Finding Faith, Hope and Charity in The Plague.
Atheism, Absurdity, the Almighty and Albert Camus.
Surviving MAGA: Creating Trump-Free Zones.
Burton Weltman
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity,
these three, but the greatest of these is charity.”
Saint Paul. 1 Corinthians 13. King James Bible.
The plague of our day is Donald Trump and his MAGA Movement. What is to be done?
I am writing this essay in late-February, 2025. We have recently contracted a second bout of a plague called Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. It is a serious illness. Those of us who reject the poisonous politics and sickening policies of Trump and his minions need to find ways to combat that plague but also, and I think this is most important, find ways of creating Trump-free zones in our minds, lives and society in order to promote social, political and mental health. I think that Albert Camus’ novel The Plague can offer some support in this regard.[1]
The Plague is about a fictional epidemic that has struck in the city of Oran in Algeria. The main point of the book is the way people fight the disease but also struggle to maintain their ways of life. The point of this essay is to aver that like the characters in Camus’ book, we should focus on ways and means of fighting the noxious infection in our body politic that Trump and his cohorts represent, but also focus on ways and means of creating and celebrating good in the midst of the evil that surrounds us. Like Camus’ characters, we need to create healthy spaces – through bottom-up efforts – even in the midst of disaster. It is one of the ways that people in Camus’ book mostly stayed together and survived. It is important for us today, too.
What I am suggesting is not new, but just needs to be remembered. Historically, small-scale cooperative efforts have often been a way in which positive changes in America have developed, sometimes arising in the darkest days. There were the utopian communities with which much European settlement began. There were, and still are, artistic and ethnic communities, local reform and charitable societies, knitting groups and book clubs… Small-scale cooperatives of all sorts have existed from the earliest days of this country and from which bigger things have developed. They were seeds of humane reform that often seemed absurd at the time but that grew into significance. Often as a means of subduing and supplanting a biological or social plague.
Our present plague is Donald Trump. There are a host of pejorative adjectives that I could use in describing him and his unfitness to be President. Many of them were included in the original draft of this essay. But I removed them, both because they are probably irrelevant and because I do not want to descend to the sort of derogatory tactics that he regularly uses. Whatever the adjectives, Trump is personally and politically unfit to be President. And as I am writing this essay, he is busy wrecking the American government and wreaking havoc on the world order.
In doing all this, Trump is also grabbing everyone’s attention. He is a tremendous showman for whom grandstanding seems to be a need but is also a strategy. And this latter point is a key. As long as everyone’s attention is on Trump, as long as his opponents focus solely on his awful and unlawful acts, people cannot develop positive projects of their own, projects which could counter the havoc he is wreaking and repair damage that he is doing. It is therefore, I think, important that we oppose Trump but also that we create Trump-Free zones. Zones of positive and creative thoughts and actions. Building from the bottom up an alternative to the horror show that Trump and his MAGA mob are trying to foist on us.
Albert Camus’ novel The Plague can help us in thinking about this. Camus’ absurdist message and the book’s effect on readers is to focus on the positive while fighting the negative. And despite Camus’ atheism and absurdism, or perhaps because of them, it is in Saint Paul’s exhortation to live with faith, hope and charity that I think we can understand Camus’ message.
A Plague of Plagues Past and Present.
This is an essay about plagues and how to survive their aftermath reasonably intact. A plague is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “A disastrous evil or affliction.” Plagues come in many shapes and from many causes. Bubonic Plagues. Locust Plagues. Plagues of Pride, Prejudice, Sexism, Racism, Nativism, Crime, Corruption, Cruelty, Greed, Demagoguery, ad almost infinitum. The world is plagued with hosts of bad things, and bad things in large numbers are often considered plagues.
