The Hero's Journey
What kind of story did Covid reveal as threatening? Why, we don’t have to look very far, because Camus’ novel provides us a perfect example.
We have already explored how The Plague shows us characters who manage to have disagreements rationally, without resorting to name calling, dismissal…or incarceration. Rieux and Paneloux, Rieux and Rambert: in Covid times, of course, such reasoned and amicable disagreement was not possible. There were certain things that one could not say, we were told; saying the wrong things could be dangerous to us all, somehow. And, so, in the atmosphere of panic and irrationality, many set themselves up as policemen and stridently condemned those saying the “wrong things.”
(As an aside, it is odd, isn’t it, how many people felt compelled to repeat what was already being repeated? Was this a sign that the repeaters needed first of all to convince themselves? Or, was the chaotic babble we have already observed at work around Trump’s election rather a species of echolalia? Truly, some of the most interesting details of the Era of Covid have to do with social psychology!)
But the novel’s example of Rieux and Rambert shows us another way than the reliable phenomenon we so often experienced, ourselves. In the novel, Camus provides us with characters who are complex and who might appreciate complexity in their fellow humans. Not only do they not call these others nasty names for daring to disagree with them, in other words; they also carefully consider whether these others might be right. Rieux, in fact, doubts his very life’s work, in consideration that there is maybe something to Rambert’s desire for escape, his opting for a life of love rather than a life of war, however righteous the “warring” cause. And Rambert is, to his own surprise, convinced by the importance of the work of his friends to put off that moment of reunion with his beloved and sacrifice for the benefit of others. Each depends upon his power of reason to convince the other of a course of action, and each accepts the decision the other makes for himself, not attempting to force a choice on the other. Neither, in other words, finds the decision of the other to pose him a threat—even if that decision is voiced, and the “wrong thing”!
The pattern here is of a capacity within the characters—not just for mutual trust and respect, and even for a realistic perspective on their shared situation, but also something more than this—which we might describe as a capacity for change and for good. And this is true even in those kooky characters who have their own ideas about things. Indeed, judging from Camus’ novel, what we might say is that even—or maybe especially—from the rebels among us, we might take some direction and inspiration.
The rebel as concept was of course dear to Camus’ heart, as he wrote a book with that title. And we see why, in the novel. His story is full of characters striving after something that seems impossible: a vanquishing of death, a rekindling of a seemingly lost love, the writing of a perfect sentence! These are characters of lost causes, sympathetically related. They are all examples of the figure of Sisyphus, whom Camus examines in his book The Myth of Sisyphus: they are people who have strongly held convictions about their duties, and each one performs that duty wholeheartedly, even if that duty should be the equivalent of rolling a giant boulder up a hill only for it to roll down again to the hill’s base.
In short, leaving Sisyphus himself to one side for the moment, the assumption made about the humans in the book is exactly the opposite of that made about humans during Covid. In Camus’ novel, humans always have the surprising capacity for doing good. In fact, the narrator is at pains to say this exact thing, even as he unavoidably must also relate crimes that are committed, lines that are crossed: “On the whole, men are more good than bad,” he says. And the plot of the novel bears this belief out: even with low-down criminal types as smugglers, one might have a valuable conversation about football. One might get a glimpse of a vital common humanity.
During Covid, we were told instead that humans always have the surprising capacity for the bad. Anyone might be carrying this most dreadful and dangerous disease, we were told, and not even realize it him- or herself. Forget for a moment the ridiculousness of a disease so dangerous and deadly that you might not notice it had taken up residence in your body. What such a perception accomplished, with the notion of “asymptomatic spread,” was that everyone was the enemy; everyone was essentially bad.
The notion is a strangely Calvinist one. The first official lesson of the disease appeared to be that humans are all—well, not born into such a situation, but—revealed as housing an unredeemable wickedness. They might look normal, but under the surface, they might be diseased. Except that this pitch (that people were not to be trusted) was so successful that people under Covid started seeing themselves as wicked and unredeemable (as untrustworthy), without any prompting. It was as much part of the spell seemingly laid on once-rational people as the jabbering about the inconsequential and uninteresting Trump.
In fact, one might daily hear from others self-reports of their self-perceived transgressions, their trips to beaches, even once that was allowed, or to restaurants, even once they were reopened, with caveats such as, “Of course, we wore our masks,” or, “I made sure to test myself immediately after.” This is one of the ways Covid proved to be so revealing—it showed us who already thought ill of themselves, and of the rest of us. It was a disease aimed, in some sense, to find out who was already the “diseased” among us: Who believed in a world needing more punishment, more control? Covid gave such people the occasion to act on that opinion, with the outcome that everyone turned out to be, if not evil, then at least guilty, of something.
I will proudly surrender my own basic rights, the eager participant seemed to say, as long as you force everyone else to go along with me. Follow the logic far enough, and you arrive at something like Russian roulette.
