SIO205: What Camus Can Still Teach Us

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 205. I'm Thomas Smith and that over there is current co-host Jamie Lombardi. How are doing, Jamie?

0:00:39 Jamie: I'm doing all right. Hi guys, how are you?

0:00:41 Thomas: We'll let them and give them a minute to answer and then yeah, they'll email you their answer. You, you love the listeners. Uh, we have gotten some awesome feedback lately. It's been really fun. So, uh, we're here to do some more and you can go ahead correct me if I'm wrong, but here's, here's what I feel like is happening today. I feel like we've covered a lot of great stuff. And while, you know, everything we've talked about, you're definitely uh. Utilizing your philosophical toolkit and, and everything. But like today, we decided it'd be fun to actually talk about something that not just using your skills, your training, all that, but is actually related to someone you've read and studied. And it will be right out of your, I don't know, your actual degree and training. Is that accurate?

0:00:43 Jamie: I, You're So, um, sort of. Um, so I, um I studied philosophy at Rutgers and bioethics at NYU. Um, but they were very serious analytical philosophy schools. Um, and the person we're going to be talking about today, Albert Camus, is not an analytical philosopher at all. And so he has never been formally assigned to me. I've never officially studied him in a course, because analytic departments sort of just gloss over the existentialists and continental philosophy more broadly. So all the reading that I've done on Camus has been self-taught, self-done.

0:01:30 Thomas: Okay. Oh, okay.

0:02:10 Thomas: Okay. Well,

0:02:11 Jamie: So

0:02:12 Thomas: That's interesting that you say that. I think it could be cool to maybe remember that you're talking to a lay person, a lay audience, and maybe do you want to talk about the difference between kind of the analytical philosophy? Because I'm glad you said that, because A, that's really cool. And B, when I read this essay that you want me to read by Camus, I was thinking like, oh, this is not exactly what I expected out of, you know, a philosopher. Like it is very it's more it's it's kind of poetic. Doesn't strike me like particularly as technical. Now, I don't know if he has other work that's that's different. But yeah, do you want to talk about maybe the distinctions there and the different kinds of philosophy?

0:02:52 Jamie: That would probably require its own episode to sort of break down. Analytical philosophy is the sort of philosophy that any of the listeners who have taken a philosophy course in the United States have most likely encountered. It's very much concerned with the phrase "carving the world at its joints," and it's an attempt to use very precise logically based language to sort of make sense of our reality. And it's done in a way that can often be described as dry and devoid of passion.

Continental philosophy is done very differently than the way that much of analytical philosophy is done today. And some of the big names in continental philosophy are those like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Kierkegaard is another one. And their approach is much more literary and much more poetic, as you saw with the essay, The Almond Trees by Albert Camu that I sent you. And they're trying to answer, I think, the same questions, right? What is the meaning of life?

How do we live good or better lives? What is an ethical person to do? And the biggest difference in my opinion is how they approach these questions and the particular way they apply the tools to get at their best guesses at an answer.

0:04:24 Thomas: That was a perfect explanation. I don't feel like we need another episode. You got it. That was exactly a podcast answer. You gave us a good indication of it. And, you know, I don't feel like we read a dissertation. That's perfect. So, yeah, we're going to be doing Camus. We're going to Be Doing, as the logo for the podcast has, you know, philosophy, skepticism, politics, all that kind of stuff. It's a philosophy episode, so that'll be fun. You to Camus? Apparently, it wasn't assigned reading, but what eventually led you that way?

0:04:56 Jamie: It wasn't, it was a couple of couple of factors. Before I started teaching philosophy, I was struck by how much philosophy I still didn't know. And I was terribly worried that I was going to show up to class and I was gonna have a student who asked me a question about some philosopher that I didn't no, which would have been very easy to do, because there's an abundance of philosophers and philosophical writing that just time constraints being what what they are, I'm never going to get to.

0:05:29 Thomas: Well, I feel like you could have faked your way through the, oh, is he the white dude with, yeah, yeah. He's the old white dude, okay, yeah, no, I know who you're talking about, I would have done that, that's

0:05:33 Jamie: Yeah, so before I started teaching, I made a concerted decision to sit down and set myself a schedule to go through some of the philosophers that were big gaps in my understanding and that I just knew nothing about, so that at least I would be able to to refer students to something that could help them. And I had begun that process, and then shortly thereafter, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and I found myself in a kind of state of horror and bewildered as to how to deal with this. And I did the only thing it seemed rational to me to do, which was a deep dive into the French existentialist philosophers who were also acting as members of the resistance during the time that Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany. And it was then that I found Camus, and it has just been an unrelenting love affair ever since.

