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   DecaturNature (decaturnature@theatl.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 09:54:33 JST DecaturNature

   I'm currently reading (and enjoying) "Brave Genius" by Sean B. Carroll. It's the story of Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, two French Resistance members who became friends after WWII as they fell out with the communist movement, and went onto win Nobel Prizes (in literature and medicine).
   The account of their lives as France crumbled was vivid, as is the frustration that they felt as they recognized the totalitarian direction that the Soviet Union had taken (specifically with Monod's opposition to Lysenkoism)
   https://www.seanbcarroll.com/brave-genius-story
   #history #science #biology #literature #books

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     Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 09:54:28 JST Kit Rhett Aultman

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     @DecaturNature "Resistance, Rebellion, and Death" was my introduction to Camus and I consider it the most essential of his writings. It's just so intense in every possible direction.

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     DecaturNature (decaturnature@theatl.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 09:54:29 JST DecaturNature

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     Though I did get distracted from "Brave Genius" by picking up some of Camus' work; specifically the essay collection "Resistance, Rebellion, and Death".

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance,_Rebellion,_and_Death

     #books #philosophy

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     Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 11:05:32 JST Kit Rhett Aultman

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     @DecaturNature Wow...I could have sworn that was "Letters To A Nazi"...but it's been a few years and we've had a few cocktails by the fire tonight. And he certainly knew about French imperialism...he was Algerian, and indeed I believe RRD has an essay about how his experiences of being Algerian which really shaped my thinking about the generations that inherit a colonial project and what they owe the colonized.

     But yeah, your point is valid, and IIRC the book picks up hard after that.

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     DecaturNature (decaturnature@theatl.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 11:05:33 JST DecaturNature

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     • Kit Rhett Aultman

     @roadriverrail "Letters to a German Friend" are interesting as wartime propaganda within an occupied country. His depiction of the French as slow to violence is a noble ideal, but not quite historically accurate (as I'm sure he knew, given their imperialism and incidents such as the Dreyfus Affair). In some ways, it has the same feel as Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" -- trying to tear down the ideology of the enemy while establishing an ideal for the nation to follow after liberation.

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     Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 11:20:49 JST Kit Rhett Aultman

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     @DecaturNature Yeah, I remember reading that part and reflecting on Israel-Palestine in it. That would have been like 22 years ago, but you can see Camus looking at his Algeria and worrying a Gaza-style genocide would happen there. Indeed, a massive through-line of his is that where discourse halts, violence and genocide follow.

     I should re-read "Why Spain", now knowing significantly more about the Spanish Civil War than I did at the time.

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     DecaturNature (decaturnature@theatl.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 11:20:50 JST DecaturNature

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     • Kit Rhett Aultman

     @roadriverrail I'm in the "Preface to the Algerian Reports" right now. It's intense. I hadn't realized that some people had hoped for an egalitarian integration of France and Algeria -- rather than French domination or Algerian independence.
     He wrote: "Such a position [an equal union] satisfies no one today, and I know in advance how it will be received by both sides. I sincerely regret it, but I cannot do violence to what I feel and what I believe. Besides, on this subject no one satisfies me either. This is why, finding it impossible to join either extreme camp, faced with the gradual disappearance of that third camp in which it was still possible to keep a cool head...I decided to take no further part in the constant polemics that have had no result other than to harden the uncompromising points of view at leggerheads in Algeria and to split even wider a France already poisoned by hatreds and sects.
     "There is indeed a spitefulness in the French, and I refuse to add to it."

     This essay is a good refutation of today's 'campism' and 'hyper-partisanship'. It's important to be clear about the wrongs being committed, regardless of who commits them. This is the same message he had in "Why Spain" regarding some in the anti-Soviet movement of his day, that would have him ignore the crimes of Franco in order to oppose Stalin (or vice versa, for some anti-Fascists).

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     DecaturNature (decaturnature@theatl.social)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 12:38:54 JST DecaturNature

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     • Kit Rhett Aultman

     @roadriverrail "The Unbeliever and Christians" is also a good essay, along with his tributes to Rene Leynaud. They both emphasize admiring what is admirable in a person and their beliefs, rather than demanding that they adhere to your own beliefs. It seems to be a core tenant of his individualism, as was his refusal to align with the major political/social forces of the day -- he uses the essay to place himself in outside of both Christianity and Communism.

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     Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 12:38:54 JST Kit Rhett Aultman

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     @DecaturNature I feel specifically that "The Unbeliever And Christians" informs a pillar of my politics more than any other work-- that you're welcome in my foxhole if you're clear on which direction the enemy is. There's such a lonely begging to his conclusion that he can't fully explain the evil of the world but that he knows he can do something to help, and pleads to a common decency that this be enough to build coalitions.

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     Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Saturday, 30-Nov-2024 12:42:34 JST Kit Rhett Aultman

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     @DecaturNature Regarding standing outside Christianity and Communism, this is a theme you see repeated with Sartre, too, and for very much the same reasons...that both offer an ontology and a teleology, but that the act to submit to them must come from somewhere outside those things. Now that I think of it, this is a different viewpoint on "the problem of Grace" from within Christian theology (that is, if "grace" must save you from your corruption, your asking for grace was already corrupt)