Covid-19 is an infectious coronavirus attacking humanity in a world-wide pandemic. Charles Eisenstein, author, essayist, and public speaker, asked a rather interesting question related to this pandemic in his March 2020 article, The Coronation. It is one deserving of consideration: “Why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity?” His argument is that other threats paralyze us, but somehow, we got jolted into action by covid-19. And the reason, according to Eisenstein, is we don’t know how to deal with other overwhelming threats. In contrast, we seem to know how to “control” the covid-19 situation. Control involves physical actions, such as social distancing, which are easier to do compared to mental actions necessary in other cases. The argument is interesting but incomplete.
For one, other threats affect specific groups (children, depressed individuals, addicts). Covid-19 is indiscriminate and affects every single person on the planet. Early on, we convinced ourselves that the virus affected mainly the elderly and a few vulnerable populations. While these populations have borne a disproportionate amount of the pain, the stats say everyone is susceptible to infection and can suffer similar consequences. The only comparable threat to covid-19 is climate change, although such a threat isn’t imminent and still too far away to matter. Covid-19 is immediate and in our face. As others have argued, it is the dress rehearsal for the bigger show to come when climate change will affect us all.
The missing ingredient in Eisenstein’s perspective is the recognition that covid-19 affects the core of what makes us human. Homo sapiens evolved as a communal group, favoring close social contact. It is why we have been so successful and literally reigning supreme. However, our strength is also our weakness. Being social makes us susceptible to diseases transmitted from individual to individual. Covid-19 is taking advantage of our evolutionary strength, the social bonding and cohesion of our species. The ruthless assault by this invisible enemy has taken many fellow citizens in agonizing deaths due to respiratory failure. While the attack is ongoing, it has also unmasked what could be humanity’s ultimate secret weapon and the basis for surviving this war: the adaptability of our social cohesion.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his book Principles of Biology in 1864. Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. He conceptualized the evolutionary process as comprising of two movements – integration and differentiation. For Spencer, the principle of integration provided the unifying dynamic keeping a differentiated population together. When integration weakens, it leads to dissolution or disappearance of the differentiated traits and of the species. Integration describes processes which become the driving force to unite, combine, and integrate parts into a whole. When there is high interactivity among the parts, it produces connected and interdependent organisms with features of social cohesion. Social cohesion refers to the glue that makes a group a group. The glue of social cohesion emphasizes the connectedness or bonds arising to make individuals in the group meaningfully related to one another. It also enhances the identification with the group, incentives and willingness to cooperate, social and economic balance, and what modulates the interactions among members. In bee, ant, and primate societies, social cohesion is the ultimate expression of the integration drive. And this is what covid-19 is leveraging to attack us—the essence of what makes us social creatures. It is also why our response is so unique.
In humans, social cohesion reaches its zenith when integration of the whole benefits the individual parts. By this I mean when the infrastructure of the society, the institutions of government and politics, provide the guidance and incentive to practice social distancing, for example. In this way, they encourage individuals to go against the grain of evolution to survive. This is the part of the story covid-19 has exposed. It has shown that this most treasured feature of humanity, its social cohesiveness, is adaptable and can be relaxed to bend to the attack we are under. Bend but not break. And in that flexibility to allow for the infectious agent to exhaust itself. What the pandemic has shown is that humanity can respond and adapt as the communal organism it is. It has been fascinating to watch and it portends a new and exciting evolutionary step in the story of humans.
