that life is meaningless, that the universe is indifferent to human hopes, and the only honest response to all that is to live fully anyway. You build that fucking sandcastle with a smile on your face knowing the tide will wash it away. In a very unreflective way, this was Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger. He refused to lie about the world’s indifference and found a very strange kind of peace in that truth.

But there was always a limit to that position. It was too closed off, too solitary, too blind to other people. But still, we have to ask what happens after you’ve seen through the illusions? What are you supposed to do, and how are you supposed to anchor yourself, in an absurd world?

That’s where Camus went with this next novel. The Plague, published in 1947, is the book where the artist and the moralist finally come together. It’s still about absurdity, but it’s also about responsibility, compassion, and the discovery of a shared fate.

Olivier Todd, Camus’s biographer, once said that The Plague shows Camus “distancing himself from the absurd in order to find the pathway to revolt.” That’s exactly right. The novel doesn’t abandon the absurd; it moves through it. It asks what it means to resist a meaningless world with other people.

Shared Suffering

The story is simple. The Algerian city of Oran is struck by a plague. At first, the townspeople ignore it. Then they panic. Then they learn to live under it. The book follows a small group of people as they work, suffer, and endure the chaos and uncertainty.

Camus said the novel could be read three ways: as a story about an epidemic, as an allegory of Nazi occupation, and as a reflection on the metaphysical problem of evil. I always found the third meaning to be the deepest one.

For Camus, evil was another name for suffering, and suffering was inescapable. The whole point of his absurdist literature was to face that fact. But then we still have to figure out what to do with that knowledge. The absurd “teaches nothing,” he wrote, about how to respond to evil. The Plague is his best attempt to articulate that response — and it remains my favorite novel for that reason.

What he discovers is that suffering can become a bridge. It can draw people together instead of isolating them. When suffering is shared, it becomes the ground of solidarity — that, at any rate, is the idea.

From Meursault to Rieux

In The Stranger, our boy Meursault is the archetype of solitary revolt. He refuses to lie, he refuses to play the social game, and he faces death with open eyes. But the important thing about that story is that his revolt ends with him alone in a cell, shouting into the void.

Dr. Rieux, the narrator of The Plague, starts from the same awareness but ends somewhere very different. He too lives without illusions, yet his response to the absurd is not detachment but sober engagement.

Camus once wrote to his mentor Jean Grenier after attending one of the postwar purge trials in France. The accused was clearly guilty, but Camus left the courtroom before the verdict. “In every guilty man, there is an innocent part,” he said. “This is what makes any absolute condemnation revolting.” Then he added, “What Rieux means is that we must cure everything we can cure while waiting to know, or see.”

That sentence captures the essence of Rieux, one of my favorite characters in all of literature. He doesn’t know why things happen. He doesn’t pretend to. He has no interest in people who do. But, importantly, he refuses to wait for certainty before acting. He works to relieve suffering here and now. That, for Camus, is the truest form of revolt.

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Throughout The Plague, each character is eventually forced to choose between personal happiness and moral responsibility. Some flee inward. Some turn to distraction. A few, like Rieux, dedicate themselves to the sick.

And Rieux never stops working. He sleeps little, eats irregularly, spends his days tending to the dying. He has no illusions of resolution. He just does what must be done, because someone has to do it.

This is what connects Rieux to that other hero Sisyphus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes that Sisyphus is heroic because he continues to push the stone even though he knows it will always roll back. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Rieux’s struggle isn’t all that different. He knows the plague will return, that his work will never be finished, but he presses on. God I love this closing passage:

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know, but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

For Rieux, revolt is not about success or purity. It’s about endurance. Again … the struggle itself is what makes life meaningful.

The Birth of a Collective

At the start of the novel, Oran is a dead city without imagination. People live by routine. They’re absorbed in business, pleasure, and habit. When the first rats appear, no one wants to see what it means. But as the plague spreads, denial becomes impossible. Then the city closes its gates. Families are separated. And gradually, something changes. The people of Oran begin to understand — some of them, anyway — that their fate is shared.

So Camus uses the plague as both symbol and catalyst. It reveals what was always true about the human condition: that everyone is vulnerable and everyone depends on others. The plague strips away ideology, hierarchy, and illusion. All that remains is experience itself.

In his notebooks, Camus wrote, “People live according to different systems. The plague abolishes all systems.” How so? I think it’s because suffering has a way of exposing the truth of our equality. The world is unjust, but within that injustice, there is solidarity.

When people act on that awareness, when they help one another not because it will save them but because it’s right, they become fully human. This is what the scholar Robert Zaretsky calls Camus’s “ethics of attention.” To pay attention to another’s suffering is to affirm life.

Rieux does that. So does Tarrou, the idealistic outsider who joins him. Their revolt is quiet but contagious. It spreads like a counter-plague, undoing the isolation that the sickness created.

The Conversation with Dostoevsky

Camus’s dialogue with Dostoevsky is all over The Plague. It’s that question we opened with: What do you do with a world in which children suffer needlessly?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously rejects God because of that suffering. “If all must suffer to pay for eternal harmony,” he asks, “what have children to do with it?”

Rieux voices the same protest. “I refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture,” he tells Father Paneloux. But Rieux’s protest leads him somewhere Ivan could never go. Ivan is consumed by abstraction. He never gets out of his own head. So his rebellion ends in despair. Rieux’s begins in despair but ends in compassion. He accepts the world’s cruelty without accepting its logic.

In that sense, Rieux unites two opposing figures from The Brothers Karamazov: Ivan, the moral rebel, and Zossima, the saintly monk. He has Ivan’s moral clarity and Zossima’s capacity for love. He refuses both metaphysical resignation and spiritual consolation.

This is Camus’s quiet answer to Dostoevsky. You do not need to choose between rebellion and faith, between God and nihilism. There is a third path: to live honestly within the absurd and still care for others.

A Secular Saint

Rieux’s humanity crystallizes in his conversations with Tarrou, some of which are profoundly moving. Tarrou dreams of becoming a saint without God. Rieux replies that he prefers to be a man among men: “What interests me is being a man,” he says. “Yes, we’re after the same thing, but I’m less ambitious.”

It’s just a line but you can see an entire philosophy in it. To be a man, for Camus, means to accept one’s limits, to live with contradiction, and to act with decency even when there is no ultimate reward. Rieux has no belief in salvation. He has only the knowledge that people are suffering and that he can do something about it. That’s what makes him a secular saint.

When Father Paneloux calls the plague a divine test, Rieux refuses. To make a virtue of suffering, he says, is to betray the living. Camus himself wrote in his journals that humanity had been “intoxicated for two thousand years” by resignation to evil. Rieux sobers us from that intoxication.

