Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir were having a drink when de Beauvoir asked how anybody can be happy in a world so full of misery. How can they laugh and drink and dance when millions of people are being murdered and abused?
It’s a good question, and one I’m sure many of us have asked at one time or another. Unless you’ve made a deliberate effort to avoid even a glimpse of the news, you know that the world contains vast and intense suffering: wars, murders, and abuse, of course, but also sickness, famine, and natural disaster. How is it ever okay to clink glasses of champagne while children are dying? How can we so easily sleep at night knowing that someone, somewhere, is being tortured?
And then Camus gave his answer: “Happiness exists, and it’s important; why refuse it?” Camus argued that refusing joy does nothing to cure the misery in the world. It merely adds your misery to the total sum. It makes us less capable of defeating it.
A Brief for the Defense
In 2005, the poet Jack Gilbert published a poem called “A Brief for the Defense,” where he imagined a defendant accused of having joy. The world contains famine and torture and children dying in places you will never see. And so how can you dare to laugh? How can you be happy while others are suffering?
Gilbert’s answer, like Camus’s, is to say that if suffering exists and you respond by extinguishing your own joy, then suffering has produced two losses rather than one. First, there is the pain itself: the bullet, the scream, the anguish. And then, there is the echo — the suffering that comes from focusing too long on the suffering. We shouldn’t allow misery to win twice.
In fact, he even goes further than this, further than most people are comfortable with. Gilbert says delight isn’t only permitted, but that you have a duty to feel delight. To deny yourself joy when the world contains so much horror would allow horror to set the terms. When so much of the world is dark, we are responsible all the more for bringing in some light.
Gilbert and Camus were not saying that we should ignore suffering, or that we shouldn’t try to help. Rather, they were saying that our pain doesn’t relieve the world’s pain. In fact, Camus argued the opposite: Accepting happiness makes us better equipped to fight for it.
For our tomorrow
In 1946, among the ruins of Nazi Germany, the philosopher Karl Jaspers described something similar to de Beauvoir’s unease but on a grander scale: what he called “metaphysical guilt.” This is not the guilt of anything you did, but it’s the guilt of simply surviving when others have not. It’s that unbearable guilt of being here when others could not be. It’s the happiness you enjoy that others cannot.
Jaspers argued we cannot will this feeling away, but we can learn from it. We can learn that we are bound to all humans who have ever existed and will ever exist. When we adopt this metaphysical view, we see ourselves in solidarity with the species. History is a network, and our lives are webbed together. In my living, I represent life.
I am writing this article in November, when many countries around the world mark a remembrance for those who died in conflict. And, in the UK at least, there’s a line that’s used a lot. It’s from the war memorial at Kohima: “For your tomorrow, we gave our today.” So, use it. Use the today that we have been gifted. Find all the joy that those who gave their lives could not.
Camus, Gilbert, and Jaspers are getting at a similar thing. Pausing to appreciate the sacrifices of the past and present is important and respectful. Working as much as is reasonable to alleviate suffering is moral. But living as fully and happily as we can is a kind of duty. We should laugh loudly for those who cannot. We should enjoy the world’s wonders because so many are deprived of access to them. We should squeeze as much goodness from life as possible because that isn’t possible for millions.
As the activist Dan Savage put it, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
This article You’re allowed to be happy. In fact, you have a duty to be. is featured on Big Think.