Condemning the terrorism of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in their campaign for an independent Algeria, Albert Camus outraged the anti-colonial French left by declaring: "I have to denounce blind terrorism in the streets of Algiers, which might one day strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I'll defend my mother before justice." In choosing his flesh-and-blood mother over the abstract ideal of justice, Camus proved himself not just to be a good son--one of the few remaining meaningful roles left in a post-God world--but a true humanist. Sartre may have written that "Existentialism is a Humanism," but for him human beings were less important than the fashionable causes they were killed in the name of (though extreme principles necessarily lead to extreme hypocrisy, and it is certain that for Sartre some people, like himself, were less worthy of sacrifice than others). To be a good Communist party member was to put Party before all else, certainly before such a historically negligible element as one's mother. To do so would be scientifically (remember that Marxism was once seriously considered a "science") absurd--and few intellectuals besides Camus took the centrality of absurdity to life seriously. Perhaps the suspicion that most left-wing intellectuals would indeed put justice (or egalitarianism, or solidarity, or multiculturalism, or whatever the sacralized word of the moment may be) before their mothers is what makes many, including the lower classes they aim to speak for, look askance upon them. If a man can't be trusted to put his mother first, how can he be trusted at all?
If the concept of mother is expanded to motherland, we can see exactly how and why the internationalist left failed so spectacularly in the twentieth century. The concepts nationalists use in their rhetoric--blood, soil, community--are much more tangible than abstract notions of international worker solidarity. International socialism failed precisely in 1914 when the workers of the world chose their physical neighbours--their fellow citizens--over their imaginary neighbours--their fellow workers in distant lands. It was the floating threat of internationalist rape of the motherland--by communists, by Jews, by global finance--that allowed ultra-nationalists to expand conservative ideals like land and blood into counter-revolutionary sacralized abstractions of their own. The irony is that by elevating the concept of motherland to a holy signifier, ultra-nationalists were equally as guilty as the communists in putting unreachable goals before actual people. "Between my motherland and my mother, I choose my mother," would be just as much a heresy in a national socialist milieu as "Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother" was for Camus in an international socialist milieu. The autonomy of the family is a threat to any totalitarian system, and due to the primordial loyalty they inspire and the unregulated cultural and moral values they impart, perhaps mothers are the greatest anti-revolutionary threat of all.
Human beings exist in two worlds--the physical world, and the symbolic world that gives the physical world meaning. Symbols are made real through actions in the physical world. Thus communism was certainly a real phenomenon, as real people lived, killed and died for it--but it was them, not the symbols, that made it real. Thus Stalin was as much a legitimate representative of communism as Marx. Humans are symbolic animals and can no less rid ourselves of the urge to create abstractions than the urge to defecate and eat. Camus discussed the meanings of many important abstractions in his work: freedom, justice, revolt, exile. This is what makes him a philosopher and an intellectual, like his countryman Sartre. But unlike Sartre, unlike the ideologically dogmatic left, Camus was not willing to sacrifice his physical world of flesh-and-blood ties for symbols that are ultimately only as meaningful as the meaning we put into them. If the meaning we put into symbols involves the sacrifice of kin, these symbols are instrinsically anti-human. The swastika is anti-human, though surely Heidegger claimed to be deeply concerned with the human condition; the hammer and sickle is anti-human, though surely Sartre and the rest of Stalin's apologists claimed to be humanists. To be an intellectual requires an active mind, but to be a human being requires more than that. It requires, at the very least, loyalty to one's mother before any abstraction. Unlike so many intellectuals, Camus was more than the sum of his symbols: he was a true human being.
