The Complicated Nature of Commitment
Whenever we hear the word commitment, we usually understand it in a positive light.
To be in a committed relationship means to be devoted to one person. To be committed to your profession, again, means to have a devotion to that profession.
The unspoken element of commitment is that it presumes that you’ve realistically assessed the potential object of said commitment. This is the only way true commitment can mean anything at all. If all we ever do is act on impulse, we’re sure to be disappointed.
However, when we commit to something, it’s typically something we love, enjoy, and appreciate. The object of our commitment has earned not only our cursory interest, but our devotion.
This is, in the end, what makes the object of our commitment so unique and special.
But commitment can be misguided. It’s possible for us to commit ourselves to something that’s ultimately harmful and self-destructive.
It’s the potential of self-destruction that makes the nature of commitment worthy of our reflection. In the forward of Albert Camus’ Committed Writings, Alice Kaplan succinctly draws out one essential element of commitment that occupied Camus.
She writes: “During his [Camus’] lifetime, there was no shortage of political parties pursuing violent doctrines and governments driven by corrupt motives. Commitment, he knew, could be a blinding devotion as well as a force for good.”
In Committed Writings, there are two forms of commitment that resonate with Camus. The first demonstrates his commitment to confronting Nazi ideology (in “Letters to a German Friend”), and the second features Camus’ distinct condemnation of capital punishment (in “Reflections on the Guillotine”).
The commitment that Camus so often reveals in his work has to do with ideas that concern the individual. His commitment isn’t adjusted to a specific political party or politician, but to a living and breathing individual.
In fact, Camus doesn’t devote himself to a single ideology at all. And it’s well-known that Camus was against all political systems. The force that appeared to drive the Algerian-born Frenchman was one of immense perspicacity.
Camus didn’t believe a utopian end justified a bloody means. If a utopia was ensured by the killing of millions of civilians, Camus would wholly reject the prospect. In fact, it was this very subject (which included the publication of Camus’ The Rebel) that saw his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre eventually crumble.
As a consequence, Camus believed in individual rebellion, but not in a collective revolution.
For Camus, individuals fundamentally matter more than the collective. An individual has a face and feelings, whereas the collective is a faceless entity that gravitates toward authoritarianism. Authentic empathy and identification can only take place at the individual level.
Kaplan’s words in the forward reflect this sentiment:
“No account of the Stockholm speeches can ignore Camus’s exchange with an Algerian student at Uppsala. Challenged on his position on the Algerian War, Camus responded that ‘people are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.’ The phrase has been reduced to a slogan: ‘Between my mother and justice, I choose my mother’—a quip that soon became the cornerstone of all critiques of Camus’s position on Algeria. His critics disparaged him as a man who preferred the private to the public, who chose self-interest over the good of the community. But in truth he was decrying the random violence against civilians in Algeria on the part of both the French army and the FLN in those days. The tramway that ran through his childhood neighborhoods was one of many familiar places—alleys in the Casbah, sports stadiums, bus stops, cafeterias—that had become the scene of attacks on civilians, French and future Algerians.”
What we commit ourselves to must represent itself as both the means and the end.
If you’re only committed to making money off your writing, the writing itself will suffer. If you’re committed to “justice” by destroying businesses and assaulting civilians as retribution against the government, you’ve become a destructive adherent of ideological shadows. If you’re committed to the hope of an eternal conscious torment for those who’ve wronged you, your mind has been successfully pillaged by hatred.
In a world surrounded on every side by infinite darkness, the shimmer of the individual remains. Humanity is the jewel of existence. And nothing is worth its sacrifice.