Plagues come and go, and interest in them waxes and wanes accordingly. Interest in plagues has waxed in recent years as a result of the COVID pandemic. It has also come from Trump’s labeling immigrants as a plague. A consequence of calling something a plague is that all-out extreme measures are justified to battle the problem. War against the plague is effectively declared and the heavy armor is brought to bear. In recent years, cries have gone up from some quarters to eliminate COVID and from others to eliminate immigrants. Liberals seek to reinforce the health services. Trump seeks to send troops to the southern border. Putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.
Albert Camus was putting his mouth where his misery was when he published his novel The Plague in 1947, which came shortly after the elimination of the Nazi plague in Europe. The story, about a fictional bubonic plague in the city of Oran, Algeria, illustrates the social, political and moral consequences of facing a disease similar to COVID, and the book has recently become popular for that reason.
But the story also relates to the plagues of prejudice and demagoguery that Trump and his MAGA followers are spreading amongst us. And it exemplifies the absurdist philosophy that Camus propounded as a challenge to the moral sensibilities of his time, and that remains as a challenge to our ability to face the plagues of ours.
The Plague: A Descent into Hell/ An Ascent into Absurdity.
The Plague dramatizes the descent of a city and its citizens into what could be called a heart of darkness. There is an outbreak of bubonic plague that seemingly comes out of nowhere and completely overwhelms the city. The disease spreads rapidly and kills quickly. It is evil incarnate. The authorities initially respond with denial and only under considerable duress, bodies begin piling up in the streets, do they take significant action.
Isolation ensues. Sick people are quarantined against the rest of the population, and the town is quarantined against the rest of the country. People who were just visiting the town are stuck there. People who were visiting elsewhere are forbidden to return. People are falling sick in the streets and sometimes dying within hours. It is a seemingly hopeless situation. But not quite.
Camus wrote most of The Plague during World War II and finished it shortly thereafter. It bears the imprint of his life in occupied France during the war. As the plague spreads, the city in his book begins to resemble a Nazi-occupied territory. Quarantines are established and public activities are limited and controlled. Then, as the disease spreads further, deaths multiply exponentially. Sick people are carted off to so-called health centers to die, and the town begins to seem more like a Nazi deathcamp. But with an important caveat.
Nazi deathcamps were designed to degrade and demoralize people before they were killed. Despondency and despair among the inmates were deliberately cultivated. The goal was to turn people into lifeless zombies so they would passively stumble off to execution. Inmates were also encouraged to turn on each other. The goal was to destroy the prisoners’ morale, induce them to give up their morality, and pit them against each other. As socially and psychologically isolated individuals, they would give up hope, be unable to act together, and be more easily managed.
The Nazi concentration and death camps were highly successful operations. They were models of efficiency in their methods of dehumanizing and destroying inmates. In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazis were widely credited with having demonstrated that people could be turned into zombies. It was a lesson that reverberated throughout postwar Western society. The dehumanization of people into masses of robot-like inmates of concentration camp-like societies became a main theme of mid-twentieth century academic literature and as well as fiction. A host of studies and stories described ways in which this could occur.
The psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, for example, himself a concentration camp survivor, reported that the Nazis had succeeded in reducing most inmates to a state of passivity and obedience. The historian Stanley Elkins claimed that American slavery was essentially similar to a concentration camp and that slaves were reduced to an automaton-like state. Sociologists David Reisman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny claimed that modern society isolated people into a lonely crowd of automatons.
Senator Barry Goldwater claimed that people in the Communist Soviet Union were living in a giant concentration camp and being brainwashed into zombies. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse claimed that capitalist society was essentially similar to a concentration camp and reduced people to one dimensionality. The novelist George Orwell described a world in a permanent state of war that reduced people to a concentration camp mentality. These are just a few examples of the thinking at that time. The dangers of mass psychology and zombification were warned about everywhere. The zombie theme even permeated popular culture and zombie movies were very popular.
Camus’ The Plague is an antidote to this mass psychology hysteria. The plague-ridden city he describes in his book shares many of the characteristics of a concentration camp. But, and this is the key, the citizens do not on the whole develop the concentration camp mentality that most people in the mid-twentieth century would have expected to result from such a situation. Camus presents, instead, a plausible picture of how a society can be hit with a plague without losing its soul.
