Hope Amidst Helplessness
“I just feel like I’m having a bad dream, but I can’t wake up.” My sister’s voice was heavy when she told me about the abrupt loss of her final semester of nursing school. Most of her friends had left campus already, and she was facing the dismal prospect of forced distance learning in isolation. She was not the only one. Across the country and around the world, millions of people have had their educations, their livelihoods, their friends and family taken away from them by a microscopic virus. It is surreal to think how our world so vast and advanced has been brought to its knees by a sub-organism so small. It is as if we are all having a collective nightmare, the kind in which we cannot run or scream. Everything simply happens as we watch.
The feeling my sister had of being stuck in a nightmare reminded me of a line from Albert Camus’s The Plague: “Pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.” The narrator is describing the shock of the French Algerian town of Oran as it descends into an epidemic of black plague. As the illness spreads, Camus examines the various stages of the town’s consciousness, outlining three Worlds, as I like to call them, that describe man’s perception of control over his circumstances: total dominance, partial control or influence, and helplessness.
The First World is the one in which we all want to live: all things are manipulable, predictable, and rational; man’s dominion is everywhere. Circumstances victimize individuals, but only as a result of failure to optimize those circumstances. A hurricane may destroy a man’s home, but that is because the construction was not up to code. In this World lived the people of Oran before the epidemic, “wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.” How often we think this way, assuming modern science and medicine will guard us from every ill, that in our enlightened age, plague and war and famine have no place. But as circumstances begin to change around us, we, like the population of Oran, soon realize that this First World is an illusion: all things do not and cannot fall under our control. And so, we begin our search for a new way to live.
In this Second World, some matters lie outside of our control, but others still respond to our actions. A type of agency, though more limited than in the World from which we came, persists. A hurricane may destroy a man’s house, but he can rebuild it, make it stronger, to withstand future storms. Such is the mindset of Oran’s populace as the epidemic intensifies, and the townsfolk become increasingly uneasy. Nowhere is this outlook better exemplified than in a scathing homily delivered by one of the town’s priests, Fr. Paneloux. He begins the homily with the indictment, “Calamity has come upon you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserve it.” He goes on to assure the congregation that the plague they face is the judgment of God upon them, and that, as such, they cannot avert it. The town can, however, take some measure of control by learning from the calamity, turning from their folly, and living more uprightly, so as to make the best of the unfortunate situation and to prevent its recurrence. Sturdy though the support may be for this Second World, it becomes more difficult to maintain as misfortune rises, and when tragedy strikes, it slips away entirely.
While movement between the First and Second Worlds of control is fairly fluid and tends to happen gradually (as with the phased onset of the epidemic in The Plague), the Third World is not so easily accessible, and the transition is often accompanied by tragedy. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have been traumatized by the loss of loved ones, either our own or those of our friends. Father Paneloux experiences much the same, as he witnesses the horrific death of a young boy at the height of the epidemic in Oran. After the child has passed, the attending physician (who had been present at the priest’s homily) lashes out at the old priest, telling him that the child was innocent, and did not deserve God’s wrath. Paneloux is crestfallen and replies, “Why was there that anger in your voice just now? What we’d been seeing was as unbearable to me as it was to you.” He begins to doubt every idea of human control, and even the idea that the world can be comprehended, as he continues, “That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.” Much like we have in this pandemic, he has reached the point of helplessness but remains steadfast.
George Frederic Watts Hope
The helplessness that characterizes the Third World of agency can lead only to one of two places: brightest hope or blackest despair. When our actions no longer carry any meaning, when we no longer have any agency in our own lives, what else is left but either the one or the other? A man’s home may be destroyed by a hurricane. Perhaps there is no reason; it simply happened. And now he must decide what to do as he sits in the ruins: either to rebuild knowing the new house will likely also be destroyed, or to continue sitting and despair. Perhaps this state of things is not always permanent. Indeed, once the house is rebuilt, at least there can be a time when all is well. We are, again, in control. But with any turn in the weather, that can change. A microscopic virus can yank us back into a World in which we have no control. Plague suddenly becomes the master of all things.
After the boy’s death, Father Paneloux gives a second homily, much more subdued than the first, in which he does not rescind his earlier opinions, but he does temper them by offering a new perspective on the height of the epidemic in Oran, one of helplessness, the Third World. He still asserts that all trials work for our good, but also that the content of those trials often defies explanation. Indeed, we cannot prevent a child’s suffering once it is done, nor can we find any reason that it must have happened. This unbearable catastrophe, he argues, pushes us beyond resignation and humility, to the point of humiliation, “but a humiliation to which the person humiliated must give full assent.” It is the humiliation of learning our place in the cosmos, not as its gods, but as its creatures, a lesson we must learn each time tragedy strikes. Man is not the measure of all things.
Dark as this realization may seem, it opens the door to the only true agency that we have in such circumstances: the choice between hope and despair, between faith and doubt. When we are brought to our knees by tragedy or trauma, when we stare into the face of an absurd and inexplicable reality, when the nightmare has become so dark that we can no longer make sense of it, we are finally free. We are free, at last, to make the only decision that really matters: to have faith that things are as they must be, or to lose heart because things are as they are. Whether that choice is framed in religious terms or secular, the dichotomy is the same: press on despite everything or give up. As Father Paneloux says in that last homily, “My brothers, a time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would deny everything?” And so, like Father Paneloux during his epidemic, we must cling to this insane hope during ours. Even if all of human history, past and future, is simply a chronology of catastrophes and lulls, even if we defeat this pandemic only to prepare for another, still we must fight on with unfounded hope. The only other option is despair.
Micah Heinz received his bachelor’s degree from Hillsdale College and is currently studying for a PhD in chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. In his spare time, he flirts with foreign languages and reads translations of 19th and 20th century literature and philosophy.