0:06:39 Thomas: I know, sometimes reading these these old philosophers, do you think he was particularly problematic in any way, or is it, is it, uh, somebody where you can read him today and still feel like, oh, okay, well, you, you know, this guy was onto something. Ahead.

0:06:53 Jamie: So regrettably, all my faves are problematic, as the saying goes. I also have a deep and abiding love for Oscar Wilde, and he has not held up too well, particularly post Me Too. Camus, I think, is less problematic, although he wasn't exactly wonderful to women. And particularly intelligent women seem to really intimidate him, it seems. But no, I wouldn't say that he fares terribly poorly.

Like, for example, Bertrand Russell has been influential in philosophy, you read some of his works, and even some of his work that I'm quite fond of, like On Marriage and Morals, where he puts forth these very progressive views on women and sex and the nature of relationships, he then goes on to say these really irredeemably racist things, which is just unfortunate and wrong. Albert Camus is not problematic in that way. In fact, he was as pretty consistent, even within in his life.

He was born in Algiers. And as he spent time there and in Paris, Algiers had eventually begun their war for independence against France. And he very decisively stood up for Algerian independence and talked about the way that it was unjust to treat the, excuse me, the Algerians, and particularly the Muslims, differently than the French citizens. And so he didn't exemplify any of that racism that it would have been very easy to slip into. So

0:06:56 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:27 Thomas: That's all, that's a relief. That's always, I know it's a, it's kind of a, a sliding scale sometimes on the, I guess, you know, everything becomes somewhat problematic to a degree. But, but yeah, so I, I see. So you, you retreated into this very interesting corner of philosophy as a response to horrible things that were happening in the world. So did it help? Yeah.

0:08:50 Jamie: It has. Unfortunately, I haven't found, you know, the answer to solve all of our problems. But it has been a great resource and a place to find comfort. Comfort, um, you know, it's very tempting, um, to take in the news today and feel like we don't stand a chance. Nazis are marching again in United States cities, I don't even know what's happening in the UK, I can't even begin to unpack that, um, climate change is barreling down at us, and it can all seem really hopeless and like one person couldn't possibly do anything. And then you remember that people were standing up against literal Nazis before the internet, before social media, and they managed to do it. And that's, that's a place at least where I can find hope, that if even up against one of the worst evils humanity has ever collectively faced, people were able to find the strength and the courage to not just cower in the shadows but but actively resist and sabotage and rebel, then perhaps there's still hope for humanity. That one might just do us in, yeah.

0:10:03 Thomas: Until climate change, that's like, yeah. Yeah Unfortunately, as I was reading this essay, I was thinking like, ah, he has me, except for the fact that if the planet just burns us, then definitely that's a different kind kind of enemy than maybe anybody's ever faced, I guess, the

0:10:17 Jamie: Yeah, and so in this essay, again, I'm looking through it as you're talking, and I think even with climate change, there is an ability here to look and see what he says and realize that actually humans, if we wanted to, we have the talents and the skill to face this crisis. It's just a matter of whether or not we're going to do.

0:10:38 Thomas: And it's, well, for me, it's, I mean, this is not, I guess it's not on topic, but for me, with climate change, it is, it's the sad part is, like, how many people are going to have to suffer before we decide we want to fix it, and you will we be too far beyond the point of no return with some of these feedback effects and stuff? So it scares the heck out of me, but anyway, back to Camu, what did you, what did you want to teach us about Camu today? Well,

0:11:04 Jamie: So, there are two main things that you need to know in order to to get anything from Camus, and they they go together. Um, the first is that for Camus, the world is absurd.

And what he means by this is not that humans themselves are absurd, or that the world itself independently on its own is absurd, but the confrontation between the two results in absurdity, because human beings are looking for meaning, they're looking to make sense of the world that they're in, why they're suffering, why there is any suffering, and a world that is unable to give them that meaning. Camus describes it as the silence of the universe.

Verse And from this he says the only serious philosophical question there is is suicide, and it's where the famous line comes from, "should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee." And it he's serious, though, because what should we do when we take an honest stop, when we look at the world with what he calls lucidity? We have to face that we are condemned to death. There is no way around this, there's no escape, our lives are finite.

And for many of us, they're full of things that are awful, so many of our experiences are unpleasant or downright awful. Our lives are full of heartbreak and illness and disappointment and jobs we hate. And why not just kill ourselves now and get it over with? And so these are the questions that Camus is grappling with. And And I think they resonate, and I think they're timely, given the magnitude of the crises we face.