In Camus’ story, most people keep their cool, and do so in the most trying circumstances. Normality is encouraged by the town officials and leading citizens, and is largely maintained. Most people keep up with their regular employments and enjoyments as best they can. “Every day, around eleven,” the narrator reports, “there’s a parade of young men and women down the principal arteries, where you can see the passion for life that grows in the heart of great suffering.” Coming out on the other side of grief, people keep up the faith that things can and will go on.
And for the most part, they do not become completely antisocial. People come together in public spaces. They gather together in restaurants and dance halls, and keep communal connections and community activities alive. “At noon,” the narrator reports, “the restaurants fill in the blink of an eye” and people stand in lines to wait for a table.[2]
It is not smooth sailing. People alternate short periods of ecstatic activity with longer periods of deepest depression. But through it all, most people carry on with their work as usual and their lives as best they can, keeping up the hope that things will return to normalcy someday. Most telling, there are seemingly no suicides, suicide being something you would expect if people feel hopeless.
Instead of becoming completely self-absorbed, many people volunteer for a public service corps that helps the sick and others in need, even at great risk to themselves. “Scourges are actually a communal thing,” the narrator says. You can’t just focus on saving yourself. You have to see yourself as part of larger community and act as such.[3]
And, significantly, their public spirit is not seen by their fellow citizens or treated as heroism. It is just people helping out, being good neighbors. Charity as a way of life. Some people who are initially reluctant to help do so anyway on the grounds that they cannot not live with themselves otherwise. Their social selves predominate over their selfish selves.
Nor is this public spirit a function of any specific philosophy or religion. At the beginning of the plague, the leading Catholic prelate in town preaches a sermon in which he claims the plague is God’s punishment for the people’s wickedness. People are getting what they deserve. But by the end of the book, the priest is volunteering to help sick people and promoting measures to end the plague. One after another, characters who are highlighted in the book, but who are just ordinary people, come around to helping others and volunteering in their spare time to support the authorities.
The first character to be concerned about the plague, and the main character in the book, is Dr. Rieux. He is one of the first to recognize the disease as a plague and to call for remedial actions. He then persists through the whole plague year in trying to help the sick and find a cure or preventive vaccine for the disease. The story is told from his point of view, ostensibly based on notes that he and a comrade took contemporaneously during the plague. At the end of the book, it is revealed that Dr. Rieux is the narrator.
The doctor tells a grim tale. This is understandable given his experience of being helpless as day after day and month after month all of his patients dies until eventually a vaccine is developed. He tells with great pain how after a few months of the disease, people stop welcoming him as a healer into their houses and, instead, begin shunning him as a herald of death because a visit from him means that the plague has come to their homes, and that death for some and maybe all of the inhabitants is nigh.
But Rieux persists in his calling, with faith for the day, hope for the morrow, and care for his fellow citizens. He says of himself that he is “a man with a fondness for his fellow humans, weary of the world he is living in, and determined, for his part, to refuse injustice and concessions,” no matter the outcome.[4]
Although he never catches the disease, Rieux suffers from absence of his wife who has been visiting elsewhere and cannot return because of the plague. At the end of the book, Rieux was told, and he tells us, that his wife had just died of something other than the plague. It is absurd and ironic that he comes into contact with this highly infectious disease all day every day and survives. His wife misses the plague, but still dies.
Rieux’ main sidekick in the book is Jean Tarou. Tarou is in Oran on vacation and gets trapped by the plague. He speaks most clearly as an apostle of absurdity who believes that life is a losing battle against death and suffering, but one that must, nonetheless, be waged cooperatively with others. Never give up is his credo. And he helps Rieux with anti-plague efforts. Ironically, Tarou dies of the plague at the end of the book just as a vaccine has been developed and the plague is over. It is absurd and tragic that he works with the diseased for many months without getting sick, but then gets sick and dies just when a preventive vaccine is finally available.
