Lethally corralled as we are by a virus that has so far proven more resilient, more indiscriminating, and as resurgent as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban rolled into one, it is a legit question whether there is in it a lesson to be learned, or if anything or anyone is trying to teach us something thereof.
The questions that may be asked would be even more justified if we consider that, as of today, there is no answer to the definitively political question concerning the origin of the virus. (If it wasn’t created-and-released from a lab somewhere in China or created in an America lab and planted somewhere in China— to, for instance, keeps that communist country from producing selling far more stuff to the West than the West can produce to sell them.)
So, one of the possible questions would go like, Is the Planet maybe attempting to do for itself what we have not being able to do for it, so that it can continue to be there for us? Since among the things humans do potentially harmful to the viability of the Planet unplanned, indiscriminate, and endless self-production of the species cannot be discounted, neither can Covid be discounted as a biological tool the Planet has come up with to rid itself of extra weight, as to make lighter its planetary trekking. Is the Earth thereby attempting to preserve lebensraum for itself, to spare us or to lessen the impact of global warming and the natural disasters scientifically associated with that, which are ever more frequent these days? Questions like these are obviously speculative, but not totally nonsensical, and nothing too surprising should be read in the suggestion that the Earth could be utilizing Covid as a tool for its own survival.
As it has recently come to be known by oceanographers researching the phenomenon, nature has been creating plastic-eating bugs to survive the pollution of its waters being perpetrated by humans, and that could be scientific evidence that the planet has the potential capability unto itself of mounting a self-defense and coming up with the natural means to that end as soon as a threat becomes serious enough to its survival. It is a long-known fact to science that living organisms can under adverse situations go as far as to eating the parts of themselves that stand in the way of, and which weaken and impede the healthy functioning their resolve to preserve the whole to “remain in their being,” as Spinoza was first in gaining philosophical awareness of. The human body itself is no exception to this instinct. The most important of functions of living organisms being to keep themselves alive, to achieve this they would not spare even themselves as it happens in the authophagy mode, for instance.
Why then couldn’t Covid be a manifestation of nature practicing the population control that our liberal policies refuse to admit are necessary, while at the same time bemoaning the high energy consumption, the scarcity of recourses and the foods needed to keep feeding an ever-growing world population that is the primary cause of such scarcities, relative to the energy sources that have been most preferred or prevalent in the world as to now?
Of course, it is an old understanding of philosophy that disastrous calamities like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other forms of natural events, can be regarded as efforts by Nature to maintain a necessary balance in world population. The only wrinkle in that physo-thanato explanation is that those methods of natural cleansing often bring the destruction of natural habitats, resources, and material structures that support animal life. But not viruses; or at any rate, not this virus. This virus addresses itself to humans alone, and to the woeful cats and dogs they keep too close to themselves; but any other kinds of animals that humans have not perversely managed to spoil by ostensibly turning them into a humanoid of sorts, are safe from Covid. Everything except humans gets out scot-free and remains untouched.
This fact goes a great length to bolstering the speculative claim I am making that Covid might be trying to do its part in bringing down the numbers in population growth. Covid might be trying to make the world population it will spare less vulnerable to planetary overheating. Somebody got to do something that really works about that. Maybe it will literally take a half dozen millions of lives, or some number there about, or a lot fewer than that, give or take. Nobody knows for sure.
Here it could be a valid objection to my speculative reasoning, to say, for example, that the Greek Plague, the Black Death, and the not-really-Spanish “Spanish” Flu, took place at times when, given the low numbers in the world population, it would be logical to infer the Earth was quite cool or cool enough not to resort to drastic measures of population control. However, such objection would lose some of its strength once you consider either the very specific causes, or the historical circumstances under which at least two of these outbreaks took place. Whereas the Greek and the not-Spanish “Spanish” Flu are historically related to military scenarios and to wars, what the European Black Death has in common with the Covid pandemy, apart from its possible duration, is the absence of large military activity during and throughout each of them. Except for the acrimonious spat between the US and China, instigated by Trump as a result of the latter fearing its economy losing out to the mighty resilience of the former’s economy, as indeed it is, no major war scenario was at foot at the time Covid was first detected in China.
When the above is considered, it still makes reasonably speculative sense that Covid may be trying to get it through our heads that the numbers of humans must come down to exponentially reflect the energy technologies we have been working with. While Elon Musk and others opine that the Earth is not yet overpopulated, that might be only in relative terms, not in absolute ones. In absolute terms: the energy sources the planet has been running on have already demonstrated to be insufficient and/or inadequate to sustain a forever growing world population without it having decisive weight in the depletion of natural reserves, and necessarily in the precipitation of global warming and other climatological imbalances. In relative terms: the new sources of energy that could emerge in the future and be globally deployed could make it correct to say that the planet is not overpopulated. But then, that would be when and/if.
As for any science-based indications, this docu, by David Attenborough shows how the warming of the Earth has methodically bore a correlation to the population growth almost to the dot. Yet, even as the documentarian himself provides sufficient evidence for it, he at the same time refuses to admit the negative correlation between ever-growing population, depletion of natural resources, and global warming. That makes him an example of how our liberal policies are complicit in the demise of our Home.
Therefore, enters Covid… Lockdowns, sheltering-in-place, social distancing, crowd and human traffic control, masking-mandates and above all, the vaccines supposed to be the panacea to our ills, are all measures yet to unquestionably show their worth in defeating Covid. Some people do not get the vaccine and get Covid; some people do not get the vaccine, and do not get Covid. Some people wear a mask and get Covid; some people do not wear a mask, and do not get Covid, and yet, some people do both, and still get Covid. And that kind of suggests that this virus is not going anywhere until it gets the pound of flesh that scientists would probably one day come to see as having been necessary to balancing off the world population.
As a matter of fact, vaccination against the virus has in some countries become one of the sources of the virus itself, as demonstrated by the registered failure of vaccines to protect against and to prevent its spreading. The name for this colossal failure is “boosters.” For instance, if South Korea and Israel are two examples of largely vaccinated populations where Covid has made a daunting comeback, Japan is an example of the virus receding presumably after having claimed the pound of flesh it demanded from the Japanese (only to then make a comeback with a vengeance, presumably to demand more flesh by the pounds). In either case, scientists in those places will be dumbfounded for a while, if not forever.
I am not proposing that we stop trying. Yet, if speculative reasoning is correct that Covid is attempting to teach us a quick but effective way to fix global warming by eliminating its most obvious cause, then all our attempts to destroy the virus could turn out to be self-sabotage on a massive scale. Incidentally, we still think modernity more “advanced” than Antiquity because we have found scientific and medical methods to help people live longer lives. And maybe we are, but at what price? Covid might be a teaching moment on the likely answer.
Even as the sciences and the earthly powers are presently failing us, in a world the gods have taken leave from and where God remains dead, humanity has no place to turn to. This is a lesson we are yet to learn.