Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

It’s 2012 and Hurricane Sandy is approaching New York. The director of the ICU in Bellevue Hospital has to make a choice. The electricity will cut out; ventilators will fail. There aren’t enough for all the patients. Dr Evans is forced to make a stark decision with limited information: who will live and who will die. She looks down a list and puts check marks next to patients’ names.

Of course, doctors make these decisions all of the time. We have limited resources, limited space, limited time. Who gets prioritised? In what ways? Using which methods?

One answer is to maximise results: prioritise the most possible good for the most possible people. Prioritise those with the best chances of survival, with the best quality of life.

But even this is fraught with problems.

Prioritise the young over the old? The immature over the wise? How do you quantify quality?

Maybe a lottery is fairer?

These are philosophical questions; ethical questions.

And the more you explore them the more one unavoidable truth becomes obvious: there is no absolute truth, no answer that doesn’t have its alternatives.

The situation is absurd. Definition: unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate.

Albert Camus was an early twentieth century French philosopher whose works expressed a philosophy of the absurd.

In the Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1952, Camus challenges the idea of reason, logic and rationality, describing the limits of our understanding of the world as humans, protesting that philosophy itself is an almost useless and self-negating task.

Camus is always asking that age old question – what is the meaning of life?

Because if we knew the answer to that question we’d know how to act.

The question of acting is an ethical question – what should we do?

The traditional answers to these questions have, for millennia, come from religion. Religion tells us what we should do and why we should do it.

We should not kill because we’ll go to heaven if we don’t.

Answering these questions secularly, without the aid of a higher celestial authority, is more difficult.

For Camus, in fact, it’s almost useless.

How can we ever know what to do with any certainty when even the clearest questions have exceptions?

I shouldn’t kill? What about in last resort? What about to protect? What about to save the lives of millions? Do we kill through inaction?

This is a caricature, but every single action we take is laden with these problems. Every decision could be the wrong one, every movement has an infinity of alternatives.

Philosophy is often the search for absolutes, universals, guarantees, but when we stop to think, no guarantee of absolute truth can be found.

Should I eat this toast now or wait half an hour? Should I eat bread or cereal? Should I start this job or that one? Should I ring my friend now or later? Should I make this move or that move?

In everyday life, we usually act through habit. We wake up, eat breakfast, get on the bus, do the job that’s been taught to us. We rarely have to really think. Only when we forced to do we contemplate ethical problems. A heart attack? Maybe I should change breakfasts. Global warming? Maybe I should cycle.

Thought requires force.

Is my boss being unfair requiring me to come into the office? Should I shut my small business and lose my ability to live or open and risk infecting others? Should I visit my grandma even if I have no symptoms? Should divorced parents still share custody? Should governments even ban exercise outside?

When we try and work through these problems there’s often no right answer, only bad choices with limited information. Decisions often have to be made at random – with a gut feeling, not a rational calculation.

‘The absurd’, Camus writes, ‘is lucid reason noting its limits’.

We’ve been playing a lot of chess on holiday and the game really demonstrates Camus’s observations, the limits of reason. I can scan the board and see where each piece can move, comparing my possible moves with my opponents, and can just about consider a couple of moves ahead, but very quickly I reach the limits of calculation. Frustration sets in and one move becomes as good as another. You could stare at the board for ever.

You just have to move.

New York department of health ventilator guidelines state that during an epidemic patients should be prioritised on a first come, first served basis. But if there’s is a choice between two patients, all else being equal, likelihood of survival is the basis for allocation.

But what variables are included here? The young are more likely to survive than the old, but what’s the cut off? Advanced cancer patients don’t make the cut, but how advanced?

And it gets darker.

The rich are statistically more likely to survive than the poor because of healthier lifestyles.

And in America, this means that statistically, white Americans are more likely to be prioritised over black Americans who have health conditions that are the product of poverty.

Even the first come, first served basis prioritises the urban over the rural.

History is always complicit in ethics. No good deed goes unpunished.

‘what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart’.

During the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone families had to wait for ‘safe burial’ teams to arrive after relatives had died. Often this took days, disregarding religious beliefs about a timely burial. At other times, families weren’t allowed the religious cleansing rituals required after death because of the risk of spreading the disease. Sometimes the distress and social friction communities experienced as a result of this could be as bad as the disease itself.

Social distancing presents a similar dilemma. How long can societies isolate before the economic slowdown kills more than the virus?

For Camus, the absurdity of habit and the limits of any transcendental reason are illustrated by the image of Sisyphus – condemned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a mountain every day, only for it to roll back down for him to repeat all over again.

In Sisyphus, Camus sees the human conditioned at its starkest.

But he highlights the moment when Sisyphus returns back down to the bottom of the mountain towards the rock – it’s in this moment that he is most aware, and in an awareness of the truth everything becomes clear, we acknowledge our fate and return to it anyway.

Acknowledging the problems of acting and acting anyway takes courage. Knowing that absolute truth is unavailable and being resolute anyway is a demand of being human.

Camus writes, ‘All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols’.

We become most human – most free – when we acknowledge this.

We must live with an awareness of this absurdity or risk falling into a numb and frozen immobility – our fate is to act without being sure of how to act.

The important thing, Camus writes, ‘is not to be cured but to live with one’s ailments’. Life is ‘unjust, incoherent and incomprehensible’. We must live anyway.

In a pandemic, or other global emergency, the ethical imperative to act, to help, to think about what one should do becomes clear and urgent. We must act now. But we – people – live under the dark cloud of emergency conditions daily. Pandemics only serve to illuminate what might normally go hidden and ignored. Mothers go without food, fathers without jobs, children without the right to play, grandmothers going cold. The question is not how to act, but simply to act. Until we continue to solve these problems, like we have the injustices of the past, only inaction is immoral. Complacency and indifference are inexcusable. It’s the absurdity of enjoying the lack of clarity and acting anyway that’s integral to the human condition.

There’s a line in The Myth of Sisyphus that strikes me: ‘In the time of the absurd reasoning, creation follows indifference and discovery. It marks the point from which absurd passions spring and where the reasoning stops’.

In other words, when our reasoning stops, our body – its movements, its ability to create something new, to makes its mark on the earth – starts. When we’re all in conditions antithetical to our social nature, when we’re locked inside and have to work in new ways, when we have to make tough decisions about how to help people and the ways we can support our communities, it’s this – the limits of our minds but the power of our capacity to act – that might be worth reflecting on.

To create, to be hopeless, to not know.

We’re under lockdown in France right down, and at 8 every night as you can hear, people cheer, shout, and hit pans and drums from the balconies in solidarity. Here, the supermarkets are full and the weather’s better than London, and we’re luckily able to work from home, but the British Foreign Office has just advised that all citizens abroad return home before flights are grounded completely. We don’t want to risk being stuck here if we need to get back for whatever reason and we can’t, but we also don’t want to return to London where shelves look empty and social distancing hasn’t been adhered to. There is no good answer.