All Must Be Safe - Apparently

I am worried that we as species are beginning to treat the world as if it were a safe digital theatre where as the supposed primary “users" must expect to gain total control over nature. Anything that gets in the way or spoils that narrative is to be suppressed.   

The Telegraph carries a story today claiming that most over 60s are continuing to don masks which six months after vaccination started is strange considering most have been double jabbed. It, the vaccine, was hailed as the Messiah coming into town, or the personal force field around your body. In January we were promised by the Vaccine Minister that once a small majority were jabbed the population would soon be experiencing intoxicating levels of freedom and that vaccine passports were certainly not the British thing.

 So it was surprising to the hear the Prime Minister announce yesterday that large venues and nightclubs would now require double jabbing (not even a PCR test will do).  The safety narrative is getting stranger and stranger. Maybe this will include churches or at the very least cathedrals. Perhaps I should get the vergers ready to receive your papers! No papers, no communion! Gosh, I wonder what St Francis would have done, or Mother Teresa, or Jesus? 

One Facebook post read in large print 'No one is safe until we are all safe.'  I have to confess that I am the sort of geek that takes a statement like this and swirls it around my head for hours. What on earth does it actually mean, medically, philosophically, theologically? Because the more I reflect on it the creepier this line appears. It has a dystopian tinge about it.

I am reminded here of CS Lewis' Abolition of Man essay. I encourage anyone who has not read it to do so. It would seem that what is being claimed by that statement is exactly what Lewis forewarned, we are trying to control the uncontrollable to a scale that is not only impossible but will fundamentally damage us. 

There is something in the Western mind that misunderstands  the Genesis mandate for 'dominion' over Creation in a mechanistic and brutalist manner.  This slant has become more ingrained as we become post-Christian. We expect the world to behave like an engine where inputs and outputs can be predicted and managed.   To paraphrase the environmentalist and author Paul Kingsnorth - we are haunted by the idea of the Machine. It’s part of our original sin. I get the sense that the early environmentalists and 1970s self-sufficiency crowd grasped this problem in a way that the new green movements do not.

Let's go back to 'that' statement. So, if people are posting 'No one is safe until we are all safe' and this roughly corresponds to Zero Covid then the necessary question is  - at what price? Complex systems in nature do not behave digitally and deliver predictably.  For instance most systems in nature can be strong armed to deliver 80% but beyond that it becomes nearly impossible to get a 100% clear result without massive energy inputs. A good analogy is the speed of light.  It might be possible one day for us as humans to travel 50-80% to c. However, the energy graph required to get to 99% is probably more than is contained within the Sun. To get 100% requires more energy than exists in the whole universe. 

Another instance of nature not “playing ball” is in farming and pesticides. When complex systems interact they produce highly (chaotic) unpredictable interactions. They are what mathematicians call non-deterministic systems. Clearly early on pesticides where driven through on the idea that they would be of great benefit. But the ecology doesn’t work like this. Soon there are a myriad of consequences which pop up even within human populations (low fertility?) The problem was that initially the agricultural industry enthused by these products imagined the land as simply a push-pull machine. Nature is not designed in this way. 

So it may be possible to control Covid19 so that it is reasonably manageable and eventually does the natural thing and becomes one of many flu-like viruses. Nevertheless this is totally different from trying at high speed to eliminate it all together - zero Covid. I suggest that the societal energy required as we attempted to such a foolish goals creep ups into the Trillions of dollars. We might as well start printing money from our inkjets.

I think what I am trying to counter against is a digital view of the world. Such world does not exist. Maybe our migration to cyberspace over the past two decades has convinced us that only a clean pain free existence is acceptable and just around our grasp. We might even believe that a species that this is what we are due, a safe world where life is totally negotiable. To me it sounds as if we have come to dislike the real world we have been given. It is too messy - too unpredictable. "Hey I didn't sign up for this when I dropped out of the birth canal!" 

Did Lewis recognise that in the worst aspects of scientism there can be a combination of both consumerism and collectivism? Collectivism envisages that human systems can industrially dominate everything. The Communists used to cry out, "In the future the Party will control the weather." To pour scorn on this was to feel the full weight of the State come upon you. How dare you question the new orthodoxy comrade! Likewise, at the other political extremity consumerism portrays a world where the customer is always right and our years is series of sunshine- like achievements. Take that it to its limits and humanity is a simply reduced to a holiday trip with exciting challenges. Death becomes the ultimate consumer inconvenience. We cannot for out lives on Planet Earth go on Trip Advisor afterwards with “I want my money back!" God I suspect does not care for such thoughts. 

In the movie Elysium (2013) the rich live in a giant space wheel about planet earth while the rest of humanity struggles in overcrowded slums. In Elysium there are no viruses or nasty bugs. Everything is disneyfied and sterile. Though every down on earth  in the film is jealous of the elites and covets a ticket to get up there, in reality what the story does not explore is the basic problem that without bugs we perish.  Nature is symbiotic with us: we need the bugs and the bugs need us. 

Chuldren who grow up in the muddy supposedly dirty outdoors are significantly less likely to get early cancers. Dirt can be good for you, builds up your natural immunity. Bugs and viruses have their place too within the human ecology, the most obvious being good stomach bacteria.  Sure, over a very long period of pharmaceutical input nastier inflictions like Polio and Measles can be managed out of our species, but these are the exceptions rather than the norm. And those changes and adaptions take time.   If we play  God with too much of nature and try to iron out all disease to the nth degree we will end up with more mess than we started with, and probably crash the economy in the process (another complex system in itself).