The outbreak of Coronavirus is a good opportunity to think about how we treat guests whose novel appearance amidst us may pose hardship, but whose continuing presence is undeniable.
Here it’s useful to begin from an accurate perception of things — which, for me, means starting from a process-relational conception of reality. In Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding, the universe does not consist of objects moving around in the container of space, or even in an Einsteinian time-space, so much as it consists of events. Each event that makes up reality is characterized by a selective and subjective “taking account” of things present to experience. (For Whitehead, experience, or what we might call “interiority,” was in the character of all events, and as his mathematical and cosmological work involved taking account of Einstein’s theories of quantum physics, that meant for everything from the most microscopic — the subatomic level — to the most macrocosmic.) In any such “taking account,” which he called “prehension,” the how of that taking account — which always involves some “feeling,” though for us humans can also involve what we call “thinking,” and results in some action — is what is at issue, and what affects the world around it in turn. It is what implicates us in the universe, and vice versa.
The appearance of Coronavirus means that, suddenly, there is a massive taking account of a new visitor. Metaphorically, one can say that global humanity is taking account of this new object. I say “metaphorically,” because there is no single, unified agent called “global humanity.” Even if there are efforts to construct such an agent — via international institutions and political or other instruments — that agent does not (yet) exist. Rather, what exists are many millions of such accountings, occurring both in sequence (you and I continue responding to situations as we navigate our emptier streets, keep our distance from each other, and worry about the possible presence of this new visitor) and in parallel (all of us doing that at once).
Coronavirus is, in this sense, what ecophilosopher Tim Morton calls a hyperobject. It is a strange stranger that has come to us stealthily and surreptitiously, and we must learn to accommodate its presence among us. Our collective response to this presence is what I have (responding to Morton) called a “hyper-event.” In this hyper-event of our sudden awareness of this new and doubtful guest, we collectively deliberate over our responses: how to contain and slow its spread, how to mitigate its impact, how to develop herd immunity that would enable our outlasting it (or incorporating its presence) more completely and effectively, and so on.
Ultimately the hope is that its presence will be accommodated with the kinds of public health measures — vaccines made available and distributed across a large enough segment of the population, for instance — by which we accommodate other viral dwellers amidst us. Those are, of course, precisely the kinds of public health measures that require coordinated actions and services distributed across a very broad scale, of the type that neoliberal economics has tended to substitute with complex, private, for-profit methods that aren’t likely to be up to the task.
The hyper-event of Coronavirus is not different in form from the hyper-event of global climate change. That visitor has been with us longer, and our array of responses — from denial and obfuscation to mitigation and adaptation — constitute the hyper-event of the climate crisis. (“Denial” is now certainly more than mere denial: its denial is no longer that climate change exists so much as it is a refusal to grant climate change the status of being the defining reality of our time. The denial enables a subterfuge by which borders and boundaries can be tightened and policies set in place that allow the denier and his political-economic allies — the fossil fuel industries, among others — to squeeze out as much profit in the time that the denial makes possible.)
The upcoming fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day — like the more recent debate over the proposed “Anthropocene” designation — can be thought of in related terms. The recognition of global ecological precarity, launched into action on April 22, 1970, is a response to a new visitor, one that we know is coming to stay with us for a while, and perhaps forever. Like Coronavirus, we must learn to account for its presence. We’ve now had over 50 years to do that, and it’s time to assess how well we’ve done.
Why do I think the metaphor of “visitation” is appropriate for thinking about Coronavirus or global climate crisis?
Viruses are part of a global ecology. They are not necessarily new to the world: they tend to enter the human domain as a result of the growing interactions between wild populations and domesticated (including human) ones. According to virologists, only an estimated 1% of wildlife viruses are actually known to science. A paper published in Nature three years ago showed “that bats harbour a significantly higher proportion of zoonotic viruses than all other mammalian orders” (and see here and here). Well, guess what…
Like Edward Gorey’s “doubtful guest,” viruses arrive unbidden, surprisingly and mysteriously, stoking fear and taking victims without ever fully revealing their intents. They are “doubtful” not only because we doubt their guesthood. It is also doubtful that they are the guest and we are the host: the tables could easily be reversed to reveal us as the guests, setting up our tables amidst them and feigning surprise when they show up to take a seat.
Their impact on us depends on our response to their presence. As some have advocated for years, the best response is something like the One Health Initiative, “a worldwide program, involving more than 600 scientists and other professionals, that advances the idea that human, animal and ecological health are inextricably linked and need to be studied and managed holistically.”
There is a global ecology of relations that implicate us, participants in global humanity. And it is calling us to take notice.
In the end, the best we can hope for with Coronavirus — and perhaps that’s the case with these other doubtful guests — is perhaps to end the way Gorey’s story does:
In other words, get used to it. It is one of us, too.
For fun:
