Humanity in the Plague
A (hopefully temporary!) conversation on exploring the moral and communal dimensions of this era of social distancing
About me: I work as the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT and the Convener for Ethical Life at MIT's Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life and also serve as the “Convener for Ethical Life” at MIT’s Office for Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life. Until all of this happened, I was peacefully enjoying a year-long sabbatical from my roles at both Harvard and MIT, focused on a new book about technology, ethics, and humanism, and on my role as the first-ever “Ethicist in Residence” at TechCrunch, a publication covering the world of Silicon Valley technologies.
And then.
I wrote a book a few years ago that happened to be a New York Times bestseller for a little while, and more relevantly happens to center around an in-depth analysis of The Plague, the canonical 1947 novel by Nobel laureate and existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. In Camus’ novel, the world — or at least the small village of Oran, French Algeria, that comes to symbolize our entire human world — is utterly devastated by a sudden and shocking return of the Bubonic plague. Or perhaps it is Cholera. Whatever the matter, everyone seems to be either dying or at risk of death, and there is no way out of a walled city filled with innocent victims. The government, the economy, culture, and religion have all shut down. Human contact is fundamentally dangerous.
Sound, um…all too familiar?
In The Plague as in our (again, hopefully at least a little bit temporary!) situation, what we need is a way to discover, or if not then to invent, our humanity in the midst of a fatally flawed moral universe. But how do we do more to do good and live well when EVERYTHING seems difficult?
That’s what this conversation will be about.
“The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; so to say it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won." - Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
“I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing." - Albert Camus, The Plague
In the meantime, tell your friends!