Another main character, Rambert, is a Parisian journalist who is trapped in Oran by the plague. He tries over and over again to escape from the city, but one after another his plans for escape fall apart or fail. In the interim between efforts to escape, he volunteers with Rieux and Tarou in helping with plague victims. Finally, toward the end of the book, when he can safely be smuggled out of the city, Rambert decides to stay and help with the anti-plague efforts. He cannot live with himself if he escapes the disease but leaves his friends in a lurch.
Faith, hope and charity permeate Camus’ characterizations of Rieux, Tarou, Rambert and other citizens in The Plague. It is ironic that sentiments of Saint Paul would predominate in a work of the atheist Camus, but not surprising. Camus was what we might call a lapsed Catholic or what he himself called “an independent Catholic.” Given his background and moral commitments, it makes sense that the moral of his story is a secular version of Saint Paul’s mantra. Camus saw in people a life-affirming commitment that runs counter to the hopeless feeling promoted by the dismal facts of life. It is a persistence of faith, hope and charity that is absurd but essential to our humanity.
Defining Absurdity? An Absurdity?
Camus was a proselytizer of absurdity. Life is absurd, he proclaimed, and it is the better part of wisdom to recognize that fact and work with it. It is a proposition that Camus illustrated in all of his works, especially including The Plague. Absurdity is, however, a slippery concept, more easily illustrated than explained and not always easily understood. For one thing, one has to distinguish between absurdity in common colloquial parlance from absurdity as a philosophical concept. Camus uses both meanings.
Absurdity in the colloquial sense is defined in the Merrium-Webster Dictionary as “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound or incongruous.” This definition essentially encompasses the failure of things to turn out the way we think they should. If something has worked every time for many times and now doesn’t work, we think it is absurdly unreasonable or incongruous. Absurdity in the philosophical sense is defined by Wikipedia as a “theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless” and that “trying to find meaning leads people into conflict with a seemingly meaningless world.” The definitions relate to each other but also conflict.
Looking at the colloquial definition of absurdity from the perspective of the philosophical definition, the colloquial definition could itself be considered absurd. For something to be unreasonable in the colloquial definition, there must first be some idea of reasonable. That, however, is just what the philosophical idea of absurdity denies. There is no such thing as reasonable, so there can’t be any such thing as unreasonable. Similarly, for something to be unsound or incongruous, there must be some generally accepted ideas of soundness and congruity, which the philosophical idea of absurdity denies. So, what can we say about absurdity? We can at least say we know it when we see it. Donald Trump as President of the United States is an example of the colloquial definition of absurdity.
Absurdity in the colloquial sense is not necessarily fatal or forever. Things that are absurd in the colloquial sense can generally be fixed so that they cease to be unreasonable and incongruous. Trump, for example, could be impeached from office. Most commentators think, however, that there isn’t any fix for philosophical absurdity. There is no way, they say, to overcome the meaninglessness of things, and people just have to face up to that fact. They even claim that it is a sign of maturity to be willing to accept absurdity as a condition of the universe and meaninglessness as a fact of life.
Camus is often cited as a proponent of this dark definition of absurdity. And in some of his bleaker statements, Camus sounds as though he is promoting this sort of fatalistic and nihilistic meaning of absurdity. But he isn’t. Camus is both darker and lighter in his ideas. On the one hand, he contends you cannot say that the universe is meaningless because you don’t have the right to speak of either a universe or of meaning. This is a definition that borders on nihilism.
On the other hand, however, Camus propounds a lighter idea of absurdity as something that is inevitable – everything ultimately is meaningless – but is not acceptable. It is one thing to acknowledge meaninglessness but another to accept it. He acknowledges it, but still rejects it. He insists on looking for meaning even as the knows it is not to be found. It is a position that seems consistent with a reading of Saint Paul’s exhortation to faith. hope and charity.