0:12:51 Thomas: You're gonna have to give us some, some, some answers. I think you posed the question. I feel like, I mean, I know that he didn't kill himself, so he must have found some sort of answer to that question, right? Drank a lot of coffee, I guess. Oh.

0:13:05 Jamie: And I'm not, I'm sure he ever really got an answer. One of the things that really comes through with Camus, and for those who are not familiar, Camus has this reputation of being kind of a cad. He was a notorious philanderer. His wife spent time in a mental institution because she was unable to deal with the difficulty of his many affairs and the dividedness of his attention. Attention, you know, he was in the premier literary circles of Paris, he won the Nobel Prize, ostensibly he was living the life, right? Anybody looking from the outside at Camus would be like, "oh my god, this is who I want to be, this is how I want to live my life." But privately and internally, you get a sense from the journals that he kept, that he lived with this ever present despair, and he writes constantly of this loneliness that haunted him, despite how populated he the parties he attended were. And so even amidst all of this celebration and jubilation and, you know, material success in ways that most people can't even fathom, he also really struggled with the darkness. I

0:14:18 Thomas: You think it was related to that core philosophy of his, or some psychological issues, or can, is it possible to even separate that?

0:14:27 Jamie: I'm not sure it's possible to separate them fully. Um, Camus lived, you know, a really unusual life. He grew up desperately poor in Algeria. Um, in his biography, the home that he lived in is described as having absolutely no books.

Um, he was only able to attend higher higher education after a school teacher of his, who was quite fond of him, went to his house and had to talk his grandmother into allowing him to go, because the family was so poor, they desperately wanted him to work and earn money for the family.

And the teacher had to say, like, "hey, you know, listen, actually, I think he's got a real talent here, and he could in the long run make more money if you allowed him to school." And so Camus' early life was marked by poverty. It was marked by the absence of his father, who died during World War I. His mother was partly deaf, and so there was a silence in his life that he talks about, as well as it was marked by a very domineering grandmother who controlled his mother, who controlled him, who controlled her, and and was quite strict and unsupportive of any of the things that brought joy to Camus' life, like, for example, playing soccer, or what he would have called football. Ball. And this poverty, I think, stayed with him.

He describes it in one of his works as an experience that colors one's childhood and never really leaves them. And so he had grown up with these sorts of hardships and always kind of felt himself to be on the outside of the world and never really belonging where he was. And then he experienced World War II. And as part of the the resistance, saw his friends, you know, gunned down before him, was aware that people were being brought to gas chambers and killed in mass.

And I think this was a thing that really affected him, and that he felt personally, like, I think he felt personal responsibility for the state of the world. And he wanted to to push back against the magnitude of the suffering. And that in some ways, it felt like a personal failure, he wasn't able to as successfully as he wanted.

0:16:34 Thomas: Would he be accurately described as a nihilist, or is that a different category of, Of, don't know, thought or philosophy?

0:16:41 Jamie: This, this, this is a tricky question to answer, because I think there's no idea in all of philosophy that gets misunderstood more than nihilism. And so, just, nihilist is the idea that nothing really matters, right? And these concepts that we have of good and bad are just meaningless. And if that's true, murder is as meaningful as mercy, it's all just arbitrary. And neither Camus nor Nietzsche, who nihilism is often attributed to, really believed that. In fact, when they talk about nihilist, in this this looming catastrophe of humanity, when we have to face that God is dead, for example, and there is no objective meaning, is that this shouldn't lead to destruction and crime. What this should lead to is a transformative renaissance, that man should take this opportunity to build something for himself that has value instead of looking to the outside world to give it to him.

0:17:45 Thomas: Interesting. So is it like slightly more optimistic than, than maybe a pure kind of nihilism would be?

0:17:50 Jamie: It's definitely more optimistic in the sense that we can create our own meaning, or that wecan decide how to choose our lives. In one of Camus' most famous works, The Myth of Sisyphus, he ends it by saying that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. And it's the idea that even if we're strapped to our boulder, and we can't do anything to change the of the tasks that are set to us, in that moment of consciousness, when we prepare to lift the boulder back up and do it again, we can take pride or feel courage that we've chosen to to continue doing this. And we can find success in our willingness to continue to face what would crush us, and a sort of victory in our resistance to it wanting to crush us. And saying, actually, no, I'm good, I'm going to keep picking this back up. And I'm gonna keep doing this no matter how, where, how it wears me down. And the mere fact that I have this resilience is something to be be joyful about, that I'm not being crushed, I'm not defeated.

0:18:57 Thomas: Have you seen the, well, this wouldn't work for you, but I I've mentioned it, but have you seen the meme where Sisyphus is like, it's not so bad. I can listen to podcasts. That said, There. You Go. Okay.

