This week I was supposed to be in a warm and sunny place visiting and having good time with friends. But the plans were cancelled and now here I am feeling duty-bound to write one more blog post. I could take the week off as originally planned but I don’t want to surrender too much to this bug. It can control my movements but not my pen, oops sorry, my keyboard.
Fighting a virus is so frustrating. It is not big enough to slap it or whack it. You can’t hose it down or blow it away. Invisible and tiny infiltrates everything. We close the door behind us as we come home and we may carry it inside with us. We look out the window wondering when it will invade our privacy but we can’t see anything. We wash our hands but it could be on our clothes and shoes. How do you escape such an intruder and stalker?
I could go on like that listing all the frustrating thoughts that come to mind, but I prefer to write down some loftier (oh, just poetic license) thoughts I made as this virus is taking more and more of a foothold in our daily lives.
We are first and foremost biological creatures. This is a virus attacking a species. It affects us, sickens us and kills us biologically. Time for us to think of ourselves as a species not as individuals or groups, or nations. It is in such moments we realize we are one and the same species and we need to defend us together, grieve together, recover together. We humans have done a horrible job exterminating countless species. This is the moment to reflect what that means when we ourselves feel that existential threat.
We are also social creatures. To endure and overcome the challenges and risks of our biological journey on earth, we created art, and literature, and culture and religion to find beauty and meaning as an antidote to our fears and the anxiety of our eventual end that we, better than any other species, are able to contemplate. But none of these we do alone. We share and enjoy them together. It is in sociality our species has found an instinct that increases our chances to survive. But now this social life we value is under attack. Our natural inclination to socialize puts us at risk and could kill us. Imagine if the biological balance between us and other forms of life were such that we had to give up our sociability. We would no longer be able to learn from each other or develop empathy for strangers. And we would not be capable to trust others to care for our offsprings, to feed us or defend us. We would not be the same species.
Trust matters. Nothing is more important in our social life than trust. It keeps us together, establishing expectations of reciprocity, fairness and solidarity. Those who betray our trust we consider unworthy of interacting with us. In serious matters, societies often ostracize those who violate the unwritten rules of trustworthiness. In cases, like the one we face now, when we have to engage in collective behavior as pluribus not unum, we need to trust those who have the responsibility to lead the common effort and fight. We expect of them reliable information, transparency and unvarnished truth. As harmful as this virus is, it gives us the opportunity to judge the trustworthiness of our leaders and inform ourselves in future political decisions.
Science matters. Thanks to our developed brains, we humans can learn about the laws of nature and develop technologies and responses to natural forces. That helps us gain some – not total – control over our fate. We don’t have to wait and see what the course of the virus will be for our survival. We can counterattack it biologically as well. Funny, though, that our reliance in science increases when we face a clear and present danger that threatens us now not down the road. We are wired to have this strong response to present dangers. It would be even better if we could overcome our relative indifference to future risks, like those lurking due to climate change, and let science guide us. Being selective in our acceptance of scientific knowledge is not wise.
Character matters. The virus has the potential to kill us one at a time. But it will kill less of us if we show solidarity. A person’s character is tested in crises. We have to do the right thing not only for us but also for our fellow humans. We have to sanitize, stay home and keep our distance from others. We are not used to living like that. Our contemporary life is full of recreation and entertainment opportunities that take us away from home and mix us with many people, often strangers to us, in all sorts of interactions. How can we suspend this life style without feeling being out of our skin? But we need the temperance and perseverance to do it.
We have become a complex species. Not just a host to billions of biological cells, but also social players as well as cultural and spiritual beings wielding technology and interacting politically to organize the path of our finite lives. As such we can suffer or perish in many different ways because of our multifaceted nature. Biologically, socially, technologically, culturally, spiritually.
Or we can marshal all these constituents of our species and survive one more time and try again to become a better species for ourselves and the rest of the natural world.
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