An Atheistic God. A Hopeless Hope. A Careful Love.
So, how does a self-styled atheist whose gospel is hopelessness and meaninglessness become an apostle of faith, hope and charity? The answer, I think, lies in the difference between ideas and feelings. Camus rejects the ideas of faith, hope and charity, especially as they are conventionally defined, but his novels reflect a sentiment of faith, hope and charity. A belief is an idea. To Camus, a belief in God was the death of the intellect. Likewise, the idea of hope, meaning in traditional Christian terms a belief in an afterlife, was a debilitating opiate of the people. And the conventional idea of charity, defined as giving things to those who have too little, was an insincere effort by those who have too much to assuage their bad consciences.
But faith, hope and charity can flourish with secular meanings. Faith can be described as a response to the question of why the universe holds together and doesn’t disappear in the next moment. Logically, there is no reason why it shouldn’t. Just because the universe has been around for some five billion years is no logical reason to believe it should continue that way. Such a belief is an example of the empirical fallacy in logic. Religious believers avoid the empirical fallacy by assigning the task of holding the universe together to God. For atheists like Camus, however, God won’t do.
Leaving aside the improbability of God, for Camus the pain and suffering that exist in the universe render the idea of God obscene. Dr. Rieux in The Plague is an avowed atheist. He says that if he believed in God, he would just give up trying to do good because he would have to conclude with the Catholic priest that the plague is from God. And if the plague is from God, then to hell with Him. But since Dr. Rieux doesn’t believe in God, “he believed he was on the true path, fighting against creation, such as it was.” He concludes ironically that “perhaps it’s better for God if we don’t believe in him and if we fight against death with all our might, without raising our eyes to the heavens where he keeps silent.”[5]
But while a belief in God may be unacceptable, it is still hard not to feel that there is something or Something that holds things together, that makes disparate things into a universe and keeps it from falling apart or disappearing in the next moment. The confidence which we all have – at least those of us who are relatively sane – that things will persist and won’t break up into pieces or disappear at any given moment is a form of faith. It is an absurd faith. But one which we can see in the main characters in The Plague. You can call it God if you want, or Dog or Super Glue or Mustard, or whatever…
If people cannot live without faith in the universe, neither can they live without hope. Not necessarily the religious hope of life eternal or a belief in an afterlife. That is an idea of hope that we don’t see in The Plague. Hope among the book’s characters is defined by the feeling that they will live for the next moment. Anticipating the next moment is something that people do instinctively, feeling immortal even while recognizing their own mortality. It is not logical to feel that one will be alive in the next moment, or the next, or the next, ad infinitum. But it’s almost impossible not to feel that way. It’s an absurd hope. It was the hope of people in The Plague as they acknowledged death but refused to accept it either for themselves or for others.
Charity permeates The Plague as Camus’ characters try to save their fellow citizens. Not charity in the conventional sense of looking down on your social inferiors and giving them some alms. Nor is it sympathy for others, feeling bad for them. Rather, it is empathy, sharing their troubles and feeling bad with them. As we see it in The Plague, charity is sharing among equals.
It is a sharing that derives from the credo “I think, therefore we are,” which is the obverse of Descartes’ famous credo “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes’ formula is, in fact, nonsense. There can be no “I” without first there being “you.” We only know ourselves through contact with others. I can have no sense of myself without my first having a sense of others with whom I can compare myself and get a sense of “I.” It is my relationship with others that defines me.
We see ourselves as mirror images of what we see of ourselves in the gaze of others. Charity, then, is a way of defining myself favorably in your eyes so that I can, in turn, see myself favorably. Charity is caring for others as yourself. Not merely as though they are you but as though they are, in fact, a part of you. Not feeling their pain but inhabiting their pain. Not loving your neighbor as if your neighbor were yourself but as your neighbor is yourself. Charity is a commitment to caring and a feeling of solidarity.
