The Plague, a 1947 book by Albert Camus, sheds light on the moral complexity of COVID-19.

Many popular reading lists for the COVID-19 pandemic include a text by Albert Camus, a French existentialist philosopher who was a journalist and a writer and a member of the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation. Camus was born in Algeria, and his father died soon after his birth. For a fascinating glimpse into Camus’ life, have a look at Albert Camus: A Biography, by Herbert R. Lottman. Though he sought to avoid being called an existentialist as a means to avoid association with Jean-Paul Sartre, a one-time friend turned enemy, Camus’ work centers upon existentialist themes such as the need of each individual to take responsibility for one’s existence.

Camus’ unique twist on this theme involves couching it within the absurd — which is to say, for Camus, it is due to the fundamental absurdity of life that we must all take responsibility for creating meaning ourselves. After all, there is no yard-stick by which to measure meaning; human beings experience life and ascribe meaning to it themselves. The most absurd part of the entire affair is that we never find out if we did it right or not. Virtue seems to be one way of dealing with this problem in The Plague, but for Camus, virtue is not in and of itself meaningful beyond what it means to the one who bears it — again, due to the fundamental absurdity of life.

In The Plague (1947), this necessity on the part of the individual to confront the absurd stands out in two stark reliefs, masterfully woven into a fictional narrative of a disease which many interpret as an allegorical discussion of the politics of World War II. The first sense of the plague in the text is just that — the disastrous outbreak of pestilence which destroys the economy (read: everyday standard of living) of the village of Oran, Algeria. However, the second sense in which the term is employed in the book is different, more striking, and more permanent.

In fact, it is possible to read the narrative in such a way as to ascribe the outbreak of plague in the first sense to the prevalence of the plague in the second sense; that is, the decadence of the culture has led the village of Oran to a certain currency-fixated complacency with respect to the fragility of the relation between humanity and nature — this complacency results in a lack of vigilance and the resulting inability to mount adequate defenses against the outbreak which ultimately, tragically, claims the lives of far too many of the citizens of the village.

2020 will forever be known as the year of COVID-19; the pandemic which swept the globe and infected far too many human beings. Politically, it will be remembered as the year in which authoritarian regimes around the world made public their own inadequacy. And for many of us, it will be remembered as the year in which our elected officials were too slow to act to prevent the loss of a loved one.

However, as Camus might remind us, all is not lost. We have become complacent, and the effects of that complacency have been quite painful. However, we can still unite in the face of this tragedy, and many of us will stand up and be better than we were before, setting aside our financial concerns to purchase and donate personnel protective equipment to hospitals, care for each other, and stay home for fear of transmitting the disease to or from those we love. Those of us who do will have acknowledged reality in a deep way, deeper than most of humanity will ever understand, and will have responded to it, thus setting the course for a brighter future.

The Hero

Tarrou is perhaps the most striking, the most beautiful, the most admirable character in the work. Despite his lack of professional commitment to the medical field, he sees what needs to be done and does it; in fact, the risks add up and he dies of plague as he works to accomplish his task. Tarrou is unable to turn the tide of the plague, and he is unable to save the lives of the people affected by it — but still he stands, stalwart, unyielding, convicted of the rightness of his actions and willing to die for them. His long soliloquy toward the end of the piece is perhaps the most brilliant moment in an extraordinary, popular work.

The purpose of this speech is to describe what a close reader might term the “real” plague — the instinct to kill another human being or commit actions to bring about such ends. Some don’t know they have it, this monster lurking within. Others have learned to live with it — and for Camus, it would seem, the only true path to goodness is to become a third type of person, the type of person Tarrou is, who becomes self-aware and works to change himself. Tarrou knows he is stricken and seeks to alter himself to “get out of it.”

The philosophical history of this idea that we need to purify ourselves goes all the way back to ancient Greece, in which the Gorgias provides Plato an opportunity to recount a Socratic argument in which the great founding father of Western philosophy argues that the purpose of punishment is to make the punished better; hence, if one acts unjustly, it is in one’s interest to turn oneself over to the authorities for punishment to become better.

Disabused as we are, in the modern age, of the notion that the authorities have any better idea what justice is than we as individuals do, Camus’ character seeks to work against himself to stamp out this tendency to kill others who threaten him. In so doing, he cultivates his humanity and his compassion for his fellow man — which leads him to create the sanitary squads to mitigate, to whatever extent is possible, the spread of the disease.

Tarrou’s final days are “spent keeping that endless watch upon [himself] lest in a careless moment [he] should breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection upon him.” The good man, for Tarrou, is “the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.” The profound significance of the presence of this character in a Camus book about the absurd nature of pain and the human condition at large ultimately seems to be a critique of the way in which good people are used up by the rest of the mass of humanity.

Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, Tarrou’s sacrifice is in some sense necessitated by the political call to avoid “false” alarm at the outset of the disease, when it is obvious enough to Rieux and other experts what the cause of the disease is and yet things are not quite pressing enough to call politicians to action before things spiral out of control.

The Victim

The city itself begins the novel in something of a trance — the mundane has overtaken it; the desire to make money has overpowered the desire to utilize said money for some good beyond itself, and as a result there is a problem which dates all the way back to ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, who knew that money is not good in and of itself because it is essentially worthless. No, money is only good insofar as someone else is willing to trade something good for it — and once the sight of this knowledge is lost, avarice is the only possible outcome.

Perhaps the most absurd observation I can contribute from my study of the book is the sense in which the plague, for the city, is in fact the cure. Besides killing too many and causing too much grief, the plague actually breaks down the immoral conditions in which the inhabitants of the town lived before it struck, bringing back solidarity, meaning, and communal reality into focus within their lives.

