Ancient Thebes, Greece: An epidemic disease is ravaging the city. Its king, Oedipus, has sent his brother Creon to the oracle of Delphi in search of the cause behind this plague. The oracle, channelling the god Apollo, explains that the murderer of Laius, Thebes’ king before Oedipus, is still living within the city’s borders; this is the reason behind the disease. As is later revealed, the murderer of Laius was no one other than his son, Oedipus himself.
Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, is a classic example of the hubris–nemesis structure. But it’s also a great example of the moralizing of epidemics. The plague fell on Thebes because of the moral failure of its king. Oedipus Rex opened in 429 BC, one year after the plague of Athens, which claimed the life of its political leader Pericles, as described by the historian Thucydides (who also contracted the disease but survived). It’s hard to resist the temptation to see Sophocles’ play hinting that the Athenian plague was also the result of some moral lapse. Indeed, according to Thucydides, the Athenians interpreted the disease as a sign that the god Apollo had turned against them, siding with their enemy, the Spartans, as the Peloponnesian war still raged.
Having watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal again a couple of weeks after the coronavirus had officially reached Europe, I was reminded that the Black Death of the mid-14th century was also understood through a moral narrative. In one of the film’s most striking scenes, Christians in a procession self-flagellate as a way of acknowledging their sinfulness to God and asking for forgiveness. Given this long history of seeing pandemics as the result of moral transgression, perhaps it’s no surprise that the current pandemic has been read in the same way. Memes and Instagram posts declare that the lockdown, in the words of actor Danny Trejo, feels like Mother Nature “has sent us all to our rooms to think about what we have done.” The philosopher Markus Gabriel wonders “is coronavirus an immune reaction of the planet against the human hubris, which destroys countless living beings for greed?” A narrative has developed that interprets the pandemic as nature’s revenge on humanity’s senseless destruction of the environment. But moralizing the coronavirus in this way obscures the real message we should take away from the pandemic.
Max Weber used the term “disenchantment” to describe the process of nature losing its magic, its mystery, to us after discarding the belief that natural events were pregnant with moral meaning. Weber saw this shift as the result of the Enlightenment’s rationalist streak and in particular its emphasis on science as the source of explanation of the natural world. Today we mostly see this step as a sign of progress: We have abandoned the superstitious view of nature that would have ascribed divine authorship and moral significance to any natural phenomenon we couldn’t explain, and moved on to a scientific worldview that has helped us master nature and put it to the service of our needs and desires. But Weber also saw a darker side to this development: The scientific world view allowed no space for meaning and transcendent values to be part of nature. As a result, all that was left was a rabid individualism. This line of thought was further developed by philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as Martin Heidegger. For the last, science had instrumentalized nature and reduced her to a standing reserve, an endless set of resources to be exploited for our pleasure.
Weber’s diagnosis can seem quite prescient in light of today’s environmental crisis. We see nature as meaningless, as something whose value is its usefulness to us, rather than as something of divine provenance and intrinsic value. It is tempting to see the antidote to this predicament as being a kind re-enchantment of nature. Indeed, despite the weakened state of the religious image of nature, commentators often use the language of religion, including references to the apocalypse as well as sin and hubris, in describing the consequences of climate change. Another effort to partially re-enchant nature can be seen in the Gaia hypothesis, the idea popularized by chemist James Lovelock that the Earth as a whole is a singular homeostatic system, self-regulating and self-organizing with the aim of promoting life—not unlike a living organism. The name Gaia itself references Greek mythology and the female personification of Earth, the one that according to recent memes is now sending us to our rooms to think of what we’ve done. Gabriel’s half-joking question about whether the coronavirus might in fact be the Earth’s immune reaction, a kind of anti-body to protect it against us, the real virus, also implies that the Earth itself is an organism. Hegel’s philosophy, one that Gabriel is well-steeped in, in fact suggested that nature as a whole is best understood as an organism, rather than as a dead, mechanical thing that Newtonian physics seemed to suggest it was.
But even when it comes to the current climate crisis, re-enchanting nature doesn’t seem to be necessary to understanding either the causes behind it or indeed the moral demands that we do something about it. We know what kinds of human activities cause the Earth’s climate to destabilize, and most of us understand that we have a moral duty to put a stop to this in order to prevent human and animal suffering. There’s no need for an appeal to a nature beyond that of the scientific image.
The current pandemic is no different. Seeing it as Mother Earth’s punishment for humanity’s many sins—overpopulation, deforestation, globalization, capitalism, etc.—isn’t necessary, or for that matter particularly helpful. Pandemics have been part of human history long before any of the current socio-economic structures existed. What’s more, if we choose to understand the coronavirus outbreak as the price we have to pay for these moral failures, we will miss the real lesson to be learnt here.
Going back to Sophocles’ play, the hubris committed by Oedipus isn’t just the casual murder of an old man who turns out, unbeknownst to him, to have been his father. The real hubris is Oedipus’ arrogance. Despite a dire warning from the oracle of Delphi that he was fated to murder his father and marry his mother, Oedipus believed that simply fleeing his native Corinth was enough to protect him from such calamities. Oedipus’ self-assuredness made him complicit to his terrible fate, that’s the tragedy of his situation: He brought it on himself.
If there is an analogous lesson to be learned about our collective hubris in light of the coronavirus pandemic, it lies not so much in our moral culpability to what we’ve done to nature (contributed as it might have to our predicament) but rather in our arrogance in acting as if we had nature under our control. Scientific progress has done a great job of explaining away the mystery that used to surround pandemics. It wasn’t until 1933 that the scientific community understood that it was a virus that had caused the 1918 so-called Spanish Flu. Today we understand what viruses are. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was sequenced in a matter of weeks, and this will help in the development of treatment drugs as well a vaccine that will hopefully make us immune to it. We also understand how the virus is spread and what we have to do to minimize our chances of getting infected by it. But ultimately, we cannot make ourselves immune to viruses altogether; we cannot cure ourselves of our vulnerability to nature. In that sense, we haven’t really disenchanted nature. We can’t predict all its events, and in that sense, it remains a threat to us.
What we are seeing today are healthcare systems and economies on the brink of collapse as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The human world has been operating as though nature could never truly disrupt our lives. Our overconfidence in our grasp of nature and of technology’s ability to tame her has instead revealed our exposure and fragility to natural events. The tragedy is that we had been warned, not by oracles this time, but by scientists whose prophecies, like Oedipus, we underestimated or flat out ignored. According to the scientific image of the world Weber diagnosed we live in, nature isn’t out to punish us for our moral transgressions; nature is in fact indifferent towards us. That should be just as terrifying.
Photo: Bénigne Gagneraux’s The Blind Oedipus Commending his Children to the Gods, courtesy of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden.
Alexis Papazoglou
Alexis Papazoglou (@philosgreek) writes on philosophy, current affairs, and politics. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford's philosophy department in 2018 and previously taught philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Royal Holloway, University of London. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
This is quite thoughtful. I am going to share it as an excellent example of the power of the liberal arts and sciences working together.