NSZ: Critical thinking and mindfulness, by playing the ‘stating the facts game’ instead of comforting philosophical denial, I think Camus envisioned a world where giving people work by building infrastructure wasn’t a partisan issue as one example.
But he doesn't state any fact. He spoke against irrationalism, but he deemed the world irrational. His way of opposing what you call 'comforting philosophical denial' is simply arguing for a form of non-cognitivism. There is nothing to be known, no rule to follow. The only thing that's left is his personal blend of ethical subjectivism. 'Nothing matters, stay strong and live without consolation.' Within that framework, not only he's not able to state, say, that emissions of carbon dioxide effects the climate of the planet (that would mean accepting 'scientific determinism', and he doesn't), he cannot even say that a rapist is worse than someone who decides not to rape. He could try to point out why that rapist should behave differently, maybe, but his words would not matter more than the ones of the rapist's himself. 'There is no truth, only truths', he said in
The Myth of Sisyphus.
At least Sartre tried to create a moral system of sort. Camus rebelled against every possible system of knowledge (but, of course, then he went on to explain how things truly are and why we must rebel against them). I don't find that appealing. It's philosophically useless and, empirically, does a bad job at explaining why we don't treat moral decisions as matters of taste. If we act the way we act
only because we are blinded by rules and power structures, how come we cannot stop arguing about what it means to live an ethical life? How come we don't regard it as debating over which kind of ice-cream flavor is the best? And, again, if there's no way of understanding anything, why should I care about what Camus thinks in the first place?
NZS: Yes by subscribing to Camus' philosophy which marries humanist and nihilist points of view; we should desire work that fulfills us emotionally, which means elevating past the spectacle of commodity culture that we currently inhabit and towards a system of decentralised governance where it’s easy to comprehend how effort directly contributes to the upkeep of your community and culture
.
But 'the spectacle of commodity culture' appeals to many people. They are following their emotion when they decide to spend their whole afternoon watching sitcoms. And, arguably, a rapist is following his emotions too when he decides to rape someone. I don't need a system of decentralized governance to understand how badly I would like him to stop.
We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience.
This debate has been going on since writing was invented. We have been telling stories and painting caves since the dawn of time and there has always been someone around who tried to argue how all those forms of representation corrupted our experience of the real world. Is writing bad? Take a look at what Socrates had to say on the matter:
Socrates: [Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
NZS: At one end of an institutional continuum one can place the total institutions that routinely destroy the autonomy and initiative of their subjects. At the other end of this continuum lies, perhaps, some ideal version of Jeffersonian democracy
At the other end of the continuum there's probably this: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/20/stone-age-massacre-offers-earliest-evidence-human-warfare-kenya
NZS: And, more broadly, do the the cumulative effects of life within the patriarchal family, the state and other hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists?
Not necessarily. Those forms of libertarianism and anarchism are equally dogmatic. The writer is just appealing to extremes, which is a logical fallacy. If X is true (where x stands for how bad oppression, allegedly, is), then Y (not being 'oppressed' at all) must be great...well, no. I am more concerned about consequences, and I don't have enough evidence to support that position.
But I don't think this is the right thread to discuss that.
NZS: He also thought (at the time he wrote it) his book was the equivalent to the golden age of philosophy and nothing more needed to be written.
Yes, and then he changed his mind and wrote another one.
NZS: It speaks to their short-sighted universalist teleology, but it doesn’t mean I need to be a universalist to call upon it. It’s a valuable meta-ethical concept that also speaks to a desirable ethical nihilist ontology.
Whose short-sighted universalist teleology? Wittgenstein was a christian. He read Dostoyevsky, he read William James. He fought wars because he believed that those experiences could give him true insight into the human condition. He went to Russia, because he thought that Marxism had some of the religious attitudes he liked so much. He just thought we could not talk about ethics.
