the “primitive” impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities. Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,” he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking. The way out of Meursaultism is to think about particular people, proximate causes, and obtainable objectives—not an easy thing to do in any circumstance and nearly impossible in the face of those ideologies, left and right, for which, Camus writes, “fear is a method.”
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.