Reduce the Number
“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?” ALBERT CAMUS · THE UNBELIEVER AND CHRISTIANS
Yesterday we saw the counterfeit, a bond made of nothing but blame. Today Camus shows the real thing in action, and it is almost shockingly practical. In 1948 he was invited, an unbeliever, to speak to a monastery of Dominican monks. He did not flatter them and he did not attack. He made an appeal. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured, he said. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
Notice how modest and how enormous this is at once. Camus does not promise to fix the world. He has no illusion that suffering can be abolished or evil explained. He simply refuses the two easy exits, the despair that says nothing can be done and the comfort that says it is all in better hands. Between them he stakes out the only ground worth standing on. We cannot save everyone. We can save some. So let us, together, reduce the number.
And then the reaching hand. If you do not help us, who else can? He is speaking across the widest divide there is, faith and unbelief, and instead of arguing about God he asks the monks to stand beside him and work. This is solidarity as invitation. Not agreement first and action later, but action that binds people who will never agree.
It cuts through so much of our paralysis. Faced with a vast wrong, we freeze, because we cannot fix all of it. Camus hands us the smaller, doable task. Reduce the number. And do not do it alone. Ask.
Today, take one wrong too big to solve, and do the part of it you can. Then turn to someone and say the honest words, if you do not help, who will? Reduce the number by one. That is not too little. It is the whole thing.
