We are part of nature and the most important lesson of COVID-19 is that it reminds us of our sheer vulnerability.
We’ve heard a lot about the economic consequences of COVID-19, but little about the deeper moral and human issues. While frightening, it’s a unique opportunity to think about better responses to the big issues that challenge us all.
The virus’s technical name is SARS-CoV-2, or coronavirus 2019, or COVID-19. It is one of a number of viruses common to people and animals. At the time of writing the primary source of the virus in unknown. Certainly, bats have genetically similar viruses and these can infect an intermediate animal that then passes the virus on to humans. The geographic source seems to be Wuhan, China in late-2019. The initial zoonotic, or animal-to-person infection has subsequently spread person-to-person. It’s the speed of this spread that’s of real concern.
Pandemics have always been with us. The best-known historical plague was the Black Death of the 1340s-1350s which spread extraordinarily quickly from China to the Middle East and Europe. Reliable estimates are that more than fifty per cent of Europe’s population died, with the virus spreading directly from person-to-person.
Then there was the so-called “Spanish Flu,” the influenza outbreak of 1918-1919. This particular H1N1 strain infected some 500 million people and more than 50 million died, more than in World War One. Most of those infected were young, healthy adults under the age of forty. This pandemic was particularly bad in India where up to eighteen million people died.
The hard facts are that nature is a self-correcting system and a pandemic is the most common way it uses to restore balance and keep species’ numbers in check. With a current world population of 7.7 billion, we face the risk that nature will intervene forcefully to restore balance in the earth’s life systems.
With global warming and massive biodiversity loss, some re-balancing of human numbers is needed. Because it de-stabilizes us and makes us vulnerable, COVID-19 gives us a chance to re-examine deep-seated issues that we assume are irrefutable, like much of contemporary economic theory underpinning over-consumption and “limitless” growth in a finite world. Pandemics shake our certainties and force us back to the moral basics.
One long-term lesson from COVID-19 is that it confronts us with the fact that our lives are rooted in the biological structure of the world, that we are not separate from and over against nature, but an intimate part of it. We need to embrace ecocentrism and biocentrism, so that we develop a sense of seeing ourselves as part of the world, rather than seeing nature as something we can use as we wish. We are part of nature and the most important lesson of COVID-19 is that it reminds us of our sheer vulnerability.
It also destabilizes us enough to face something we constantly sweep under the carpet, over-population. The moment population is mentioned politicians run a mile and we keep putting off confronting the fact that we are consuming resources at a totally unsustainable rate. For sure, social justice and equity between nations is part of the solution, but we simply can’t hide from the fact that there will be 9.8 billion of us by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. Over-population is a reality and growth fantasists notwithstanding, these numbers are unsustainable. This is vividly illustrated in Sub-Saharan African in countries like Niger where the fertility rate is 7.2 children per woman, with girls unable to finish even primary school.
Until now the pandemic has largely impacted the developed world. Its impacts on the developing world, particularly Africa, seem to have been minimal. But with more than one billion people, Sub-Saharan African countries have minimal health care with many people weakened by HIV, tuberculosis and infectious diseases. It will be hard to maintain social distance to prevent the virus spreading in Africa’s crowded slums and public transport.
Africa remains an unknown for the spread of the pandemic with Ethiopian WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying his “biggest concern” was COVID-19 breaking-out where there were weak health systems. However, given the fact that most COVID-19 deaths occur among older people, the one advantage Sub-Saharan Africa has is its youth bulge with the median age under twenty, whereas in Italy it is 47.3 years.
In Australia some of the most responsible responses to the outbreak are coming from large corporations and from government departments that are encouraging staff to work from home and setting up the IT to make that possible. Distinctions are being made between business critical and non-essential meetings, with critical meetings being held via webinar, or web conferencing through the internet in real time. Air travel, both domestic and international, will certainly decrease with a welcome drop in the enormous amount of CO2 (1.3% of human caused greenhouse gases) omitted by aircraft.
Some have pointed out that the adjustments that have been forced on us by the pandemic may well change the way in which large organizations and businesses are run, as people become increasingly at ease with working from home via the internet. The need for large office buildings may well disappear as new ways of working and communicating evolve.
