Human beings are the only species on Earth that do not know how they are supposed to live. All other species have a natural environment and a natural way to sustain their form of life. While some animals have to build things to make their environment what it ought to be (as in the case of beavers building dams), there is no question of what they ought to build and how the species ought to make a living for itself. As in all environments, things can go wrong: a falling rock can break the dam, the water can become poisoned, a virus may spread. Yet when something goes wrong in the life of beavers, it is not because they have the wrong idea of how to organise their lives. Indeed, beavers cannot have the wrong idea of how they should live, since it is set by their nature.
For human beings, by contrast, the question of how we should lead our lives is always at issue, even if we try to forget that fact. We can discover the ideal conditions for other species by studying their natural way of life. But we cannot discover the best way for us to live simply by studying our present or past societies. We are the only animals – among the species known to us – who do not have a given place in nature. We have to make a home for ourselves. By the same token, we are liable to create conditions that are inimical to our own flourishing. Thus, when we are hit by a pandemic, we cannot treat it merely as a natural, unfortunate event that happens to befall our form of life. Like all animals, we can be infected for contingent reasons, but unlike other animals, we are answerable for the social causes and consequences. A pandemic inevitably raises the question of who we are as a species and how we organise our societies.
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This article appears in the 26 Aug 2020 issue of the New Statesman, The world after Covid