His moral vision is entirely grounded in this world. It asks no permission from heaven. It grows from the simple recognition that we are all vulnerable and therefore responsible for one another.

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Philosophers like David Sprintzen have argued that The Plague pushes the social order to the edge of collapse. Once the old frameworks fall away, the people of Oran must reinvent meaning in real time. They can no longer rely on tradition, religion, or ideology. They have to build morality from experience itself.

That’s what makes The Plague much more than a moral allegory. It’s a blueprint for what a secular ethics might look like: an ethics based on presence rather than promise.

The plague abolishes the future as an object of hope. It also abolishes the past as a source of authority. Only the present remains. What counts is not belief or outcome but attention and action.

The philosopher Cecil Eubanks (also, incidentally, my dissertation adviser) described this as a “politics of foundations without foundationalism.” Meaning has no metaphysical anchor, but that doesn’t mean it is groundless. It emerges from shared action, from the solidarity of people who work and suffer together.

Camus believed this orientation could serve as the basis for a new kind of politics — one that rejects both divine authority and ideological certainty. Revolt, in that way, becomes the secular ground of ethics and politics alike.

The Plague Never Dies

When the epidemic finally ends, the city erupts in celebration. The gates open, lovers reunite, families embrace. Which is of course what you’d expect. But Rieux stands apart from all that, thinking of those who did not survive. He’s attuned to the fragility of that joy. The plague, after all, never truly disappears because those fucking rats will always return at some point.

That realization is not meant to depress us. It’s meant to keep us awake. Evil, cruelty, and injustice are not temporary defects in the human story. They are constants. The task is not to abolish them once and for all but to resist them continually.

That’s Camus’s philosophy of revolt: to live with full awareness that the plague will return and still choose to fight it.

In The Stranger, revolt ends where Meursault ends — alone, defiant, lucid. In The Plague, revolt becomes collective. It’s a chorus instead of a monologue. It lives in the ordinary decency of people who work quietly to ease one another’s pain.

The Hope of the Defeated

Camus called The Plague his most positive book, and he was right, though there is nothing overly sentimental about it. It offers no redemption, no happy ending, no escape from mortality. What it offers instead is a faith in decency, in endurance, in the stubborn human impulse to … help.

Rieux says he feels more fellowship with the defeated than with the saints. I always loved that line. It’s basically Camus’s moral outlook. The measure of a good person isn’t victory but fidelity. To act without hope of success, to keep pushing the stone uphill, to tend to the sick even when you know they will die — that’s the kind of hope that matters.

It’s about saying “yes” to the world, not because it’s good or meaningful, but because it’s ours. And it’s the only one we got.

Thanks for reading. If you’re getting value from this series, consider sharing or, even better, subscribing!

[This is the fourteenth entry in my Camus series, adapted from my dissertation. The level of revision is evolving, so feel free to share thoughts or merciless pushback in the comments.]

“Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society.” — Albert Camus, The Rebel

One thing that should be clear by now is that there’s no final victory in Camus’s moral universe. Even if humanity perfects all its institutions and relieves most of the world’s suffering, the cry of injustice will still echo. Somewhere a child will die for no reason, and the question “Why?” will go unanswered. Because there is no answer — no good one, anyway. It will always be like that. For Camus, this was not an invitation to despair. Instead it was the beginning of wisdom. And it was the point at which politics had to begin again, stripped of illusions and grounded in the tragic limits of the human condition.

So in this post I’m going to explore that tragic politics — the politics of revolt — and trace how Camus wrestled with the modern loss of foundations, and how his encounter with Dostoevsky helped him imagine a morality without transcendence and a solidarity without God. We’ll have to cover a TON of ground to do this, and I’ll be compressing about 30 dissertation pages into 2,500 words or so, but this is the good stuff, right? This is what you’re here for … right? Ok, good. Let’s start by looking a little closer at what Camus, a non-believer, learned from Dostoevsky’s theology of suffering.

The Problem of Foundations

As I explained in a previous post, Camus thought ideologies filled the hole in the modern world left by the decline of religion. Where faith once gave order and meaning, political doctrines now promised salvation through History. The result, as Camus saw it, was a new kind of absolutism—one that no longer appealed to God but to reason, race, or revolution.

Camus’s response to this crisis is what he called “revolt,” a moral stance that begins in refusal but ends in affirmation. Revolt says “no” to the absurdity of suffering, but in saying no it also says yes to life. The revolt that begins in metaphysical protest becomes a principle for politics: to fight injustice without justifying new forms of it, to act in the name of human dignity without appealing to divine authority.

Camus’s great question, then, was whether moral order could survive without metaphysical order. Could human beings affirm shared values without reference to something absolute beyond them? Could there be meaning in a thoroughly disenchanted world?

Dostoevsky’s Underground

No one, Camus thought, faced this dilemma more honestly than Dostoevsky. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s narrator speaks directly from the ruins of moral certainty. “Nothing is sacred,” he declares. “Our belief in general rules has been destroyed.” The underground man is the first fully modern individual: isolated, ironic, unable to believe in either God or Progress. His torment is not just psychological but civilizational. Once the transcendent ground of value disappears, everything becomes permissible and nothing is meaningful.

For Dostoevsky, this was the essential modern tragedy. Freedom, unmoored from faith, turns into nihilism. Reason, left to its own devices, produces systems but no soul. His later novels are studded with characters who worship new gods — science, socialism, ideology — but find only emptiness. In The Possessed, the revolutionary Shatov insists that no nation has ever been built on reason alone, for every people needs a living idea of the divine, a vision of ultimate purpose. Without it, societies decay; they lose the inner cohesion that binds one generation to the next.

To Dostoevsky, Christ was that binding idea. Not simply an object of belief but a principle of order, a motive force, a figure through which life made sense and love became possible. Christ, in his view, united people not by doctrine but by revealing the sacred worth of every person. Religion, for Dostoevsky, was not a set of epistemological claims; it was an orientation, a practice, a way of being and seeing.

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Camus admired this insight, even as he rejected its theological form. He agreed that human beings could not live without meaning, and that meaning depended on shared values. But he refused to return to faith simply because nihilism was unbearable. The modern mind, he thought, could not honestly believe as it once did. That epistemological ship had long sailed. To restore the old order, one would have to pretend that modern knowledge did not exist. As he put it in his notebooks, “we would have to act as if we had learned nothing.”

So Camus set himself an impossible task: to find a foundation that was not foundational, a source of value that did not depend on metaphysics. He wanted to affirm what Dostoevsky affirmed — human dignity, moral responsibility, love — while remaining faithful to the limits of experience. He sought what he called “measure” instead of faith.

