Humanist Absurdism

I am just an open source engineer and a part-time costco worker, I am not a scholar. This essay names the framework my other essays have been circling, and my own personal life experiences and belief systems heavily influence it.

The systems we built are now the center of the world, and they use reason to make it colder.

By reason I mean what the people running a system would call reasonable. It's only reasonable for the system to work efficiently. So when we say no, it should not work that efficiently, it should not be killing us, the system sees that as irrational, and a humanist just sees it as dignity.

I've been circling that disagreement in everything I've written, and this is the essay where I name it. I call it humanist absurdism.

You can't refuse to build, you must. Refuse and you lose your job, you can't feed your family, and you might starve yourself. The systems we find morally bankrupt issue the same paychecks that keep us alive, and pure resistance is a luxury for people with trust funds or nothing left to lose.

But build exactly what a company or a system wants you to make, and you might become a monster and throw away all of your ethics. That isn't acceptable either. Something recoils when you're asked to implement the dark pattern. The soul has friction, however worn down.

So you have to work within that middle ground, the gray area.

Humanist absurdism

Choosing to be a person when the system wants you to be a component.

Humanist absurdism starts where Camus does, with a universe that hands you no meaning, and says the revolt is to stay human and make the system better for ourselves and for each other.

For Simone Weil, every system has gravity, and the one thing that beats it is grace from God. I keep the gravity, and the grace comes from the people beside you.

For Levinas, the face of another person puts a responsibility on you before you choose it. I keep that too, and I ground it in people, since I haven't taken his leap to God.

What I keep coming back to is that the moral revolt is the ethical responsibility. Revolting against a system is your way of showing grace, the way Weil meant it, and it's your responsibility toward the face, the way Levinas meant it.

Working in the gray

At the end of the day it's all about the balance between self-preservation and caring for others.

This shows itself in many parts of our daily lives, no matter how small. I would love to spend every waking moment on open source, digital sovereignty, on my own business/vision and on writing philosophy, and I spend a lot of my time working at Costco to earn the money that lets me build. It could be a lot worse.

This isn't about me, because the stakes get so much bigger.

The Factory

In December 1934 Simone Weil, a philosopher, took leave from her classroom and went to work on a factory floor in Paris. She stayed in the factories until the summer of 1935. She wanted to know from the inside what the work does to a person, and she could have left any day she liked, which the people beside her could not.

She expected the work to make her angry, and it made her obedient. She wrote to a friend that no revolt had risen in her, and that what she found in its place was the last thing she expected of herself, the docility of a resigned beast of burden. The hurt she describes is mostly humiliation. You are given orders and a pace, you stop thinking because thinking slows your hands, and after a while you stop expecting to be treated as a person.

Gravity wears the revolt out of people before they can use it. The person on the line can't quit, because the line is the rent, and the line is built so that after enough shifts they no longer want to.

So on a factory floor the revolt starts very small, with refusing the docility. You keep asking the person beside you what they are going through, which is what Weil meant by attention, and you keep it up on the days you have nothing left.

I break from her on what the suffering is for. She thought it could lead a person to God. I think a person being crushed needs the weight taken off, and I've argued that here.

The Soldier

Emmanuel Levinas was a soldier before he was the philosopher of the face. He served in the French army, was captured in 1940, and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, the last three years in a camp in Germany, in a work detail that cut wood. His parents and brothers, who had no uniform to protect them, were murdered.

War is the system he starts from, because it has no outside. Everyone in it is handed a role and made to play it, and there is nowhere to stand and decline. A soldier can't walk off the line.

His warning is that the face doesn't work like a shield. The first thing another person's face says to you is you shall not kill, and people get killed anyway, his own family among them. His claim is that the order to fire has to override something, and you can only override what was already there.

In the camp, he wrote later, the people who walked past the prisoners had stopped seeing them as human. A stray dog the prisoners named Bobby still did. He was waiting when they came back, jumping up and barking, and for him they were still human.

So for a soldier the revolt is the hand that stays. Along the trenches of the first war there were men who had someone in their sights and let them walk, with every pressure on them to fire and nobody watching to applaud. Most soldiers fire when they are told to. The number who don't has never been zero. I go through all of this here.

The Teacher

Louis Germain taught primary school in Belcourt, a poor district of Algiers, in the early 1920s. One of the boys in his class was Albert Camus. Camus had lost his father to the war before he was a year old. His mother was partly deaf, could barely read, and cleaned houses. His grandmother ran the home and wanted him to drop out of school to get a job and start earning.

Germain couldn't change any of that. A teacher can't fix a school system, or the street a child lives on, or what waits for them at home. He had one classroom and the hours after it. He gave Camus free lessons for the scholarship exam, and by Camus's own later account he went to the family and argued until the grandmother let him sit it. In 1924 Camus entered the lycée.