0:19:05 Jamie: Yeah, so Camus would love that. Yeah. No, Camus would totally be down with that.

0:19:09 Thomas: Yeah. Me too, as long as I can listen to podcasts. Not so bad, you know. It's funny, I feel like in a sense, like, as a as an atheist, nihilism is like true, or that kind of outlook is true, if from the perspective of the universe or something, yeah, I don't think anything really really matters. But like, I happen to be a human. So to me, murder is not good. You know, like, it's not, it's, it's weird. It's like, it is that feeling of needing, I guess it's this, I don't know, it seems to be pretty common human impulse of needing some meaning beyond the thing you're doing. Like you need, you need like a meaning beyond humans to feel like something matters, or that it's worth something. But really, if you're not religious, like I'm not, I guess it's a little hard to deal with. But then, I don't know, I've realized that I'm a human, and things matter to humans, and there's outcomes that definitely are better and worse for humans. I try to be comfortable with that, I think.

0:20:17 Jamie: Yeah. And so Camus would also totally say that one should avoid a leap into what he would call metaphysical consolation, right? You shouldn't try to escape the absurdity of life by appealing to notions of God or eternity or an afterlife. You should face it. And you should also not live your life on autopilot, right? Where you're just so consumed with the day to day tasks that you allow them to sort of work as an intoxicant and to remove you from having to face the world with lucidity that, oh, we're gonna die. And this is really all there is to it. Am I actually doing anything with this brief bit of life that I have to make it worth it so

0:21:04 Thomas: Would you think about this if, hypothetically, you know, because, because one of the assumptions under all this is like, well, death is inevitable and all that, and, like, I don't know, I, you know, we do the other, uh, sci-fi podcast, like, maybe it's not inevitable, eventually maybe there is a way to prolong our lives indefinitely, or, you know, upload us to the cloud or something, how would, how would that change this outlook? What do you think would Would it? Yeah, good.

0:21:28 Jamie: That That's really interesting. There is another philosopher, decidedly in the analytical tradition, Derek Parfit, who has talked about the nature of identity and how to understand its continued continuity through time. And so he has this, this, the, the teleportation example. And it's, yeah, and so that comes from Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. And it says the idea is that is this person on the other side of the teleporter really you in a meaningful sense? Or is this a different person? Right? And so I think it without answering that question, it would be really hard to say how that would impact Camus' philosophy, right?

0:21:48 Thomas: Oh yeah. I know that one.

0:22:14 Jamie: Because Because fundamentally, it's still going to depend on whether or not it's you who's uploaded.

0:22:14 Thomas: Well, or, or just if, right. But like assuming it is, or assuming maybe there's a different way that we are able to find a way to prolong our brains without, you know, our bodies rotting away. Like some, some way that hypothetically we can kind of agree for the sake of argument that we, we, мы eliminate that question and say, okay, this is us. What, what would it mean for this philosophy if we were able to live forever? Is it contingent, is it like really dependent on the fact of death?

0:22:45 Jamie: You know, interestingly, in the case of the Miss Sisyphus, Sisyophus never dies. He is contemned to this torture of rolling the boulder up the hill for all of eternity. And Camus thinks that this fits in that circumstance. So I would imagine that he would think it would apply in a simulation or an uploaded consciousness. Consciousness. Because, you know, there could still at least be the possibility that it could get turned off. You know, it could be the possible run of electricity, I don't know, the cloud doesn't sustain. If we were still contingent upon some material basis for wherever the consciousness was uploaded, death would still be possible. But even if it weren't, right, we'd still have to ask ourselves, well, shit, what is the value of existence now? What do I I do with myself? What benefits are there to be had as an uploaded consciousness, right? We may not need food anymore or shelter. But I would suspect there would still be something like needs, right? Something like lives or existences that go better or worse, that would still force us to to reckon with these questions.

0:23:19 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:57 Thomas: You know, uh, apologies for this, but I mean, I gotta talk about this show that I, I, I told Aaron that I wanted to talk about on Philosophers in Space, but I don't think it's ever gonna happen. Are you by any chance familiar with the show Forever, with Maya Rudolph and uh Fred Armisen?

Okay, it, it's, yeah, it didn't, it hasn't gotten a lot of attention, I don't think, but it is, it is so interesting to me, and I loved watching it, because the premise is, they like, they eventually, they are a married couple, and they, they actually eventually die, sorry, it's like within the first episode, but uh Fred Armisen dies, and and then later uh Maya Rudolph dies, and when they die, they go to this afterlife that is just, just the earth, like they're just still on earth.