The result is a moral philosophy rooted in experience rather than revelation. The good, for Camus, is whatever sustains the world we share; the evil is whatever denies that shared reality. He agreed with Dostoevsky that reason alone cannot sustain a civilization, but he also believed that invoking God was intellectually dishonest in a disenchanted age. The only honest path was to build a moral world from within the limits of the human condition.

The Experiential Ground of Belief

For Dostoevsky, belief was not a matter of intellectual assent but of lived experience. The idea of God was inseparable from how one experienced reality itself. As Bruce Ward puts it, the “idea of life” that unites a people is not consciously perceived as an idea; it is simply felt as reality. In this sense, to lose faith is not just to change one’s mind — it is to inhabit a different world.

This is why Dostoevsky’s great saints are not theologians but lovers. Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov tells his followers to “love a man in his sin,” to “kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing love.” For him, divine love reveals the interdependence of all things, and to act from that love is already to participate in God. Zossima’s message is not otherworldly; it is profoundly embodied. Love, he insists, is its own reward.

Camus found in this a model for his own secular ethics. Zossima’s call to love the world as it is becomes, in Camus’s language, a call to affirm life even in its absurdity. What Zossima grounds in God, Camus grounds in shared experience. Both understand that value is not imposed from above but realized through action. Love and revolt are two names for the same movement of the spirit: a refusal to accept suffering as fate and a determination to respond with compassion.

Christ and the Rebel

Camus’s “rebel” is, in a sense, Dostoevsky’s Christ without God. Like Christ, the rebel stands with the suffering and refuses the logic of domination. But the rebel’s solidarity arises not from faith in divine love but from the shared recognition of human limits. To say “no” to injustice is also to say “yes” to the common dignity of life. Revolt, Camus writes, “is a collective experience.” It is not the assertion of an isolated will but the awakening of a bond.

In The Rebel, Camus contrasts this measured revolt with the total revolutions of modern history. When rebellion becomes an ideology, it forgets its origins in human suffering and becomes the very thing it opposed. The revolutionary who kills in the name of freedom denies the freedom he claims to serve. The moral task, for Camus, is to remain faithful to the experience of revolt itself — to the sense of outrage that affirms value without pretending to resolve it.

Christ and the Rebel, then, are both figures of transcendence through immanence. Each reveals the sacred within the human. For Dostoevsky, transcendence is love of God expressed in love of others; for Camus, it is fidelity to the world expressed through solidarity. Both reject nihilism, but Camus refuses to escape the world to overcome it. His is a faith in the earth.

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From Individual to Collective Revolt

Camus’s fiction traces this moral evolution. In The Stranger, revolt begins as individual defiance. The protagonist Meursault refuses to lie about his indifference to God or death, and in that honesty he discovers a strange freedom. But his revolt remains solitary; it affirms authenticity without compassion.

In The Plague, the horizon widens. Dr. Rieux, the reluctant hero, fights the epidemic not because he believes in providence or progress but because he cannot bear to see others suffer. He finds meaning not in metaphysical justification but in shared struggle. “The only means of fighting a plague is common decency,” he says, and that simple phrase captures the heart of Camus’s ethics: a refusal to surrender to despair, a commitment to human fellowship without illusion.

By the time of The First Man, Camus’s final and unfinished novel, revolt has become a form of belonging. The young Jacques Cormery discovers a sense of home not in ideology but in memory, in the fragile beauty of the world and the faces of those he loves. Here I really think Camus gives his most intimate expression of solidarity: the recognition that we are bound to one another by our shared vulnerability and by our longing for meaning in a silent universe.

The movement from The Stranger to The First Man is the movement from the individual to the collective, from negation to affirmation. It mirrors the philosophical journey from nihilism to revolt, from the absurd to the political. Camus never abandons the tension between the two, but he learns to inhabit it more fully.

That tension — between rebellion and restraint, value and relativity, individuality and solidarity — is the essence of Camus’s political thought. He once wrote that the world “has no foundations,” but he refused to conclude that it therefore had no meaning. The absence of absolute truth does not abolish the need for justice; it simply makes justice more difficult, more precarious, more human.

Camus’s politics of revolt is not a program but more like an attitude. It demands that we act without pretending to know the final meaning of history. It asks us to diminish suffering even when we know we cannot eliminate it. It calls for limits in a world that worships absolutes. In this sense, revolt is the moral form of humility.

This is also where Camus parts ways with Nietzsche. Nietzsche sought to replace God with the creative power of the individual will. Camus found that path equally destructive. Once the self becomes the sole source of value, it easily slides into domination. The will to power may begin in affirmation but ends in tyranny. Camus’s rebel, by contrast, recognizes that his freedom is bound up with the freedom of others. He cannot affirm himself without affirming the world that sustains him.

The Tragic Measure of Politics

The politics that emerges from this vision is modest but very demanding. It refuses utopias because it knows that suffering and injustice will never be abolished. At best, they can be reduced. “Even by his greatest effort,” Camus wrote, “man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world.” Yet this limited task is not meaningless; it is the very measure of our humanity. To act in the name of justice, knowing that injustice will endure, is to live the paradox of revolt.

This is why Camus distrusted both revolutionary absolutism and cynical resignation. The first sacrifices the present for an imagined future; the second abandons the future altogether. Revolt, by contrast, is fidelity to the present. It is the decision to care, to keep faith with the living world even when it offers no ultimate justification.

In this sense, Camus’s thought remains political in the deepest way. It asks what kind of community can exist among finite beings who know there is no final redemption. His answer is a community of limits, bound not by ideology but by mutual respect for the fragility of life.

Revolt as a Way of Living

For Camus, revolt is obviously about resisting injustice. But it’s also about living in truth. It’s a discipline of attention to the world as it is. Like Zossima’s call to “love all God’s creation,” it requires an active love of the world — all the beauty, all the pain, all the absurdity, all the grace. Camus called this fidelity to the earth. He believed that the more lucid we become about the world’s indifference, the more responsible we are for one another.

This is why Camus could write, at the end of The Rebel, that the only true progress lies in learning “how to live and how to die, and in refusing to serve injustice.” Progress, for him, was moral, not historical.

The modern world, he feared, had mistaken technical mastery for moral progress. It could transform matter but not the heart. Against this backdrop, revolt is a form of resistance to abstraction itself. It restores proportion to human action. It reminds us that political life is not about achieving perfection but about bearing witness to a shared truth: that human suffering is always an outrage, and that our task is to reduce it where we can.

