We are living in a world where lies, politely called misinformation, have seemingly taken over our discourse, where false definitions of our basic principles are gaining currency, where the forces of authoritarianism seem to be marching all over the face of the land enforcing their will with threats and violence, and where civilization itself seems to be ready to collapse into ash and rubble. The response by many of those who are opposed to all this is equally troubling. I have read so many commentaries that have adopted the idea that there is almost nothing that can change the course of events, that we must just accept the idea that everything is collapsing and prepare to live in some sort of Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic world.
“We’re screwed” sums most of it up.
Such defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And there are other ways to look at our current moment and to view our prospects.
It’s time for a little Antifa math. Some original Antifa math.
In the middle of the last century two men, George Orwell and Albert Camus, happened upon a simple formula for freedom and resistance to the forces of oppression and destruction. Both men were original antifas. Orwell fought against the fascists in Spain and, despite his increasingly bad health, threw himself into the war effort with work for the BBC and participating in the Home Guard; Camus had been rejected, because of his health, by the Republicans in Spain but during the occupation of France participated in the resistance to the Nazi occupation primarily by editing the resistance newspaper Combat. Both men had seen much of their world reduced to actual ash and rubble.
Both men happened upon the same formula for understanding freedom and resistance: two plus two make four.
Although they were contemporaries, the two men never actually met although they were supposed in May 1945 but Camus had begged off because of exhaustion and tuberculous. Camus did read Orwell, he noted in his journal he had read 1984 and a few other of Orwell’s books, but it had to have been after he wrote The Plague. Orwell probably never read Camus. At least there is no evidence that he had.
“Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Winston Smith, the main character in 1984, writes that in his journal at the end of chapter seven in the first part of the novel. He had been musing about all the different ways the Party uses misinformation, constantly rewrites history, and, more generally, lies about everything. Earlier in the chapter Smith had written that he understood how it was done but not why. Smith is part of the apparatus of misinformation. We, of course, understand or come to understand, that it is just one of the ways the Party maintains itself in power along with fear, keeping everyone distracted and busy, constant surveillance, intimidation, purges, scapegoating — whatever enemy they are at war with, Goldstein, Jews. We also come to understand that the Party does all of it to maintain power, that there is no other goal or vision for it.
I think about this every time I hear the right down-playing the events of January 6th, or talking about “election integrity”, or their furor over how history is taught, or when they are using threats of violence to intimidate, or indeed, just about everything they say or do. That is the opposite of what Orwell wanted for his novel — a cautionary tale, and not, as the right seems to be using it, as a handbook for political power.
But there is another angle to look at Orwell’s equation for freedom that is often overlooked. He, and many of us today are focused on the negative interpretation — the denial of the ability to say two plus two make four. That is the focus of 1984. It can also be seen as an affirmation. For freedom to exist, truth has to be the basis of discussion. And by truth I mean based on facts — provable facts. Those stubborn things, as John Adams called them. When any discussion is not based on provable facts, there can be no freedom, only manipulation. Manipulation through falsity and lies can only lead to the dystopian future Orwell tried to warn us about — it is basis for totalitarian and autocratic regimes where any sort of political discussion devolves into nothing more than shouting slogans, intimidation, scapegoating, and violence. And that is exactly where the right in our country is now.
It has become increasingly clear that the disinformation and misinformation currently being spread by the right is causing great harm to our country, democracy and individuals. And the purpose seems to be similar: the pursuit of raw power.
But, if freedom requires the ability to say two plus make four, it also requires that those, like O’Brien, face some consequences for trying to force people to say two plus two make five. It used to be accepted that a freedom or a right existed for an individual up to the point where it infringed on the freedoms and rights of others. The adage form of it was about your right to swing your fists ends with someone else’s nose. This idea has gone by many names over the centuries: ordered liberty and rule of law are the most common. Freedom needs parameters or it simply devolves into anarchy, or into might making right. This has always been a corollary to ideas about freedom. When it comes to things like misinformation, however, there are those that howl that applying parameters to freedom of speech is an attack on the very idea of freedom. But freedom of speech and press is not now, nor ever was, an absolute right. Defamation, libel and slander have long been civilly actionable, as Alex Jones, that raucous purveyor of disinformation, discovered. Inciting people to violence, giving false testimony under oath, and fomenting sedition are criminal acts, as the absurdly-named Oath Keepers discovered. Commercial speech has long been regulated. At the very least, I think some regulation of social media may be called for to ensure that misinformation and disinformation don’t rise to the top because of algorithms.