This is all very well for large organizations, but smaller business operations will not have the resources to do this, especially when much of their business is face-to-face. Those impacted by the 2019-2020 bushfires need particular support and help. Governments have made promises and are stepping-in with what results only time will tell.
Finally, a word about distancing and fourteen-day home quarantine and other public health requirements. It’s clear that we’re morally obliged to self-isolate and maintain social distance when that is a public health requirement. Here our responsibility to the community and to other people becomes a central issue.
Above all, we need to maintain good humour. In the end it’s a good laugh that will save us.
Paul Collins has just finished writing a book on population.
Paul Collins is an historian, broadcaster and writer. A Catholic priest for 33 years, he resigned from the active ministry in 2001 following a dispute with the Vatican over his book Papal Power (Harper Collins (1997)). He is the author of 17 books, the most recent being The Depopulation Imperative(Australian Scholarly (2021)) and Recovering the ‘True Church’ (Coventry (2022)). A former head of the religion and ethics department at the ABC, he is well known as a public commentator on Catholicism and the papacy and also has a strong interest in ethics, environmental and population issues.
Comments
8 responses to “PAUL COLLINS. COVID-19. A chance to rethink the deeper moral and human issues”
Paul,
As usual you are able to join the dots. In my former job before retirement as educator(teacher) /climatologist, I can see the temporary decrease in Green House Gas emissions, being a positive for “Mother Earth”. I firmly believe in the concept of Gaia. As you say the issues of overpopulation, unsustainable resource extractions and a concept of unlimited growth are unsustainable .Maybe this IS a wake up call for humanity .Will we heed it?
Thomas Malthus was always right, it just took a couple of hundred years to hit home
Yes, not too hard on him, this is a processive event also. There must be a start.
The contrast shown between the Brady Bunch world of advertising mall and super market life and the bizarre site of sweaty fat people brawling in aisles over a few rolls of toilet paper asks a few questions of this writer. So much more to follow.
La Peste shows how to behave in a pandemic Albert Camus’s novel suggests quiet courage and decency are the best we can aim for in times of pandemic
All the talk of the ‘virus’ (after watching the French News on SBS TV ) made me think of Albert Camus’s La Peste – which was an allegory of the human destructiveness of War and Nazism as a plague.
He wrote it during WW2 while recuperating from TB in hiding on a farm near the town of Chambon sur Lignon where 5000 Jews were saved by French Protestants under the leadership of their Pasteur Trocmé following the Biblical Law of ‘Love One Another’!
La Peste shows how to behave in a pandemic Albert Camus’s novel suggests quiet courage and decency are the best we can aim for in times of pandemic
Although an admirer of Collins, I confess I cannot this time understand Collins’ words “In the end it’s a good laugh that will save us” Are the 190 thousand dead so far laughing with him? Medical and science experts have commented that this virus (like SARS) has spread due to the failure to ban ‘wet’ i.e. live animal food markets which facilitate the transfer of disease from animals to humans and which are still conducted illegally in a number of countries! and so many innocents pay the price!
Were the Bushfires a self-correcting system as well? Or was the failure to heed advice 20 years earlier a tragic demonstration of flawed political leadership in all its dimensions; moral, human. environmental, ecological and the essential skill of listening to one’s advisors ( Hearken!)
I would prefer to see Collins conclude with the call for ethical and moral treatment of humans and animals rather than simply ‘maintaining good humour’!!
Compare the medical and budgetary responses of France to those of Australia’s and you will understand why I am not laughing! How good is pandemonium?
As Voltaire wrote: ” I laugh for fear of crying!”
Substantially a very good article, except for the very last sentence. It reflects the old, but oh so deadly Aussie attitude that “she’ll be right mate”! Pity!
Paul proceeds from the presupposition that “nature is a self correcting system” and concludes with a prescription for good cheer – “In the end it’s a good laugh that will save us” – and there will be many like minded followers of Gaia who would agree.
It would seem Paul would have us have us stand an the entrance of Dante’s “Inferno” and wait as nature intervenes forcefully to cull the human population – back to more sustainable levels. Those of us caught up in the cull might like to grab copies of “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” while we contemplate Hades or deliverance in one of its many forms
“In the end it’s a good laugh that will save us”.
I must admit I find it hard to laugh at what is happening …!
Wise words Paolo