The Last Word

In the end, Camus’s politics of revolt is an ethics of endurance. It accepts that the world is unjust but refuses to be reconciled to that injustice. It recognizes that we cannot justify life, yet insists that we must live it well. Like Dostoevsky’s Zossima, Camus believed that meaning arises in the act of love itself. But for Camus, that love no longer points beyond the world; it is an act of fidelity within it.

Maybe this is why Camus’s work continues to speak so powerfully now, in an age that feels once again unmoored from foundations. He reminds us that we can build meaning without illusion, that solidarity does not require metaphysics, and that rebellion, properly understood, is an affirmation of life.

Even in a perfect society, children will die unjustly. The cry of “Why?” will not be silenced. For Camus, our task is not to answer it but to respond and to live as if that cry matters and to try to build a world in which fewer cries are heard.

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[This is the thirteenth entry in my Camus series, adapted from my dissertation. The level of revision is evolving, so feel free to share thoughts or merciless pushback in the comments.]

When I began this series, I talked about how deeply Dostoevsky shaped Camus’ understanding of totalitarianism in The Rebel. That early analysis dealt mostly with philosophy and political theory. Now I think we can turn back to the places where Camus dramatized these ideas and gave them life.

I hope it’s clear at this point how much Dostoevsky’s moral world saturates Camus’ fiction. In The Fall, the protagonist Clamence directly invokes the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov. He’s held up as the prophet of benevolent tyranny who insists that people prefer security to freedom. Critics have also drawn parallels between Chigalev’s “system” in The Possessed and Camus’ portrait of power in Caligula. There’s something to that, but Dostoevsky’s presence is most explicit in Camus’ State of Siege — a play that he wrote in 1948 and one that deserves way more attention than it usually gets.

Camus called State of Siege a direct attack on the kind of political society that was emerging in his time, whether on the right or the left. It’s a strange, allegorical piece set in the Spanish city of Cádiz, where the citizens suddenly find themselves ruled by a mysterious plague. Unlike The Plague, which centers on the moral endurance of individuals, State of Siege is a story about the state itself. It tinkers with all the ways fear, reason, and ideology can organize human life into something both efficient and totally flat and lifeless.

Camus said the goal of the play was to defend “the individual, in that which is noble in the flesh, in short, terrestrial love, against the abstractions and terrors of the totalitarian state.” That’s the big tension of the play: the human and the abstract, love and order, the living and the systematic. And at the heart of it all is a question that also occupied Dostoevsky: why do people so often choose servitude over freedom?

The plague made human

In State of Siege, the plague takes human form. He arrives in Cádiz as a kind of immaculate bureaucrat. He’s polite, methodical, convinced of his own virtue. He offers what every exhausted society seems to want: clarity, control, and mostly relief from uncertainty. “Order, silence, and total justice,” he promises. No more confusion, no more wasted effort, no more suffering born of chance. Everything will be rational, predictable, and secure. Sounds LOVELY!

I think Camus’ insight here is that the authoritarian impulse does not always (or reliably) come with tactical boots and goofy hats. Sometimes it’s an unassuming civil servant promising to manage life more efficiently.

The Plague abolishes freedom by calling it chaos. He presents obedience as a form of moral hygiene. The people, weary of disorder, begin to submit almost gratefully. As he puts it, “We will do all the thinking for them.” The reward for surrender is peace of mind. This is the same trade that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor offers in The Brothers Karamazov. “The most painful secrets of their conscience,” he says of humanity, “all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all.” Freedom is agony and the Inquisitor’s solution is to take that agony away.

Camus and Dostoevsky are clearly diagnosing the same disease: the longing to be ruled by someone who promises to make life coherent. The tyrant appears not as a monster but as a savior. “I don’t ask you to thank me,” Camus’ Plague tells the citizens. “It’s only natural, what I am doing here for you.” The Inquisitor, too, insists that he sacrifices his own freedom out of love for mankind.

Both figures embody what Camus called “false humanism,” the belief that to protect people from themselves is the highest moral act. It’s essentially the foundation of every ideology that claims to serve humanity by abolishing it.

The machinery of isolation

The Plague’s next move is to destroy solidarity. The idea is that freedom depends not just on this abstract thing we call “rights” but on the actual bonds between people — bonds of sympathy, love, and shared purpose. So he sets out to break them.

His decrees are almost comically absurd, but the absurdity is strategic. Citizens are forbidden to help anyone stricken with illness. They’re ordered to keep vinegar-soaked pads in their mouths “to teach discretion and the art of silence.” Language itself becomes suspect. And then you get a recurring theme in Camus’ fiction, which is that when communication breaks down, when people become mutually unintelligible to each other, everything very quickly goes to shit.

Here’s how The Plague explains his plan: “I seek to fix things up in such a way that nobody understands a word of what his neighbor says. Then we shall be well on the way to that ideal consummation — the triumph of death and silence.”

It’s an image that could describe any regime built on fear. The more isolated people become, the easier they are to manage.

Dostoevsky anticipated this logic in the parable of the Inquisitor. There, too, control begins with dependency. The Inquisitor recalls Christ’s refusal to turn stones into bread and mocks it as naive. People will not follow freedom, he says, but bread. “Turn them into bread,” he imagines saying to Christ, “and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep.”

For the Inquisitor, freedom is a curse. For The Plague, it’s a form of disorder. Both understand that the fastest way to break the human spirit is through need — hunger, fear, love. Camus dramatizes this in the play’s second act, when Diego, the rebel hero, is forced to choose between his lover and his cause. Victoria gets sick, and The Plague offers to save her if Diego will surrender. “Don’t you realize,” he says, “that ten years of this girl’s love are worth far more than a century of freedom for those men?”

The appeal is intimate, emotional, almost reasonable. I think it exposes the heart of despotism: not brute force but the seduction of the human need for security and affection. Most people, Camus suggests, are conquered not by violence but by persuasion. They yield because the cost of defiance feels too high.

This is why both The Plague and the Inquisitor see themselves as benefactors. They spare people the anguish of moral choice. They promise to replace the uncertainty of freedom with the calm of obedience. What they destroy in the process is precisely what makes freedom meaningful: the space between individuals where love, speech, and judgment can exist.

The ant-heap

Once solidarity is gone, what remains? Certainly for Dostoevsky, and maybe to a slightly lesser extent Camus, the answer is is reason without limits. The Plague’s toady bureaucrat, a character named Nada, boasts that under the new order, the world will be divided “between well-drilled ants and the placid dead.”

The image of the ant-heap comes straight from Dostoevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, the Inquisitor dreams of reducing humanity to “a unanimous and harmonious ant-heap.” Both writers use the metaphor to describe the same impulse: the dream of perfect rational order, where every individual becomes a part of a collective mechanism.

