covid-19 as an agent of progress
Crises are periods of acceleration. The reason why all of us feel so overwhelmed today is simply because time is progressing at a much faster rate than it used to.
It may seem improper for me to use the word “progress” here. After all we are going through a massive health crisis with equally massive economic, social and psychological consequences. What is so progressive about this?
Well. If we leave our anthropomorphic framework and for a moment stop thinking about ourselves and instead focus on the evolution of life in general, what looks like a regression is indeed a progression. In other words, we as humans may be regressing, but nature itself is progressing. In fact, nature never ever regresses. What seems like a step backwards always eventually turns out to be a precursor to a bigger step forwards. To see this, all we need to do is zoom out in time.
So what happens when we zoom out? We see that the entire evolutionary history is characterized by a series of dialectic progressions through differentiation and integration, an alternating sequence of creation and synthesis of dualities.
Here, the word “synthesis” is very important. Nature does not break and asymmetrically choose one side of the dualities it creates, it transcends them instead, and this transcendence step requires the dualities to stay unbroken and functioning. In other words, nature stands on the shoulders of old dualities to build entirely new, higher-level ones.
What has all this got to do with SARS-CoV-2?
Long story short, SARS-CoV-2 came out of nowhere, dealt a heavy blow to many fault lines and is now responsible for directly (or indirectly) restoring (or accelerating the formation of) the following six dualities. (Dominant sides are placed on the left. We will delve into each topic later on in the post.)
But how come a small virus do all these? It is not even alive, right? Besides, why should we care about such metaphysical interpretations?
First of all, SARS-CoV-2 too is a life form and deserves the respect that every other life form commands. True, in its inert form, it looks like a simple encapsulation of 30,000 letters, but in action, its complexity is utterly mind-boggling. (Thousands of research papers are published to date.) Remember, a tree is a seed-in-action. Life is all about information, but information itself can only be recognized when it is in action. (Same thing can be said for computer programs.) A virus is no different than a seed. It just grows within you rather than out in the open.
Secondly, SARS-CoV-2 is not sadistically killing for fun. (As far as I know, only humans do that.) Like every other living being, it just wants to replicate. Death is a collateral damage. It is currently mutating and trying to adapt itself to its new host after crossing to a new species. (Such viruses are called zoonotic viruses.) Over time, it will increase in virality and decrease in lethality, and eventually join the harmless community of human coronaviruses that have been co-evolving with us for thousands of years. (Yes, there are lots of viruses that have been co-evolving with us. In fact, some of the technologies in our bodies have direct viral origins, the most dramatic example being the placenta.)
Thirdly, SARS-CoV-2 is of course just minding its own business. The duality restorations themselves are happening because the virus is stressing our systems (biological, sociological, political, economic) to their limits and exposing all the underlying weaknesses. (Generally speaking, malfunctioning of a duality becomes immediately apparent upon a test of robustness.) To think of this crisis solely in terms of its health effects is dangerously naive, and not deriving the right lessons from a crisis of this magnitude is a massive waste. What is at stake is the survival of humanity. We need to stop being so myopic and start thinking about far future rather than the next electoral cycle.
You may say that it is still too early to think in big-picture terms. (As the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously remarked, it is still too early to draw final conclusions from the French Revolution.) But in matters of life and death it is always better to be early than late.
Before we delve into the dualities, since there is a lot of misinformation in circulation, I want to first make sure that we are on the same page with respect to a few important background items.
We will inevitably be touching some controversial topics. So now is a great time to drop the legal disclaimer:
All postings on this site, including this one, are my own and do not necessarily represent the strategies or opinions of the organizations I am affiliated with.
We Could Have Been a Lot More Prepared
In Turkey, we say earthquakes do not kill people, bad buildings do. There is a lot of wisdom in this.
Was SARS-CoV-2 an entirely unique, unanticipatable event? Did it catch everyone by surprise? Of course not. Even Bill Gates has been shouting for years that it is only a matter of time that we get hit by another big pandemic and that we are utterly unprepared for it.
Currently, we are suffering from three major bottlenecks:
Hospital Beds. This is particularly easy to solve. China built a 1,000 bed-capacity pre-fabric hospital in a month. May be you can not do it today in such a short period of time, but you definitely could have if you had thought about it well in advance.
Medical Ventilators. These machines do not require rocket science to build. We could have easily stocked hundreds of thousands in a decentralized fashion.
