When Viruses Loom Larger than God
I (like you, no doubt) am tired of thinking about COVID-19 already, though my browsing history might betray me. I’ll abstain from taking a side on whether COVID-19 merits the panic it has created or not—the question belongs to epidemiologists for now, handed off to historians soon after. Of greater interest to me has been watching the responses. I have the odd experience of watching reactions in three different contexts—first in Hong Kong where the virus cancelled a Bible conference I should have spoken for. Then in the Philippines where we spent the last week scrambling to move an entire college online with 12 hours warning. My city goes into complete lock-down tomorrow. And now the wave is breaking in the US where many of my friends and family live.
Suddenly the systems of the world that once seemed robust and vibrant transform themselves to chalky, brittle powder. Globalization, cross-border supply chains, a world order that had stayed largely intact for 70 years vanish and we find ourselves only a presidential decree or two from being stranded on the wrong side of a border. COVID-19 taught us that public health is now inescapably global; it also proved that individual political actors will look out only for themselves and that the entire web of global links can be unwound in mere days.
When life functions in stable, predictable ways, we delude ourselves that reality can be controlled, domesticated, put into a cage, and fed water and bread crumbs at our pleasure. Few and rare are the sicknesses that can’t be treated somehow and those belong to the statistical flukes. We — the broad average, the general public — we can expect to be “ok,” so long as we can afford the bills, refuse cigarettes, keep our weight reasonably under control, eat organic, and not fall into any statistical ditches. The comfortable, middle-class ease is our birthright—sans-deformity, disability, serious injury chronic pain or the loss of anyone in our immediate family. Surely any of these problems can be fixed.
But the absurdity of it all struck me when reading a biography of Peter the Great (1682-1725). He’s Czar of Russia—out of millions of people the one with the best access to wealth and medical care. But of Peter’s 14 children, three reached adulthood, three died in early childhood and the rest died as infants. Me? Of everyone I know in the US or the Philippines (including very distant connections), I can name exactly two families who have lost a young child.
What if COVID-19 is the story of societies unacquainted with the fragility of life—a reality humans simply managed for thousands of years? What if the horror and panic at these fatality rates is because we don’t know how to fathom a disease that can’t be simply wiped away with a round of antibiotics?
If so, that framework goes far to explain the global behavior that has been starkly irrational. None of this comes from the most reflective parts of our brains or the most noble aspects of our natures. But these extremes make sense if what we’re watching is societies coping with world-views that can no longer account for what’s happening and require a paradigm shift. Always before you could do something; or buy the answer on Amazon; or if desperate enough there was always the government. But what to do when all of these fail? When no one has a prepared answer? We lunge outward, flailing about for something—anything that seems solid enough to deliver us from this unknown.
A comparison helps me. Living in a concrete jungle known for the world’s worst traffic, I have a low-grade neurosis. I would rather jump in and out of busses, chase trains or walk my way through traffic lights—anything at all—to avoid sitting in stop-and-go traffic. I’ve even consciously admitted to myself that it might be faster to just get in a taxi and ride than my strategically unstrategic style of bus-hopping. But there’s a critical reason. Chasing busses at least lets me feel like I can do something. I’m not helpless, at the mercy of the random driver I flagged down, endlessly waiting for the sea of red brake lights to change. At least when I’m on my feet I can do something. I can pretend, anyway, that all my effort is making a difference, even if it probably isn’t.
Maybe that’s what we’re collectively doing. Maybe people are rushing out to buy enough toilet paper for months and slapping masks on faces, not because it will actually make any difference but because they desperately want to believe there’s something we can do. We need to believe that if only we can buy or plan or read some article “out-there”, we’ll be safe from COVID-19—whether that hope really makes that much sense or not.
And maybe the most helpful, truthful thing any of us could hear is that there is exactly nothing we can do. Panicking won’t make a difference; it certainly doesn’t help. Instead, we would be better humans if we came to honest terms with reality.
There are things on planet earth that no one can control. You might die from COVID-19. Or your wife or your grandfather or your child. Those things can happen to humans and have happened to humans before in the history of the world. As in most of them. Your reality up to now has been the exception, not the rule.
And flattering or not, the solutions we turn to for stability right now expose deeper insights into the worldview that was there all along. If your worldview or theology are not robust enough to incorporate COVID-19, they were never worth having to begin with. If you aren’t prepared for dying, were you ever really prepared to live?
Why, after all, were we willing to be comfortable and apathetic when the consumer supply-chains and antibiotics helped us keep everything under control? Did we not know that we were still dying? Are our own systems of mental self-regulation so brittle that a single virus can shake our world apart and send us off hoarding rolls of toilet paper to restore a sense of stasis? Does “God is our rock” sound like a mere platitude; a bromide rolling off the tongue of someone in a clerical collar because, “well, I guess that’s what those kinds of guys are supposed to say”? Has a microscopic virus you had never heard of 3 months ago somehow grown bigger than your god? And if your god can be so easily dwarfed, was he ever really a god to begin with?
I’m under no allusion that COVID-19 will change the world in any fundamental ways. The planet is already too old; the human race too predictable. Viruses come, viruses go, but the earth remains forever. In the end, COVID-19 won’t actually change many world-views at all because everything will default back to normal business just as quickly, if not more so.
So, will the people and their flaccid world-views. People will remonstrate a bit about how this or that government handled it, as if they were ever in control. They’ll even joke a bit about how we overreacted and then send COVID-19 off to its minor seat in the pandemic world hall of fame. Over the next year, we’ll gradually work through our stockpile of toilet paper and pass along the extra rubbing alcohol. And then all will return to their comfortable, entitled charade, pretending to control the world around us.
But before, during and after, the Creator will still be on the throne. And before, during, and after, the truly wise will give reflective thought to recognizing Him as the defining reality of our world. Which is what they were already doing anyway.
Because there’s a reality more life-defining and death-constraining than COVID-19. It’s the one who created it all.
“God is,” after all “the One you must fear” (Eccl 5:7).
Dr. Joel Arnold serves at the Bob Jones Memorial College, Manila, Philippines. He blogs at Rooted Thinking where this article first appeared. We republish it by permission.