The Us in Virus

How much of what we do in a day, week, month or year serves to distract us from the fact that our lifestyles are unsustainable, that whatever current ease we enjoy is purchased at the expense of invisible others, past, present and future? Even as the land called North America was stolen from peoples who had been living here for many thousands of years, so too have our cities been stolen from the toil of ordinary people, then sold back to us at exorbitant cost to the benefit of a few. Even so do the transportation networks and commodity chains that allow us to live in these cities suck the life possibilities from future generations who will have to contend with the biosphere we are in the process of transforming irrevocably.

No wonder we take refuge in distraction, even while that which we are distracting ourselves from grows ever more expansive in its ability to shape lives, cultures, and environments.

There is a gaping VOID around which modern culture is constructed, and it is growing bigger. Whether we realize it or not, our lives are increasingly organized around an absence: of values not grounded in service to economics; of relationships not structured by exploitation, coercion and abuse; of belief that the future could be different from the steady erosion of hope and possibility we have come to expect. And yet, most of us know or intuit, at some level, that if humankind is to continue its tenancy on the planet something’s gotta give and it better not be the planet.

So we must change, but we don’t know how. When an unexpected crisis of global proportions strikes, like the coronavirus, the whole system shudders. The VOID peeks out from a thousand cascading fissures in the edifice we have created to protect us from confronting the reality of our predicament. Institutions that purport to “serve community” are unable to recognize the most basic emotional needs of their workers, now sequestered at home, but required to “clock in” digitally, even while they are worried sick over the developing situation. Governments that have been decimating social infrastructure for half a century find themselves unable to care for the basic well being of the citizenry, even while readying massive transfers of wealth to the private sector in service of saving “the economy.” The price of gasoline plummets, the planet enjoys a rare moment of relief from accumulating atmospheric greenhouse gasses, and we are anxiously told this constitutes a dire crisis for the stock market.

What has so warped our understanding and hearts that we interpret one of the greatest windfalls our planetary home has encountered in modern times as an unprecedented calamity? But wait, is not the planet here to serve OUR needs? As raw materials to be shaped according to OUR designs? Is not the natural order one of WAR, between humans and the environment, humans and animals, humans and humans? To think otherwise is naive dreaming, tree-hugging idealism.

And yet, here is a tiny organism that, in two short weeks, learned how to transmit itself, first from animals to humans then from humans to humans, with alarming effectiveness. This same tiny, brainless creature has upturned, in a few short months, a globalized economy that took half a millennia to build. It has put entire modes of human life on lockdown and seemingly effortless achieved what decades of international negotiations about climate change have been unable to effect. Perhaps this is but a small taste, a friendly warning shot, of what nature might have in store if we continue to act as if WAR were the only mode of relationality with any true reality. 

The sudden interruption of our lives has caused a kind of tectonic sliding, whereby the institutions, ideologies, infrastructures and habits we rely upon are thrown out of joint with the affective realities they are designed to contain and manage. Management hierarchies that cover over their inequities with subtle strategies of interpersonal domination are suddenly revealed as inane and ineffectual: part of the ploy to keep everyone in their place. But that place is suddenly our homes. Private and public implodes. Whatever is left of the common spaces of our communities are eerily vacant, a moment perceptually conditioned by a thousand apocalyptic films and TV shows. We act as if it were the virus that has created these situations, when all it has done is reveal the vacancy at the heart of our societies, much as world wars did for past generations.

We talk about a return to “normal” when it is normal that is killing us.

Confronted by the VOID we, recoil back into the known, but the known has become pathological. We are the “us” in virus.  

Even as we suffer in isolation, uncertainty and illness, this virus offers us wisdom and hope. It allows us to see, if only for a few brief days or weeks, the insanity of the world we have constructed to protect us—from ourselves. It offers us the opportunity to deploy a right and ability that so much of contemporary culture has tried to seduce or coerce us into forgetting: the right of REFUSAL. We now have an excuse to say NO to insanity, to the daily, incremental erosion of our wills, hearts and dreams. And, in the interruption this crisis has created in our everyday lives, some of us might find a slim, precious space of reflection from which to demand and work towards something different.

This is the other “us” in virus: the “us” we have a chance to rediscover as we care for each other in the face of a series of interlocking systems that, it turns out, are simply incapable of providing a humane response to suffering and crisis, grounded as they are in the VOID at the heart of our society. And though we live amidst that void, if this virus is showing us anything it is that the VOID does not yet exhaustively define us. There remains something in us all that is wiser, smarter and more loving than the lies, economic systems and distractions that have blinded us to our shared vulnerability. And it is this “us” in virus that might yet bring us together in service of building something new.