It is the manner in which the marauding coronavirus has reduced us, jerked us out of our comfort zone, disabused us of illusions about who we are and about the might and the competencies of our civilization, that is now arresting our attention.
We have come around, incrementally, though not without, in so many instances, first dismissing the threat as an irritating intrusion into our comfort zone, to the chilling realization that we may be engaged in a battle not just for our lives but for our way of life. Modern civilization has been known, mostly, to throw the might of its science and its technology at threats to many of the various challenges that it has had to face. It has, up until now, been able to remain ahead in the survival ‘game’ in a game where survival, in itself, counts as a triumph. The Coronavirus, in its awesome manifestations, threatens to be a game-changer, or if not, to send one of the strongest signals in generations that our survival and the continued development of our civilization, as we envisage it, will not ever be settled by a single grand showdown with nature; it is more likely to be a protracted, even never-ending battle of attrition.
Rather than opt for embedding itself in a pre-determined corner of the globe and confining its rampaging to a limited geographic space, as preceding maladies have done, the coronavirus has chosen to make a grander global appearance. If the loss of life has already been considerable, claiming lives is not its endgame. Its motive is fear as much as it is fatality. It has come to make a mark, to rip to shreds the script of predictability by which we, as humans, live and from which we carve out our comfort zone. Coronavirus is dismantling the ‘certainties’ that are the very guidelines for our existence and it is doing so in a methodical and frightening manner.
Our other weapons in our survival game-of-attrition have been our dogged persistence, our unrelenting ability, up until now, to hold fast and to push back. It has been so with other maladies. This time around, even If our responses have not exactly been put to the sword, they are being frustrated in their accustomed treks by forces which we are nowhere near to fully comprehending and which, increasingly, are challenging our mental stamina. In the end we may survive this though it has to be said that the coronavirus has already made its point in fearful fashion.
The physical mark that the virus has inflicted up to this time aside, its ruthless penetration of our socio-cultural defences has been something to behold. In the proverbial twinkling of an eye it has targeted what is perhaps humanity’s most enduring fear, the fear of uncertainty, of not knowing what lies ahead. That aside, it has dug enormous craters on our social landscape, crucially, compelling us to set to one side such priceless socio-cultural indulgences as worshipping together, playing together, entertaining ourselves together, working together and for myriad other reasons, gathering together. It has attacked and disfigured some of the valued behavioural traits that lie at the centre of our social existence. Numbered amongst the arsenal of weapons possessed by the coronavirus and other maladies of this kind is its capacity to initiate macabre mind games, which, as numerous previous experiences have proven, are ‘weapons’ to which the human psyche remains enduringly vulnerable. Fear, not least of what lies ahead, is one of mankind’s most enduring weaknesses.
Even with its rampage still in a condition of incompleteness the coronavirus has already moved to test our capability to survive without the facility of our valued social trinkets…like the facility of watching a live sports performance, or going to the theatre, or (in the context of our own local culture) going to a bar with friends. Who knows in what macabre ways the withdrawal symptoms are manifesting themselves.
So that it is not a matter of whether or not some form of medicine will materialize but whether the interregnum between the ongoing grand ‘performance’ of the coronavirus and a cure may not spawn profoundly life-changing consequences born out of our inherent human weaknesses, not least our crippling fear of the uncertain and the unknown.