In November 1957, a month after his Nobel Prize was announced, Camus wrote to Germain that after his mother, his first thought had been of him. "Without you," he wrote, "without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was," none of it would have happened.

So for a teacher the revolt is that hand, held out to one child inside a system you can't fix.

The Nurse

The other three have a name, a year and a place. I don't have that for a nurse, because the nursing that matters most leaves no record.

It's a very quiet job. A nurse does some of the most difficult work there is, at the most difficult points of other people's lives, and nobody ever gets to hear about it. No one wins a Nobel Prize for being there when somebody is on their deathbed. Nobody becomes famous for catching the wrong dose before it reaches the patient, or for noticing at four in the morning that someone's breathing has changed.

A nurse can't fix a broken healthcare system, and they can't walk out on the patients in front of them either.

So for a nurse the revolt is to keep showing up for the person in the bed, with nobody keeping count.

The Driver

When I was in foster care, a woman drove me to the visits with my family. Her job was to move a kid from one address to another and back. A driver can't change the placement, the schedule or the file.

She drove slow. She let me play Pokémon on her Game Boy and asked me about my day. She felt like the only person in that system who treated me as a human.

I don't remember her name.

So for a driver the revolt is to drive slow, hand over the Game Boy and ask how the day went.

Embedded kindness

Embedded kindness is my name for what the people above did. Each of them put a small mercy inside a system that had no room for one, a free lesson, a shot not taken, a wrong dose caught. If you build systems for a living, the mercy can go into the thing you build, because every line of code is a moral choice.

Individual mercy within the system is necessary and insufficient. It keeps people alive today. It does not change what kills them tomorrow.

What I used to believe

For a long time my answer was a quiet one. I called it anonymous friction. You are told to build something you believe is cruel, you can't refuse, so you hold part of yourself back where nobody can see it. I pictured an unspoken network of other people doing the same, each of them guessing at the rest.

I've dropped it. Resistance that nobody can see looks the same as doing your job badly, the person it was meant for never learns it happened, and it ends the day you leave.

I also used to think the answer was to organize. Then I realized a crowd just multiplies what it's given, and it can be given the saint or the monster the same way one person can. Organizing can be really good until it turns into mob mentality, and the same kind of organizing that leads to very positive change can also lead to an angry mob that ends democracy.

Melancholy optimism

If you want to fix a cruel system, you will find yourself living within cruel systems, so you need to be realistic. You need to realize what you're good at, or what you can get good at, and which systems are susceptible to change. Then you need to understand how much effect you can have on other people and on yourself, because within this gray area self-preservation is still important, and you have to find that exact balance. That takes knowing yourself and your own limits, and knowing what other people need and want.

It is also very important to keep what I call melancholy optimism. A lot of the systems we live within are very cruel, and a lot of them are even unfixable. There is still something you can do, because there are layers of systems, and even a small change in one of those layers can be enough to help a bunch of people and spark a much, much larger change.

So yes, as Albert Camus said, the universe has no meaning. With humanist absurdism there is still hope, and there is still a reason to keep pushing.

Layers of systems

By system I mean whatever is doing the crushing. Sometimes that system is a factory. Sometimes that system is an abusive relationship.

We don't just exist in one system, and it is our responsibility to revolt against the cruel ones, but there's always a system on top of that, and systems often rebuild themselves. It leads all the way up. When you've solved everything else, there is nothing left to revolt against except the universe itself.

The revolt never finishes, which is the absurd part of it, and it's also the part that I love.

The revolt is forever, and the revolt is for each other.

Sources

Weil, Simone. La Condition ouvrière. Gallimard, 1951. The year in the factories and the docility passage come from her letters to Albertine Thévenon in this volume. The wording here is my paraphrase.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. First published 1950 as Attente de Dieu. Attention and "what are you going through?" come from the essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God" in this volume.

Levinas, Emmanuel. "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights." In Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. The camp and the dog Bobby.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. First published 1961 as Totalité et Infini. War as a system with no outside, the face and "you shall not kill".

Ashworth, Tony. Trench Warfare 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System. 1980. The soldiers who held their fire.

Camus, Albert. The First Man. Translated by David Hapgood. 1995. First published 1994 as Le Premier Homme. The teacher's visit to the family, and the 1957 letter to Louis Germain printed with it.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. First published 1942 as Le Mythe de Sisyphe. The absurd and revolt.

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The Framework

Humanist absurdism is one part of a larger framework. I call the whole thing recursive absurdism, because many of the layered systems of society have recursed onto themselves and onto each other. We don't really understand why many of them exist the way they do anymore, and we keep moving on like it's okay.

The larger problem is techno-absurdism, systems nobody understands, including the people who build them. The trap a lot of people fall into is neo-absurdism, where you turn inward and manage yourself. I wrote about humanist absurdism first because I believe it is the remedy. I say remedy because there is no fixing this, and a remedy is the thing that makes it at least bearable. That is why I call myself a humanist absurdist.