The threat of Meursault

I want to talk about Jack Abecasis’ idea that Meursault is  a character totally free from all morals or social norms and the consequences of such a reading. The idea that it is possible to ever become free of such things is a matter of some contention. I think it is totally reasonable for us to feel threatened by the idea that all our morals and cultural standards our entirely arbitrary and there is no way for us to make an objectively true judgement about anything. If Meursault is, as Abecassis says,  the triumph of intellect over culture and  emotion then that means there are no intellectual grounds for belief in our values and we have to either find some sort of intellectual defense against Meursault, accept a meaningless universe, or declare intellect an unsuitable method to find truth. All of those are difficult propositions and highlight why the reading of Meursault as the perfect nihilist is worthy of discussion.

If Meursault is the perfect Nihilist then his behaviour must be entirely arbitrary and illogical, he must be without motive. If all values are an invention of society then he has no logical basis on which to make any decision. Our society likes to compartmentalize morals and values as only being related to obviously ethical decisions, particularly when business is involved we usually see morals as unrelated. Yet I would contend that all the decisions we make are based on morality, more then just decisions our very way of understanding the world around us is very much based off of morality. All of us are constantly making value judgements, consciously or unconsciously, about the world around us and about our possible futures. We all have some idea about the way our own lives and the world in general should be, and we make decisions to try and make things the way they are supposed to be.

I would argue this belief that there is a way things should be is the major steering force of our lives and a direct product of our morals.  We all have certain beliefs that allows us to make decisions whether they are the ones we would typically label as moral or beliefs we don’t typically label as morals because they have to do with our own material success. Regardless of how we label these beliefs, they still shape the way we think the world should be. Most of us believe material success is a worthy goal and think a world in which we have material success should exist. However we have other moral principles that interact with this belief and override it and all help us to determine what should be. I realize this argument is kind of sketchy but the point I am trying to get across is that all of our decisions are based on the belief that some futures are more desirable then others and we determine the desirability or value of these futures based on our values and morals.  Meursault has no values so he has no way to determine which future is more desirable, whether he pulls the trigger doesn’t matter because to him all values are arbitrarily determined and therefore cannot be used to determine which course of action he should follow. For Meursault there is no logical reason why any course of action is more desirable then any other.

Yet Meursault still clearly makes decisions, he still chooses one even though there is no logical reason to choose it or to not choose it. He is a huge threat to any sort of rational understanding of human behaviour, the only way we could understand and predict the behaviour of others is if they take action for a reason, if it is entirely arbitrary then  we can;t understand it. We presume that not only crimes but all other actions have some sort of motive, yet Meursault is entirely without motive. We must try to find a way to explain why Meursault takes action even though he has no motive for it.

I am uneasy with the explanation that he just arbitrarily makes a choice even though he has absolutely no reason to choose either option. We should understand that the idea that a human can behave without motive threatens our understanding of humans and renders Meursault incomprehensible. We can try to use an absence of free will to explain it away, if Meursault’s  actions were predetermined then he never had a choice to make, but then we are still left without anyway to understand or predict these predetermined behaviors. If we don’t put Meursault’s cognitive processes in a different category from our own then we leave ourselves open to the possibility that all human behavior is incomprehensible. We must therefore either categorize Meursault as either mad or inhuman, (I would prefer inhuman) or deny that he is a perfect nihilist and assert that there are reasons for his behavior.

Individual Responsibility & Culture

One of the discussions that comes up a lot when we are talking about Wide Sargasso Sea is exactly how much sympathy we can extend to Rochester. I tend to sympathize with him until he refuses to let Antoinette go with half the money because of his pride. Regardless of where exactly we lose sympathy with him, or if we do at all, I think his character brings up interesting questions about an individuals responsibility to rise above the prejudices of his culture. While many of his problems are distinctly a result of his pride and his own flaws we can see where his ideas about possession and ownership of Antoinette can come from the gender roles of his time. English law and customs tend to support the idea that while she may not be exactly his property her status is pretty close, and so we can see how some of his fixation on owning and objectifying Antoinette is a partly trying to live up to social standards. I think we can also blame Victorian culture for the unsatisfactory relationships in Mrs. Dalloway, if you judge those relationships to be unsatisfying. This raises questions about whether or not an individual is responsible for overcoming the prejudices of their culture and whether or not we should judge them harshly for failing to do so.  

The racism that is present in Mr. Mason and to a lesser extent in Rochester is reprehensible but is not unexpected. Neither of them have any real contact with the people of Jamaica before coming there and the their preconceived notions come from people with huge authority in British culture. So there is a viable argument to be made that they should not be held responsible for their own attitudes, as they have to overcome huge cultural barriers. That said if you excuse people for simply going along with authority and culture you justify being complicit to any number of horrible actions. From the holocaust to slavery absolving individuals of the responsibility to resist evil authority is something that is problematic, and has been something Americans have been reluctant to do. I think we ruled in Nuremberg that following orders is not a valid excuse for a war crime, though we have been inconsistent in that ruling.

    In addition people clearly have overcome the biases of their culture and we celebrate those people for doing so. If we want to believe human equality is a self evident universal truth then we have to believe that people who lived in other cultures had as much an opportunity to discover it as we do now. Therefore we have to condemn those who did not, but that makes up the vast majority of people living in those cultures. It is hard to say that everyone who was a part of a system like southern slavery are reprehensible human beings and should be held accountable for their actions, I am sure many of them were good people who loved each other and lived meaningful lives. Yet the progress our society has experienced from things such as suffrage and the civil rights movement are based entirely around forcing people to stand up to authority by demonstrating the injustice of the culture or authority in question. I think we would be far less forgiving of a person with racist attitudes living in the 1960’s then in the 1700’s, yet both of them have been exposed to the same ideas that we would hold fly in the face of a universal principle such as human equality. We tend to hold modern people more responsible for racism because culture goes against their beliefs so they have no excuses. Yet if we accept that people in teh 1700’s are not guilty we absolve them of responsibility to oppose an unjust majority, a dangerous act.

If it seems like this is going in circles I think that’s because my thought process is. I certainly think we should hold people to a high enough standard that we should expect people to be able to overcome the biases of their culture, yet throughout history most people have not. This means either humans are so flawed we should not be expected to oppose injustice, or most of the people who lived could rightfully be considered evil. I really don’t want tor each either of these conclusions and I think the most popular answer is probably going to be to hold them responsible to a limited extent, which makes sense but I find unsatisfying.