Ants don’t question. They act. They carry stuff from one fucking place to the next. They swarm when you roll the mower over their mound. They bite if you get too close. They perform their functions without reflection. That’s precisely what both The Plague and the Inquisitor want from their subjects: to obey, to execute, to stop thinking. “What I desire of them,” The Plague declares, “isn’t comprehension but execution of their duties.”

Camus and Dostoevsky saw this as the political form of nihilism. When the transcendent order collapses, the human mind fills the void with its own designs. Reason becomes a tool of domination. The ideal of truth becomes a quest for control.

For Camus, this fusion of nihilism and reason explains the logic of modern totalitarianism. Once you accept that there is no higher law, everything becomes possible in the name of progress, science, or history. What begins as the desire to perfect society ends in the mechanization of life itself.

Is Camus a little heavy-handed here? Yeah, probably. Nevertheless, I think the core insight holds.

Reason without restraint

This was Camus’ great theme in The Rebel: the transformation of reason into ideology. From Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, he learned that ideas are not just intellectual positions but psychological necessities. Even false beliefs provide structure. When God dies, the need for meaning doesn’t die with him. It just migrates from heaven into history, from faith into politics.

Camus saw this migration most clearly in Marxism. He called it the secular heir of Christianity, a faith in the perfectibility of man transposed from eternity into time. The promise of salvation becomes the promise of revolution. History becomes … divine.

Dostoevsky saw it coming decades earlier. He believed that socialism, at its most fanatical, would eventually replace God with the state. Nietzsche saw another danger: that the will to truth, once freed from any transcendent measure, would become its own weird form of tyranny.

Camus is obviously influenced by both visions. He came to see reason as an extension of the same metaphysical hunger that once expressed itself in religion — the longing for coherence, order, and final answers. When that longing turns political, it produces ideologies that try to organize the world as a single system of meaning. The result is what he called “the empire of logic,” where everything that cannot be measured or planned is declared meaningless.

This, he believed, was the essence of 20th century totalitarianism. It wasn’t just the abuse of power; it was the logical outcome of a world that had lost faith but still needed certainty.

Between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

By this point in his thought, Camus was suspended between his two great teachers. Nietzsche remained the philosopher of freedom and doubt, the man who tore down absolutes and dared to live without them. Dostoevsky understood all of that but drew a moral line: without transcendence, he warned, the world would collapse into crime and confusion.

Camus admired Nietzsche’s courage but saw the wreckage it left behind. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he took Nietzsche’s side, defining the absurd as the clash between our hunger for meaning and the world’s indifference. But by the time he wrote The Rebel, he had watched the metaphysical void turn political. “Sensing the absence of transcendence,” he wrote, “men decided to kill so that it might exist.”

That single sentence contains the tragedy of modern history. When faith disappears, people create substitutes. They make gods of reason, race, class, or nation. They kill for ideals that promise to end killing. Nietzsche foresaw the danger but thought it could be overcome through the creation of new values. Camus doubted that this could work. The experiment had already been tried, and the result was ideological terror on a global scale.

Even so, Camus could not retreat into faith. He rejected Dostoevsky’s Christ but accepted his insight that human beings need something beyond themselves. Where Dostoevsky placed God, Camus placed the Rebel — a figure who says “no” to injustice and “yes” to life, who resists totality without claiming absolute truth.

The Rebel, unlike the revolutionary, knows that limits are what make freedom possible. He acts in the name of people, not history. He refuses both resignation and domination. For Camus, this was the only credible ethic left to a world without transcendence.

The enduring lesson

Looking back now, it’s hard not to be struck by how much both Dostoevsky and Camus foresaw. They understood that reason, unmoored from moral limits, can become a weapon. They saw that progress, when treated as destiny, leads to its opposite. And they knew that the most dangerous form of despotism is often born of the desire to spare humanity from its own freedom.

That’s what unites The Brothers Karamazov, State of Siege, and The Rebel. Each work describes the same wish to be freed from responsibility. We crave freedom, but we fear it. We want meaning, but we don’t want to earn it. And so we surrender our agency to those people (or technologies) who promise to make life simple.

Camus’ answer was never optimism. It was more like vigilance. Freedom is not given; it must be lived. The moment we stop thinking for ourselves, we prepare the ground for the next inquisitor or plague.

Thanks for reading. If you’re getting value from this series, consider sharing or, even better, subscribing!

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[This is the twelfth entry in my Camus series, adapted from my dissertation. The level of revision is evolving, so feel free to share thoughts or merciless pushback in the comments.]

The last post explored how a certain kind of reason becomes its own ideology. This one asks what happens when reason becomes the engine of History itself. That’s what we affectionately call the “Hegel Problem.”

Not Hegel the meticulous philosopher of logic and spirit that scholars slavishly admire, but the Hegel absorbed and simplified by the modern mind: History as God, reason as destiny, the present justified because it exists. Camus thought that this transformation gave intellectual cover to the worst political faiths of the twentieth century.

What follows is an unforgivably brief account of how that happened, and how Camus, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky grappled with it.

Before coming to Hegel, it helps to recall the way Nietzsche and Dostoevsky framed the problem. Both saw modern ideologies not as the negation of religion but as its mutation. The secular creeds that replaced Christianity kept its architecture while discarding its transcendence. They inherited the same yearning for redemption, the same need for certainty, and the same hope that History would reconcile all contradictions.

For Dostoevsky this was the natural consequence of faith’s collapse. The intellect took over the work of salvation. The “abstract love of humanity” that he mocks in The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov is what remains when Christian charity becomes an idea instead of an act. You end up loving mankind because it’s a helluva lot easier than loving your actual neighbor.

Nietzsche saw the same pattern from a different angle. In The Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science he describes modern humanism as “a shadow of God,” the lingering morality of a dead religion. Even after the “death of God,” he said, we continued to worship truth, progress, equality, and History. We just changed up the vocabulary.

Camus absorbed both critiques and turned them into a political argument. Dostoevsky exposed the psychology of ideological faith. Nietzsche diagnosed its metaphysical sickness. Camus saw it become a historical reality. Once “mankind” is an abstraction, anything can be done in its name.

Ideology as Secular Salvation

For all three writers, the danger was the same: ideas replacing experience, abstractions replacing persons. Dostoevsky’s revolutionaries in The Possessed kill for logic, not hatred. Nietzsche’s moralists worship truth even when it destroys life. In Camus’s century, ideologues claimed to serve humanity while excusing their crimes with “the logic of history.”

