Absurdism In The Age of Trump.
“That’s just absurd!” is something I hear and exclaim with increasing and upsetting frequency these days. Things are somewhat fucked. The President of the United States is a reality TV star, possibly working for the Russians, who praises dictators for murdering their own people. Children full of life and hope and joy die at concerts and in refugee camps to satisfy the homicidal whims of madmen. A young, black student is stabbed to death by a white supremacist in the most gun-crazy country on earth, one of many in a campaign of violence which somehow isn’t labelled terrorism. Extremists want to ban my trans friends from using the bathroom and rip me from my husband to satisfy the demands of their twisted religion. Our civilisation could end in nuclear fire at any moment for the most trivial of reasons. It’s all utterly, utterly absurd.
The news gets more terrible and less explicable with every hour; each morning is a horror show to which we’re glued like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, minus the Beethoven.
Despite the fact we’re technically living in the most peaceful period in human history, it feels like the gyre’s widening again. The fundamentalists and the fanatics seem filled with a passionate intensity while we grow day by day more exhausted holding onto our convictions.
We’ve been here before, of course. There have been many moments in our history where the forces of brute tribalism, mysticism, and violent nihilism have been arrayed against those of reason, compassion, and humanity. Everything that allows us to exist as a civilisation, all the progress we’ve made — science, civil rights, history, medicine, space exploration, you name it — is threatened by this confrontation. We barely avoided a permanent descent into darkness just over half a century ago. And they didn’t have ICBMs or catastrophic climate change back then. We screw up this time, we die. Our senses and our sciences say we’ve no room for error.
A large part of this current rejection of progress, empathy, and modernity is rooted in mistrust, a misunderstanding of rationality and science as a way of explaining reality. Science simply serves to describe the universe and its functioning as a physical system. It is a powerful tool for us as a species and as individuals. But, because the universe it elucidates is a fundamentally undirected one where everything always happens by accident and humans will strive for meaning even where none exists, science and reason fail to explain it to us in a way that entirely satisfies. They never can, because our scientific knowledge of the universe is definitionally incomplete and does not claim to be anything else. And, we are told, satisfying answers require completion.
The universe outside ourselves clearly doesn’t care that we’re alive; yet we, as part of the same universe, care about that more than anything. We need the cosmos to care, to love us back. And we feel betrayed when it doesn’t. As W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, “The error bred in the bone / Of each woman and each man / Craves what it cannot have, / Not universal love / But to be loved alone.”
It is in that gap between what we crave and our lived experience — when our tidy mental model of the world constructed to explain it comes into contact with the incomprehensible randomness of the real — where Albert Camus found the Absurd.
Albert Camus and the Absurdity of Existence
“This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrationality and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942
Throughout his work, and most directly in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus attempted to answer that fundamental question: “What makes life worth living?” It’s the same question Hamlet asks of his audience in Act III, Scene I. Does one accept the world in all its outrageous contradictions, its suffering, slings and arrows, or refuse to participate (that is, kill oneself)? When faced with the laughably small scale of your existence and the absence of inherent meaning therein, how do you deal with that honestly without throwing your life away out of despair or retreating into blind mysticism?
We can’t help but try. For Camus, as for myself, the answer lies in accepting that disparity — then using it as fuel. It lies in sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness in the face of the inevitable and the infinite.
It is natural for the mind to recoil from that kind of realisation. When faced with the sheer size of the cosmos compared to what we can even see of it from afar, let alone experience, we are sorely tempted to retreat into a comforting anthropocentric bubble. There’s a reason the ultimate punishment in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a machine which provides the subject with an accurate view of their place in the universe, extrapolated from a fairy cake. It’s supposed to send a sentient creature mad, and probably would at that. We all have a vastly inflated sense of our own importance and delude ourselves daily, believing in grand designs into which we fit. We are each the heroes of our own tale, after all. Realising you aren’t special can be terrifying.
But once you get past the initial shock, the fact that we’re all quite so small is thrilling.
If there is no overarching anthropocentric structure to reality — no deities, no afterlife, no eternal damnation or salvation (as all available evidence seems to suggest) — and nothing outside ourselves to provide meaning, then every instant of our lives is precious. If we’re all cosmic accidents, just a tiny part of the universe able to observe and think about itself, each moment we get to experience a little more of it matters. We impoverish this world and our time in it by reducing them to a test by some incalculably cruel neolithic god or the grinding progress of cold, loveless ideologies.
Our response to the cosmic perspective and the absurdity we encounter on a daily basis must be either suicide, denial, or a revolt against the crushing weight of its conclusions. I choose revolt.
Revolt does not mean rejection of reality, however. We have to approach the truths of our world unflinchingly no matter how unpleasant they are, both because we need to survive and because delusions (mysticism, magical thinking, and irrationality) are a kind of mental abnegation. To choose them is to choose to flinch, to look away, and go through life with eyes at least half closed. I’d rather keep mine open. Revolt is, in Camus, “a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity…an insistence upon an impossible transparency.” By forcing that confrontation and the resulting change in perspective, revolt simultaneously strips us of our delusions of heroism whilst calling on an individual to challenge the inevitable with every breath.
It is the insistence that, no matter what happens, life is to be lived to its fullest. We must savour what moments we have, because unless the world is even stranger than we thought (and I’m not discounting that possibility entirely) they’re all we ever will.
The joy of life is found in this revolt against the implacable logic of slow time. It’s frankly amazing to see. We strain to wrap our squishy, highly-specialised hominid brains around a vast, inhuman universe so much weirder and grander than we can hope to fully understand. We construct great edifices reaching towards the sky and carve our faces into the sides of mountains in spite of the certainty that, a billion years hence, none of what we build will be left standing. We scatter messages among the stars so we can look up and say, “someone out there, someday, will remember who we were,” in the knowledge that they very likely won’t. We delve into the secrets of the universe, then use what we learn to talk to one another and amuse ourselves. Humans are thoroughly, patently ridiculous in our hubris, but we fight tooth and nail against entropy all the same. Sometimes we even succeed for a while. And either way, there’s satisfaction in the struggle.
One must, as the philosopher said, imagine Sisyphus happy.
Pushing Boulders Uphill
Beauty often springs from that tension between our desire to leave a permanent mark on the world and the knowledge we almost certainly never will. There’s suffering, too. And death. It can be painful knowing we fundamentally only matter to one another. The urge to imagine ourselves the heroes of our own tale, at the centre of a universe made just for us, is as powerful as it is dangerous. It often leads us to privilege our own experiences over those of others and shut out the light in a vain attempt to hide from the world as it is. We can do monstrous things in the dark.
Turn on the TV and you’ll see it. The fanatic, the fascist, the fuckup with a grudge and a gun. They all march to the same, deadening drum. They all harbour the same impulse towards glory and triumph, the same need to remake an irrational world into one that makes sense to them even through apocalyptic violence. The same urge to deny reality, cry foul at the sick joke of consciousness in an uncaring universe and, instead of undoing oneself, lash out at others. That impulse has animated the worst chapters in human history, and it appears to be picking up its tools again.
The question is not why. That we can surmise. The question is how we stop it.
And I have to confess I don’t know the answer. I don’t think anyone does, in its entirety. There isn’t a master key to anyone’s heart or a surefire way to cure a person of the existential dread at the root of their hatred. If there was we’d have found it by now.
Accepting the absurdity of our short, futile, incredibly unlikely existence riding this little ball of rock, orbiting an unremarkable star in a nondescript section of one of a trillion galaxies might be a good place to start.