Trained Critical-Care Personelle. We could have pre-trained people beforehand just in case the need arises, focusing on the processes for handling severe pneumonia and assuming that such trainees will always be supervised by doctors who will manage the tricky cases.
If this is indeed a “war”, then why are we so ill-prepared for it? We routinely allocate trillions of dollars to military defense budgets. Why did we not channel a minuscule amount of that against the risk of a pandemic?
What we have is a case of bad leadership, not some kind of bad misfortune. We even had an opportunity to lay the scientific foundations for the current frantic vaccine development efforts well in advance, but missed it due to bad risk management practices. (Remember, technology can be developed in a frantic fashion, as we do during wartime, but science can not be rushed.)
The best-case scenario, as Schwartz sees it, is the one in which this vaccine development happens far too late to make a difference for the current outbreak. The real problem is that preparedness for this outbreak should have been happening for the past decade, ever since SARS. “Had we not set the SARS-vaccine-research program aside, we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus, ” he said. But, as with Ebola, government funding and pharmaceutical-industry development evaporated once the sense of emergency lifted.
James Hamblin - You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus
We Will Probably Be Unable to Stop This Pandemic
Now that the genie is out of the bottle and the outbreak has reached a pandemic status, we are very unlikely to be able to fully contain this virus. (Asymptomatic "silent spreaders" have made the job particularly hard.)
Since COVID-19 is now so widespread, within countries and around the world, the Imperial model suggests that epidemics would return within a few weeks of the restrictions being lifted. To avoid this, countries must suppress the disease each time it resurfaces, spending at least half their time in lockdown. This on-off cycle must be repeated until either the disease has worked through the population or there is a vaccine which could be months away, if one works at all.
The Economist - Paying to Stop the Pandemic
It seems like, unless the highly speculative mRNA technologies with very fast development cycles miraculously pay off, there will not be a vaccine around for at least another year or two. Remember, even if something works in the lab, the chances are it will very likely fail in the real world and not pass the necessary efficacy and toxicity tests. (The average success rate of new infectious disease medicines starting clinical trials is just 20 percent.)
If we are lucky, the virus will mutate into a more infectious but less lethal form. (It has already branched into several strains, but the mutations so far seem to be trivial.) However the structural mutations of the sort needed for such a change may render any herd immunity built up against the old version of the virus meaningless and unleash brand new waves of contagion.
There are also question marks about duration of immunity. In other words, even if we manage to develop a vaccine, it may not be a permanent solution.
OK. Now that we are in sync we can go back to the dualities.
Duality 1: Old vs Young
SARS-CoV-2 miraculously does not kill any children, except in very rare cases. We should be grateful for this. Although we do not currently have a full grasp of the underlying causal mechanisms, the general patterns of lethality are clear. One obvious correlation is between lethality and age. Risk of death increases exponentially with age.
On the other hand, if you look at who is getting most screwed by the measures taken by governments, it is disproportionally the young people.
Universities and schools got closed the first.
Many low-paying entry-level jobs (populated mostly by the young) were eliminated the first.
In times of uncertainty, people fall back on existing connections and trust networks. (In other words, those who have not had any time to build up social capital have nothing to fall back on.)
“All generations suffer during an economic crisis. But the consequences last longer for the young. Economic misery has a tendency to compound. Low wages now beget low wages later, and meagre pensions after that.” (Source)
Governments may be freely dispensing money today in order to ease the economic pain, but it will be the young who will need to pay off the accumulated government debt in the future.
So, the damage caused by the threat is mostly absorbed by the old, while the damage caused by the reaction against the threat is mostly absorbed by the young. This is clearly not sustainable, but also not that surprising since the decision makers themselves are mostly old people as well.
Prestige, wealth and power have always been concentrated in the hands of the old, but the recycling frequency of this concentration has significantly slowed down thanks to the advances in life expectancy. As our leaders are getting increasingly older, in literally all spheres of life, including academics, politics and business, our society is losing its evolutionary dynamism. This is a dangerous situation since, as technology advances and accelerates the pace of progress, we will need even more cognitive plasticity, not less.
Remember, what stands in the way of progress eventually gets wiped out. Humanity itself owes its own existence to a series of mass extinctions. Evolution is a cold-hearted ruthless bastard.
Will we be able to deal with the catastrophes waiting for us? The answer hinges on how fast we can develop the right (hard and soft) technologies.
