Sorry, Camus. The universe has always been sending us messages.
We simply haven't been listening.
In 1957 Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the devastation of not one but two World Wars, there was widespread disillusionment in the apparent meaninglessness of Western civilisation. Camus the novelist, playwright, philosopher and political activist, had emerged as a moral spokesperson of his generation. Fifteen years earlier, as WWII still raged in Europe he had written his most famous essay, the Myth of Sisyphus.
His opening lines are straight to the point:
To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy…Everything else … is child’s play…
However, according to Camus, a difficulty arises precisely when we ask what is the meaning of it all, because regardless of our appeals, he says the universe is silent.
This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart…The absurd is born of the confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
The daily monotony of our lives, Camus says, resembles the Greek Myth of Sisyphus, the ancient story of a king condemned for eternity by the gods to roll a boulder to the top of a mountain only to see it roll back down again. Sisyphus must roll the boulder back up again, only to see it roll down again. Repeat. Repeat. The myth reflects the mechanical repetitiveness of our daily lives — wake up, eat, go to work, work, go home, eat, sleep, and wake up and repeat the same process the next day. Occasionally, without reason, the question Why? pops into our minds, and it is at these moments we are confronted with the nothingness, the unreasonableness of a universe that is seemingly indifferent to our existence, our joys, our hopes and our pain.
Camus says the immediate options for relief are bleak. He suggests physical suicide is one. He argues that the commonly taken route of maintaining the illusion that somehow life is coherent, for example by believing in religion, is to commit intellectual suicide. Such approaches only cloak the absurdity of asking for meaning in a universe that will not or cannot provide any answer. If we seek an authentic human existence, we must revolt against the absurdity by remaining vigilant, and by relinquishing our need for the certainity of an answer we can liberate ourselves.
Camus wrote his essay in the shadow of a world war, and received his prize at a time when nuclear annihilation of the planet was a possibility, but it is not stretching the metaphor too far to say that we also are in something like a war. Just as the war Camus’ generation found themselves in was existential and on a planetary scale, so is ours. And just like Camus, we are all participants whether we choose to be or not. Like the prospect of total nuclear devastation, the war we are in reaches every continent, the upper reaches of the atmosphere and the deepest ocean trenches. It touches every species, every dimension of life on earth. Unlike nuclear annihilation however, our war is not just a possibility. It is happening in the real world right now. Another difference, perhaps more clearly perceived is that this is a battle of the human heart, for the main ‘perpetrator’ is our own inclination towards seeking eternal gratification in the transient. To say it another way, it is our willing and unwilling participation in a global consumer culture that both drives and is fed by the exploitative corporations and extractive industries that are so destructive of our biosphere.
The other difference is that far from being silent, the universe is clearly shouting back at us. Around the world, heat waves, forest fires, extreme droughts, hurricanes and flood events have become increasingly commonplace. More than eighty years ago, amateur scientist Guy Callendar painstakingly collated the temperature records from 147 weather stations around the world and connected the rise in temperatures with carbon dioxide emissions from global industry. Only eight years ago, every nation on the planet agreed to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, established to keep average global temperature rise under 1.5C but the half-way report last year found we are failing on almost all of them. On many we are going backwards. Fossil fuel extraction continues unabated. Inordinate quantities of plastic waste flows into our oceans. Biodiversity continues to diminish. Year on year, new temperature records are being set. Yet governments around the world remain wedded to infinite economic growth and seem unable or unwilling to make the necessary hard decisions. New expressions have entered our vocabulary; eco-anxiety and solastalgia — the distress caused by environmental change.
It has now become clear that we are not facing a science problem, so much as a human problem. It is easy to get overwhelmed, and think there is little we can do as individuals. So we tell ourselves we don’t have the time to reduce our food miles and search out food that is local and in season. We drive to the supermarket in our car when often we could walk or ride a bike or catch public transport. We buy the fresh produce wrapped in plastic because we have forgotten to bring our shopping bag. And why care how we sort out the recycling bin because who knows where it all goes anyway? It gets worse. Instead of going to church on Sundays like our grandparents did, on Sundays we go to the 24/7 shopping mall in search of ‘retail therapy’, seeking relief from the stress, anxiety and monotony. It is here that the analogy of our lives with the eternal punishment of Sisyphus has relevance, because too easily we get stuck in repeating these same behaviours. Hence we choose to buy the ‘two for one’ although we do not need the second one at all. We upsize and buy that outsized SUV, we upgrade the year old smart phone that still works fine, we buy the outfit we wear only once, and we purchase that dream big house we do not really need or take that luxury cruise to the Antarctic — simply because we can. The purchases give us relief, fill our void and make us happy if only for a time— but then the question Why? enters our lives. Here we glimpse that liberation from this Sisyphusian prison is what we really want — and need. Then, perhaps, we consider our personal footprint. Then, too we become open to hearing anew the voices of traditional wisdom that teach how lasting satisfaction for homo sapiens is not to be found in the transient materiality of the world.
So this war we are in takes us to a deeper and wider place. The world and science has moved on, and is moving on. Liberation now lies not in rebelling against a perceived silence of the universe but listening to what it is telling us. Ecology has long known the deep interconnectedness of every living and non-living thing, and new discoveries of the depth of this inteconnectedness are the rule, not the exception. A word has recently emerged in ecological discussions describing our real relationship to the natural world; reciprocity. Far removed from talk of an indifferent silence underpinning our lives, reciprocity suggests we exist and live and move and have our being in a world where we are enveloped by something more like a conversation or a dance.
It has become obvious that our contemporary meaning crisis is deeply connected to our own wellbeing, the wellbeing of our communities and the wellbeing of the natural world that sustains us. Everything we do, no matter how small is connected to the whole. Every decision, every choice we make has significance. How we choose to act, or do not act in the face of our extractive and exploitative culture’s destruction of the natural world affects not just the natural world but also how those around us choose to act, or do not act. If we project despair, we influence despair. If we project indifference, we influence indifference. If however we project hope and positive action in our own lives, no mater how small that action, it has a real world effect that can influence hope and positive action. And if enough of us project hope and positive actions in small ways, together we will move mountains.