Again, it’s difficult not to reach for the spiritual metaphor here and talk about John Calvin. He was a religious leader of the sixteenth century who believed in the inherent depravity of humans. And he just happened to inspire generations of sanctimonious curmudgeons, many of whom had a prominent place in the building of this nation. Jonathan Edwards, the early American theologian, captured the essence of Calvinism quite vividly in his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), when he depicted the base human soul to be like a spider suspended only by God’s grace above the fiery pit of Hell. Nathaniel Hawthorne provided many memorable portraits of the sort in his fiction, including Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter (1850), a sternly shy minister who secretly whips himself, causing a permanent scarring of his skin over his chest in the form of a red letter A. Perhaps standing for America, we might say, after these past few years.
Contemporary Calvinists, whipping themselves into their own testing frenzy, and proclaiming that the children around them would kill grandma, shut down schools and shunted the youngsters off to the Internet for their “education” and socialization. And if that’s not a move that will turn up deeply harming an entire generation, nothing will. During Covid, the spider-like human soul was the very real child, starved of learning and friendship—and, very often, also starved of outdoor recreation, and exercise in general, and perhaps even suffering from a literal hunger from the loss of the hot meals public schools provide. So, a very vulnerable and sad spider, indeed.
And taking God’s place in Edwards’ metaphor was Anthony Fauci, and all who supported such policies.
The policing of others and the policing of self thus appeared to act on the foundational assumption that humans were not, in the final analysis, worthy. Restrictions might be more easily accepted, because who had earned the right to go to a restaurant, anyway? This was an astonishing development, especially among a left-leaning population that had once been focused on freedoms, especially freedom of expression. The Left’s ancient cause of The Rights of Man had suddenly been replaced by the wages of sin.
This was one of the many clues that the dawning of the Covid age brought with it not an emphasis on The Science but rather a new kind of religion, one in which all people were to be viewed as dangerous. In fact, why else would anyone accept lockdown except that he or she had already self-identified as a criminal?
No, it was decidedly odd that the disease required from us all an assumption of guilt unless proven innocent, to put these medical matters in judicial terms, and in stark reversal of the legal basis upon which we have been managing our common life as a society for more than a couple of centuries. In other words, where once we might have accepted that another posed us no threat, in terms of our good health, when the other also appeared in good health himself, now we might view as suspect the regular breathing, bright eyes, and vigorous manner of the random other, for he or she might despite all of these encouraging outward signs yet be carrying the very seed of death—and, as an ignorant, sinful being, not be aware of this dangerous fact. Heck, the abject worm might not even care about spreading disease and sin and wickedness, in which case there were all sorts of raised voices insisting that their fellow citizens ought to be rounded up and imprisoned—just in case.
Just, you know, to be safe.
It is no mistake that adherents to the new religion required such easily visible means of gauging “faith,” under the flimsy excuse of some pseudoscientific pretext (masking, handwashing, hand-wringing, outward panic). It was of vital importance to identify the spiders. And just as vital to place all of one’s reliance on the government for deliverance from the spiders. Because, being abject worms themselves, they could not possibly bear the responsibility. It was work enough to point and shout.
The one narrative that was prohibited, then, was the one that might allow for positive individual action. In other words, there was not just a general surrendering of common sense to authority, an example of which was early treatment—which, as we have already discussed, was said to be nonexistent. There was also nothing the private citizen could possibly do for him- or herself, in such a situation. In the Beginning was the Word, and that Word was No.
And there was no possibility of hearing or seeing anything against such an idea, even if one heard of something or saw something that suggested quite clearly that there might be effective early treatment, for example. Doctors were proscribed from doctoring, in this most “unprecedented” situation, and one might with good reason ask the question, Why should doctors be prevented from doctoring, if we are indeed being threatened by the worst disease to visit this Earth for a good century? But the overall effect, the effect one might have noticed from afar, through a car windshield, for example, or from across a room, was the general abdication of adulthood, a refusal to take responsibility or to show interest in protecting another, more vulnerable person, like a child. But more subtly, one might have noticed, listening carefully, an even deeper sacrifice, which was the surrendering of a basic plot for humanity: the hero’s journey.
You’ve seen it many times before: a humble protagonist, often an abused orphan, receives a call to adventure and answers it, leaving behind his simple home in order to engage himself in a great battle, one that seems impossible to win.
It wasn’t so long ago, in fact, that theorists like Joseph Campbell, with his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)—published two years after Camus’ The Plague—was suggesting that every culture told such stories. Now, why should they do that? Well, in order to share the basic human truth about the importance of individual action and the respect due to every human life. Campbell’s readers might have seen in the theory the inclusive idea, to borrow contemporary lingo, that all human beings dream of the same opportunity to prove themselves and probably get such a chance, in some form, during their lives, life being the hard-knock rascal that it is. Campbell was influenced heavily by Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst and student of Freud who emphasized the societal implications of his teacher’s ideas. If there was an individual unconscious, full of problematic desires and fears but also equipped with powerful dreams and symbols, then there was a collective unconscious in which all of humankind shared in this dreaming.