Duality 2: Men vs Women
Countries who handled the first wave of infections in the best fashion are mostly led by women. And who are putting their lives at stake, fighting on the front lines of this outbreak? The health workers of course, the substantial majority of whom are again women. And who bears more of the burden when preschools and schools stay closed, and nannies and maids can no longer show up to work? Women of course.
SARS-CoV-2 on the other hand has a clear preference for men. (Same was true for SARS-CoV-1.) At first, everyone thought that this was due to the greater prevalence of smoking among males, but now it looks like smoking actually decreases the risk of infection. (Apparently nicotine also binds to ACE2, the same cell-membrane protein that the virus binds to in the lungs.) Some say that the gender difference could be related to differences in estrogen levels. (We are now injecting estrogen into male patients.) Others say that it could be related to the differences in ACE2 expression levels. Science is still unsettled.
In any case, what is clear is that this virus hits old men the hardest. This is a particularly interesting group since it happens to contain the substantial majority of the most powerful people on earth. Look around you. Who is running your country? Who is currently competing to run US, the most powerful country in the world? (Hint: Males over 70.) Have you ever wondered who sits on the boards of the S&P 500 companies? (80 percent male. Average age over 60.)
Modern women have some breathing room, yes. But there are glass ceilings everywhere. We have nowhere near enough feminine (empathy-driven, “mother nature” focused) thinking in our power nodes. Our world is still very much a masculine world and we are clearly suffering from this imbalance.
Duality 3: Humanity vs (Rest of the) Environment
Historically speaking we used to die a lot more often from viruses. Over time we learned how to develop vaccines and keep the outbreaks at bay, but recently, largely due to the emergence of zoonotic viruses, the frequency of outbreaks started to pick up again.
Remember, avian influenza jumped to us from birds, HIV from chimpanzees, Ebola from bats, MERS (which is also a coronavirus) from camels and SARS-CoV-2 (to the best of our knowledge) from pangolins. There are many new, potentially a lot more severe zoonotic events waiting for us in the future.
Deforestation is bringing us more in contact with wild animals. Giant industrial poultry farms are triggering avian influenza outbreaks on an annual basis. Are these really necessary in this age of quantum computers? Do we really need to systematically massacre tens of billions of animals in slaughter houses while there are so many other dietary options open to us? (I personally prefer pescatarianism which is basically vegetarianism plus seafood, dairy products and eggs. It is very easy to transition to.)
And what about the exotic animal markets around the world catering to the rich folks who want to spice up their boring lives? Remember, pangolin is an endangered animal, in fact the most illegally traded mammal in the world.
It is almost as if we brought this crisis onto ourselves. Left unchecked, our disregard for the environment and boundless appetite for indulgence is going to destroy us. In order to prevent another outbreak, we need to restrain ourselves and reduce what is called the attack surface in cyber security. In other words, we should just stay away from living beings with whom we share so much of our DNA, and therefore so much of our diseases. Thankfully, this has already started happening in the form of closures of animal markets and meat processing plants, most of whom suffer from extremely unhygienic working conditions. (Yes, meat prices are going up and there will be shortages, but meat should have never been cheap anyway.)
Duality 4: West vs East
It is easy to forget the fact that we shape our world largely after our ideas. Something as tangible as the maltreatment of environment can be directly traced back to the sharp object-subject separation promoted by the currently dominant Western worldview. We treat nature as if it is meant to serve our needs, as if it is an object, not a subject. This attitude is actually encouraged in an explicit form by all Abrahamic religions like Christianity, as in the biblical instruction “Subdue the earth and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing.” (Meanwhile, on the contrary, almost all Eastern philosophies are infused with panpsychic ideas, ascribing consciousness to the entirety of universe.)
Recent world history can basically be characterized as the rise of the West in all its aspects. This has generally played out well for a while. Technology increased both our productive (and destructive) capabilities, and we have become rich beyond belief. However, this exponential rise in living standards have come at the cost of massive externalities in the form of environmental disasters and social inequalities. Overall, our societies have become overly individualist and distrusting, our economies have become overly competitive and efficiency-oriented, and (perhaps most importantly) our worldview has become overly analytical and reductionist.
Clearly, our lopsided philosophy is not sustainable. (This will become even more evident in the next section when we discuss the global nature of the challenges waiting for us.) But how can you balance the mainstream culture? After all, cultural evolution occurs at a very high level and is not independent of the more fundamental, tangible levels of social dynamics lying underneath it. (This was one of the most important observations of Karl Marx.) Long story short, cultural influence requires political and economic influence. In other words, a major cultural shift necessitates a major power shift first.
