Covid-19, the lessons of a virus
An unprecedented situation? No doubt with regard to our most recent memory. A century ago, the Spanish flu sowed dismay with the devastation we know. A few centuries earlier, the Black Death was depopulating countries and continents in the most tragic manner. From that point of view one could say that the world, throughout its history, has been punctuated by such trials, which always carry a symbolic and existential meaning, and to which people have sought to respond with the knowledge, the ignorance and the superstitions proper to each era.
This has been widely stressed to say that, over the last few centuries, we have left the eras of ignorance and superstition to enter the lights of reason. The modern world defines itself precisely by its entry into the era of pure rationality and by its capacity to shield itself from such invasions. And that is exactly why this situation was as unforeseen as it was unforeseeable. In his address of 16 March, President Macron stressed that “the unthinkable has come to pass!”
Crowned though it is, the virus slipped on muffled feet into our everyday spaces and our consciousness, gradually taking control of our planet and our headlines. In every major crisis the question of meaning arises with force, even if, once the peak of the wave has passed, we most often rush back to our old habits.
Nimrod, or the hubris of power
So what does today’s crisis tell us? That our humanity is fragile indeed, and that is precisely why we must take care of it; and that these pretensions to power, systematically belied in the past as well, are dangerous for our humanity and our health.
Let us recall here the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel and King Nimrod’s pretension to defy God Himself by building a tower reaching up to heaven. And what, at that moment, was the weapon of that power? The fact that men spoke the same language. Which can also be read as a parable of our globalisation.
It is quite remarkable that Nimrod, in the blindness of that feeling of omnipotence which was at once personal and collective, was tried by God in the following way: the Eternal sent him what is described as a tiny mosquito (the word virus was not yet in use at the time), which entered through Nimrod’s nose and caused such inner torment and buzzing that he literally hurled himself against the walls. Omnipotence found itself at the mercy of a mosquito!
The other arguments the prophet Abraham tried to oppose to Nimrod’s hubris seem to have had little effect on him. A Qur’anic passage recounts their exchange. “God,” Abraham told him in the Qur’an, “is the One who gives life and death.” “I too can do the same,” Nimrod answered, alluding thereby, according to certain commentators, to his power to reprieve a condemned man or to order the killing of whichever subject he pleased. “God,” the prophet then said, “is the One who brings the sun from the East; bring it then from the West!” “He who did not believe was then confounded!” (Qur’an II, 259).
As for life and death, only a few months ago the prevailing discourse was that this programme now lay in the hands of our triumphant humanity and that, thanks to artificial intelligence and no doubt to Google’s “Calico” project, transhumanist immortality was, if not within our reach, at least within that of the very next generations. When it comes to changing the order of the cosmos, it is doubtless a little more complicated!
A human verticality
The technological newspeak of globalisation thus seems, in fact, to have chosen for us what our future and our kind of humanity must be. A future that many apprehend, but which we seem to accept as a fate. It is the irrepressible march of science, people think. We would have no choice!
Several voices of wisdom, like Abraham’s of old, are raised today to say that such a choice is only the result not of science or reason, but of an ideological illusion. That the world we want to bequeath to our children is that of the quest for meaning and the elevation of our consciousness, not that of a power delivered over to itself and to a few Nimrods, budding apprentice sorcerers who have allotted themselves the role of masters of globalised techno-finance.
The world will not be short in the future of ever subtler, ever craftier viruses, coming to remind us that we are on the wrong track. Science teaches us today that it took nearly 13.7 billion years and a mathematical precision beyond compare to create our humanity, and to create within it the most precious thing: its capacity to become aware of itself and to marvel at this permanent miracle, to probe its meaning and discover its harmony.
It is this same vision that lies at the heart of the great teachings of wisdom. This purpose founds our human dignity and traces our path: that of deepening, through wisdom, art, science or any other form of activity, this human consciousness, which is also a knowledge of ourselves. One thinks here of the sapiential injunction inscribed on the pediment of the temple of Apollo.
The Abrahams of our time can draw attention to our human smallness before this cosmic adventure, which reveals to us each day, in a dizzying expansion, new bundles of billions of galaxies. Faced with such crises, we must lift our eyes to the sky, but also turn them towards our interiority!
We must also know that in the face of viruses (technological, natural, or both at once, which will become ever more formidable and unexpected), the ecologies, natural and human, teach us this same principle: knowing how to cultivate as a wealth the diversity of our languages, our cultures and nature, which in this domain must be our master and inspire us. But also, by the same teaching, that we are certainly diverse, yet interdependent too, and that one way of managing our world is to build and ceaselessly strengthen bonds of solidarity.
We must seek today another verticality than that of new towers of Babel, real or mythical: a human verticality. The one by which our humanity can relearn how to join power to wisdom and science to spirituality. The survival of our humanity, in every sense of the term, is at stake.
We must understand these narratives of the sacred texts as archetypes offered to our reflection and meditation. Nimrod is the symbol of an illusory power, devoid of wisdom. “The Abraham of our being” is the possibility of overcoming that blindness and letting a new consciousness and a new conception of our humanity’s development be born in us.
That is the lesson dealt us in a thunderbolt by this most tiny mosquito of our time. Are we ready to hear it?
Faouzi Skali, 16 March 2020. University professor, anthropologist, writer, specialist in Sufism, president of the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture.