Camus’s tone is measured, but there is a touch of fury underneath. In his 1944 essays for Combat, he writes that some socialists “invoke the love of humanity to exempt themselves from serving human beings.” They appeal to peace to avoid sacrifice and to progress to avoid justice. Dostoevsky would have recognized the type immediately.

The issue was not hypocrisy but abstraction. Once you elevate an idea — humanity, nation, progress — above concrete life, you’ve replaced ethics with metaphysics. You act in the name of man, but the man before you becomes invisible.

This is where Hegel enters the chat. If Dostoevsky and Nietzsche described this moral tendency, Hegel provided the philosophical blueprint.

The Hegelian Turn

Hegel’s system is vast, impossibly difficult, damn near unreadable, and at times objectively magnificent. But as Camus and Nietzsche saw it, it equated reason with reality. The world, Hegel said, is the unfolding of Spirit; history is the process through which reason comes to know itself. Freedom is destiny. Contradiction is progress. The real is rational.

That equation was intoxicating. It meant that everything — every event, every institution, every catastrophe — was part of a larger logic. Even tragedy had meaning because it served a purpose. Am I oversimplifying a bit here? Probably. But what do you want in a 2,500 word post?

Anyway, Camus thought this was the most seductive illusion of modern philosophy. By identifying reason with History, Hegel turned both into absolutes. Every fact, however brutal, could now be justified as “necessary.” Once History itself is rational, there are no limits left, only stages of progress.

Dostoevsky saw a similar danger in Russia. In his letters and essays, he blamed Hegelianism for infecting the intelligentsia with a worship of necessity. If everything unfolds according to “historical logic,” then whatever exists must be right. Camus later called this “the decisive justification of the spirit of power in the twentieth century.”

Nietzsche was blunter. He accused Hegel of replacing religion and art with historicism. Once you believe that “the real is rational,” Nietzsche said, you have turned morality into bureaucracy.

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History as God

The common thread is the deification of history — the belief that the world has a moral trajectory. For Camus, this was the culmination of the Enlightenment’s mistake: confusing knowledge with wisdom and progress with salvation.

He saw that every modern ideology carried a trace of this faith. The Marxist calls it “dialectical materialism.” The liberal calls it “the arc of progress.” The nationalist calls it “destiny.” Each assumes that the future justifies the present.

In The Rebel, Camus describes this perfectly. “Values,” he writes, “are either supplanted by facts or found at the end of history.” Either you take what exists as right, or you believe rightness will arrive later. Either way, the present is absolved. That’s how logic becomes violence: when the moral horizon is forever deferred.

Camus called this worldview “political realism.” Not realism in the sense of moderation, but realism as moral surrender — the conviction that power and necessity determine right.

You can see this in every ideology that claims to “represent history.” The communist and the technocrat, the revolutionary and the market fundamentalist, all insist that their principles are simply the working-out of reality itself. They differ in content but share a method: conscience replaced by calculation.

Camus saw this clearly in his own time. In Combat, he wrote that capitalism and communism both “rest on the idea of progress” and demand sacrifices in its name. The choice, he said, was not between utopia and realism but between rival utopias, each convinced of its inevitability.

Once inevitability is accepted, anything can be rationalized. “Evolution is more important than living,” wrote the German nationalist Ernst Jünger. Camus quoted that line often because it captured the essence of the disease. If history has a goal, then life becomes expendable.

The Teleology Trap

Teleology satisfies a deep, deep hunger. It gives chaos a plot and turns suffering into contribution. Camus thought this was the most persistent modern temptation.

Against it he set the absurd. Not as despair, but as resistance. To live with the absurd is to reject final answers and to accept that life is unjustifiable yet still worth living.

The absurd, importantly, refuses teleology. It says that the world does not explain itself and that this very lack of explanation gives it meaning. Once you accept that, you stop trying to turn the future into a god. And you stop killing in the name of coherence.

This is where Camus diverged most sharply from Nietzsche. He admired Nietzsche’s courage but feared the consequences of his exuberance. “With Nietzsche,” he wrote, “rebellion ends in the exaltation of evil.” Nietzsche’s aesthetic affirmation, when stripped of irony, can become a cult of power. Most people, Camus said, would rather command than create.

So he kept Nietzsche’s lucidity and Dostoevsky’s compassion, but without their leaps into metaphysics. His rebellion is quieter. It is bound by limits. It insists on living without alibis.

The Problem of Abstract Love

One of the central ideas in this series is the problem of abstraction. More precisely, it’s the habit of replacing concrete relationships with theoretical ones. Dostoevsky dramatized it in his “love of mankind” that ignores actual men. Camus made it the moral center of The Rebel. “True rebellion,” he wrote, “begins with the cry of Karamazov.” But rebellion betrays itself the moment it prefers an abstract concept of man to a living person.

This distinction is political as well as moral. To serve “mankind” is easy. To serve a neighbor is hard. Camus distrusted every movement that used universal ideals to justify particular cruelties. “Those who preach it never commit themselves,” he said of the doctrinaire socialists.

Democracy, in his view, was the one system that institutionalized this humility. It accepted that no one owns the truth and treated disagreement as normal. That’s why he called democracy a “permanent revolution of modesty.” It protected society from the thrill of certainty. I rather like that way of thinking about the incoherent mess that is democracy.

The Modern Hegelians

You could say that we no longer live under Hegel’s spell. Few people today talk about “Spirit” or “the dialectic.” But the habits remain. You can hear them in our language of inevitability.

Automation is inevitable. Globalization is inevitable. AI dominance is inevitable. Capitalism is inevitable. Decline is inevitable. Each phrase, dressed up as analysis, hides a moral surrender. If something is inevitable, no one is responsible.

This is the afterlife of Hegel in the modern imagination: the reduction of freedom to trend lines, the conversion of politics into data, the quiet translation of moral choice into technical necessity.

Camus would not have rejected technology or markets. He would only have insisted that they remain subordinate to human judgment. “The numbers say so” can be as despotic as “God wills it.” What matters, always, is who decides and on what grounds.

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The Renegade

Camus captured this pathology in miniature in his short story The Renegade, which I discussed in the last post. Remember that the protagonist is a missionary who travels to Africa to convert the “barbarous.” What drives him is not love but the lust for absolute conviction. When his mission fails, he simply switches sides. If he cannot possess truth as goodness, he will possess it as evil.

The missionary’s need for certainty leads him first to fanaticism and then to nihilism. When he can no longer worship good, he worships force. What he cannot bear is ambiguity.

Camus saw the same impulse in politics. When the world feels unstable, people often choose tyranny over uncertainty. They trade complexity for clarity, doubt for dogma, life for order. “The blinder and crueler he is,” Camus wrote, “the more he is sure of himself.” That, to him, was the logic of totalitarian reason.

