Sergio Benvenuto

June 1^st, 2020

In many cultures once referred to as “primitive” it is inconceivable for someone to die a natural death.  For example, among the Jivaros of South America, even if a person is 80 years old and dies in her own bed, it will be taken for granted that she was victim of black magic and that someone wished to harm her. Hence the person responsible for the death has to be found and punished. 

It would be naïve to think that it’s merely a question of superstitious primitive beliefs: the logic of the scapegoat – seeking a human fault in everything that’s natural – applies to us hyper-industrialized moderns too.  So, among the several theories on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that are flourishing, some point a stern finger at super-industrialization: pollution, the greenhouse effect, hyperbolised urbanization, the reduction of biodiversity…  In other words, Man is the true cause of disasters, not too different from Rousseau’s arguments after the catastrophic earthquake that struck Lisbon in 1755: Nature is in itself benign. It is human beings who create the ills that sap them. Our Culture digs our grave.

Another inverse theory is that, unsurprisingly, coronavirus first appeared in China, where promiscuity between animals and humans is highest. Besides, Chinese people eat bats (but its been established that before the epidemic there were no bats on sale in Wuhan.) The spillover theory (Quammen, 2012) of viruses being passed on from one species to another is a very serious one: but it’s being used to stigmatize “those primitives” the Chinese. 

The theories that accuse human beings – always, whatever happens – as the primary cause of their own woes, follow the same logic as that of Jivaros who refuse to accept the idea of a natural death without human intervention. The only difference is that the human causes no longer concern a single individual, but human beings as a whole. Not just a man, but Man is charged with being the perpetrator of the blights afflicting humankind.

The truth is that epidemics have always existed and always will.  Simple and disappointing, but true.  Despite all of our technology, we’re still prey to nature. The black death, which annihilated half the population of Europe in the 14th century, wasn’t of course an effect of industrialization, but of an absolutely natural mutation that Darwinism has made perfectly intelligible.  Species and viruses mutate far more quickly than evolved animal species, which is why we have to find a new influenza vaccine every year: between one winter and the next the virus species will have mutated. So, today, with electronic society in full expansion, we have to rely on the same epidemic containment techniques used thousands of years ago: not having any specific medications, all we can do is isolate people from each other as much as possible.  This wasn’t done in 1918 with the “Spanish” flu because the world was still at war and the epidemic was underestimated, and the death toll was between 20 and 100 million (according to the calculation methods of the time).

Today many talk of the Anthropocene epoch, and it is true that Homo sapiens is modifying – for worse – the conditions of the planet.  I’m the last to underestimate the threats posed by pollution, by the greenhouse effect and by the reduction of biodiversity… but human destructive power shouldn’t be overestimated either. We bring about and are subject to essential events just like at the dawn of Homo sapiens: we generate in the majority of cases through coitus, our children are neotenic, they’re subject to a very long infancy, sooner or later they die, they’re occasionally mown down by epidemics...  This is the way it will always be. Blaming humans for every ill is the other side of the divinization of Man (which dates back to Pascal) that many contemporary philosophies have condemned: if one thinks that humans are ultimately as powerful as God, it will also be thought that they may possess the same evil omnipotence as Satan. But man is neither God nor Satan.

The search for a human scapegoat can take on primitive, crude, and vulgar forms in an uncultivated population and refined, philosophical, sophisticated ones among well-read minorities. But they’re both varieties of the same prejudice.

A perfect example of the coarsest form was expressed by President Trump, who immediately found “the culprit” of the Covid-19 epidemic in China, first calling the Coronavirus “the Chinese Virus”.

According to some slightly more sophisticated theories (notably, those of  Nobel prize laureate Luc Montagnier), Covid-19 is not the result of a mere Darwinian mutation among viruses, but the effect of genetic engineering.  The virus was supposedly created in Chinese laboratories, perhaps to find a vaccine against HIV, and then the biologists there lost control of it (a thesis endorsed by Trump as well).  Many find the hypothesis attractive because, in this case too, the pandemic is seen as the effect of human technology.

