“Life… finds a way” (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #11)
Hello readers!
I hope all of you are staying safe and well in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the kind of thing that reminds us forcefully that we are not in control—painfully so. I’m hoping and praying that the infection curve flattens (and we’re doing what we can in our own small ways to that end). For my own part, I’ve made myself available in the context of our church community to do whatever needs to be done—from cleaning and sanitizing the church building to delivering supplies to shut-ins or quarantine cases. I encourage you to consider how you can do likewise if you’re young and healthy, though of course with every precaution. Wash your hands, wear a mask to help, etc. If you’re looking for input on what any local community (but especially churches) I strongly commend to you this guide.
Okay, time for the obligatory bits! I’m Chris Krycho and this is Across the Sundering Seas, a mostly-weekly newsletter about the things I’ve been reading and thinking about. You can always unsubscribe any time, but I hope you find these thoughts provocative and interesting!
Last week I said I’d be back this week with thoughts on Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, but after wrapping up my read-through of Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines I desperately needed something purely fun. Eisenstein’s tome is delightful—it genuinely goes under the bucket of fun reading for me—but the next book on our Winning Slowly Season 8 reading list is Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, and I felt quite keenly the need for good sci-fi to counter the terrible sci-fi that was Kurzweil. (Yeah.)
Two quotes from the book have already caught my attention (and rewarded our plan to read this as part of this season of Winning Slowly).
The first is on the march of technology forward—a sentiment Kurzweil would have affirmed loudly:
But now, if dinosaurs could be cloned—why, Grant’s field of study was going to change instantly. The paleontological study of dinosaurs was finished. The whole enterprise—the museum halls with their giant skeletons and flocks of echoing schoolchildren, the university laboratories with their bone trays, the research papers, the journals—all of it was going to end.
“You don’t seem upset,” Malcolm said.
Grant shook his head. “It’s been discussed, in the field. Many people imagined it was coming. But not so soon.”
“Story of our species,” Malcolm said, laughing. “Everybody knows it’s coming, but not so soon.”
—Jurassic Park, p. 94
Once a technological door is opened, we do tend to rush through it, and at the most breakneck pace. Every once in a while, occasionally, we recognize the dangers and show restraint. But in general, we go so fast that we surprise ourselves with how far we’ve come in such a short time.
(There’s an important qualifier here about how much we haven’t done this over the past few decades outside the question “How can we monetize outrage on the internet?”—both for good and for ill. For good in that we haven’t introduced massive genetically-engineered biohazards into the environment [aside from some of our more stupid industrial farming practices, which deserve an aside of their own], for ill in that many of best minds have been wasted on ad tech. Even inasmuch as I find LinkedIn to be far healthier an organization than most of the big tech companies—not least because ads are only one of our businesses, and because we are therefore free to do better on these fronts—the question of the importance and value of this set of technological investments vs. others all these minds could be set to remains.)
The second quote from the book is one that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie, because it’s (rightly) one of the two most famous lines (both delivered by Jeff Goldblum!):
“…the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.” Malcolm shook his head: “I don’t mean to be philosophical, but there it is.”
—Jurassic Park, p. 179
There is a tendency among late-modern people to think we control the world. We treat everything as a problem to be solved with technology. This is, in many ways, the root of the bit highlighted in that first quote: we create new technologies to solve any problem we confront—even when those problems themselves are technologically mediated or even technologically-created. Particularly with the background of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, I’m reminded—dare I say, we’re reminded—that we just don’t have that kind of control, though. Viruses may not be “alive” in a strict sense of the word (though viruses themselves provoke many a debate in just this area) but they are remarkably adaptable, and they’re not things we can predict or control. Though we could in principle engineer viruses as weapons, it’s for good reason that (whatever research has undoubtedly gone on in this area) no one has released such a thing into the world. “Life”—or viral replication—“finds a way” and that way substantially exceeds our grasp.
There may come a point in the future when our ability to respond to the adapatability of viruses grows dramatically, but I find it doubtful that we will ever have the total control over living and life-adjacent processes that many a utopian futurist supposes. Even Kurzweil, that rosiest-eyed of optimists, recognized that his computationally-ascendant future is likely to have its own varieties of viruses, themselves as hard or harder to deal with that anything we have faced so far. We want control, but all our aims at control introduce their own complications to the system. Ian Malcolm might have a thing or two to say about this: chaos theory and all that.
L. M. Sacasas traced this out a bit this week in one of his normally-subscriber-only issues—looking in particular at how our desire for control is a major contributor to the tendency to look for answers that suggest human agency and action as the root of our problems. If humans made a problem, we can fix it, after all… right?
To claim that this virus was engineered, I’d argue, is to take refuge again in the world of our making in which our greatest threats are either the accident or the act of malice. For these we have a category, and neither challenges our hope in the possibility of mastering nature. Accidents and malice can be addressed without tearing up the structural and ideological foundations of the modern world. In fact, we address them precisely by doubling down on knowledge, expertise, more and better technology, etc. They reinforce the need for more of the same.
…The more our world can be characterized as human-built, the more likely it is that we resort to the language of the accident.
To understand the coronavirus as an accident, then, is to save appearance for modernity. Hence my suggestion that conspiracy theories locating the origins of the virus in a Chinese lab [Chris: or, as the Chinese would have it, in an American lab: this problem of modernity is not just Western] provide a measure of cognitive refuge for those who advance them. It is not that the modern project can never be completed, it is simply that we screwed up somewhere and need to do better.
(Read the whole thing; it’s worth your time.)
The reality, though, is that this way of thinking through it is doubly wrong. First, many things happen to us that are wholly outside of human technological agency. Second, that we made a problem with technology does not imply we can fix it with technology. As much as I hope that we can make progress on dealing with climate change through aggressive investment in technology, the reality is that we cannot undo every harm we have already done, and we very likely will only be able to mitigate the future harms—not prevent them all—no matter how much technological investment we make. We are not as strong as we think we are.
That does not mean we should despair. It does mean we should embrace humility. We should be less confident in our technological society and its apparent limitlessness. We should remember that for all our prowess, we still inhabit a universe far stranger and far less well-understood than we are tempted to believe. We are small.
For COVID-19, we should of course throw every bit of technological investment we can at the problem, along with social distancing and even quarantines. But… we should also pray, and remember that we are small.