I am not suggesting that viruses, for example, think about what they are doing, or that they might deserve any of the diplomatic protocols extraterrestrials have developed for the planets they visit. But I am saying there is a logic, if you like, that governs the totality of life on earth, and human history has been much more significantly shaped by that logic than by any of the stories we have told ourselves about who we are and what we’re up to. In what comes next we will need to be honest about this fact, and never again let it slip too far from our conscious minds.
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Our human exceptionalism has been, over these past centuries, the blunt and unwieldy pitchfork with which we sought to drive nature out. But as Horace warned us, it will always find its way back. At just this moment, when we had almost taken to using the secondary and recent sense of “viral” as if it were the primary and original one, a real virus came roaring back into history. We created a small phenomenal world for ourselves, with our memes and streams and conference calls. And now—the unfathomable irony—that phenomenal world is turning out to be the last desperate repair of the human,1 within a vastly greater and truer natural world that the human had nearly, but not quite, succeeded in screening out.
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- 1. Enough about microscopic life; I would like to wrap things up here with a few words about the furtive yet on occasion perfectly visible pangolin. In our ignorance of nature, we are ill-positioned to consider with suitable wonder how strange it is that human history can still be transformed overnight not just by viruses or bacteria but by the most rare of midsize mammals. In a world in which domestic livestock vastly outweigh all animal wildlife combined—that is, if you put all the cattle on one side of a scale, and all the elephants, wolverines, pangolins and so on on the other, it would be like weighing a boulder against a pea—it is remarkable indeed that such “exotic” species as bats, civets, chimpanzees and pangolins should continue to play such an outsize role in public health, and thus in human history. In the Politics Aristotle describes human relations with other animal species, including hunting, as a variety of war. By the time of Greek antiquity, in contrast with, say, the Paleolithic, it could easily have seemed that this war was more or less won. But in truth what we did was totally dominate a few varieties of animals, while still remaining open to mercenary attacks, as it were, using biological agents, from the few that still remain free.