"To break earth's sleep at all"

A thought has been circling around the outskirts of my mind and taunting me for the last few weeks: what if, for all our fear of extra-human events, the most dangerous natural hazard is really ourselves; our fellow human beings? This is, of course, not a new idea. It has been the stuff of eco-romanticism for generations; but I have in the past usually rejected it for just this reason. It seemed to me stale; overly simplistic in its dichotomy between humankind and nature, when in fact both are human concepts; to be founded more in the hangover of human mythology (hubris and nemesis; the wrath of the Old Testament Jehovah who floods the Earth) than in scientific analysis of our plight. 

But now... even given all that, a series of recent events has made me wonder whether there isn't something to it after all. And yes, this is partly about that COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis that I keep talking about. And look, I wish as much as anyone I could stop obsessing over that theory. And I recognize too that it remains unproven, and the precise pathway of how the virus came into being among us remains a mystery. But still, once admitted to consciousness as at least a possibility, I have found myself on the precipice of a paradigm shift. Up to now, I had understood the pandemic to be a tragic but fundamentally heroic story of humankind confronting a natural hazard, and having to band together to fight it... 

And while this lesson about the need for global solidarity and collective effort holds true regardless of the virus' origins, we would—if the lab hypothesis turns out to be correct—have to see ourselves in a much more complicated situation. Instead of merely fighting the forces of micro-parasitic nature; we are in part too fighting human error. COVID-19 would be recast as perhaps the greatest industrial accident in human history—the equivalent in death count of a thousand Chernobyls; of more than 300 Bhopals. We would have to confront the idea that research done to guard us against a pandemic had actually ended up causing it; and not only that, but that it had made the pandemic worse than it otherwise would have been. 

A typical zoonotic pathogen that makes the jump from animal to human, after all, is highly virulent and symptomatic, because it is not well-adapted to survival and transmission in human hosts (as we saw with SARS and MERS, the predecessor viruses that were indisputably zoonotic in origin). While this makes such viruses deadly, it also makes them easier to monitor and suppress with modern medical surveillance.  But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus had in fact been to some extent pre-adapted for human transmission through gain-of-function research, as the leading lab leak hypotheses posit, then it would have been these experiments that made it more capable of asymptomatic transmission and thus harder to detect...

Incredibly sticky ideas! Once they have well and truly wormed their way into one's brain, they are hard to dislodge.... All of which remains, I repeat, merely speculative. But it is also not the only instance before us of the likely cost of human engineering. There is the mounting cost of anthropogenic climate change; visible this summer in record heat waves, some of the highest temperatures ever recorded on earth, and what promises to be another devastating fire season. There is the opioid epidemic that has gotten even more deadly during the pandemic, due to the resulting social isolation and economic breakdown in many communities, and which I have come to understand as essentially iatrogenic in origin. 

And there is a similar story perhaps to be told about the 2001 anthrax attacks that spooked the whole country when I was a kid, coming as they did so swiftly on the heels of 9/11. If one of the ironies of the opioid epidemic is that the people who promised to save us from pain ended up creating addictions that have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths; if one of the ironies of COVID-19 may well be that the people seeking to protect us from pandemic ended up triggering it; then so too the anthrax attacks may be a case in which the people working to safeguard the public from bioweapons in fact were responsible for the worst and most frightening bioterrorism attack on U.S. soil in recent history. 

After all—as I understand it—most students of that case still believe the anthrax spores that were mailed to U.S. legislators most likely came from a U.S. research facility designed to test defenses against bioweapons. The federal investigation into the attacks eventually came to pin the blame on a single troubled American research scientist who killed himself before the case could be brought to trial (though the case against him remains fundamentally circumstantial, and subsequent reporting raised serious questions about the strength of the evidence the FBI claimed to have marshaled against him). Whatever the specifics, it seems very likely the attacks were what is known as an "inside job."

In the opening chapter of his book, Plagues and Peoples, the historian William H. McNeill depicts human life as a "precarious equilibrium between the microparisitism of disease organisms and the macroparisitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings." (emphasis added.) And I guess my point is just that, as much as our recent experience of the pandemic and other natural disasters has seemed to present a story chiefly of our struggle with microparasitic pathogens, the macroparasites of ourselves and our fellow humans have an equal if not greater part to play in these tragedies. We, more than the indifferent forces of a hostile environment, are our own problem. 

This is a theme in some literary depictions of pandemic as well. Jack London's eerily prescient story The Scarlet Plague (1912), posits a future holocaust caused by an extremely virulent pathogen that spreads across the globe in the year 2013, killing billions and depopulating the Earth (London was not far off in his demographic estimates either, predicting a global population of 8 billion by the end of the twentieth century). As the story unfolds, however, it becomes clear that the real problem was as much the macroparasitism of human beings as the microparasitism of the "scarlet plague" bacilli. London's post-apocalyptic protagonist attempts to describe to his grandchildren how people lived before it came: 

"Our food-getters were called freemen," he recounts. "This was a joke. We of the ruling classes owned all the land, all the machines, everything. These food-getters were our slaves. We took almost all the food they got, and left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and get us more food—." This depiction of capitalist relations of production from the socialist author is reminiscent of McNeill's analysis of human "macroparasitism," which is likewise founded, in his telling, on the expropriation of food from the toiling masses. As soon as human societies developed agriculture, peasant cultivators were set upon by those who had not done the labor yet claimed the proceeds. This, to McNeill, is the birth of the state.

Indeed, according to McNeill, civilization proper—in the sense of civitas, that which pertains to the city—could never have arisen were it not for the parasitic relations between the warrior class—with the means to extort by force the proceeds of farm labor—and the people of the countryside who produced it. It may be, of course, that subsequent economic relations have attained a more genuinely reciprocal form than that; that voluntary exchange has supplanted brute extortion, at least in the ideal type of market economy (even if the older methods still obtain all too often in practice). But the basic idea that human beings have as much (if not more) to fear from each other as from germs seems as true as ever. 

So what are we to do with all this? Abandon the dream of human striving? Submit ourselves to the elements and seek to return human life to a kind of hypothesized primordial stasis that almost certainly never existed? To ask, with the poetical despair of a Wilfred Owen, "O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break earth's sleep at all?" We may incline to such a mood in a moment of global catastrophe like the present. But it is also a false hope. One of the conditions of human life is one reflected in the core existentialist insight: we have no choice but to act. Our "inaction" is itself an action, and so we are agents and captains of our fate regardless of what we do. It is a responsibility we cannot escape. 

But one can derive from all of these above experiences, nonetheless, a certain healthy caution and doubt as to the efficacy and necessity of various human ameliorative schemes. One can recognize that it is always possible for the solution to be worse than the problem (which is no justification for not pursuing solutions, merely a plea for a certain epistemic humility as we do so); and one can recognize that the forces of external nature to which we often attribute so much danger can be less destructive in the end than our own interference with that nature and our attempt to bring it under control. I was reminded late last night in thinking of this post of a passage from Byron's "The Giaour," and went to retrieve it: 

Strange—that where Nature loved to trace, 

As if for Gods, a dwelling place, 

And every charm and grace hath mixed 

Within the Paradise she fixed, 

There man, enarmoured of distress, 

Should mar it into wilderness[.]