Political theory unmoored from reality leads to chaos
Published in 1954, Albert Camus’s beautifully written book “The Rebel” is one-stop shopping for those who want a history of modernity and the crisis of the West. Writing less than a decade after the end of World War II, he offers the Nuremberg Trials as a witness to our crisis. The ideological strains on Germany in the 1930s were not unique to that country, he thought, but a feature of Western civilization.
At Nuremberg, only at times did “the real subject of the trial, that of the historic responsibilities of Western nihilism” come into view. The reason is clear: “A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization.”
The nihilistic tradition
What nihilism? In the dock at Nuremberg, Hans Frank, the Governor General of Nazi occupied Poland, testified that Hitler had a “hatred of form.” Camus tags Hitler a “convulsionist” — someone bent on self-creation because utterly intolerant of the limits the cosmos places upon us.
Nihilism is with us today, too. Even nature’s most basic form is now suspect — the difference in form between a man and a woman.
As we puzzle over our own convulsionists, we can usefully ask Camus’s question again: How did the West — heir to the Pantheon in Rome and the cathedral in Chartres — end up believing in formless history? What change in ideas unmoored us from the cosmos and tied our sense of well being so thoroughly to novelty instead of the ancestral?
Sometimes, rebellion is a worthy complaint against shortfalls in human dignity. There have been epic victories for greater justice precisely when regimes
have been measured against a standard of dignity.
History unmoored
However, once novelty and pure history replace natural order, there are only two options. You can focus on brute reality — the irrationalism of the Nazis — or unrestrained reason — the Five Year Plans of the Soviets. Communism, Camus sardonically says, “aims at liberating all men by provisionally enslaving them all. It must be granted the grandeur of its intentions.”
For Lenin, revolution was a strategic, rational affair. “He denies the spontaneity of the masses. Socialist doctrine supposes a scientific basis that only the intellectuals can give it.” Revolution above all must be efficacious, and so Lenin recommends “to use if necessary every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth.”
The merciless secrecy of the unrestricted rationality of the Soviet
planners was a function of nihilism. The Russian Revolution was “the greatest revolution that history ever knew,” but the “universal city” it proposed to build entailed rejecting “the magnificent heritage of the centuries,” and “denying, to the advantage of history, both nature and beauty and by depriving man of the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention — in a word, of his greatness.”
The rational Marxist state, utterly different in its aims from Hitler’s “biological foreign policy,” was just as utterly destructive. Rationalism made sinister through secrecy has a homicidal character comparable to Nazi irrationalism. Camus believes that “Hitler was history in its purest form.” His minister of foreign affairs, Alfred Rosenberg, testifying at Nuremberg, explained that Nazi policy was: “Like a column on the march, and it is of little importance toward what destination and for what ends this column is marching.”
Staying grounded
Instead of the “cult of history,” Camus argues that rebellion can only remain true to the dignity that is its impulse if linked with moderation. Essential is an account of history that pays deference to a measure outside of man. Modestly, the urge to dignified liberty must accept incompleteness: “persuasion demands leisure, and friendship a structure that will never be completed.”
If rebellion is to be genuinely creative and not murderous, it “cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.” This measure is the cosmos. To think under the sun, solar thought, is our creativity synced with natural measure. This is the temperate thinking of “we Mediterraneans,” says Camus, for whom “the earth remains our first and our last love.” Historical revolution nourished itself on “absolute negation” — formless history — but dignified liberty rests on a “forbidden frontier” to which man’s pride must bend.
Righteous rebellion, Camus contends, is an act of generosity to both our peers and natural order. Camus opposes solar thought that accepts “the world of the sea and the stars” to “our convulsionists.” “Dedicated to elaborate apocalypses,” they “despise” the cosmos. When we “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world,” warns Camus, we lose not only patience, generosity and tolerance, but liberty is overwhelmed by murder, as well.