And what, is what I loved about it is the characters, like Fred Armisen's character has this real personality that, and I don't know if you're like this, I know I'm not, but like, I envy these people, he's the kind of person who just gets up, has his coffee, does a crossword, does, you know, does some gardening, is, he's just like a happy guy that, he would be like the happy Sisyphus, I guess, where it's just like, oh yeah, today I'm rolling this boulder, that's cool.

And this idea that once they're in this afterlife, they have no idea really what's going on, but they could be just there forever. And he just kind of carries on with his routine. And it's so funny to me, but also, also really like interesting and like kind of realistic that he just finds himself, and he gets there just in a neighborhood, you know, and he's like, all right, well, today I'm going to do this crossword.

And he's, he's happy, in a way that Maya Rudolph's character just isn't, like she, she doesn't understand what to do with herself. And I found it so interesting to imagine, like, what if, if you essentially find yourself in a situation where you're not worried about death, you know, you're kind of just day to day, you just do whatever.

And it's so funny, that I really do think there are, there are people I've certainly met in my life who would probably be content to just like do the things they like doing, do the hobbies they likedoing, just like, all right, I just enjoy this every day. And I wish I had that, but I don't know, I don't know that I do.

0:26:09 Jamie: So I am definitely not like that. And without having seen it, it sounds like the sort of living on autopilot that Camus warns us against. It sounds like a refusal to confront the absurdity of our existence and to ask ourselves these really important important questions.

0:26:28 Thomas: Well, that's interesting. Do you really think that's like what if what if you ask those questions. And the answer is, well, you need to get, it kind of, it seems like you could either be on autopilot or I could just as easily see somebody realizing like, well the enjoyment I get out of life is the enjoyment of doing such and such activities. And that's what I'm going to do. You know?

0:26:51 Jamie: That's, that's really interesting. Because in a lot of his writings, Camus does make these sort of appeals to the Stoics and the ancient Greeks. And he sort of invokes this concept of amor fati a little bit, which is this idea of one loves your fate, and you just sort of embrace it for what it is, and you don't wish it to be different, you don't wish it to be anything other than what it is, that you recognize the necessity of the way all things are ordered, and you just sort of give into that, and, you know, achieve this sort of like higher state of happiness and being.

And so that's a really interesting question, to figure out exactly how you would make a distinction between someone living their life on autopilot, it because they're just cowardly and afraid and refusing to embrace the absurdity of existence, or someone who is living their life in a visibly indistinguishable way, but because they've embraced this concept of amor fati, and they accept that the world is ordered in this particular way, and that these are the ways that it's going to unfold, and that there's very little that they can do about it, except derive whatever joy is available to them in those moments. So that, that is actually really interesting. And

0:28:11 Thomas: Yeah. I, uh, I'm curious how he makes that argument of, you know, not being in a, in a haze, not kind of be like, cause that sounds like a very, I don't know if I'll use the correct philosophical terms here, but it, it sounds like, uh, kind of a value laden thing. Like it's a, it's kind of judgment that he's making, like, no, you need to live your life this way versus this way, while having acknowledged a sort of nihilism in a sense, like a sort of, you know, there is no higher power telling us what to do. So how does, um, how does he make that leap from, there is no higher purpose, uh, and it's kind of what we make of it, but you should be this way and not that way, you know? Yeah.

0:28:53 Jamie: So actually, that is what he struggles with throughout all of the works, right? Because in a world that is devoid of objective meaning, you don't have any basis for grounding to say one thing is better than the other. Right? And so this confrontation with reality itself, this rebellion against the inevitability of death, he says, is the one thing that we have in common with all people.

And so ultimately, he sort of grounds his way of understanding how lives can be lived better or worse by their relationship to solidarity, to human suffering, suffering, and so for Camus, I think it would come down to, you know, how honestly you're embracing life, right?

If you are blissfully going about your life, and you go to work every day, and you do your job, and you come home, and you kiss your wife, and you put your kids to bed, and you pay your bills on time, and you do the grocery shopping, and you walk the dog, and you're living contently, but right next door is the concentration camp where people are being tortured, that, let's say for some reason, you could, if you wanted to or so inclined, unlock the gate to and free these people, and you choose not to, I don't think Camus is going to think you did a morally good thing, that the contentment that you found in this world was done in a way that is desirable or that one should aspire to. And so

0:30:28 Jamie: For Camus and the existentialists more broadly, you know, it's our actions, it is our choices, and it's what we choose to make of ourselves that give meaning to the world and decide what has value.

