In need of corrective lenses to see a more-than-human world.
Draw a long line. Put every known species on it. How would you order them in intelligence, or sentience? The very definition of intelligence is anthropocentric, but if we do a thought experiment, where would a virus fit?
The definition of intelligence is the ability to acquire, understand and use knowledge[1]. The definition of sentience, for which I’ll take wisdom from Eastern philosophy, is a metaphysical quality of all things, requiring respect and care [2]. As a species, we define mental boundaries to categorise each piece of information as it passes through our collective mind. Animate vs inanimate is the very first distinction our distant single-cell ancestors made, which gave them the information to react to their environment: to evolve and to become me / a rabbit / an otter / a fern / a photobacterium leiognathi / and many million other magnificent life forms.
Coronaviruses have enough intelligence to adapt to their environment through evolution and natural selection, to change tactics to disguise their presence, and to multiply by hijacking their hosts’ relevant cells. SARS-CoV2, SARS and MERS-Cov are only a few named specimens amongst more than three hundred thousand different viruses that can infect mammals [3]. We live most of our lives side by side with these viruses. Numerous studies show these viruses are neither inanimate nor unintelligent; instead, they challenge our traditional delineations of how intelligence and sentience take form [4].
This unprecedented moment in time affords us an opportunity to widen our perspective on our dominance as the apex intelligent species on earth. To loosen control, step off our pedestal, and stop behaving as if the earth is here to serve us as the prime species. This moment also gives us the chance to overcome our biases and address inequalities between humans and more-than-humans.
The steady increase in infectious diseases over the last century points to the combined impacts of rapid demographic, environmental, social, technological changes in our ways of living [5]. The melting of permafrost and glaciers poses a further threat for disease: numerous types of bacteria and viruses lying dormant in ice will be released into the atmosphere [6]. The future holds many accounts in which a unified global community must be called out from behind its borders to tackle together the disturbances yet to come. In the wake of environmental collapse, a collective effort to disassemble climate injustices will be more critical than ever.
“…ideological virus will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking about an alternate society…”
Cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek points out, “maybe another — and much more beneficial — ideological virus will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking about an alternate society, a society beyond the nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation.”
Perhaps this pandemic is our wake-up call: the earth has no borders, and we are all vulnerable.
This is our opportunity to don our corrective lenses and see the Earth with new eyes. But it is not easy to counteract generations of delusional superiority inflicted on the more-than-human world.
We need to construct new alliances, a UN for the more-than-human world. New and novel ways of embodying a non-human perspective in its full glory and weirdness. Arts and culture can help reframe our understanding of intelligence — perhaps it can help us understand where in our new post-Covid-19 world, a virus may fit alongside our society. Governance, commerce and policy should then follow suit.
Arts & Culture holds the key to opening our perspectives to a reality beyond the limits of our senses. It can play the role of an early messenger to spark a collective epiphany as we bridge the gap between what we think life is versus what life should be. It can help us appreciate how it is to be non-human, and so, learn a little more about what it is to be human, too.
As we suspend most of our social habits, unlikely to ever return to our pre-pandemic state, we can use Arts & Culture to make sense of what we now call reality, to allow us to develop emotional muscles to embrace what feels strange, eerie, fearful, and to transform it into purpose, beauty and comfort.
In his book Intelligence in Nature, Jeremy Narby suggests, “it is about coming to terms with the natural world’s capacity to know. We are a young species, and we are just beginning to understand.” Perhaps, starting from culture-making, if we embody the collective intelligence of nature, we’ll be one step closer to an understanding of ourselves as a global community of all living things.
Finally, as a practitioner of the arts, I’d like to echo the urgent yet poetic call to action of artist & activist Gustav Metzger: “ It is our privilege and our duty to be at the forefront of the struggle. There is no choice but to follow the path of ethics into aesthetics.”
References
1-Mainstream Science on Intelligence, Wall Street Journal December 13, 1994,
http://intelligence.martinsewell.com/Gottfredson1997.pdf
2- Ahimsa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahi%E1%B9%83s%C4%81
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ahimsa
3- A Strategy To Estimate Unknown Viral Diversity in Mammals
https://mbio.asm.org/content/4/5/e00598-13
4- Giant Viruses Revive Old Questions About Viral Origins
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/335/6072/1035.summary
5-World Health Organisation, Climate change and human health
https://www.who.int/globalchange/climate/summary/en/index5.html
6- Long-dormant bacteria and viruses
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up
