With Sydney already in the midst of a strict lockdown down, and all of Victoria embarking on yet another one as I write this, it is hard not to take the coronavirus a bit personally—especially as it has ruined the plans I had for my birthday!
But, not just on an individual level, the whole of humanity has been struggling to come to terms with the sheer scale of the catastrophe we find ourselves being subjected to. In the face of the sheer scale of the disruption to our very way of life it has been difficult to resist seeing it as a malevolent force, deliberately seeking to do us harm.
This means war?
Ascribing human characteristics to the virus has crept into the way we talk and write about the virus. We’ve heard our leaders talk about how clever the virus is, how it will seize on any weakness, how it wants to destroy us. We talk about it as if it has a mind, as if it can plan, almost as if it can be reasoned with.
Now, the anthropomorphisation—the assigning of human characteristics to animals, natural phenomena and the like—of forces we don’t understand or can’t control is as old as humanity itself. It’s a way of coming to terms with a Universe that can often be a scary or unfriendly place, and allows us to have a sense of understanding or control that is comforting.
Putting a face to our fears
So, it's not surprising that, as we scramble to make sense of a world suddenly turned upside down, we attribute motivations and feelings to the virus. We don't want to believe there is no reason behind the whole thing, right?
But, the fact is, the coronavirus doesn’t think, or feel, or plan. It isn’t doing what it does because it hates us, it hasn’t spread because of some genius strategy. It just does what a virus does, transmits itself from host to host through whatever open avenues there are, blindly seeking to replicate itself.
It's dangerous to treat it as if it is anything else, that it is any enemy that can fought or reasoned with. We have to understand that it will do what it does unless we remove the methods that make that possible. It was people who chose to travel without masks, or break lockdowns, and keep doing all the things we know let a virus spread that are responsible—no one else.
We have met the enemy and it is us
We need to start taking back control instead of putting in the hands of the virus—there, see how easily we fall into humanising things?—and understand only we can make it stop. It is not an unknowable force, or something to be placated, we know exactly how it works and how to stop it. We can’t make excuses about why can’t change the behaviours that let it happen in the first place by pretending it is some mysterious and powerful opponent that can’t be stopped.
The virus is not the enemy, our own nature is, and that is what we have to find a way to fight.
David Goodwin is the former Editor of The Salvation Army’s magazine,War Cry. He is also a cricket tragic, and an unapologetic geek.
David Goodwin archive of articles may be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/david-goodwin.html