The plague is also able to finally hold politicians to account, in the sense that this is an issue which it is not advisable to “waffle” on. The reluctance with which precautionary measures are taken up is at once necessitated by the general ignorance of the citizenry who elect the politicians and also woefully indicative of the inadequacy of the machinery of the state to act upon the basis of unfamiliar evidence to bring into effect the measures which might prevent the outbreak.

For the poor inhabitants of Oran, it is thus both necessary that the plague strike and seat itself among them before anything is done about it, and terrible that circumstances do not lead to more readiness upon the part of the government to act upon the early warning signs recognized by the experts.

Still, we must not forget that the culture of the town itself is what drives the developments in this direction — the citizens are unaware that a plague is possible, and are preoccupied with money, which we must remember is not a good in and of itself. For this reason, we can conclude that there is some lack of vigilance, some lack of awareness, some failing, in other words, on the part of just this hapless populace, which ultimately leads to the destruction and grief experienced by everyone involved.

As Camus states in the third paragraph of the text:

Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. In our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, “doing business.” Naturally they don’t eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, seabathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible.

Hardly innocent, then, the citizens of Oran have become quite complacent. And if you’re reading this, and it sounds familiar, perhaps you are a member of the audience for whom Camus wrote this book.

The Informed Observer

Benjamin Rieux, the doctor who is tasked with responding to the plague on behalf of the citizens and government of Oran, is a familiar character to anyone who watches the news today. A stalwart man, he is capable of accepting a great deal of punishment and quite used to administrators who fail to heed his concerns. Stalwart though he is, Rieux is not a virtuous person for Camus. The only hero of The Plague is Tarrou, who does what must be done though he is unqualified and not responsible for the catastrophe he becomes a victim of. No, Rieux is something else entirely: the resident expert who refuses to pitch a fit, Rieux is part of the city and as such, no martyr.

Though capable of reflection, of self-awareness, of deep thought and friendship, Rieux is more a symptom of the disease than he is cure for it. As we’re informed in the beginning of the story, the bulk of the population of Oran is primarily concerned with making money, and with little else besides. Though many commentators seem inclined to exempt Rieux from this description, we have substantial reason to do precisely the opposite, including his final in-person exchange with his wife, in which she mentions the expense of the train ride she is to take.

The compassion of Camus comes through at the end of the text, though it is present all along in his choice to select Rieux as narrator. Rieux’s inability to act, his guilt, as it were, no more diminishes his humanity than it would if he were an ordinary villager with no medical knowledge and therefore not guilty due to the foresight he failed to act strongly enough upon.

In fact, Rieux approaches wisdom as the work concludes — evidence of growth, of a true character arc! Becoming something of a hero himself, though his character pales beside the humbly brilliant martyr we see in Tarrou, Rieux has become aware at the close of the work that “such joy is always imperiled.” And it is in this simple statement that Camus shares with us the true beauty of the absurd existence of human beings.

As self-aware creatures, we continuously make predictions about the future to guide our actions in the present. And yet, it is only through tragedy that we learn where the danger really lies. The powerlessness of Rieux is thus shown through his inability to act at the administrative level early in the story, and it comes full circle as he showcases his awareness at the end of the story. And what could be more absurd than the fundamental nature of man as shown insofar as he becomes aware of the danger of a crisis only by living through it, as though it were predestined to happen again? In this sense, The Plague allegory suggests, it is the inertia of culture, of the prevalence of what Hume referred to as the Principle of the Universality of Nature (the assumption that the future will resemble the past), at the social level, which makes life truly absurd.

Hope For The Future

Though it is impossible to truly hope; that is, to disavow the absurdity of the human condition as mediated by the cultural inertia discussed above, there is nonetheless a sort of bastard hope which arises as we confront the fundamental facts of life on our own terms: love grows cold, when left alone. When we are completely dominated by a love of a person or of something else, it drives our cognition into unfamiliar territory.

Forced to depart from this unfamiliar terrain by the plague, the character Rambert has first had the epiphany that there is more to the world — more to life, perhaps — than his obsession, than his beloved. And in the face of this epiphany, what is he to do, when he is reunited with her?

As Rieux ably narrates: “The plague had forced on him a detachment which, try as he might, he couldn’t think away, and which like a formless fear haunted his mind. Almost he thought the plague had ended too abruptly, he hadn’t had time to pull himself together.” The unreadiness of Rambert to confront his love after the plague has ended is a symptom of his realization that the obsession for her which once motivated him is now tempered by an understanding of the absurdity of the world — a world which would not hesitate to see the two of them ripped apart any more than it exercised its caprice in bringing them together.

In essence, The Plague is written to teach us to treasure the moments of happiness and joy we share because the superorganism of humanity is yet in its infancy — it is, absurdly, ridiculously, painfully inadequate to cope with stressors and stimuli it has seen before. How could it not be? The passing of time dulls its attention to detail. Despite the power of our civilization, the We, the collective, the mass of humankind, remains quite dull and slow to respond to threats.

Darkly, this collective humankind survives by virtue of its ability to throw bodies at a problem. This, insofar as we individual humans die when our collective fails to recognize and respond to a threat, is the essence of the absurdity of existence for Camus in The Plague just as it is for us, almost a century later, experiencing and reacting to COVID-19.

Thus, as predicted by the narrator of The Plague, the plague is not over and will likely never be over — we can only hope and love and act rationally and be as good as we can be. It is no more right to say that we deserve our fate as Father Paneloux would have it than it is correct to assume that one day the collective, assembled mass of humankind will be able to respond to all threats without loss of life. And for those of us who live, unawares, in the middle of this conflict between our species as such and nature, the difference between life and death will continue to be dictated by means beyond our understanding — that is — it will remain ultimately absurd.

This essay was originally published in Philosophy Now Magazine in June 2020. This is the unedited version. Find the edited version here.