Gems from Benjamin and Camus

Over the past year there was much talk of Orwell's 1984 and the importance of reading it again to be aware of Big Brother, totalitarianism, newspeak, doublespeak, etc. There was also a lot of talk about being on the right side of history. While these are interesting, I think they are pretty superficial ways to approach what is going on these days: reactionary, over reactions and polemics. 

I have been going back to Camus's The Plague and Benjamin's Theses On History. Neither are easy texts to understand: neither the texts themselves nor the ideas they bring up. But I think that is why they are more relevant these days than 1984 or appeals to 'the right side of history.

Here are a couple gems I have pulled from each of them that I keep running over in my head.

“There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”

“The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are ‘still’ possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”

-- Walter Benjamin from Theses on History

“But though a war may well be 'too stupid,' that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”

“None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers…. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years… and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

-- Albert Camus from The Plague