If there are problems with such theories, they are that such theories shoehorn and simplify. But if there are benefits, they are that such theories see the potential for heroism in every person and every culture, period, full stop. This, of course, is the opposite of treating strangers like depraved spiders. In fact, one might say that the treatment of people suggested by such theories as Jung’s and Campbell’s is along the lines of the urging of the great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Experience” (1844): “Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they are real; perhaps they are.”
Back to the tale: examples of this hero abound in the movies, especially American film, which has always been in love with the possibilities for good in people, especially orphans, probably because we are something of a nation of orphans and misfits and rascals. And this love is often demonstrated in American film against such ennobling backdrops as the great Western desert, especially when the director is John Ford. In Star Wars (1977), written and directed by George Lucas, that Western desert has been relocated to Tatooine, a minor planet in the film’s bustling and cartoonlike galaxy, but the young character to whom we are introduced so inauspiciously as a reluctant farmer will come to display hallmarks of the pattern: an orphan, he must confront his own dark side through perilous trials, before finding in himself a capacity for good he shares with all of humanity—and all of nature.
If such a story is useful, it is because it provides a model for perhaps humbler real-life instantiations: cramming for an algebra test and passing, standing up to the bully, helping someone to his or her feet. Perhaps even being informed of a dangerous disease and refusing to panic. Certainly, these are not bad tales to tell and to listen to. Certainly, it is not the case that we do not have the ability to overcome the challenges thrown in front of us, that we must instead hide ourselves away until the boogeyman leaves us.
But stories, especially stories of heroes, provide for their audience a reflection of important societal ideals, like fairness and compassion and courage. Because the importance of this plot pattern of the hero’s journey is that everyone can occupy its focal point. Like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, we might all find ourselves the heroes of our own stories. And that meaning is not insignificant. Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)—published the year before Camus’ novel—tells us how stories give us strength and purpose, allowing us to survive hard times. Indeed, stories might even help someone survive the hard time Frankl survived, which was the Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War.
That’s not a bad return on a story, is it? To become equipped to survive the worst hell that humans can bring to this beautiful planet? Of course not. And so, in this way, heroes’ stories also provide a measure of all-important hope.
Even the least among us might prove to be a hero—even the strange little man in The Plague with the oversized name of “Grand.” And if this story is true, we should be very careful with other people, not just assuming that they are “real,” in the Emersonian sense, but assuming as well that they can rise to meet real challenges. We must be respectful to one another, but we must also help direct one another to our higher ideals, because in our gatherings and conversations we are always in the presence of the possibility for heroism.
Want to do something impossible? we might have responded to the Calvinists of Covid. Imagine that you can solve a problem yourself without whining to authority. Imagine that a life-ending threat does not lurk around every corner and in every child. Imagine yourself, in other words, to be a hero.
How does one perform heroically, in a time of panic? Camus’ suggestion is wonderfully direct, if also startlingly simple: “The thing was to do your job as it should be done.”
Of course, during Covid, millions found themselves incapable of following such simple, direct advice. Teachers’ unions, for example, forced extended closure of schools. Indeed, in doing so they broke with traditional allies—“essential workers” who now were cast aside as a great unwashed, almost as expendable as the unvaccinated—in order to limit their contact with those germ factories, the children who were their sacred charges. For if anything should approach religious consideration in what many still mistake as a secular country, certainly it is the education of youth, so much an expression of generosity and faith and hope. Such an important job! We might have been forgiven for thinking that teaching was an essential profession—perhaps the most essential—but for the teachers’ correction.
What are the odds that argument will follow teachers, do you think? How long will it be before they agitate for more pay—more pay that they, as the preparers of the next generation, definitely deserve—only to hear echoed back to them that their jobs are not so essential, after all. Oh, well. Live by the mask, and all that.
So many tried not to do their jobs during Covid, of course. Teachers’ unions weren’t the only ones. But there were also others who resisted the temptation to hide away from the great scourge that stalked mostly over-70s with four-plus comorbidities. These resistors echoed the words of C. S. Lewis, writing in 1948—the same year Camus’ novel came out in English. Lewis was writing in response to people’s fears around the atomic bomb, in “On Living in an Atomic Age,” but contemporary readers seized on the passage as saying something about their own time, and its own threats:
…the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
So many ways to be heroic, in this brief passage! Funny that Lewis even mentions teaching…. And yet how popular was it, during Covid, to huddle together!
So, if it is narrative we are talking about, The Plague is most strange to us today because it just assumes ordinary citizens’ capacity for everyday heroism. In fact, the book’s narrator will not hear of any praise for the story’s heroes, because heroic action is just what one does, as simple as 2 + 2 = 4. Everyone dies, after all. Isn’t the death we all must seek one that catches us in the act of doing that which we believe in and love? For the teacher, for example, if it comes right down to it: What better way to die than to die teaching?
Who could have known, before Covid shone its bright light on our world, that we were a society in desperate need of heroes? Within such a context, reading Camus’ novel is much less an exercise in aesthetics or philosophy than an act of recuperation, maybe even of salvage. Just how did we come to such a state, anyway?