Something Better

One of my posts last year started off with an anecdote about a friend. We had a minor disagreement about whether or not the minor inconveniences and frustrations of life could be accurately described as "injustices." His position was that they could not—because for something to be unjust, agency is required. There would have to be some god, creator, or pantheon that set up a framework of universal laws and promised justice in the first place. If no such being or beings existed, then a misfortune could not be characterized as a departure from any system of justice. It was merely that: a misfortune. 

I couldn't disagree with his reasoning; but still, I insisted that there was something about the experience of minor frustrations in life that felt like an injustice. I cited the authority on this point of Thomas Hardy. Here was someone who officially believed in an empty and indifferent universe. Yet he was simultaneously furious at that fact. He was perpetually railing against a god he didn't believe in; and every one of his great tragedies is a massive fist shaken in protest against a heaven that he believed to be uninhabited. 

Of course, one could simply attribute this to an unacknowledged overhang of theology. Perhaps even those who have consciously shed their theism still retain some unconscious belief that the universe  is supposed to be fair and just, even outside of the role of any human institutions (of which we can have a much more justified expectation of decency). Such a theory of the case could certainly be used (and has been used) to explain Hardy. The Victorian agnostic hasn't actually shed the faith of his fathers, the argument goes—he is merely outraged at the cruelty of his fathers' god. 

What makes this explanation unsatisfying, though, is that our very first experiences of misfortune and frustration in life—long before we have had any theological programming or chance to be inculcated into a particular cultural worldview—already inspire anger. Think of a child stubbing their toe. Or a baby crying. In Cormac McCarthy's recent late-career novel Stella Maris, his protagonist, Alicia Western, expounds at length on this point: when one sees a baby wailing in dismay, she says, one is struck not only by the fact that the child is sad: but that they seem very angry about it. 

And this anger in turn must mean the children feel not only that they are suffering, but that they are suffering unjustly. Some implicit promise that was made to them is not being kept. Says Alicia, in McCarthy's novel: "The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasnt." (Sic—McCarthy's apostrophe-less contractions are an intentional stylistic quirk.) She then goes on: "A child would have to be born so. A sense of justice is common to the world." 

Oddly enough, the next novel I read after this was Donald Barthelme's Snow White, and even though it was written in 1967—more than fifty years before McCarthy's latest twinned novels were published—it seems to be in direct dialogue with Alicia's observations about the world. In one of Barthelme's characteristic quirky non sequiturs, the author suddenly waxes philosophical in the novel's final pages: "Trying to break out of this bag we are in. What gave us the idea that there was something better? How does the concept 'something better,' arise? What does it look like, this something better?" 

Then, as if Alicia has just been making her point about a baby's innate conception of a broken promise with the world, Barthelme goes on: "Don't tell me that it is an infant's idea because I refuse to believe that. I know some sentient infants but they are not that sentient." Here, then, is our basic philosophical riddle, well expressed: If we truly have an innate sense of injustice, and from our earliest moments, misfortune presents itself to us as something not just painful, but wrong and unjust, then we must have some notion the world was supposed to be otherwise: but where did this come from? 

In the opening passages of his great philosophical essay, The Rebel, Albert Camus suggests an answer. Perhaps this sense of outraged justice—McCarthy's "innate," but broken, "covenant" and Barthelme's "something better" that has been withheld from us—is simply an inescapable fact of human consciousness. He seems to imply it is simply one of the categories of the mind. In a transcendental move reminiscent of Kant, Camus argues that we cannot escape the sense that suffering ought to have meaning and justification—i.e., a sense of justice—because such a sense is implied in the very question we ask as to its meaning. 

Here's how: if one of the conditions of modern life is absurdity, Camus writes, then we are beset by a sense of meaninglessness, and that nothing has value. Yet, when we say that nothing has value, we are implicitly passing a value judgement on the world around us. We are surveying all we see and saying, nothing here has value; nothing here has meaning. In the very act of diagnosing our condition of absurdity and valuelessness and meaninglessness, therefore, we have implicitly set up a standard of values, against which we measure the universe. 

Such seems to be what is happening, when we encounter a misfortune in life and wish to rail against the universe. Either way we frame it, after all, we must end up judging a misfortune to be somehow a breach of covenant. If we say: "this is wrong because the world was supposed to be otherwise," then we clearly have Barthelme's "something better" already in mind. But, alternatively, if we say: "this is as it should be, in this world, because this world is cruel and valueless and meaningless," then we still have Barthelme's "something better" in mind anyway, albeit obscured—because to judge something as valueless implies a scale of values in which this world has been found wanting. This is Camus's point. 

