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Wednesday
As Trump daily sounds more like Mussolini and Hitler—and as the GOP and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation sign on to his expressed plans to invest all power in an authoritarian (Republican) president—New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat becomes essential reading. I recommend subscribing to her daily essays (you can get the shorter versions free) for her insights on authoritarianism. In her most recent post, the author of Strongmen talks about the importance of self-care as we push back against Trump’s efforts to turn us into Victor Orban’s Hungary.
Before going further, here (according to a recent New York Times report) is what Americans face:
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
I write about Ben-Ghiat’s latest essay here because she cites an exiled Chinese dissident recommending Sisyphus as a model for how not to burn out while fighting for democracy. The man’s allusion brings to mind Albert Camus’s famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
“I would say my personal hero is Sisyphus,” the exiled Chinese dissident artist Badiucao remarked when I interviewed him in Feb. 2022. Facing continual Chinese government efforts to shut down his shows abroad, he takes inspiration from the Greek mythological figure who was eternally rolling a large stone uphill. “It seems like what I’m doing is always censored and taken down, constantly being threatened. But the very action of an individual who keeps trying in the right direction, has its own value, regardless of the result.”
But because pushing that giant stone day after day is exhausting, Ben Ghiat adds, we need to attend to self-care. That’s because
fighting for democracy is taxing on the body and the spirit. It can be difficult to show up day after day to protest or work on lawsuits, legislation, or voter registration without knowing what the outcome of your efforts will be. This is where hope factors in, as well as the self-regard that comes from knowing you are doing the right thing.
Camus acknowledges the exhausting part but adds that the labor is also what gives our lives meaning. He sums up the story as follows:
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
There are different versions of Sisyphus’s crime, but Camus focuses on one in particular. Sisyphus has persuade Hades to temporarily return him to the world of the living to see to a domestic matter. Instead of immediately returning, however, he decides to stay:
But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
This love of life is important and, according to Camus, never leaves him, even when he is undergoing his incessant toil. Like other existentialists, Camus sees us living in an absurd universe—which is to say, in a godless universe where our suffering and dying make no sense—while Sisyphus is “the absurd hero” who refuses to surrender to this reality (say, by committing suicide). Instead, he looks to himself to find meaning, regardless of the consequences:
He is [the absurd hero], as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.
Camus imagines Sisyphus committing himself wholeheartedly to the task of pushing the rock up the slope:
[O]ne sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
For Camus, the key moment is the descent, which is the hour of consciousness. If one is pushing against an authoritarian regime that appears as immutable as the rock, then it is when the activist is pausing to reflect upon his struggle that “he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
Camus does not underestimate the challenge. The boundless grief can be “too heavy to bear,” he says before adding, “These are our nights of Gethsemane.” And yet, he contends, “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.”
To elaborate on this point, he shifts to Greek tragedy, especially Oedipus. After he is crushed by the gods in unimaginable ways, the Theban king asserts this freedom. He is no longer the plaything of blind fate because he accepts his condition and acts freely. We see him doing this in both Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus, and it is the sequel play that Camus cites, writing,
[B]lind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Œdipus…thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
Here’s the passage, which occurs when Oedipus is about to be driven from a sacred grove dedicated to the furies:
Oedipus: Daughter, what counsel should we now pursue?
Antigone: We must obey and do as here they do.
Oedipus: Thy hand then!
Antigone: Here, O father, is my hand.
Oedipus’s conclusion that “all is well,” Camus says, is a sacred remark, which echoes in
the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
To cite another example, I think of Agave at the end of Euripides’s The Bacchae. She has just, under Dionysus’s spell, torn her own son apart for having insulted the god. But whereas Dionysus is a one-dimensional presence—“I am a god. And when insulted, the gods do not forgive”—she has the force of suffering humanity. She doesn’t lapse into paralysis but reaches out to both her father and her dead son, saying to the latter,
I wash your wounds.
With this princely shroud I cover your head.
I bind your limbs with love,
flesh of my flesh,
in life as in death,
forever.
Remember that, in today’s post, for the god-decreed rock we are substituting authoritarianism, which activists must incessantly push against. Their reward is discovering that their fate rests in their own hands. As Camus puts it, “All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him.” And he concludes,
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The fight for democracy is enough to fill our hearts. Ben-Ghiat just wants to make sure that, as we walk down that slope, we find ways to restore ourselves before we start pushing again.