Some more sophisticated theories blame Man, Society, our Ideological System, and so on, as the cause of the pandemic or of its amplified impact. In particular, we have the theses upheld by the famous Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

In a series of articles, Agamben (2020a, 2020b, 2020c) first argued that the coronavirus pandemic was an invention by political power to impose a “state of exception”, a subject he has been fond of for decades (Agamben, 2005). At first it sounds like a purely denialist thesis that someone could equate to other forms of denialism that are spreading like viruses today: Holocaust denial, climate change denial, denial of the harmlessness of vaccines against childhood diseases, and so on. Few days later Agamben softened his position saying that the political powers took advantage of the pandemic to impose an authoritarian regime limiting individual freedoms.  As if political leaders greatly benefited from blocking the productive activities of their respective countries and creating an overwhelming economic crisis…

I don’t condemn as heresies all the theses that tend to scale down the actual extent of the pandemic and deny its gravity. Some say that, after all, that in many affected countries the average mortality rate during the winter and spring seasons, when the pandemic exploded, wasn’t much higher than in the same period in previous years. These are theses I am prepared to confront myself with, because they’re based on data, statistics, and probabilistic forecasting. Data can indeed be interpreted in different ways, but it’s something quite different from trying to deny the reach of the epidemic on the basis of conspiratorial theoretical premises according to which political power or capitalism manipulate and subjugate us.

Agamben’s position is the extreme pole of that whole host of opinions that consider human beings the fundamental cause of the pandemics.

It’s been stressed that the pandemic hit so many countries because capitalism gives a frenetic impulse to mobility (even to migrations, but anti-capitalists don’t mention this, because they sympathize with migrants).

The French philosopher Alain Badiou (2020), after specifying that this epidemic is nothing new or extraordinary, adds: “we know that the world market, combined with the existence of vast under-medicalised zones and the lack of global discipline when it comes to the necessary vaccinations, inevitably produces serious and devastating epidemics.”  And he goes on to say that, “the planetary diffusion of this point of origin [Wuhan]” is “borne by the capitalist world market and its reliance on rapid and incessant mobility.”  He is hinting that epidemics due to the worldwide (capitalist) market are completely different from those that spread in pre-capitalist times!  This is of course quite absurd.   I wonder what the link is between the existence of medically under-served zones (which exist of course, especially in Africa) and the origin and spread of Covid-19.  But Wuhan is by no means an under-medicalized zone (in fact, the Chinese response to the epidemic was highly effective) and the virus first spread in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the health system is quite efficient. In fact, Marxist philosophers must be evoking all of these problems (the capitalist market, poor areas…) as if reciting a litany, as a conditioned reflex, even if these problems have no clear connection with other kinds of ills we are dealing with.

It is true that many of the worst-hit areas in various countries (Lombardy, New York…) are the most mobile.  But what model of society other than capitalism do these thinkers have in mind? One with limited trade, exchanges and transportation, closed like medieval Japan?  Is this stagnation the kind of post-capitalist society they are suggesting instead of capitalism?

Badiou, like others, is evidently mixing up modernization and capitalism.  By modernization I mean the expansion of technology and the application of scientific discoveries within society, a process that has historically coincided with the development of capitalism but does not necessarily identify with the latter. I wonder whether the anti-capitalism of so many actually conceals simply a rejection of modern technological society; a somewhat regressive aspiration.

Fortunately, until now the poorest countries of Africa seem to have been hit less than rich industrialized countries (I don’t know if that will be still true when these lines are published). The epidemic hit less the African countries simply because there is less mobility. Had the opposite happened… I can almost hear the chorus of many intellectuals: Immediately they would have ranted about how this disparity in infections was an effect of capitalism, establishing a close relationship between the virus and under-development… and so on.

The limit of every ideology – therefore also of the neo-Marxist or neo-Anarchist ones I’m targeting here – is trying to force anything that happens into a predetermined framework. Of course, theories are indispensable to simplify the chaotic complexity of the world, but they always risk being a bed of Procrustes onto which reality is forced.  Some refuse to admit that reality can refute or relativize their theories and will always come up with ways to find their ideas confirmed. Many academic “critical theories” lack any critical spirit.

