In her classic work, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman shows how people who lived during the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which struck on All Saint’s Day and did particular damage to Lisbon’s many churches, considered the natural disaster to be a true manifestation of evil. Nowadays, we tend to equate evil with human cruelty and earthquakes with plate tectonics, but there are still vestiges of this 18th century way of thinking among us.
We see it in the lessons of the Presidential Cabinet’s Bible study leader who believes the COVID-19 pandemic is a divine punishment for America’s sins of godlessness, environmentalism, homosexuality, and depravity. But we also see it in the widespread urge to scapegoat Asian-Americans for what the President of the United States has repeatedly called “the Chinese Flu,” as well as the spread of conspiracy theories that hold half-a-dozen people or groups accountable for the pandemic, from the financier George Soros to the Democratic Party to 5G technology to the Chinese government to Bill Gates to the Rothschild family.
This need to find a “guilty” party is as old as the species itself, finding its origin in our species’ proclivity to see agency behind every natural phenomena. In his book, The Natural History of Religion, the philosopher David Hume wrote, “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.”
Evolutionarily speaking, this instinctual urge to imagine what caused certain phenomena has benefitted us. It allows us to detect the difference between the wind’s rustling of the grass and a predator’s stealthy movement through the plains, but even more, it allows us to see elements of the natural world as being in possession of agency — or as Daniel Dennett, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, puts it in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, we adopt the intentional stance when it comes to describing and predicting the behavior of others.
The intentional stance is the ability to treat animate objects in the world as being “agents with limited beliefs, specific desires, and enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires.” Some theorists call this the “theory of mind” — i.e., the belief that other creatures (including other humans) have a mind, which allows us to then imagine what that mind might believe about the world and what it might want, which in turn allows us to manipulate the other’s mind towards our own ends. Lying is an example of this: we imagine that the other person’s mind has a certain belief about the world, a belief we don’t want them to have for whatever reason, and so we give them false information to manipulate their belief and accomplish our own goal; but so is our relationships with our dogs: we imagine our dogs have minds that love us and are loyal to us, and so we act as if that is true.
Humans are not the only animals who adopt the intentional stance — some mother birds will pretend to have a broken wing in order to distract a predator from attacking the fledgelings in her nest; other creatures use fantastic displays to convince potential partners of their fitness and health, regardless of their actual fitness and health; dogs and monkeys will bluff others to get access to a preferred toy; etc. — but humans are the undeniable masters of it.
The entire social fabric of us naked apes comes from our expert ability to adopt the intentional stance. “We experience the world,” Dennett writes, “as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies.”
He continues, “So powerful is our innate urge to adopt the intentional stance that we have real difficulty turning it off when it is no longer appropriate.” Dennett and other researchers postulate that the religious impulse of human beings has its origins in this urge: “Much as our ancestors would have loved to predict the weather by figuring out what it wanted and what beliefs it harbored about them, it simply didn’t work.”
As the COVID-19 virus winds its way through the human species, our urge to provide it with an intentional stance remains — except now that we’re guided by an understanding of viruses as “teetering on the boundaries of what is considered life”, we’re far too sophisticated to give COVID-19 an intentional stance, thus we channel our urge towards the creation of conspiracy theories that allow us to establish some kind of power and control over what is, quite naturally, an uncontrollable situation.
The historical post mortem of the COVID-19 pandemic will surely find fault in the behaviors, decisions, and indecisions of hundreds of government officials all throughout the world, not to mention the willful ignorance of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens and the malicious intentions of dozens of self-serving capitalists and authoritarians, but it will not be able to name a single agent or group of agents as the primary cause of COVID-19, for indeed, its cause is not some evil one who wishes to do us harm, but evolution itself — the mindless, intention-less process by which the living and “the teetering on living” reproduce and survive.