0:30:39 Thomas: I Would you mind defining existentialism while we're at it here for

0:30:43 Jamie: No, no, I would not. So existentialism is the idea at its most fundamental that existence precedes essence. And what that means is that there's no predetermined God-given or God-decreed sense of human nature. There's no such thing as human nature, there's no essence of what it means to be human. We find ourselves thrown into this world, we exist first and then it's up to us to create who we are and what our essence is.

0:30:43 Thomas: Okay.

0:31:23 Thomas: So I see that it's definitely related to all these concepts we're talking about, but it's, maybe is, would that be like a broader term, kind of an umbrella term for some of these other uh philosophies? Is that fair to say? Oh.

0:31:36 Jamie: You you could say that and many people do. Camus did not consider himself an existentialist when he was writing. He either referred to himself as an absurdist or an artist. But he was definitely associated and influenced by the existentialists, who would be Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who were his contemporaries, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, who came before him, definitely.

0:32:07 Thomas: Interesting. Well, I, I know I've been been driving things with with my questions a bit, I want to make sure you, you want to get back on track to where you wanted to go with with Camu.

0:32:16 Jamie: To go. When I teach him in class, I tend to focus on the myth of Sisyphus, and then a lot of his his writing during World War II and the resistance. In particular, he's got this one letter that I absolutely adore. It's a letter to a German friend in which he debates what it means to love one's country. And can one love one country and still criticize it? Can one be a patriot without being a nationalist? And I just, I think these are timeless questions and I think Especially now, when we're at such, I'm going to call it an interesting political moment, that these are such good questions for us all to be taking seriously and thinking deeply about. I

0:32:47 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:01 Thomas: Yeah, that's interesting, because I would take that for granted. So obviously that, yes, you can. It's almost an obligation that you would have as an actual patriot to criticize when your country is doing something bad. But it was that, that a tough question for him?

0:33:21 Jamie: Don't think it was tough for him in the sense that he was worried that he wasn't sufficiently loving his country when he was criticizing it. This in particular is a response. So a German friend, you know, writes to him and says, you must not love your country because if you really loved your country, you wouldn't resist the German occupation. You would join it because to love one's country is to want what's great for one's county.

Camus responds that he should not just want any kind of greatness for his country. That military might, for example, or financial conquest isn't great if it comes at the the cost of human lives and conquest, and that's not all, greatnesses are created equal, and he says that he should should love, he wants to be able to love his country and still love justice, and this is at the nature of the debate for Camus, and I think this is really important, and I think we saw this a lot even with Colin Kaepernick when he was protesting the national anthem during the NFL games, and he was immediately called unpatriotic, that he hated America, that if he didn't like it here, he should move. And I think these are still questions that we haven't quite figured out the answer to, where we draw the line between dissent and patriotism.

0:34:42 Thomas: Yeah, well, when you say we, I plug it all into, you know, what seems to be a very polarized country. You know, I feel like on the left, I think we have a pretty good handle on that. But like broader, you Know, if you're talking about all of America, yeah, clearly, I mean, Kaepernick doesn't have a job for that reason. So clearly, a lot of people don't believe that you can be at all critical of, say, the police, and then some, you know, without somehow that being like disqualifying for you to even be a public, to be a football player. It's, it's really bizarre to me. Um, but yeah, it does strike me as quite relevant to, to this, this day and age. I, I, I hope that like on the left, we are able to have a healthier view of patriotism to where, you know it's not about your country right or wrong. It'S about trying to improve things in in your country and to make it better and, and, and improve people's lives.

0:35:41 Jamie: So that is totally a sentiment that I share, you know, as someone who self identifies as being on the left. But I bet if you were to pull a bunch of right wingers, they would also self identify as having the correct view of patriotism, and so one of the reasons that I really like, I mean, there are so many reasons that I like Camus, but this essay in particular, it literally talks about making a country great again, and what that means, and it gets students to sort of think more broadly about what it means to be loyal to one's country, and are there times that one shouldn't be loyal to one's country, right? Because at least for the most part, even still, thankfully, people are able to recognize that Nazis are bad guys, although I did once have a student pull a marker out of my hands and proceed to draw a Venn diagram to try and explain to me why using Nazis as stand-ins for generic bad guys was unfair to Germans, which was an interesting experience.

0:35:58 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:36:42 Thomas: How does a Venn

0:36:44 Jamie: What?

0:36:44 Thomas: Diagram answer that question? Question?

0:36:46 Jamie: Because Because, you know, not all Germans were Nazis, and not all Germans who were Nazis were Nazis because they thought being Nazis were good. And so when you describe all Nazis as generic bad guys, you obscure the Nazis who were conscripted into service at point of death, which is legitimate, admit, um, but

0:37:11 Thomas: Well, is it like, yeah, there's so much wrong with that, but also like, I love the people who are really ready to go to bat for however many, any percentage of dead Germans, that, like, who cares, like, is it really, are we really, are they, are we insulting that generation of dead people that doesn't have their feelings available to get hurt? It's kind of weird. Yeah.

