Searching for meaning behind the coronavirus? Don't!

"We are meaning-haunted creatures."

A remarkably well-phrased sentence, which I quoted in this post about a year ago.  In a less philosophical manner, and in a way that would easily appeal to students, I have often remarked in classes that we want narratives that seem to explain whatever it is that we are curious about, or even afraid of.  We have narratives that explain how the universe came about, how life was created, what happens after we die, and anything that puzzles us.

We are now in a pandemic moment.  The meaning-haunted creatures we are, well, we wonder whether there is a larger purpose behind the coronavirus.  Why is this happening, and why now?

A few days ago, an old friend forwarded me an email that had plenty to think about for "those of you trying to make sense of why nature is putting us through the current pandemic."  I disagreed with the premise in that original email; to me, there is no purpose behind this pandemic, nor is nature trying to teach us anything.  I wrote to him:

Viruses, for instance, have always terrorized humans, even when we lived a lot more respectfully of nature.  Even when we absolutely worshiped nature.   All over the world, for hundreds of years, people were afraid of the small pox, and prayed to every god and saint and mysterious forces.  Modern science eradicated small pox.  There is the HIV virus. Dengue. ... the list of deadly virsues is long, to which COVID-19 is the latest addition.

Nature is.  The cosmos is. The virus is.  They exist.  That is it.  There is no grand reason.  As this NY Times essay puts it, the current pandemic has no purpose either.

But then we are meaning-haunted creatures.  Which is why:

Many religious people see something benevolent in nature, or at least see purpose dimly grasped in the interworking of biology. But there’s something even deeper than religious optimism. There is a broader conception of nature — shared by monotheists, polytheists, Indigenous animists, and now politicians and policymakers. It is the mythopoetic view of nature. It is the universal instinct to find (or project) a plot in nature. A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective, impersonal laws. It’s a prescientific worldview, but it is also alive and well in the contemporary mind.

If only we accepted and operationalized something that is fundamental: "Nature doesn’t care about you."  But, we mostly don't.  "Against the frightening neutrality of nature, we humans marshal the powerful imagination."  And from that imagination we construct meanings.

It is all part of a Darwinian natural selection, and the struggle to continue to live.  Whether it is bacteria or viruses or spiders or fish or elephants or humans, it is a struggle to survive against the odds.  Going extinct is not wired into us, but adapting to survive is.  We humans also adapt and survive and fight one battle after another.  We Homo Sapiens have made it thus far because of remarkable brains that have made many things possible.  It has been a phenomenal run thus far.

As a naturalist, I resist the theological version of human exceptionalism, but as a philosopher, I’m inclined to recognize that nothing has intrinsic value until we humans imagine it so. Since we cannot find our species’ value objectively by looking at the neutral laws of nature, then we must just assert it. And simply affirm that the universe is more remarkable with us in it.

Nature does not care about us humans.  We humans--not tRump or the Republicans or the Chinese--want to be here, and we humans will make every effort to defeat the damn coronavirus and anything else that comes our way!