When Words Become Shields

Evan Swensen
September 15, 2025

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” With this striking sentence, Albert Camus summarized a writer’s duty and the role of literature in human survival. For Camus, words were more than art—they were tools for clarity, truth, and resistance.

Camus, born in 1913 in French Algeria, grew up in poverty after his father was killed in World War I. His childhood was one of scarcity, yet it seeded in him a profound awareness of fragility and resilience. Later, as he matured into a philosopher, novelist, and journalist, those early experiences sharpened his vision of life’s absurdities and responsibilities. His statement about civilization is not abstract—it was forged by history’s fire.

Consider Camus’s time during World War II. He worked as an editor for Combat, an underground resistance newspaper in Nazi-occupied France. At great personal risk, he wrote essays exposing tyranny, calling readers to moral courage when silence would have been safer. Here is the embodiment of his quote: writing not as decoration but as defense. His words were barricades against both propaganda and despair. Through his pen, Camus helped to remind a fractured Europe that integrity mattered, that humanity still had a voice, that civilization was worth preserving.

Yet Camus’s life also reveals another dimension of his claim. After the war, his novel The Plague became more than fiction. Written in 1947, the story tells of a town besieged by a deadly epidemic. On the surface, it is a medical crisis. Beneath, it is a metaphor for fascism, oppression, and human indifference. The plague, like totalitarianism, thrives when people deny its existence or turn away. Through this allegory, Camus revealed the danger of apathy, showing how civilization erodes not by sudden blows but by the slow decay of truth and responsibility. His warning feels uncannily alive today.

Camus was not without personal conflict. His break with Jean-Paul Sartre, once his intellectual ally, underscores the cost of his convictions. Sartre leaned toward revolutionary violence, believing it could forge justice. Camus rejected this. He argued that to embrace murder, even for a cause, was to betray humanity itself. In his view, if writers justified violence with words, they contributed to the destruction of civilization rather than its preservation. For Camus, the writer’s task was not to incite destruction but to prevent it—by upholding clarity, honesty, and compassion in the face of chaos.

His influence extended far beyond philosophy and literature. During the Cold War, Camus’s insistence on dialogue, restraint, and the defense of individual dignity challenged both Soviet communism and Western complacency. He became a rare voice refusing to excuse cruelty, regardless of ideology. His words encouraged readers to see that writing could serve as moral ballast in turbulent times.

The legacy of Camus rests not just in the pages of The Stranger or The Myth of Sisyphus, but in the reminder that writing is not neutral. To write is to choose a side—against lies, against violence, against indifference. Civilization depends on such choices. Without writers to illuminate truth, societies stumble blindly into destruction. With them, the world retains at least a flicker of conscience.

Camus’s words challenge today’s writers no less. In an age of misinformation, polarization, and cultural fatigue, the writer’s role is again vital. Writing is more than expression—it is stewardship. Writers must guard memory, confront corruption, and humanize those reduced to statistics. In doing so, they hold back the collapse of compassion and keep civilization intact.

In the end, Albert Camus reminds us that writing is not simply an act of creation. It is also an act of preservation—of dignity, of hope, of humanity itself. Writers may not always change the course of history, but they help ensure history does not devour itself. That is no small task. That is civilization’s lifeline.

The Power of Authors: A Rallying Cry for Today’s Writers to Recognize Their Power, Rise to Their Calling, and Write with Moral Conviction, written by Evan and Lois Swensen with a foreword by Jane L. Evanson, PhD, launches this September. You’ve been reading its heartbeat in these Monday messages — soon you can hold the book in your hands.