The coronavirus is neither good nor bad. It wants only to reproduce.
Nature doesn’t care about you. That may seem harsh, but strictly speaking, nature doesn’t care about anyone or anything, except passing genes into the next generation. We know this if we’ve studied evolution. It was Darwin’s great achievement to explain the adaptation of organisms without appeal to God’s design or mystical idealism. Darwinian evolution is true (corroborated by mountains of evidence), but it’s also a cold metaphysics. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould described it as a “cold bath view” of nature — not warm and fuzzy in the way religion characterizes nature.
Reflect for a moment on the Rhizocephala, or “root-headed” barnacle, which lives its life feeding inside crabs and other crustaceans. It gets inside the crab as a seed and begins to spread throughout the host in a series of complex root systems, often infiltrating, like a creeping vine, every limb of the crab. This root system castrates its host (preventing the crab’s continuation of gene line), stops the crab’s molting cycle and keeps it alive (all the while feeding off it) for years. Or consider the tarantula hawk, a giant wasp that hunts tarantulas as a food supply for its larvae. The wasp paralyzes a tarantula with its powerful sting and lays an egg on the spider’s paralyzed body. When the wasp larva hatches out, it feeds slowly on the still living tarantula — even carefully avoiding at first the consumption of working vital organs, to guarantee extended freshness. Not even the most inventive Hollywood writers can spin tales this fantastic, yet it is the bread and butter of everyday biology.
Should we thank the E. coli in our guts that help us to digest? Should we alternatively fault the virus that is breaking down our immune systems and spreading through the host population? These organisms are not evil or noble, intentionally wreaking havoc on our health — they are simply doing what comes naturally, surviving and reproducing. This is not meant to sound callous or insensitive. It’s obvious that our struggle with other organisms matters a great deal to us — causing real despair and tragedy. But from the more general evolutionary perspective, this drama is value neutral. Strictly speaking, it isn’t even a drama because there is no plot in nature.
Many religious people see something benevolent in nature, or at least see purpose dimly grasped in the interworking of biology. But there’s something even deeper than religious optimism. There is a broader conception of nature — shared by monotheists, polytheists, Indigenous animists, and now politicians and policymakers. It is the mythopoetic view of nature. It is the universal instinct to find (or project) a plot in nature. A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective, impersonal laws. It’s a prescientific worldview, but it is also alive and well in the contemporary mind.
President Trump, for example, has described the coronavirus as our great enemy in an “all-out war,” saying, “The virus will not have a chance against us” and a few weeks later, “We will win this war!” But strictly speaking, wars are fought against malicious agents — people who mean you harm. The coronavirus is like every other virus or pathogen — it does not mean us harm. It wants only to reproduce. After Darwin we see that nature can be horrifying, but not evil (nor good). When Mr. Trump puts a moral frame on the spreading virus, he interprets it in a mythopoetic manner, and we clearly understand him because we too apply the mythopoetic frame easily and naturally.
If we must frame this in terms of politics, the left is just as mythopoetic as the right. I have heard many liberal commentators lately moralize on the grounds that our encroachment on pristine nature and our environmental sins have brought the zoonotic spillover as nature’s retribution. The left, proposing a mythopoetic tragedy of hubris, suggests that we brought this upon ourselves. Pope Francis suggested that pandemics may be nature’s retaliation for human abuse of the environment. “I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature,” he said, “but they are certainly nature’s responses.”
In reality, zoonotic spillover, parasitism, predation, extinction, are not punishments at all, but business as usual. They have always been here and always will be. Most of the known pathogens that infect humans have zoonotic origins, and human abuse of the environment is not their principal cause. Most spillover and transmission result from our domestication of animals, the adaptation of animals (e.g. rodents) to our urban environments and the unprecedented human mixing of urbanization.
Disease and death are not bugs in the system, but features. In fact, the cold-bath truth is that natural selection works only because many more organisms are born than can survive to procreate. Natural selection is not malevolent, but it’s clearly not benevolent, either.
Against the frightening neutrality of nature, we humans marshal the powerful imagination. Imagining that we are in a species-wide war with a biblical-style evil enemy may be factually absurd, but I recommend we embrace this powerful fiction anyway. We evolved to capture and clarify our experience in mythic stories — plots with good guys and bad guys: We draw upon “The Force,” we pray for divine intercession, we try to get in harmony with the Dao, enlist the Dharma, forge good karma, make sacrifices to purify ourselves (Ramadan, Lent, Yom Kippur), and generally try to turn nature and destiny to our benefit. How could we do otherwise? The stakes are the survival of our very kin. The more vulnerable we are, the more our mythopoetic imagination comes to the fore. Medicine and science will hopefully find a vaccine, but for those of us who don’t have research labs, imagination can aid in the battle.
Imagining that we are at war with an enemy will help us make the difficult personal sacrifices (like social distancing and sheltering in place) that go beyond our own egoistic hedonism. Imagining that the sins of our failed environmentalism have brought nature’s vengeance will help us prepare better for the future and course-correct our environmental policies. Personifying nature can be adaptive and beneficial.
Imagining our lives as a dramatic struggle with occasional enemies (microscopic and macroscopic) can help us change hearts and minds, embolden convictions, inspire sacrifice, and thereby change the actual outcome of epidemics and other trials and tribulations. But mythopoetic views of disasters like this one are easily influenced by charismatic leaders (formerly shamans and priests, now presidents and politicians). The “enemy” we war against gets personified into an ethnic group for scapegoating. So let us put our faith in science and give our gratitude to health care workers, but let us also use our imaginations carefully and responsibly, so that the denouement of this story is eventually a human victory, not just a national or political one.
Some might argue that a human victory is not what’s needed here, that the neutrality of nature free of concepts of good and evil obviates a winner or loser. That may be true, if we view it from a distance, but in the thick of it, the imperative of our genetic survival remains. It is our unique Darwinian legacy.
As a naturalist, I resist the theological version of human exceptionalism, but as a philosopher, I’m inclined to recognize that nothing has intrinsic value until we humans imagine it so. Since we cannot find our species’ value objectively by looking at the neutral laws of nature, then we must just assert it. And simply affirm that the universe is more remarkable with us in it.
Stephen Asma is a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago and a member of the Public Theologies of Technology and Presence program at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. He is a co-author of “The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition.”
New York Times
