The Pandemic Awakening
No one alive today has personal experience of a global pandemic on the scale of the novel coronavirus gripping the world today. Many thinkers are sharing their perspectives on what it means, how we should respond, and how our world may change as a result. Theories abound about the pandemic as a message to change our ways— from Gaia or from God. Some believe that Gaia (Earth) wants us to stop destroying our life support systems and start living in harmony within the web of life. Others believe that God is punishing us for our “sinful ways” that mostly involve sexual behavior and reproduction. Both perspectives see an over-arching Deity trying to teach us a lesson—and operating the way humans do, through teaching, preaching, and punishing.
From a systems thinking perspective, what’s happening is what happens all the time in living systems: we are getting feedback that lets us know our systems are not working. We citizens of the Industrial Growth Society (1) have been getting similar feedback in recent years about the climate crisis in the form of catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and floods, but have been able to mostly ignore that feedback because these events are localized in impact. The COVID-19 virus is global in its reach and we are unable to ignore the feedback, (as much as some politicians and corporate CEOs would like to).
In living systems, feedback comes in two forms: negative and positive. These two words mean something quite different than normal usage. Negative feedback keeps us going within certain limits; if we go beyond those limits, we may die or suffer harm. Negative feedback keeps our body temperature within a few degrees, regulates our heartbeat and respiration, and signals us in various ways when our social behavior deviates too far from social norms in our culture. It’s called “negative” because it reduces deviation from norms that help us survive. Positive feedback, on the other hand, informs us when our habitual behaviors and responses are no longer adequate to meet changing conditions. We have to learn, change, adapt—and ultimately establish new norms to accommodate the new conditions through negative feedback again.
Positive feedback actually amplifies deviation from norms, because the system’s normal responses don’t work. The COVID-19 virus is acting as positive feedback on many levels. Because it is a “novel” virus apparently originating in an animal, humans have no built-up immunity to it—although the majority of the population are able to survive its incursion through strong immune systems able to rise to the challenge. The pandemic is in a “runaway positive feedback loop” in which the more people get sick, the more people are infected—and the virus spreads exponentially. This is the danger in positive feedback: deviation leads to more deviation, unless the system can find a response that stops or reduces the deviation (negative feedback). History has many stories of this kind of runaway feedback loops—e.g. the Black Plague, or the introduction of small pox from Europe into the New World that decimated indigenous populations who had no immunity to it. In time, we will develop “herd immunity” —in other words, adapt to the virus—but in the short term, we are being devastated by its rapid spread and death rate.
We are quickly developing systemic responses on a social level: hand-washing, “social distancing,” face masks, and other sanitation practices. But these adaptations only slow the spread; we cannot contain it. Meanwhile, these measures are severely impacting other human systems: familial, educational, medical, economic, financial, transportation, governmental and more. I don’t have to spell out the effects to anyone aware enough to be reading this essay. These social systems are frantically trying to adapt to this new perturbation, with varying degrees of success. Some may collapse altogether; others may survive in crippled form. Some may transform and become more flexible and resilient. Meanwhile, people are suffering, many from the attempts by social systems to adapt, if not from the viral illness itself.
How does this pandemic relate to other crises (positive feedback loops) we are enmeshed in today? In his NYT Op-Ed (2) and in Emergence Magazine’s podcast. “Shaking the Viral Tree,” David Quammen explains the origins of viruses and our role in their proliferation:
We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it…We must remember, when the dust settles, that nCoV-2019 was not a novel event or a misfortune that befell us. It was — it is — part of a pattern of choices that we humans are making…
And he goes on to urge:
We should not let this crisis go to waste. We should use it as an opportunity to demand from ourselves, and demand from our leaders, substantive change—real, drastic change in the way we live on this planet.
The dominant Industrial Growth Society (IGS) is like a virus itself. It is not really a living system, although it is created by living systems: humans. Like a virus, it cannot reproduce itself; it depends on its host to do that. The IGS would disappear in an instant without the life support systems of the planet providing fuel for its machines, materials for its production, dumping grounds for its wastes, and human beings to keep it functioning on all levels. Also like a virus, it spreads in ever growing circles, always needing more fuel, more materials, more places to dump its wastes, more human labor and sacrifice to keep it going. That’s why it’s called the Industrial Growth Society—it relies on endless growth, which is impossible in a finite world with finite resources to exploit. Consequently, as the IGS has spread across the planet, it has left ruined landscapes and communities, suffering and death in its wake. It has provided a false prosperity to a significant minority of humans, which serves to distract their attention from its wider and deeper destruction.
And now a physical virus has brought the IGS to a temporary halt—resulting in much fear and suffering for so many people dependent upon it for income and the basic needs that income provides. This halt has also resulted in dramatically clearing skies over big cities and the return of porpoises to the canals of Venice.
In addition to exploiting its Earthly host, the Industrial Growth Society violates other requisites for healthy systems, in that it extracts energy and material from its host without assuring the health of its host through reciprocity. It would be like the respiratory system in our bodies extracting nutrients from the digestive system and, in return, supplying only a fraction of the oxygen needed for digestion. That is why our economy is in free fall now: the IGS is set up to funnel most of the wealth and resources to a mere one percent of the subsystems that support it. Consequently, when the whole population is under siege by a novel virus, our various social systems—which should benefit the whole population—are not prepared to respond.
For example, our for-profit medical system is unprepared to provide adequate medical services to everyone who needs them—neither people infected with the virus nor those with other health challenges. Our medical system cannot even protect its own workers from infection because of inadequate supplies of personal protective equipment.
Rebecca Solnit (3) points out:
At moments of immense change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social, ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s corrupt, what matters and what doesn’t.
The impact of the virus is demonstrating so clearly that we are truly interconnected as humans all over the planet, and that if one part (subsystem) is weakened or sickened, the whole is also weakened and sickened. True, not everyone infected by the virus will die, but everyone will be impacted by the death of loved ones, coworkers, and people who have been providing essential services. Because we are so interconnected, our empathy is aroused by the suffering of those around us–and our capacity for empathy actually helps us to survive. We might think of empathy as a form of negative feedback that helps us maintain our well-being.
Living systems survive and thrive through cooperation, by guarding and nurturing the health of their subsystems and the larger systems to which they belong. If we continue to think of ourselves as separate from other individuals, communities, nations, or other living beings—and even competitive with them—humanity will sicken and die. When we poison the atmosphere with excessive carbon from burning fossil fuels, we endanger the whole living system of the planet—and this affects all life, human and non-human. Our children suffer from respiratory diseases while glaciers and ice caps melt. It’s insanity to continue on this path, yet profit for a few and denial on the part of many persist and rule the day while the common good languishes. We are prisoners of our established “norms”—and of our human capacity to ignore and block feedback. It takes a global pandemic to wake us up.
As Solnit suggests:
A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
May this global experience unite humans to seek the “common good” beyond cultural and national differences—not only among our human communities, but also within the web of life on which we utterly depend. Our human systems can self-organize around new norms that support the health of all living beings and ecosystems of Earth. May we cease fighting one another, oppressing one another, and competing for food, water, energy, and other resources. Only by functioning cooperatively as a healthy living system can humanity hope to survive the challenges of our time: pandemics, climate disruption, racism, oppression, and rampant greed—and the spiritual impoverishment that subsumes it all.
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Notes:
1. Norwegian eco-philsopher Sigmund Kwaloy originated the term Industrial Growth Society.
2. David Quammen, “We Made the Corona Virus Epidemic,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/
3. What the Coronavirus can teach us about hope,” Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, April 7, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/