The Guilt of All

Everything we have built this month has a shadow, and today we look straight at it. In The Fall, Camus gives the microphone to a man named Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a charming, ruined ex-lawyer who has turned self-accusation into a weapon. Listen to his creed. We cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state with certainty the guilt of all. Every man testifies to the crime of all the others.

At first it sounds almost like solidarity. Clamence, too, has discovered a we. He, too, insists that no one stands alone. But look at what binds his we together. Not a shared value worth defending, not mutual need, not the brotherhood of destiny. Only guilt. His bond is a courtroom in which everyone is accused and no one is spared. This is the exact negative of everything we have built this month. Where real solidarity says we exist, so let us defend and rescue one another, Clamence’s version says we are all guilty, so I am free to judge you.

Camus wrote The Fall as a warning, and it is aimed at people who think of themselves as good. It is fatally easy to slide from I stand with others into I see through others, from fellow feeling into a superior, universal contempt dressed up as honesty. Clamence is not free. He is desperately alone, using the guilt of all as a way to feel less small. His we does not save anyone. It only lowers everyone to his level.

The warning is worth taking personally. Solidarity that runs on shared blame, on the grim satisfaction of everyone being complicit, is a counterfeit. It has the form of the bond and none of its warmth.

Today, catch yourself in the Clamence move, the moment fellow feeling curdles into we are all guilty anyway. Refuse it. Choose the harder we, the one that says we exist and is trying to save someone, not the one that only accuses.