Orwell did not, in 1984 at least, delve into the issue of what are the edges of freedom because he was writing about a society where any independent thought or freedom had already been extinguished.
Camus, on the other hand, found that two plus two making four is not just a statement of truth but also of the logic of resistance.
But before we get into the logic of resistance, there are a couple of things in The Plague that accurately echo our own situation. Eerily so in places.
At the very beginning, Camus gives us an intriguing portrait of the town. Oran is an ugly place, striking for its ordinariness. “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce and their aim in life is…’doing business.’” As long as you cultivate habits, you can live quite comfortably with the banality of life. But to live by cultivating habits means you don’t really think about, well, anything. In short, the people of Oran lived rather thoughtlessly filling their days with work and family and reading the papers[1] and doing all the expected things of normal, modern life.
Then the rats start dying.
At first, no one is really sure what is happening so most people ignore the situation or just find it annoying, or, like some of the newspapers, use it as a chance to criticize the local government for not dealing with the dead rats better, like it was just another mundane bit of politics. When the plague starts to infect people, however, almost no one wants to admit it; there is even a reluctance to even say the word plague. Even in discussions among doctors. And there is a lot of denialism — “It can’t happen here” sort of response along with a healthy dose of “Even if it does, it won’t be that bad” sort of minimalism.
Honestly, I can think of no other work of literature that better captures not only how most of us were living before our myriad problems came to a head or how we reacted to the first signs of those problems. Most of us, until relatively recently, lived by habit — commute, work, commute, dinner, and then an evening of TV or surfing the web, repeat tomorrow. We never gave much thought to any of it; we just cultivated the habits. And we were encouraged in all this by the entire “self-help” industry. Books like Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules (because what is following a bunch of simplistic rules than the cultivation of habits) all reinforced the idea that if we all had the right habits we would all be healthy, wealthy, and, if not exactly wise, then happy. We were also, like the people of Oran, focused on making money — working. In fact, the idea of work had become a nearly all-consuming obsession, either through necessity or habit.
Like the people of Oran ignoring the dying rats, we mostly ignored all the early signs of our various plagues. The growing sentiment on the right that undermines our democracy in favor of an autocratic form of minority rule have been around for almost as long I can remember. It became noticeable with Ronald Reagan proclaiming that government was not the solution to our problems but was the problem. Think about that for a moment. It was not an attack on any particular policy. It was, rather, an attack on the very idea of democratic governance, on the idea that the people, through their elected representatives, are capable of effectively governing themselves. That has been the justification for every system of autocratic government in the world from monarchy to fascism to communism. There are a couple of through lines that developed from that idea. The first is the erstwhile Republican Party’s continued attempts to obstruct and delegitimize any and all actions by the Democratic Party. Indeed, they want to obstruct and delegitimize any government action of any kind. Everything from the impeachment of Bill Clinton by Newt Gingrich’s House to Carl Rove’s nattering on about a “permanent majority” by Gerrymandering to the constant filibustering of Obama years to the plan to overturn the election on January 6th. The other through line is the rise of the so-called militia movement of the 1990s to the falsely named “Patriots” of the early 2000s to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who led the storming of the Capitol.
We did the same with climate change — deny and minimize. I remember first hearing about climate change, then called global warming, and how it was caused by releasing a lot of CO2 into atmosphere by burning fossil fuels back in high school. Understand this: I’m old. I graduated high school in 1985. Just imagine what the world might be like today had we started to shift to renewable energy back then. And my memories of renewable energy are even older — solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy were hot topics when I was in elementary school primarily because of the Arab oil embargo. And we did the same with our economic problems especially rising inequality, wage stagnation, concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands, and corporate consolidation. We ignored all those trend lines that really do go back at least forty years. Worse than that even. Many of us believed the Hayek-inspired economists when they said all those negative trends were actually good things.
