Coronavirus shows that our self-destructive civilisation is fragile. But the earth may be on our side. by Michael Smith. This article argues that self-destructiveness including neo-liberalism facilitates twin scourges: plagues and environmental catastrophe (“ecocide”). In reacting, as you would expect, against ecocide Gaia, the force that regulates the earth’s environment, also attacks plagues and those that cause or facilitate them. I’m going to take you on a journey through plagues; humans’ self-destructiveness; neoliberalism as a manifestation of that self-destructiveness; how countries have performed on both Coronavirus and ecocide in ways that reflect their self-destructiveness; and how ultimately Gaia is responsible for the Coronavirus and is a warning to us to take better care of our exhausted earth. Plagues Coronavirus and plagues Coronavirus is not the first plague to bring civilisation to a standstill. But looked at from the perspective of the planet forcing a standstill is a cry for help that, rather than bringing down our civilisation, affords us the chance to reflect on our selfdestructiveness and maybe save it. Particular human civilisations – as opposed to humanity itself – assailed by plagues have not always had that chance. Historical Plagues In 430 BC during the Peloponnesian War typhoid crossed the Athenian walls as the frugal Spartans laid siege, killing two-thirds of the population of the cradle of democracy. The first appearance of the bubonic plague in 541 AD stopped the Emperor Justinian from saving the Western Roman Empire and expedited the ascent of Goths and Vandals and the so-called ‘dark ages’. In the fourteen century bubonic plague put an end to England’s feudal system with its moribund social rigidity. In 1520 the death-worshipping Aztec empire was destroyed by colonists’ smallpox. So…plagues are dangerous to the very survival of particular civilisations. Human Ecocide Human driving of species loss and climate change is self-destructive. In the last fifty years humans have damaged the earth so much that most life forms are under existential threat. Humans have wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles and threatened a million species with extinction to the point where we are facing the sixth Great Extinction. Since 1906, the global average temperature has increased by more than 1.1 degrees. A further .4 of a degree rise may put 20-30% of species at risk of extinction. Climate change generates rising seas, hurricanes, floods, droughts and desertification. Self-evidently it is self-destructive to have manufactured a future of this. It is, then, extraordinary that we are currently accelerating towards probably 3 to 4 degrees and perhaps, in places, 10 degrees centigrade of warming by the end of the century. A quarter of a billion years ago, a rich and wonderful world was annihilated in the end-Permian extinction when the world warmed the same amount, 10 degrees. It is a simple truth that most humans have not synthesised that this bears on our civilisation. We’ve known about climate change since the 1860s. We’ve really known about it since around 1988. Yet since then global emissions have risen by 50% and continue to rise, causing and threatening all this, to the point that over the last dozen years it has become a clear and overarching existential threat. Society has failed to recognise, still less control, this momentous threat. Some countries are worse than others in their approach to climate change. So…ecocide is dangerous to the very survival of the whole of human civilisation. We have discussed the dangers of plague and ecocide. But human self-destructiveness compounds the dangers of both plague and ecocide. Self-destructiveness Self-destructive societies are open to plague and ecocide Societies that are self-destructive tend to make mistakes. They open themselves to predation, to attack – to plague, to ecocide. Already-self-destructive societies are more likely to generate plague and ecocide. Societies that are underprepared, licentious, self-absorbed, intolerant, arrogant, profligate, reckless, short-termist, greedy, laissez-faire, uneducated, anti-scientific or ignorant. That, in Freudian psychoanalyticalterms, have clinched Thanatos – the death wish. Self-destructiveness. Humankind has always had a destructive side but it really lost its existential caution, and became self-destructive from, at the latest, the beginning of the twentieth century after which it fought two ‘world wars’ and entered an epoch of nuclear and now environmental threat to the continuation of the human species. But some societies and some people within those societies are particular vectors of self-destructiveness – and of plagues and ecocide. Neo-liberal self-destructiveness: Britain, the US, Brazil The most self-destructive, though of course certainly not the most evil, ethos to have arisen in the history of humanity is globalised capitalism, market-deferential laissez-faire that I shall call, denigratingly, neo-liberalism. It originated in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s USA forty years ago. It promoted capital over humans. It stopped those countries investing in their populations, including in their education. It promoted irresponsible laissez-faire. It celebrated inequality. It was a form of death worship. Aftera while society and many citizens became self-destructive. After a generation of social, environmental and cultural decay countries that had been beacons for much of the twentieth century turned to populist authoritarianism, xenophobia, racism and narcissistic leadership: the UK elected hedonistic Brexit Boris; and the USA racist, sexist Trump. A similar but accelerated process threw up proto-fascist Bolsonaro in Brazil. Self-destructive leaders and Coronavirus Boris Johnson is so self-destructive he did not even protect himself or, apparently, his heavily pregnant partner, against Coronavirus. He nearly died. His chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, who advised a lax approach to the disease, then discovered he had it and travelled and picknicked half way across England risking multiple infections in search of law-breakingisolation. Trump’s deathly instincts have helped make the US the worst mortality victim of Coronavirus. They spawned his initial denial of the disease – a “Democratic hoax” and his subsequent obsession with prematurely reopening his country. He believes Coronavirus can be cured by applying light and injecting disinfectant. On a personal level he continues to shake hands, does little to social distance, ingests insidious malaria drugs, and refuses to wear a mask. Reflecting this puerile vanity, Vice-President Pence