A magnificent (and potentially very dangerous) power shift has been taking place in front of our eyes for a while. It acquired its most legible form in Donald Trump’s popular campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” and his dramatic fight against the Chinese technology company Huawei. Then SARS-CoV-2 came out of nowhere and accelerated this power shift further.
People are blaming China for all sorts of things today, most of them being quite unjust. Yes, it made some big mistakes during the first few weeks of the outbreak. But look at the situation in US today. Do you think that the world would have been better off if the outbreak had started off in US instead?
China’s centralized government (once realizing the gravity of the situation) swiftly sealed itself off from the world and took draconian social measures (that would be unimaginable in the Western world) in a very short period of time. As a result it managed to significantly slow down the virus at its source and earn the world at least 2-3 months to prepare. What did the rest of the world do during this time? Nothing. More importantly, thanks to the data shared about the structure, virality and lethality of the virus, the rest of the world never had to operate in complete darkness. This data played a vital role in the formation of initial policy decisions in the Western world.
People are angry at China today, essentially because they feel that they are bearing a disproportionate amount of the suffering. But is it really China’s fault that it has managed to bounce back in such a short period of time, that it is enjoying significant structural advantages in handling a crisis of this sort?
Cultural differences matter. It is not a coincidence that Eastern countries (China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan) have all handled the crisis well, while Western countries where people have low trust in each other and their governments are all having a hard time containing the panic and mobilizing a harmonious front against the virus.
Generally speaking, under stressful conditions centralized systems always perform better, and under relaxed conditions decentralized systems always perform better. I do not know if you have realized but the world have turned completely communist in a matter of weeks. Big corporations are begging for help, governments are postponing taxes, indiscriminately extending credit-lines to everybody, guaranteeing bank loans and even helicoptering money around. While the federal government in US is failing to establish coordination across states, China’s centralized government can at any time instantly mobilize even its tiniest capillaries.
Privacy is a huge issue in individualist Western countries. Meanwhile China is reaping the rewards of its years of investment in surveillance technologies, tracking everyone and collecting all relevant data in one place where it becomes actionable. It can instantly detect and isolate any new local outbreaks. I know, China is bad, in the sense that there is no freedom of speech there. But US is bad too. Nearly 1 out of every 100 American is in prison or jail, an incredibly high ratio by world standards. Being a superpower seems to correlate with tyrannical internal control, either in a “preventive” form (as in China) or in a “therapeutic” form (as in US).
China has become a world onto itself with its giant interconnected population and diminishing reliance on external demand to prop up its economy. Remember, US emerged as the world leader after World War II primarily because it has managed to stay away from the mayhem that ravaged everyone else. China seems to be in the same exact position today with its ability to seal itself off from the pandemic. At some point, it will no doubt think of deploying something similar to the Marshall Plan. In fact this has already started happening in some form with the high-profile deliveries of medical equipment.
The most important thing that China has demonstrated to the world is that there is an alternative way of becoming a superpower based on a radically different philosophy of governance. This is exactly what is scaring the shit out of Western leaders and what has shocked me on a personal level as well. When someone shatters your worldview and wakes you up to the dual nature of truth, it really hurts. You feel enlightened, but also duped and angry.
“The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
- Niels Bohr
China has lifted a billion people out of poverty in a spectacular growth story, and is today making colossal bets on revolutionary technologies like AI and blockchain, while US is pathetically cutting back its R&D spending. China’s super-efficient bureaucracy run by the top brains in the country in a meritocratic tradition is exhibiting a long-term planning of the kind that we desperately need, while US can no longer think beyond the next election cycle and has proven itself to be utterly incapable of leading us in global challenges like climate change.
Duality 5: Local vs Global
Thanks to the unstoppable march of globalization, the world has now become interconnected in so many different ways. Ideas quickly spread thanks to the vast social media platforms with billions of users. Viruses quickly spread thanks to vast number of flights between hundreds of cities. I mean, think about it. One person eating an exotic animal in China eventually causes the stock market in US to collapse. How amazing is that? (It is also interesting how social media is playing a non-trivial role in this drama.)
So, in some sense, globalization reinforces itself by quickly amplifying local problems to a scale that requires a global approach which in turn requires better global governance. Today we have a pandemic in our hands, but the world has completely failed to act in unison. This means that we have a lot more work to do, which of course is not a surprise to anybody. We have already seen a slow version of the same film. It was called the Climate Change Fiasco.