The Afterlife of Hegel

Was Camus fair to Hegel? Perhaps not. But honestly, I’m still not sure I even understand Hegel, so there’s that. But I do think Camus was at least partially right about Hegel’s legacy. Three ideas passed from Hegel’s philosophy into the bloodstream of modern politics.

1. History has a knowable direction.

2. Whatever exists is rational.

3. The end justifies the means.

Together they erase limits. Once history and reason fuse, no independent standard remains to judge power. That’s why Camus called Hegel the philosopher who “furnished the decisive justification of the spirit of power.”

This is also why Camus tied Hegel to the denial of the absurd. To live within History is one thing; to absolutize it is another. The first is human. The second is nihilism disguised as optimism. It replaces the mystery of life with the machinery of progress.

Nietzsche remains the necessary counterpoint. He too saw the death of transcendence and the danger of historical faith. His answer was to create values and embrace the earth. Camus respected that but refused to turn creation into a new metaphysics.

“Rebellion,” for Camus, was not about mastery but about fidelity — to others, to the present, to life as it is. It was an ethic of limits, not a celebration of strength. In a century drunk on destiny, that sounded like weakness. To Camus it was the only form of strength that did not destroy itself.

Living Without the Alibi

What, then, do we learn from all this?

First, beware the word “inevitable.” It’s almost always a disguise for power. Second, prefer persons to programs. If “humanity” is invoked to excuse cruelty to humans, the logic is already corrupt. Third, refuse moral outsourcing. Markets do not decide, history does not decide, algorithms do not decide. People do.

Fourth, keep rebellion tied to limits. Camus’s “yes” to life is always shadowed by a “no” to excess. The moment rebellion seeks total victory, it becomes revolution in the worst sense. Finally, defend the institutions that make humility possible. Democracy matters not because it reveals truth but because it teaches us to live without it.

To live without transcendence, Camus believed, is not to live without restraint. It is to replace divine law with self-limitation, the constant awareness that we are fallible and free at the same time.

The Long Echo

Hegel dreamed of a world where reason was immanent and freedom was History’s unfolding self-knowledge. Read generously, that vision celebrates human dignity. Read politically, it becomes a moral alibi.

Camus watched revolutions that loved their future more than their citizens, ideologies that worshiped ideas of man while despising actual men. He saw how the language of progress could justify almost anything, and how the cult of inevitability always ended in coercion.

Camus’s answer remains clear. Refuse the alibi. Live within limits. Accept ambiguity. Defend the person against the program. No promised utopia. No guaranteed victory. Only the difficult work of living without excuses and with one another.

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[This is the eleventh post in an ongoing series adapted from my dissertation on Camus. The level of revision is evolving as I go, so feel free to share thoughts in the comments or DMs.]

Camus once wrote: “The ideologies which guide our world were born in the time of absolute scientific discoveries. Our real knowledge, on the other hand, only justifies a system of thought based on relative discoveries.”

That’s vintage Camus. It’s the sensibility I most admire in him. It’s also what annoys the shit out of people about him. I call it humility. Others call it pathological moderation. As we move more into Camus’ politics, I feel fairly confident in saying you will land in one of these camps. We shall see!

So what’s he saying, or trying to say, in that quote? I think he’s saying that the age of science should have humbled us by showing the limits of our knowledge but instead gave birth to ideologies that pretended to have absolute answers. Our discoveries should’ve made us more modest, not dogmatic.

Recall that Camus spent his formative years as a writer working out the basic problem of absurdity. For him that meant the mismatch between our hunger for meaning and the world’s refusal to offer it. After this period in his work, he shifted his attention to politics. That wasn’t just because he was writing in the middle of the 20th century, surrounded by fascism, Stalinism, and world war. It’s because he saw a deeper link: reason itself was being co-opted to fill the void left by God.

That may sound strange. Reason, dangerous? As opposed to what? Superstition? Fanaticism? Blind faith? I’m certainly on Team Reason if that’s the menu. For Camus, the answer is more complicated. He’s not anti-reason. After all, reason is the very faculty that allows us to recognize the absurd in the first place. But reason also feeds the human craving for totality. And when it tries to go beyond its limits, it shape-shifts into ideology. It becomes religion without God.

This was, for Camus, the defining problem of the 20th century: the way ideologies dressed themselves up in the language of reason and then justified crime, terror, and mass murder.

And here’s where Nietzsche and Dostoevsky enter the frame. Both had diagnosed the problem in their own way decades before. Nietzsche called socialism a “degenerate form of Christianity.” Dostoevsky filled his novels with characters who destroy themselves with logic. Camus took both seriously. He saw in them a prophetic anticipation of the world he was living in.

This post is about that triangle: Camus, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. About how absurdity and reason intertwine, and why the pursuit of certainty so easily ends in ideology.

When Reason turns inward

Camus defined the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus as “lucid reason noting its limits.” That’s an important phrase. Reason is indispensable, but it has boundaries. Push too far and it collapses into self-contradiction.

Dostoevsky got there earlier. Again and again in his fiction, the cleverest, most logical characters spiral into despair or debauchery. They can’t stop thinking. They need to justify every goddamn desire, every doubt, every value, every choice. And that endless reflection, as you might expect, eats them alive.

Andre Gide, a French writer Camus admired, once said that Dostoevsky contrasts love not with hate but with “excessive mindfulness.” It’s the intellect, Gide argued, that individualizes us, that separates us, that becomes “the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Love demands surrender. Reason demands proof. And Dostoevsky’s characters — like so many of Camus’s later ones — can’t stop demanding proof.

Again, let’s go back to Stavrogin in The Possessed. He wants to believe in goodness, in life, in other people. But he can’t will himself to do it. He writes, “I lack greatness of soul… because I can never lose my reason, and I can never believe in an idea.” His intellect won’t let him leap. He knows what he longs for, but he can’t cross the threshold. He’s trapped by the demand for certainty.

Or take Kirilov, also from The Possessed. Without God, he obsesses over freedom. Logic convinces him there’s no God; his intellect insists there must be reasons to live. He craves faith, but he can’t summon it. As one critic put it, his denial of God conceals the most desperate need for God. His suicide is his final attempt at coherence: to show the world that he will not invent God just to survive. He becomes, in his own mind, the first “truly free” man in history.

Or take Dmitri Karamazov, tortured by doubt after being exposed to Western materialism. “It’s God that’s worrying me,” he confesses. “What if He doesn’t exist? What if it’s an idea made up by men?… For whom is man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful?” What kept him awake at night wasn’t hatred of God but the terror of relativism. If values are just inventions, then everything is up for grabs. Dmitri drinks, fights, and rages in part to silence those questions — but they always resurface.

