Corona Virus’ Message: A Harbinger of the Future
So this whole Covid 19 thing has gotten pretty big. It’s altered all of our lives in fundamental ways. It’s easy to get caught up in the discomfort, the fear, the change in routine, the challenge of isolation. Though this pandemic may just be our biggest wake-up call yet. It may just be the crisis we needed to move in a better direction. Though to do that, it’s important we take in fully the implications of what’s presently going on.
What is Covid telling us?
On the most basic level, it’s telling us to stay away from each other to prevent the spread of disease. Though, upon listening to an interview with Medium’s Joe Brewer on a recent podcast interview, I began to recognize something deeper, more structural. That is, epidemics are a feature unique to civilization — and integrally tied to it. Not only can epidemics only spread within civilization, but civilization is destined to suffer from them.
Think about it. Civilization is contrasted with earlier hunter-gatherer societies. Before the advent of agriculture and cities, people primarily lived in roving bands of hunter-gatherer tribes. These tribal arrangements rarely exceeded ~150 members for good reason. While one tribe or band of people may trade or interact with other communities, there was nothing near the amount of travel that we see in modern culture. There was no opportunity for viruses like Covid to spread. It just didn’t happen.
Once agriculture was invented, humans began to gather in larger, more densely populated communities. Cities, city-states, nations, empires, countries; all these are articulations of the same basic way of life that was initiated by the agricultural revolution. While our civilization may be global now, it’s fundamentally the same as it was from the very start. And it’s victim to the very same vulnerabilities.
My guess is most of us have known this, albeit unconsciously. It seems that every year or two there is a new big scare about somesuch disease. Ebola. Swine flu. Bird Flu. Mad cow disease. Of course, none of these reached the level of threat of Covid, but the fear was there. Perhaps it was the collective historical memory of the massive epidemics like Polio, AIDS, H1N1, SARS, and even the bubonic plague. Civilization has been ravaged by epidemics since it’s inception. I believe life has been sending us a message for a long time that we’ve been too avoidant to hear.
Civilization as we know it is an Unsustainable System
Sustainability is a word that’s been tossed around a lot in these past ten years. It seems like any major business or person of even basic knowledge espouses the value of it. There are countless initiatives for sustainable infrastructure, sustainable businesses, sustainable energy, and the like. All this talk about sustainability and we’ve been overlooking something profound. Our whole society is unsustainable, down to its very root. Whether it’s the earliest known cities in the fertile crescent or the familiar rise and fall of empires, every known civilization has fallen. Except for the ones that haven’t, yet.
What’s been most alarming to me about the Covid 19 pandemic has not been its severity, but its weakness. Even at the very beginning, when the response to Covid was lacking, the contraction rate was 10% among close family members. Current mortality rates of covid are estimated at 3.4%. While this is certainly something to be taken seriously, this means Covid 19 pales in comparison to much more serious epidemics of the past. By comparison, the 1918 H1N1 pandemic infected one-third of the world population at the time and is estimated to have killed 10% of them.
Of course, there are inherent problems in trying to compare these pandemics with one another. There is a massive amount of guesswork in these estimates, and even more in drawing conclusions about them. The mortality rate from Covid 19 would have been much higher without the effectiveness of modern medical treatment such as ventilators, just as an example. Though we would be remiss not to consider the possibility that Covid 19 is not a powerfully deadly pandemic. If our civilization was so destabilized by Covid 19, what happens when a more deadly, more infectious, less manageable disease infects the globe? If we look at history, worse is bound to come.
A Herald from the Future
Covid 19 is a herald of future events. This brush with catastrophe is foreshadowing what is to come. While serious and devastating to many, this was a manageable threat. And yet the economy has plummeted, businesses are struggling, and people everywhere are experiencing panic, rage, and despair. It seems to me that these negative effects are far less the result of the horror of Covid 19 as much as it is the inherent instability of our global civilization. And rising human populations, growing urbanization, increasing economic disparity, rising international tensions, and catastrophic effects of climate change are certainly doing little to help that.
Taken in whole with an honest and courageous eye, this is a hauntingly stark reality. The prognosis for our civilization is not positive. Like all civilizations, ours is bound to collapse. The difference between our current civilization and all ones prior is that ours is global. That means ours will be a global civilizational collapse. This is, of course, obvious to those with the courage and wisdom to see it. Though it makes it no less shocking when events like this happen and remind us: the end may be closer than we dare to believe.
The temptation here is to turn to some reason to have hope that all will be okay. “Of course there must be a silver lining to this dire situation!” our anxiety may plead with us. And while I certainly could go on to paint a picture of some bright and shining future for the planet and humanity, I will stay my own urge to do so. Perhaps the invitation from Covid isn’t to continue grasping for some uplifting future, but to sit with the reality of our demise. After all, it may be the one thing our civilization has yet to do.