Remember, the West did not even move a finger while China was crumbling for two months. No pharmaceutical company was willing to develop a vaccine back then. Look how many are racing today. World’s novel drug development capacity is almost entirely concentrated in US and Europe, and vaccine manufacturing know-how is concentrated in just four companies. Should we feel lucky that Americans and Europeans are dying along with the rest of us?
Even developed countries among themselves can not agree on what actions need to be taken. Not only do the responses of each country differ, but their timings do so as well, causing the virus to slow down here and accelerate there. This lack of uniformity and synchrony implies that even China’s own declaration of victory was premature. As long as the virus is still circulating around the globe, it will eventually find its way back into every single country.
I hope wealthy nations include poorer ones in these preparations, especially by devoting more foreign aid to building up their primary health-care systems. Even the most self-interested person—or isolationist government—should agree with this by now. This pandemic has shown us that viruses don’t obey border laws and that we are all connected biologically by a network of microscopic germs, whether we like it or not. If a novel virus appears in a poor country, we want its doctors to have the ability to spot it and contain it as soon as possible.
The Economist - Bill Gates on How to Fight Future Pandemics
Of course, it is ridiculously naive to expect a global coordination in an unequal world. Developing countries with barely functional health systems and already fragile economies can not afford to take the radical actions taken by developed countries. The inequality is drastic. For instance, Italy has 41 doctors per 10,000 people while Africa has only 2. (Source) Millions will die in Africa and get probably less global media coverage than Italy alone received.
Similar coordination issues had popped up during the climate change debate. A substantial portion of the carbon dioxide stock that is causing global warming today is due to the past economic activities of the developed countries. Putting a cap on this stock literally amounts to asking the developing countries to stop developing simply because they are late in the game. Of course they can not comply, what do we expect?
Lesson is simple: If you ignore inequality, it will eventually bite you back, because everything is interconnected. We are living on the same goddamn globe, breathing the same goddamn air, drinking the same goddamn water.
Of course, there is inequality not just among the countries, but also within the countries. Poor people everywhere are a lot more likely to suffer from obesity, malnutrition, poor hygiene, air pollution and high population density, all of which increase the risk of death by Covid-19. They are also affected the most by the drastic measures taken by the governments, since they often have no savings, no safety nets, no access to proper healthcare, no private cars, no spaces to self-isolate and no jobs that can be done remotely.
Duality 6: Physical vs Digital
Do you know what is truly global, by birth? Digital businesses. (That is why they find it difficult to localize themselves and why governments find it difficult to regulate them.)
Do you know which businesses are completely unaffected by and even benefiting from the current crisis? Again, digital businesses. They effortlessly adjusted to work-from-home conditions and consumption of all things digital has skyrocketed. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook alone now account for more than 20 percent of the market capitalization of S&P 500.
We have been witnessing the rise of the digital for a while now. (A topic very dear to my heart!) This trend was best articulated by Marc Andreessen who presciently observed that software is eating the world. We are infusing information into everything we use and using more bits less atoms. Matter is getting smarter and products are getting lighter. Our entire economy is slowly being virtualized and ephemeralized.
A higher level of complexity is emerging above us, a higher level of life forms so to speak, based on silicon + light rather than carbon + water. (Silicon is the new abundant element facilitating construction and light is the new fluid environment facilitating communication.) This is the next step in the grand narrative of life which is evolving towards an enigmatic singularity. We are collectively giving birth to something whose complexity will be categorically beyond our comprehension, and just like every other birth, the process itself will be full of trauma and pain. In this particular case, it will require a social reform and a restoration of all the dualities we have been talking about.
Again, as we pointed out at the very beginning of this post, nature does not create dualities for no reason. The newly emerging one between digital businesses and physical businesses is no exception. (Think of it as the society-level version of the mind-body duality where the mind is maturing late in the game just as it matured late in the evolution of biology.) Time unfolds through the dynamisms unleashed by such dualities and nature progresses to higher level complexities by synthesizing these dualities in a dialectical fashion. (You are the synthesis of your mind and body.)
So what exactly is SARS-CoV-2?
If you really zoom in, it is a simple string of 30,000 letters wrapped inside a spiky sphere less than 100 nanometers in diameter.
If you really zoom out, it is a dialectical agent, speeding up a traumatic birth process, inflicting pain but also pushing in the right direction.
In other words, the answer depends on how you want to look at the question.