0:37:12 Jamie: Yeah.

0:37:36 Jamie: So I have not stopped using Nazis as a generic stand-in for bad guys in, you know, thought experiments about runaway trolleys and things like that. Um, I'm still using Nazis as bad guys, um, but it's helpful because generally, even still, we have this sort of historical consensus that the Nazis were bad guys. Thankfully, still.

0:38:00 Thomas: It's real philosophy happening here. Yeah.

0:38:01 Jamie: Yeah, you know, we do, the President of the United States does insist that, you don't know, many of them are very fine people. But at least my experience in class with students is that there's a general recognition that Nazis generally are bad. And so it's instructive, I think, to get students thinking about, at the time that Camus was writing this, there wasn't that historical consensus, and people were trying to make sense of these competing claims about what it meant for a country to be great and what it means to be patriotic to a country, particularly during a time of war. And so it really, I think, facilitates a lot of really great conversations, because on one level, it seems like they're having conversations about the past, and they're having conversations about topics that have been settled for us, right? Nazis are bad.

And then at the same time, once they spend time with this material, they're able to apply it to where we are now currently, and the way that these debates are framed currently. And it's really amazing to see the way that this can get students thinking about things, things completely differently than perhaps they were before they came into class. No,

0:38:25 Thomas: Yeah it is always amazing to remember that, like, yeah, you're, you're totally right, like, they, depending on the the year, you're not, you know, people aren't just under the assumption that of course Nazis and Hitler are bad, like, it's amazing that when they're synonymous with, like, bad guys for us now, broadly speaking, um, to, it's also kind of disturbing if you've ever taken a look at some of the journalism of the time, you know, like the way, the way they're, like, describing, I, you know, I can't think of immediately what it is, but um, the way they did either interviews with Hitler or, like, described Hitler, and it's it's reminiscent of even, even how you might describe a leader today, where the word, it's so anodyne, you know, it's so, just this this, like, boring profile of Hitler, know, like, it's you crazy to even think of that now, but that very much was how it was up until a certain point.

0:40:06 Jamie: Absolutely, and I think that's one of the advantages of talking about this now, because it creates this sort of contrast, and it's a really good way to get people thinking. No one ever thinks they're the recipient of propaganda, right? Everybody thinks that they're doing an adequate job making sense of the information that's passed down to them. And it's really not until you see something that can be analogous to what you're living through right now that you can also still recognize as propaganda, where those light bulbs start to go off in your head, and you're like, oh my God, this world isn't organized the way that I thought it was. And then all of a sudden, there's like all of this learning, and it's amazing to kind of witness. And in my experience, and I don't know if it's just because I'm so excited about Camus, that it's sort of spilling over, or some objective fact of the matter about Camu's body of work, but Camus, unlike any other philosopher that I've covered in class, like, really resonates with the students. So,

0:41:09 Thomas: Do you think that speaking is not Camus or not in a different time as someone on the left now, does it even make sense to talk about like a loyalty to your country or a patriotism? Like for me, sometimes I don't even, yeah, I was born here and everything. And like, I think there are good things about the country, but I don't know that there's any, like that's all contingent. You know, if our country as it is now, you know, increasingly becomes, you know, run by people that I completely disagree with and are doing things that I don't like. Like, I don't feel any particular loyalty to it beyond when it's doing things that I think are good for the world. Is that how you feel or is it just me?

0:41:55 Jamie: You know, this is a complicated question. Question, I, the idea of patriotism, patriotism to me doesn't make a lot of sense, um, especially the way that it's practiced, it seems just arbitrary, I don't see anything inherently virtuous about having a particular affection for a place because I happen to have been born there, it's just an an accident, um, and so I don't see why one geographical location should be more deserving of my affection or loyalty than another on the sheer accident of my having been born there, is how I would answer that question, right?

0:42:42 Thomas: Yeah, no, I agree. And also, actually, I think the thing that killed any sense of my patriotism the most was learning more about history, and also like the experience of Black America throughout the centuries. It's a whole different thing. The amount that we have whitewashed history in our curriculum, honestly, I think it's really harmful. I think gives people a very inaccurate view of what happened and a sort of rosy view of all these historical figures where you're like, well, no, they owned humans, so they actually weren't that cool.

