Coronavirus and hope

Hello everybody,

I hope you’re bearing up under the present pressures. This is certainly a time of uncertainty and insecurity. We are immersed in a time of transition and that has always been a challenge to our sense of security and well-being.

It is interesting and important that many of our normal outlets and distractions are unavailable to us and we are forced to emulate a more contemplative lifestyle. One result is likely to be a deeper reconnection to our basic human nature and truer, more basic needs. Rebuilding some of our values and societal norms with a greater emphasis on our earthy nature would be a very good outcome.

Epidemics have been associated with times of social transformation, especially at moments of cultural intersection and the associated dissolution of the familiar. When Christendom encountered Islam, humanity had to reconcile incompatible images of the divine and the Black Death ravaged the world. The plague ended at the same time the European Renaissance birthed a new rationality and irreligiosity. The Cartesian revolution placed mind apart from, and above, matter and much of our scientific and industrial prowess can be seen to have derived directly from that new belief structure. The Spanish Flu arose at precisely the time of the First World War when European culture changed from an agrarian economy and became fully committed to industrialism and urbanization. People reveled in the power of self-creation and self-definition.

But with that power there have been abuses and a disidentification with the body and the Earth. Epidemic HIV led to a reevaluation of morality, innocence, self-defense, and individual responsibility. In that instance, a huge collective distress led to rapid social change and a precipitous decrease in mortality rate. The present global disruption might accomplish a similar transformation without the worst-case scenario coming to pass.

It is said that people allow themselves to change once the pain of staying the same outweighs the imagined pain of changing. Clinging to established beliefs and customs is the psychological corollary of the body’s desire for stability but transformation is akin to the spirit’s desire for freedom and adventure. Sometimes these two urges are in conflict. Collapse often precedes reinvention.

The human body wilts in outer space, even whilst the mind thirsts for the stars. Our society has become exaggeratedly mental, for better or for worse. And imbalances cannot endure. The exhaustion caused by a disharmonious lifestyle leads to weakness and eventual collapse. For a number of years, it has become clear that a technological utopia is theoretically achievable but remains somehow unrealized.

Over-industrialization is leading us to extinction. It has been theorized that this unchecked plunge towards extinction is due to some human psychological flaw, perhaps a cultural death-wish akin to Freud’s Thanatos; or a religious compulsion to keep Heaven far apart from Earth; or even a pathological misogyny that pits patriarchal power against community and nature. Whatever the motive that drives our present headlong rush, the truth remains that our lifestyle is unsustainable. Whilst we have become increasingly aware of this, our cynicism, despondency, anger, determination, and even fatalism have also grown. Even through a purely self-centered lens, it is madness to destroy our own environment, and yet our world continues in its insistence upon our Titanic progress.

Globalism, urbanization, ecological crisis, the internet, sexual and gender revolutions, and the liberation of the self from historic constraints all mandate a profound and existential change of world view and self-identity. This all represents a change in not just the content of thought, but in the very method of thought. This is precisely the level of change that has historically accompanied epidemics.

As a medical provider, I have long thought that many of our recent health crises are, at root, a crisis of inflammation. Food intolerances, auto-immune syndromes, and many psychological illnesses can be seen as a failure to confidently adapt and reform within a rapidly changing environment. Inflammation is the name given to the dissolution and restructuring of the body according to a change of function and requirement. A new environment or behavior necessitates adaptation and new structures, some physical and some social. A body goes through achiness as it becomes accustomed to a new activity. A couple argues but establishes new patterns of relationship. Distress, fascination, anger, and even revolution is equivalent to the pain, swelling, redness, and heat of inflammation.

Western culture’s resistance to transformation and pathologizing of the inflammatory process has resulted in the tendency of the individual to suppress inflammation, often aided by medications, to get stuck in inflammation, or indulge in an aggressive pattern of denial, like Nero’s soundtrack to the Roman pyre. The current inflammatory, transformational crisis and dichotomy exists physiologically and psychologically, and individually and collectively.

This is a time of enormous confusion and the present crisis begs two questions: What is the new environment to which we should adapt? And what is the core humanity that will endure despite new appearances and new behaviors? What will be the world and what is the self? Our crisis is that both of those questions remain unanswered, each answer interrelated to the other.

We are epigenetically capable of expressing a range of potential adaptations. More than any other organism, humans develop in an environment which is culturally accumulated rather   than original and elemental. Evolution from the hunter gatherer, through agrarianism and imperialism, to industrialism has been exponentially faster and more challenging to our adaptive capacity. Whilst genomic memory might find some correspondence between automobile travel and horseback, or a house and a cave, there is very little about air travel or the stock market that our instincts can relate to.

There is the very real danger, if not likelihood, that we have created an environment beyond our epigenetic capabilities and to which it is simply impossible for us to adapt. In order to endure, we must evolve a spontaneous intelligence that can discern the value of certain inventions without waiting years for destruction or disease to reveal their true value.

It is possible that the result of epidemic is the dying of the old and the inevitable predominance of the new. If a tree grows a limb that turns out to be detrimental to the whole, the limb dies back to the trunk, or the plant to the root, and, hopefully, life continues again. Similarly, we are effectively re-examining our basic needs, our commitments to industry, and our relational norms. While we are socially isolating, or dying back, many of us will also contemplate the benefits of industrial de-escalation, personal slowing down, our dependency on societal structures that actually foster anxiety rather than security, and how technology might ennoble us without harming us. One might also pray that this hard truth will dispel inertia, paralysis, and denial.

Our individual and collective identities will undoubtedly undergo a transformation and that is both terrifying and vital. Industry that harms the human being, the Earth, and the ecosystem is intolerable and the greater part of us must know this, instinctively and spontaneously. We must develop an immunological sensitivity to denial and lies, no matter how flattering. Our intrinsic and original humanity, like the Earth and ecosystem must assume centrality and assert preference. Ecology is the new morality. We have looked for God in the skies and must now turn within and beneath. The future has to nourish our basic human nature or else we have no future at all.