More to Admire

This is the closing line of The Plague. Dr. Rieux, who has watched a city torn apart by disease and fear, sets out to record what happened and arrives at this conclusion. There are more things to admire in men than to despise.

What is striking is how unspectacular his evidence is. Rieux has not seen miracles. He has seen tired ordinary people doing what was needed. The clerks who kept records. The volunteers who ran the sanitary squads. The doctors who returned day after day to hospitals they could not leave.

Nothing about any of them looks heroic from a distance. Up close, when the city had every reason to collapse into selfishness, they did the work.

This is one reason revolt matters in Camus’s sense. Not because it produces grand gestures, but because it shows what ordinary humans are made of when something has to be refused. When plague comes, people rise. The pattern repeats whenever a real crisis arrives. The capacity was always in them. The conditions only revealed it.

Losing faith in people is easy and mostly premature. Camus offers an unfashionable answer to it. Wait for the crisis, then watch. What is admirable in people is not absent. It is dormant, waiting to be called up. The plague, against its own grain, turns teacher.