An epidemic, whether it was the plague, or cholera, and so on, used to be interpreted as a divine punishment for human sins. Instead today, an intellectual élite interprets an epidemic as a punishment that human beings inflict upon themselves. Many think that “Nature rebels against humans”. Nature has taken the place of God as the punisher. But for others, Homo sapiens ruin itself for the sin of having generated capitalistic societies.

In fact, in the last century a process of divinizing the human being has replaced God.  Secularization, taken for granted today, is a divinization of the human. “God is dead”, Nietzsche affirmed, "and we humans had killed him".  But the death of God leaves the place of divinity vacant, which tends to be occupied more and more by Man.  The human being wants to become what this divine being was: omnipotent. Today science and technology are the human activities that seem more than any other to promise the divine elevation of man.

But every divinization always produces, as its inevitable shadow, the antiphrasis of diabolical power.  Every God leads to the emergence of its counterpart demons. If God created the world and the world is full of evil, then there must be a counter-God somewhere. It may not be omnipotent like God, but it certainly is extremely powerful. It was in fact the counter-God who humanized Adam and Eve, tearing them away from their subdued bliss. If human beings replace God, then they can replace Satan too. Divinized human beings self-produce their own diabolization.

But how do we reconcile this process of divinization of man that seems to mark secularized (i.e. Godless) modernity with the actual contents of scientific knowledge, which instead drastically scales down the role of Homo in the universe?  Freud spoke of three fundamental narcissistic wounds inflicted on man in recent centuries: Copernicanism, Darwinism and Psychoanalysis.  Copernicus displaced the Earth from the central position of the Ptolemaic universe. Darwin shattered the belief of an essential difference between human beings and other animals. Freud himself inflicted the third narcissistic blow by saying that the Ego is not a master in its own home.

Science actually shows us the extent of our human irrelevance in the universe.  Yet science, hailed as our new divinity, is invoked as a mark of our overwhelming superiority over all other animals. So, has modernity, from Copernicus onwards, been a narcissistic debasement of the human being, or its elevation to a sort of god?

The truth is that these wounds of human narcissism posited by Freud in turn inflated human narcissism: the more human beings recognize themselves as marginal and random, the more the idea of their desperate might emerges as a form of compensation. Our admittance of irrelevance – “we live in a fair to middling planet in a marginal part of our galaxy” – becomes our pride, the compost of our arrogance: we are capable of not being anthropocentric!  “We’re the only animals who can look at the world not just from our point of view!”  But this is not true – even science is anthropocentric. This is where most of the drama of modern thought lies.

Anthropologists tell us that many primitive cultures call themselves “human beings” tout court, as if all other cultures weren’t human.  In this way, these scholars praise themselves as non-ethnocentric, in contrast to the primitive peoples they study, thus affirming obliquely an extraordinary superiority to these peoples. It’s the double bind Lévi-Strauss ran into when he said: “The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism!” But, as many believe that barbarians do of course exist, then barbarism really does exist! It is a paradox.

In actual fact, science doesn’t realize – as it’s not its job to do so – that what it knows and discovers about the universe will always be a human point of view. Objectivity, which is a great ideal, is always a relative quality: the world we know is ultimately the one we need.  Philosophical pragmatism said precisely this: that at the end of the day only that which is useful is real for human beings. But instead of being condemned as a limit of humans, as their cage, as a Platonic cave with no way out, this is extolled as the prodigious anthropocentrism of human beings.

Giorgio Agamben (2005). State of Exception. University of Chicago Press.

Giorgio Agamben (2020a). “Reflections on the Plague”, http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/reflections-on-the-plague/.

Giorgio Agamben (2020b). “Clarifications”, https://medium.com/@ddean3000/clarifications-giorgio-agamben-3f97dc7ed67c

Giorgio Agamben (2020c). “Social Distancing”. http://autonomies.org/2020/04/giorgio-agamben-social-distancing/

Alain Badiou (2020) “On the Epidemic Situation”. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4608-on-the-epidemic-situation.

David Quammen (2012) Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, W.W. Norton & Company.