0:43:20 Jamie: So that's absolutely the other side of it, um, know, as almost a middle-aged American with some education under my belt now, it's really hard to take stock of the world and not realize that, like, ooh, guys, we're kind of the bad guys in a lot of this.

0:43:42 Thomas: Yeah are we the baddies, as they say. Yeah.

0:43:45 Jamie: Yeah, And so that sort of goes through my head a lot, you know, and there's the obvious ways that we have, you know, children and adults in concentration camps at our southern border, and that's the obviously obvious piece of it.

And the less obvious and less discussed piece of right is the way that we systematically destabilized governments that we found threatening to us, um, and so trying to reconcile all of these things that I've learned about what my country has done, right, um, including the wars in Iraq and and Afghanistan, the banging of the drums, again, to go to war with Iran, our indifference to what's happening in Syria or Yemen.

And I just, I can't take seriously this idea that I should hold in particular esteem the United States, because the United States really wanted to be a force for good in the world and freedom and democracy.

It has the resources and the influence to do that, but it chooses not to do that, and I think it should be held responsible for that, and I think we should have a more fair accounting instead of speaking in these sort of mytholized euphemisms about beacons of democracy and shining cities on hills. Yeah.

0:45:01 Thomas: I think it's, it's even going to be a bigger problem going forward, especially with China, you know, I mean, they've got Uyghurs, uh, if that's how you pronounce it, uh, you know, in camps as well. Like, it's, they're, they're really, they're doing really bad things. And, uh, but we, you know, markets, or market, like, we, there's also a lot of companies that want to do business and trade and all that, and finding that way to to try to, I don't know, do anything about that, but without becoming isolationist is certainly a big problem. But anyway, um, while we're getting to the closing time of the podcast here, anything you want to leave us with, with Camu, and make sure that we got to that's

0:45:43 Jamie: So The Stranger is probably Camus' most well-known novel. But my particular favorite is The Fall. It takes place in Amsterdam. I had actually read this on the plane on the way to Amsterdam.

0:46:02 Jamie: And this is just my absolute favorite. It's a monologue. So it's written from the perspective of one speaker. There's no dialogue. There's not a interaction. And he's telling the story of his life in a bar in Amsterdam after he's forced to completely reassess himself, um, he's walking home from work one day, he's, you know, a fancy pants lawyer, and he is walking over this bridge where a woman jumps from the bridge to her death, and he has this moment where he knows if he chose to, he can perhaps jump into the river and and save her and make a difference in the trajectory of the world, and he chooses not to, and he chooses to go home, and this decision haunts him, and the book is, you know, fundamentally about how it's our choices that define us, it's the way that we make sense of, you know, the moral luck that happens to us, and the narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves that define so much of who we are, and I just think it's wonderful, and I think everybody should read it. So.

0:47:15 Thomas: A great recommendation, that's funny, The Stranger has been on my list, because, because kind of like you did with philosophers, I've realized, since I was such a bad, not even bad, it's not even accurate, I was not a reader for the longest time in my life and have so many just giant holes in my knowledge of like the, you know, classic novels and books and all that. And The Stranger was on my list, so maybe I will have to, maybe I should bump The Fall up ahead of it.

0:47:45 Jamie: The Stranger, Ginger, is also wonderful and gets at really interesting questions at the heart of existentialism, but for me personally, The Fall is my absolute favorite fiction work of his.

0:47:59 Thomas: Well, that's great. This was a ton of fun, and, uh, thanks so much for doing this, I learned a lot. I do want to say, as we're coming to a close here, a, I hope you caught the bonus episode we did, that was only for patrons on patreon.com/seriouspod, that was a lot of fun, and we were thinking we'd do a little bonus extra for patrons, and I'm gonna, I'm going to tease it, what do you think? All right, so back, now that we've taken a nice interesting stroll down philosophy lane, we're back into politics, because I have been very curious to ask Jamie what she thought of this Elizabeth Warren quote that some people online are, know, and maybe justifiably, making a big thing of. Here, I'll read it real quick, and then we're going to go off to Patreon land if you'd like to join us. But recently, when asked about, you know, President Trump and how he might push Elizabeth Warren around or not, she said, quote, "I know how to fight and I know how to win. You don't back down from a bully.

Nobody's getting behind me on a debate stage and doing a handsy thing. That's not happening." End quote. And, uh, people have been talking about whether or not that's a little bit of a jab at Hillary, and maybe kind of victim, victim-blaming, so we're, that in the bonus segment here for patrons. If you can't make it, that's a-okay, we still love having you as a listener, but if you want to hop on over to patreon.com/seriouspod, enjoy that discussion now. If not, we will see you next time.

0:48:19 Jamie: Sounds good. A