When we denounce the universe as empty and godless and meaningless, therefore, it is never from the perspective of a genuine nihilism—because a genuine nihilism, for Camus, would be self-contradictory. Hence, the sense that our suffering is without reason, meaning, or justification, is always a protest. The thought itself of its meaninglessness requires a standard of meaning. Hence, our reaction to suffering must always take the form of moral judgment—even when there is no agent involved in causing it. "This falls short of my standards—this is wrong," we say. This explains the rage—the fury and outrage that cannot be interpreted as mere sorrow—of Alicia's bawling babies. 

This is why, for Camus, every rejection of the world is not truly a rejection of all possible reality. It is, rather, a protest in the name of what should be—of what we could call, using Barthelme's terminology, the "something better." In McCarthy's two companion novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, Alicia is said to have taken her own life at last because "she didn't like it here." But even to form such a value judgement on the world implies that Alicia was not a true nihilist: for a world to be found wanting, we must have some implicit idea of what it should be instead—even if this idea is only a product of human consciousness. 

Camus writes: "Every solitary suicide, which is not an act of resentment, is, in some way, either generous or contemptuous. But one feels contemptuous in the name of something. If the world is a matter of indifference to the man who commits suicide, it is because he has an idea of something that is not or could not be indifferent to him. [... F]rom this act of self-destruction itself[,] a value arises which, perhaps, might have made it worth while to live." (Bower trans.) Thus, Alicia's "not liking it here" implies the world ought to be likable, and could have been likable; it discloses, in its very act of ultimate denial, a glimmer of Barthelme's "something better." 

This line of reasoning also reveals why railing against the universe—the fist shaken at the heavens—feels like a fundamentally political act, even when it lays its charges against no human government or institutions. 

After all, one could easily imagine a doctrinaire Marxist critiquing Thomas Hardy's protests against fate as politically sterile. One could say: the Victorian bourgeois novelist shows us human suffering, yet he then pulls a misdirection. Instead of laying his charges at the door of a hypocritical and evil society, he turns them against the gods, fate, a deity that even he concedes does not exist. Thus, he defuses the revolutionary potential of the very emotions his portrayal of suffering has unleashed. He renders his own work politically toothless, by shifting its cries of outrage toward metaphysical wisps of nothingness. 

Yet, I cannot feel—in reading Hardy—that this critique has any validity. The protest against the universe is one of passion, and it seems to partake in some mysterious way of the same fury of all revolutionary sentiment, even if it is directed only against a non-existent deity, rather than human institutions. Camus's framework helps explain why it seems so. Hardy's protests are a form of what the French writer would call "metaphysical rebellion"—and it is one phrase of the larger whole that makes up the rebellious impulse. It is therefore of a piece with—not a distraction from—political revolt. 

Why is that? Well, because—once again—to protest against the universe as cruel or inadequate implies a standard of judgment. It contains, in nuce, an idea of a world that ought to be—the "something better." And this in turn is a profoundly radical and revolutionary idea, because it provides the basis for a critique of all that exists. It is the starting point for rebellion—and indeed, the only possible starting point for it. The sense that this is not right, the world we find around us is not the one that should be is the only idea we have that can begin to disclose to us—apophatically, by a process of negation—the world we want to build. 

Thus, Camus writes—in a world without assured values and meanings, under the conditions of absurdity that confront us in modern life—the impulse to rebel, the sense of outraged justice, provides the only fixed  star by which to pilot our craft. It is, he writes, our methodological starting point—the equivalent of Descartes's cogito for modern consciousness. We do not know what ought to be—we cannot fully articulate a set of values that we can assert with confidence to be absolutely true. But we can begin to gesture toward such ultimate values by starting negatively with a rejection of what is. Whatever should be, we can say, this is not it. 

Hence we begin at birth with a sense of broken covenant—and it is this impulse, far from being political sterile or futile—that provides us with the only intuition on which to begin building something better. In the crying rage of Alicia's babies is found the deep structure of a more just and less iniquitous world. It is the first glimpse we get in this life of something that will dog us always as an innate and inescapable idea: the vision of "something better." 

And so I think I was right—and Hardy was right—in my disagreement with my friend. When I stub my bare toe on the kitchen counter, it is not just unfortunate, it is wrong. This is not how it should be! And it discloses, in my very protest, the dim outlines of the world that ought to be, instead. One, perhaps, in which I wear shoes.