But, like the people of Oran, we have reached the point when we can no longer ignore our plagues — our gates have been closed as they were in Camus’ novel. Once the gates close at the end of part one, the people of Oran fall into a few main categories. Many people simply try to continue their lives as normally as possible. There are those that flourished with the closing of the gates. Garcia and other smugglers do a brisk trade. Cottard, who is saved from arrest by the closed gates, even feels liberated in the enclosed, plague-infested city. Then there are those, like Rambert, who seek to escape. There are also those, like the priest Paneloux, who think everyone should just accept the situation and bow down to the inevitable.
And then there are the resisters. They resist the plague because two plus two make four; the plague is here, we must fight it. Or to put it another way, the truth must be acted upon. “There is nothing admirable in this attitude; it is merely logical,” Dr. Rieux, the narrator and Camus stand-in, observes in Part II. For Orwell, merely proclaiming two plus two make four was an act of heroic defiance. For Camus, however, it isn’t that; it isn’t even particularly praiseworthy. Afterall, as Camus points out, we do not praise a teacher for saying it, even though there are points in history where saying it may well lead to a person’s death. Nor does Rieux find praising those who take action based on the reality that two plus two make four to be a good idea because to do so would give into the idea that callousness and apathy are how most people are. Rieux, and thus Camus, rejects that idea. The real issue is whether you can make the calculation at all.
Once you make the calculation that two plus two equal four, then you must act. Camus connects this idea with the idea that most people are relatively decent and that what is not decent in us has more to do with ignorance. But, of course, the question then becomes how are we to act? For that, Camus gives us the example of Grand.
Grand fascinates me. He is an older white guy whose career never advanced beyond the position he took back in his twenties, his wife left him years ago — something he still grieves, and he basically lives in poverty in ill-health. He has, also, spent years working on the first sentence of a novel. He relentless revises that one sentence because he wants it to be perfect, instantly recognizable as a work of literary genius. There is never any indication of what he has planned for after that sentence or even what kind of novel it is to be. Grand is, in short, the type of person we would normally associate with the burn-it-all-down attitude of the MAGA-verse — marginalized, isolated, and lied to by a system that is willing to use him without any concern for his well-being.
Except he isn’t.
Too poor to give up his day job and in not in any condition to do heavy lifting, Grand keeps the records of the sanitary squads so everything can run smoothly. Every evening after work he goes to Rieux’s office to compile his statistics, make graphs, and mark his maps. He does this without hesitation. “Plague is here and we’ve got to make a stand, that’s obvious. Ah, I only wish everything were as simple!” he said when he was thanked for it. In short, he does his bit. He is under no delusion that his recording keeping is going to stop the plague. No one involved in fighting the plague seems to be under the delusion that they, alone, can stop the plague. But, as more and more people start doing their bit, the plague is dealt with until eventually the gates reopen. It is not, however, without setbacks and losses along the way. Even after the gates open, there is the recognition that the plague can come back.
Do what you can; do your bit. Be like Grand.
And that brings me back to the “we’re screwed; we’re doomed” crowd. I know most of them would argue they are merely pointing out the problems we face. That is valuable work. But when every set-back is treated as an irretrievable calamity, every problem as an insurmountable challenge, and the opposition to any sort of change as intractable and impossibly powerful — in short to adopt the attitude that we’re doomed — then a bigger danger will raise its head. That danger is fatalism — the idea that we shouldn’t even try to do anything because, well, we’re doomed.
Fatalism is the opposite of hope — the belief that the future will be worth living in. Give up on hope and we really will be doomed. Both Orwell and Camus were confronted with a world that had been, quite literally, reduced to ash and rubble. But neither man ever gave up on the idea of hope.
[1] Interestingly, both Camus and Orwell took a dim view of newspapers. Orwell, in 1984 and elsewhere, and Camus in both The Plague and The Fall, suggest that the newspapers of the period were what we would call infotainment, a midcentury version of surfing the net.
