{"id":4426,"date":"2020-03-20T05:01:59","date_gmt":"2020-03-20T09:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=4426"},"modified":"2020-03-20T05:01:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-20T09:01:59","slug":"tony-judt-on-the-plague","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=4426","title":{"rendered":"Tony Judt on the Plague"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2001\/11\/29\/on-the-plague\/#fn-7\">The entire article is here.  <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It does not follow from this that the plagues that humankind brings down upon itself are \u201cnatural\u201d or unavoidable. But assigning responsibility for them\u2014and thus preventing them in the future\u2014may not be an easy matter. And with Hannah Arendt we have been introduced to a further complication: the notion of the \u201cbanality of evil\u201d (a formulation that Camus himself would probably have taken care to avoid), the idea that unspeakable crimes can be committed by very unremarkable men with clear consciences.<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2001\/11\/29\/on-the-plague\/#fn-6\">6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These are now commonplaces of moral and historical debate. But Albert Camus came to them first, in his own words, with an originality of perspective and intuition that eluded almost all his contemporaries. That is what they found so disconcerting in his writing. <strong>Camus was a moralist who unhesitatingly distinguished good from evil but abstained from condemning human frailty. <\/strong>He was a student of the \u201cabsurd\u201d who refused to give in to necessity.<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2001\/11\/29\/on-the-plague\/#fn-7\">7<\/a><\/sup><strong>\u00a0He was a public man of action who insisted that all truly important questions came down to individual acts of kindness and goodness.<\/strong> And, like Tarrou, he was a believer in absolute truths who accepted the limits of the possible: \u201cOther men will make history\u2026. All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims\u2014and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The entire article is here. It does not follow from this that the plagues that humankind brings down upon itself are \u201cnatural\u201d or unavoidable. But assigning responsibility for them\u2014and thus preventing them in the future\u2014may not be an easy matter. And with Hannah Arendt we have been introduced to a further complication: the notion of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=4426\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tony Judt on the Plague<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8rNFZ-19o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4427,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions\/4427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}