How the language of human warfare masks the true nature of the present crisis.
A leading article in ‘The Times’ of 13th April 2020 states, “Not for nothing has military language been applied to “front-line” workers in the past few weeks. They are saving their country and endangering their lives.” Indeed, much of the coverage of the coronavirus crisis uses military language. In his speech recorded after being discharged from hospital, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, said that we are, “making progress in this incredible national battle against coronavirus. A fight we never picked against an enemy we still don’t entirely understand.”
It clearly makes sense to use such language. The situation around the world has much in common with times of war: the number of deaths; brave men and women, particularly in NHS and social care, putting their own lives at risk to save others; massive disruption to the lives of the civilian population; a state of emergency; deployment of armed services. Just like in times of war, alongside the heart-breaking stories of families losing loved ones without the usual comfort of final goodbyes, there is also much talk about ‘community spirit’. Television and social media are full of creative ideas of how people can help themselves and each other to cope with the disruption to their everyday lives.
The trouble is that however appropriate such language may be, it masks an important aspect of the crisis that needs more attention than it is getting. Particularly for the long term. A clue to this was provided in another article in the same edition of ‘The Times’ – this one about ending the lockdown in UK. Google and Apple have announced co-operation “at breakneck speed” to develop an app that will work on smart phones to allow contact tracing, Their representatives are quoted as saying, “There has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems.”
Except that it isn’t “the world’s” problem – it is humanity’s. We are so used to equating ‘the world’ with ‘humanity’ that we don’t even notice the difference. But in terms of our military metaphors, it matters a great deal. Unlike all wars reflected in the language that is all around us today, this isn’t a battle for supremacy between nations of humans or the values that they stand for, this is a struggle for survival between two different species: homo sapiens and Covid-19.
Each is struggling for its niche in the ecology of life on earth.
The language of war isn’t totally inappropriate, of course. Like human warfare, struggles between species produce winners and losers – survival for the successful and extinction for those less robust. But as we have watched the daily evolution of the struggle in terms of the timelines of the numbers of tests, new cases, and deaths per day, each of the two protagonists – homo sapiens and Covid-19 – is calling on evolutionary resources that operate on a completely different timescale: different from the daily graphs, and different for each of the two of them.
Covid-19 suddenly appeared in humans in December 2019, the latest mutation of a coronavirus. It evolved in the way that biologists have understood increasingly well since Darwin first drew attention to it – natural selection by means of biological evolution. And viruses have been around for some 1.5 billion years. They are small, relatively simple organisms, and with a lifecycle measured in days, they evolve rapidly
Homo sapiens, on the other hand, has been around for only a few hundred thousand years, and being a large complex mammal with a life expectancy of 70 or 80 years, we evolve biologically very slowly. On the other hand, as evolutionary scientists such as David Sloan Wilson of Yale University and Kevin Laland of St Andrews have pointed out in recent best-selling books[i], humanity is evolving socially and culturally very rapidly indeed.
So, the two species involved in the present struggle, extremely different in terms of size and length of life, are also calling on different evolutionary resources: biological evolution versus cultural evolution. And that is the point that is being masked by the language we are using. It is hiding both an opportunity and a threat.
Our cultural evolution revolves around our adaptability and our inherent ability to learn. This is a characteristic that has been central to our species’ evolutionary success. We have developed resources such as language, written and visual media, the process of science and global communications each of which has supercharged the ability to learn that lies at the heart of what it means to be human. And there are many signs that the global scientific community is indeed working together to maximise our learning during the present crisis. That is the opportunity.
But in addition to exploiting this opportunity, we should beware of inadvertently succumbing to the threat. The threat that our military language reconnects us strongly with a more troublesome evolutionary characteristic that we have inherited – tribalism or “us versus them”.
Wouldn’t it be great if, using the ‘energy of crisis’ that is being inspired by both our present words and our actions for the common good, we could learn not only how to win the struggle against Covid-19, but how to prevent our own shadow side from holding us back?
Terry Cooke-Davies
13th April 2020
[i] This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan Wilson and
Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind by Kevin N. Laland