Making Meaning Out of Meaninglessness. Making Trump-Free Zones Out of Absurdity.
Camus is an apostle of absurdity and the meaninglessness of the universe. But for Camus, absurdity is not a dead end of meaninglessness. Absurdity is a two-sided dialectic. On the one hand, it is meaningless to claim that everything is meaningless because that would make that statement meaningless as well, and it would involve you in an infinite regress of meaningless statements about meaninglessness. That doesn’t stop Camus from proclaiming that all is meaningless, but it leads him into an ironic antithesis.
According to Camus, we cannot live without meaning, even if that meaning evaporates under closer scrutiny. There is also no meaninglessness without first there being meaning. You can’t have less meaning – meaning less -unless you first had more meaning. And there is no meaninglessness without a renewed search for more meaning. Absurdity starts with a stab at meaning and a sliver of hope which are then dashed against the reality of meaninglessness and hopelessness. But then the cycle starts up again with another stab at meaning and sliver of hope.
Nihilists, who reject any search for meaning, confound acknowledging something with accepting it. It is one thing to acknowledge meaninglessness, which is a key to absurdity, and another to accept meaninglessness, which is the opposite of absurdity. The absurd person acknowledges absurdity but fights against it and never accepts it.
As The Plague came to an end, Dr. Rieux and his comrades were relieved and rejoiced. They were also resigned to the likelihood that the plague could return. The doctor warned his comrades not to become complacent. “The plague bacillus never dies or disappears” and it can return at any time. In Camus’ absurd universe, nothing is ever for certain and nothing is ever forever. Which is no reason not to keep fighting, to rejoice at victories, and to hope that lasting progress has been made.[6]
But looking back on the plague year, the doctor is gratified at the public spirit most people had shown. At what is in effect the faith, hope and charity of the populace. He concludes that even “in the middle of scourges, there is more to admire in humanity than there is to scorn.” During the plague, people came out of their shells and came to realize that “There were no longer any individual destinies, only a collective story of the plague and the feelings everyone shared.” There were no great heroes, the doctor explains, “such as those you can find in the old tales.” Just ordinary people doing what they saw as their duty. And it is astonishing, the doctor says, that they never ran out of people willing to deal with the sick and the dead, that there were so many people who would risk getting the plague in order to do the public good.[7]
Rieux is also gratified and grateful that even in the midst of the plague, people did not completely give up their lives to the plague. While fighting the disease, they continued to do the sorts of things that make life good. Eat, drink and party. Play music, dance and sing. Whatever made them happy. They “undertook to recapture their happiness and to deprive the plague of that part of themselves they would defend to the last.” Developing what can be called Plague-Free Zones in themselves, among themselves, and in their city.[8]
And that is the moral of this essay. That in the midst of the current plague of Trump and MAGA we should not let him deprive us of that part of ourselves that we would defend to the last. That we don’t get so caught up in the negative of responding politically but also, most importantly, emotionally to Trump, that we are unable to act positively in our own lives.
Trump’s strategy is to throw out a constant stream of provocations with the aim of absorbing all of his opponents’ time and energy in responding to them. His goal is to get his opponents so wrapped up in responding to him that we cannot promote our own programs and policies and, just as important, cannot demonstrate in our own lives what we value the most. If we do that, if we focus all are attention on him, he wins.
So, my proposition is that even as we work in opposition to the evils that Trump and his MAGA mates would inflict on us, we all of us try also to set up Trump-Free Zones in ourselves, among ourselves, and in our society. To do like the populace in The Plague and live out our faith, hope and charity in the face of the plague around us. To do whatever positive and creative things we can. And, as Jesse Jackson has been wont to say: “Keep hope alive!”
BW 2/25
[1] Albert Camus. The Plague. Alfred A. Knopf. New York: 2021.
[2] P. 82.
[3] P. 30.
[4] P. 14.
[5] Pp. 86-87.
[6] P. 207.
[7] P. 111.
[8] P. 94.
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