And then there’s Ivan Karamazov, the supreme case. Ivan’s rebellion is pure reason, a rational refusal to accept a world that includes the suffering of children. He can’t justify morality without immortality. And so, by his own logic, “everything is permitted.”

The irony here is pretty thick. Ivan doesn’t want to be a nihilist. He wants coherence. But coherence, in the absence of faith, drives him straight into nihilism. His intellect won’t let him stop short. Camus sums it up perfectly: “Caught between unjustifiable virtue and unacceptable crime, this man of supreme intelligence is killed by contradiction.”

“Killed by contradiction” sort of captures the whole problem here. Reason, left to itself, can’t ground morality, at least not in any secure way. This, of course, does not mean that you can’t reason your way to morality. No serious person believes this. To be sure, Camus didn’t. It just means reason does not offer some transcendent foundation for ultimate values. And if you demand that it must, you end up like Dostoevsky’s tragic heroes or you retreat into a totalizing ideology.

Every age has its versions of this. Today we have the technocratic dream that pure data or AI “reason” will one day replace messy human judgment. On the other side we have conspiracy cultures, where every event, every coincidence, every headline, is pulled into a closed, airtight system that feels rational but is completely detached from reality. Both are examples of reason, untethered from limits, eating itself.

Nietzsche’s shadow

Nietzsche diagnosed the same condition, but he came at it from a different angle. He agreed that the “death of God” left modern man stranded without foundations. But instead of lamenting it, he saw it as an opportunity. For Nietzsche it was a chance to create new values. The problem wasn’t reason itself, but the slavish way we’d tied reason to metaphysics.

If you read Camus, especially his later stuff, it’s obvious that he admired this part of Nietzsche but also feared it. Nietzsche’s demand for new values was inspiring, but in practice it opened the door to exactly the kind of absolutism Camus rejected. If you read Nietzsche one way, he looks like a prophet of freedom. Read him another way, and he looks like a prophet of ideology. That’s why Camus walked a middle line. He internalized Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and his diagnosis of modern nihilism, but he resisted Nietzsche’s temptation to resolve the problem with a leap into myth, will, or destiny.

For Camus, Nietzsche was right that modern ideologies are “degenerate Christianities.” They inherit the same need for certainty, just with new names: History, Reason, Progress, Nation. And once you’ve convinced yourself you’re on the side of “History,” anything can be justified. That was exactly what Camus was staring at in mid-century Europe.

And again, there are echoes today. We’re told that AI will inevitably replace human labor, that capitalism is the natural endpoint of human freedom. These aren’t neutral observations — they’re narratives of inevitability. They function like Hegelian alibis: history is on our side, so resistance is futile. Camus would’ve bristled at this. For him, inevitability is the ultimate excuse for inaction and, occasionally, for the worst forms of political violence.

The Hegel problem

This brings us to Hegel, another shadow in the background. Camus thought Hegel embodied the apotheosis of reason — the idea that history itself unfolds according to rational laws, and that everything, no matter how terrible, serves a higher logic.

This was absolutely intoxicating to generations of revolutionaries. It made history itself into a kind of god. If reason is embedded in history, then the executioner’s axe, the prison cell, the purge — all of it is necessary, all of it is justified.

Camus loathed this. For him, Hegelianism was reason drunk on itself. It excused violence in the name of totality. He saw it as the intellectual root of Marxism’s worst excesses and of every ideology that claimed history as its alibi.

This is where Camus differs most sharply from the Hegelians of his time. He wanted rebellion, yes — but rebellion without appeal to history, destiny, or absolute justification. Rebellion had to stay tethered to limits. Otherwise it turned into murder.

The need for certainty

Camus dramatized this pathology in his short story The Renegade. The protagonist is a missionary who goes to Africa, full of zeal, eager to convert the “barbarous.” But what drives him isn’t love or even conviction. It’s his need for certainty. “I dreamed of absolute power,” he confesses, “the kind that makes people kneel down… the blinder, the crueler he is, the more he’s sure of himself.”

When his world falls apart, he embraces force instead. Truth, he realizes, is square, heavy, merciless. Goodness is impossible. So he bows to the only consistent thing he can find in the world: evil. By no means is it Camus’ best work, but it is a pretty chilling parable. The missionary’s lust for certainty drives him first to fanaticism, then to nihilism. Either way, he simply can’t live with ambiguity. He’d rather worship power than endure limits.

This is the “political realism” Camus hated. The idea that truth is nothing but force, and that justice belongs to the strong. Once reason loses its grounding in transcendence, it becomes a tool: great for strategy, but incapable of setting limits.

And that’s how we end up with ideology. Ideologies take reason, inflate it into totality, and then enforce it through power. “This is how I see things” turns into “this is the truth, and the police will show you we’re right.”

Reason as pathology

The throughline in all of this is the pathology of reason. Not reason as such — Camus never abandons it. But reason unmoored, reason turned into an idol. Dostoevsky dramatized its effect on individuals. Nietzsche showed how it metastasizes into culture. Camus synthesized both: ideology is what happens when reason becomes religion.

This is why Camus kept circling back to absurdity. To accept absurdity is to accept limits. To insist on totality is to fall into ideology. And for Camus, ideology was not just a political danger but a metaphysical sickness.

He knew it firsthand. He saw the way totalitarian systems justified terror with reason: the logic of history, the inevitability of progress, the science of race. All different creeds, all claiming rational authority, all lethal.

And he saw the same impulse at the individual level. Characters like Clamence in The Fall or Caligula in the play of the same name — brilliant figures who reason themselves into madness because they can’t accept the world as it is.

Living with Limits

What, then, is the alternative? Camus’s answer was simple but difficult: live within the limits of reason. Don’t demand coherence where there is none. Don’t worship totality. Don’t turn your hunger for certainty into an ideology.

This doesn’t mean giving up on truth. It means accepting relative truths. It means refusing the leap into either nihilism or absolutism. It means choosing rebellion over resignation — rebellion in Camus’s sense, which is grounded in the acceptance of absurdity, not in its denial.

Camus will always be relevant in this way. Whatever ideologies we’re living with — technocratic rationalism, hyper-nationalism, transhumanism, etc. — they all offer their promise of certainty. And I think Camus would say that these are not escapes from absurdity but its denial.

In practice, this is why democracy matters. Democracy is institutionalized humility: no one has the whole truth, we argue it out, we accept disagreement. Authoritarian movements, by contrast, sell the thrill of certainty — one truth, one people, one destiny. But it’s bullshit. It’s always bullshit in the end.