The Plague: What We Can Learn, Relearn or Unlearn From Albert Camus’s The Plague

Abigail
Dec 9, 2021
6 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2022

Through the battles against contagions, we may find our true faces

You heard this saying: History has a tendency to repeat itself. What better example we can have than this pandemic we’ve been painfully going through for years now? Notorious diseases such as cholera, Spanish Influenza, AIDS, SARS, MERS, and Covid-19 have constantly been human’s worst nightmare. It is, however, worth taking note that the repetition of history does not only apply to the manifestation of diseases; it painstakingly confirms our ceaseless foolishness and vulnerability.

Let us revisit the two new infectious diseases we have encountered for the last two decades: SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory). Both are viral respiratory diseases that have put us in deep concern. However, neither succeeded to spread as widely as to be claimed as a pandemic. As of today, we still do not have any standard vaccines or treatments for either of them. Both SARS and MERS naturally disappeared, like a bold wave trying to engulf the entire world only to listlessly vanish back to the ocean.

I wonder if our experience with SARS and MERS had primed us to believe that we have become too strong, too great to be knocked over by disease. The media praises how smart we are with all kinds of advanced technology every day. It was natural to think and feel that the dark days when humanity suffered from diseases were long gone.

That was so until we met Corona Virus in 2019.

A lot of scholars argue that arrogance is of natural human nature. Having seen and learned numerous incidents of how arrogance has shaped and shifted human history as well as on a personal level, I strongly agree with their argument. In the same regard, I do not think the current generation of humanity is particularly arrogant. People in the city of Oran in the novel The Plague by Albert Camus were not different in how they reacted to the sudden calamity and city-wide quarantine.

Whether Covid or the Plague, We Are Underdogs

I still vividly remember the early days of lockdown in the spring of 2020. The whole city was suddenly submerged in immense fear. Besides the few people living under the same roof, every single person became a serious threat to health and well-being overnight.

In fact, Covid-19 is, in any shape or form, not as destructive as plague. In the 14th century, the bubonic plague killed an estimated 60 percent of Europe’s eighty million population (thus called ‘The Black Death’). Its fatality rate is much higher than Covid’s, ranging up to alarming 40% - 60%. It is understandable why in The Plague the governmental officials were in great disbelief when they found about the appearance of the plague and town people were immediately swept by fear.

The disease rapidly spread and grievously took the lives of many. The damage done by the plague was not only physical but also mental and psychological. When a relatively smaller portion of people was directly contacted with the plague with its physical toll, the entire town suffered from the severe side effects of social isolation.

One might say that the first effect of this sudden and brutal attack of the disease was to force the citizens of our town to act as though they had no individual feelings. (p.53)

In other circumstances the people of the town would have found an outlet in a more external or more active life. But at the same time the plague left them idle, reduced to wandering round and round in their mournful town, day after day, engaged only in illusory games of memory; for in their aimless walks it was likely that they would always pass along the same paths, and, more often than not, in such a small town these paths were precisely the ones that in earlier times they had taken with their absent loved ones. (p.56)

Finally, in these extreme of loneliness, no one could hope for help from his neighbour and everyone remained alone with his anxieties. If one of us, by chance, tried to confide in someone or describe something of his feelings, most of the time the reply that he received, whatever it was, would wound him. (p.59)

Compared to people in Oran with whom the only allowed communication means with the outside world was a ten0word telegram, we had many more recourses. Though physically apart, we can communicate with anyone in the world through phone calls, emails, social media, and video chats (Zoom has now become an essential element of our lives!). With these recourses, the pain we had and are still having may be lighter than it of the Oranais (Oran's people) but did still affect us. In Toronto, a great deal of weeds stores have newly appeared for the last couple of years. I speculate this phenomenon was at least partially caused by Covid-19.

Will There Be An Ending to This Pain?

When the vaccines for Covid first came out early this year, we celebrated the imminent ending of the pandemic. As of today, we are still on this prolonged battlefield against the disease. Recently a new variant of Covid was found, Omicron, which contains a larger number of mutations in the spike protein, and the entire world is tensed up again. It is not clear whether the current vaccines are effective to ever-appearing different variants of Covid, and we can only keep following the general safety guidelines to minimize the damage. By now, as much we want to deny, it seems like we have come to a painful realization: Covid’s disappearance is not entirely up to us but more likely up to itself. Thinking back to SARS and MERS, those diseases largely disappeared (or at least their dangers were greatly reduced) “naturally”, and Covid might just be like that.

Camus would probably say the same thing. At the end of The Plague, the bubonic plague that tortured the town of Oran for months somewhat mysteriously disappeared, unaccountably when it pleased. As all the restrictions were lifted, people threw huge celebrations and soon acted as if nothing had happened. Again, the confident yet shallow thinking claiming the greatness of humanity came up to the surface:

Against all evidence they calmly denied that we had ever known this senseless world in which the murder of a man was a happening as banal as the death of a fly, the well-defined savagery, the calculated delirium and the imprisonment that brought with it a terrible freedom from everything that was not the immediate present, the stench of death that stunned all those whom it did not kill. In short, they denied that we had been that benumbed people of whom some, every day, stuffed into the mouth of an oven, had evaporated in oily smoke, while the rest, weighed down by the chains of impotence and fear, had waited their turn. (p. 229)

Grabbing and putting on a mask every time I step out the door has long been a habit that I no longer have to think about it. One day, we will welcome the day that not only wearing a mask won’t be enforced by law but also doing so will look strange. But still then, it will not mean the definitive possibility of having another infectious disease that can instantly put the world into a pandemic. As much as we believe, or would like to believe that we, humans, are invincible, we are in fact helplessly vulnerable and fragile.

At the end of The Plague, Camus left a solemn warning:

However [Dr. Rieux] knew that this chronicle could not be a story of definitive victory. It could only be the record of what had to be done and what no doubt, would have to be done again, against this terror and its indefatigable weapon, despite their own personal hardships, by all men who, while not being saints but refusing to give way to the pestilence, do their best to be doctors.

Indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux recalled that this joy was always under threat. He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms cellars trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city. (p. 237-238)

Camus through The Plague gives us a lesson that is especially relevant in the current situation. No matter how successful we may be in our own lives, tragedies that abruptly come with greater power than our own remind us that the best thing we could do is to live in humility and decency.

Because, truly, history repeats.

Review written on December 03, 2021