Our failure as a civilization

If the novel coronavirus indeed goes away, and if we survive the virus, we should not remain unaffected. Even if we are able to do so, we should not be willing to go back to the way things were.

The virus has comprehensively laid bare the various and ingrained failings of our global human civilization in the 21st century. At a time when human civilization continues to boast about its remarkable progress, especially in the modern industrial and technological eras, it once again finds itself in a precarious condition of endangerment, troublingly similar to civilizations that have existed previously, civilizations that we have come to disdain and disregard as primitive and archaic.

The virus today threatens our civilization with extinction, perhaps not in terms of the extinction of our human species, but the extinction of our much touted, and valued, ways of life – for what is a civilization without its way of life?

Throughout human history, in this disregard for former civilizations, the latter civilizations found themselves to be distinct, more special to the ones before them. This palpable sense of progress and superiority inevitably also occupied subsequent civilizations of a sense of security and/or invulnerability specially in relation to calamities or threats already faced by previous civilizations. Surely, subsequent civilizations have reasoned, with material industrial and technological progress, such civilizations are immune to the existential threats faced by the ones preceding them.

However, as civilizations continued to progress industrially and technologically, the specter of the possible extinction of human civilization has only increased, rather than decreased. And so, for any civilization, including our current one, to have this most insincere sense of stability, safety and control, is self-defeating and entirely false.

However, once again, even with all our collective technological and industrial progress, the most advanced civilization in the history of humankind faces an existential threat. This threat is not from a technologically glamorous and/or advanced advent of self-extinction such as a nuclear winter, but a threat that was common to our most primitive of ancestors – a plague, a pandemic – thus not only shattering the illusion of any sense of the security of our civilization against extinction, but also our false sense of superiority over our ancestors.

The aforementioned false sense of security has allowed subsequent civilizations to focus, perhaps mistakenly, on more productive forms of activities, rather than being concerned with self-preservation. These productive forms of activities have been different and varying forms of capitalism marking the linear evolution of capitalism. We have cited and measured our success as human civilization thus in terms of industrial and technological output, understanding the same to be a measure of the “richness” of our civilization.

And so, we have claimed that there has never been a civilization richer, more advanced, and therefore more secure than ours. Yet, with this virus, we have found this ‘wealth’ of our society to be a glorious folly, and our touted technological and industrial progress to be fatally misdirected, as humankind struggles to employ all this wealth, and industrial and technological output to effectuate a most basic agenda, essential self-preservation.

It is most important perhaps, to understand this virus, and the resulting existential threat to our civilization, not in the vacuum of unforeseeability or force majeure, but as a symptom of the misdirection of the collective efforts of our civilization. Surely, the virus continues to ravage the richest nations which have found trillions of dollars failing to serve as effective currency, in the face of a lack of basic and equal healthcare facilities for their people.

All the arms and ammunition the world has accumulated has failed to provide protection to humankind as we find ourselves lacking basic masks and gloves. All our technological and industrial output, the futures, blue-chip stocks, complex debt obligations, paradoxically unsecure securities, etc have lost value as the most valuable and scarce commodity is revealed to be toilet paper. And, perhaps in a most poignant indication of mankind’s misdirected progress, as death tolls around the world mount, the most basic tenant of modern capitalism, oil, is today less than worthless.

When wild forest fires rage in thick redwood forests at temperatures of hundreds of degrees they destroy all flora and fauna in their paths, including the canopies of magnificently tall redwood trees standing for hundreds of years. But, as the fires destroy, previously blocked sunlight shines on the burnt-out earth and allows life to grow anew where it previously could not.

We have never had such repeated and thorough evidence of this most intrinsic vulnerability of our global civilization. This virus has and will continue to ravage and destroy our civilization and expose its misdirection and failings. But it will also give us the opportunity to realign and redefine ‘progress’, not simply in terms of gross industrial and technological output, but in terms of civilization’s ability to overcome hostility to achieve an egalitarian form of social, physical and economic safety for all.

A post-virus world will need to be a more cooperative and less hostile place. It will have to reconsider the utility of modern conflict, nuclear stockpiles and infructuous wealth to refocus on a global agenda that ensures the economic prosperity and well-being of all and not some, and the preservation of current and future generations linked inextricably to the preservation of planet earth as our home.

In our evolutionary journey as a civilization, we have acquired misdirected ideas of progress that are plagued with inequality, excess, individualism, aggression and hostility to outsiders. However, as humans we retain our ability to learn from our failings, and define and seek a better future in light of such failings, by way of our most inherent qualities of cooperation and intelligence. It is essential, for the survival and prosperity of our civilization and those subsequent, that as we overcome this virus, retain our humility and employ our most valued ability to learn from our failures, rather than to return to them.

The writer is a lawyer.