Coronavirus has put us in our homes, and the events which are unfolding throughout the world have forced many to rethink our priorities in life. It has also put into spotlight our relationship with mother nature and how life forms on the planet are interwined with each other. Given the pain felt by people in this calamity, one can only shudder to think how much pain might be coming in next decades if the climate change warnings given by scientists start being true.
As the civilization has advanced, humans have increasingly insulated themselves away from the nature. Nature has been abstracted away, just as a processor or RAM is abstracted away by the high level language to provide a powerful interface to the progammar. The layer beneath exists, but the programmar forgets about it. The abstraction provides us with faster rate of progress, but it can prove to be disastrous if we forget the fundamentals. It is like a computer programmar mistaking a monitor for the computer and getting rid of the CPU or RAM.
In the prehistoric times, man used to live in forest. There were no villages or cities. There were only forests, and man lived in the forest. He was a hunter gatherer, surviving by collecting wild plants and killing wild animals. At that time, man was very close to the nature. Today we go to a forest without paying attention to the types of trees and shrubs and sounds of birds. But, hunter gatherer societies are very aware of all the plants and species found in their forest. An anthropologist who spent a significant time with hunter gatherer tribes of Papua New Guinea recounted that in the forest there were 32 kinds of mushrooms, some edible and others poisonous. The edible and poisonous mushrooms differed very subtly in their looks and smells. The difference was very obvious to tribe members, while to the anthropologist they looked the same. Once when the tribe members were cooking mushroom, the anthroplogist expressed reservations that tribals may make a mistake. The tribals were offended.
Slowly, humans discovered agriculture, and started clearing forests for agriculture. We also started to domesticate the animals. With time, we lost touch with the forest. Forest was the entity where dangerous animals lived. If you wanted go from one town to another, you had to cross the dangerous forest. In countless ancient Indian stories, like Panchatantra, people start their journey to go to some far away town but then some interesting incident happens in the forest, like they meet a dead lion, which stupid learned people try to make alive; or they meet a wicked old lion with a golden bangle which attracts a dumb brahmin. Some stores are completely set in forest, with animals as the characters.
As humans started living in a concentration (like in villages and towns) and started interacting with animals more, there arose some problems. When there were food items at one place, there were rats, cockroaches, monkeys, flies, etc and they caused lots of bacterial and viral diseases which we had not faced till then. These problems only exacerbated as we entered industrial age, where there was even larger concnetration of humans and animals. There were bubonic plagues, and plauges caused by rats, and diseases caused by mosquitoes and lots of other diseases caused by lack of hygiene. The idea that many diseases are transmitted by various animals and insects is relatively new and for thousands of years, we were continously hammered by many diseases. Malaria, typhoid, chickpox, small pox, polio, tuberculosis, all were very common till a few decades ago.
Going through the List of epidemics is an exercise that causes fear. Some plague wiped out 1/3 of Japanese population in two years, Black Death killed 60% of European population, some epidemic killed 80% of Mexico's population, and so on. When Europeans came to Americas, native American populations were decimated by the diseases that Europeans brought to Americas. Native americans had not seen those diseases which are created when there is huge concentration of humans and animals, and they had no resistance against them.
And worse thing about these epidemics was their unpredictability. If something is predictable, we somehow make peace with it. Like with death. We know old people die, so if someone dies in old age, we just say RIP and move on. Our social structures evolve around this inevitability. But epidemics were unpredictable. They will not come for 50 years, and then suddenly they would wipe out 50% of population in 2 years.
After being battered with these plagues for thousands of years, medical science advanced enough to erradicate most of them: by discovering that hygiene matters, and by finding vaccinations for most of the diseases.
In the post industrial world, we have abstracted away nature even further. Now we don't even know where our food comes from. I don't know where was the grain that I eat was grown? Who grew it? Which cow's milk did I drink? And if you eat meat, what is the history of the animal which was killed for you?
Sometimes, good leads to bad and bad can lead to good. Success may breed hubris and failure can spur you to action. Transition from hunterer gatherer system to agriculture and then to industrial age led to surplus production which led to flowering of arts and sciences (though there is no agreement that it led to improvement in happiness of people). But it led to overcrowding of people and animals and led to severe epidemics. For thousands of years, plagues and epidemics killed lots of people in unpredictable ways till medical science advanced enough to get rid of those. That removed a lot of misery from people's lives, but may have set us up for next cycle of disasters. Our population has grown exponentially since then. It was earlier kept in check by epidemics and to some extent, by wars.
In absence of these, humans may have grown in numbers to an unsustainable level. Along with the numbers, our affluence has increased, and to reach there we have exploited the planet to unseen levels. Forest area is continually in decline, global temperatures are on rise, water levels are receding and species are getting extinct at an unprecedented rate. If there is a correction, the pain felt by us may be on a much much larger scale than the epidemics we have seen in earlier centuries.
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Increasing abstraction of nature has been reflected in our religions too. I lately read about the belief systems of various native American tribes: Sioux, Cherokee, Lakota, Navajo, Aztecs and Incas. Their belief systems revolved around nature. Mother nature is what gave them food. There were gods of rain, water, thunderstorm, and god of moon and god of sex.
In vedic religion too, there were gods of nature: Indra, Agni, Varun, Vayu etc. Vedic hymns are full of worship of these forces of nature.
But as civilization advanced, these "primitive" gods gave way to more abstract Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, and their avatars, which are on higher pedestal than the nature gods. In puranic stories, when Indra faces some unsolvable problem like encountering a powerful demon, he goes to Brahma, who redirects him to Vishnu or Shiva and they provide a solution to Indra's problem. Perhaps, moving away from nature gods to more abstract gods occurred as we moved more and more to agricultural way of life.
In abrahamic religions, god was abstracted away further. In Christianity and Islam, there is "one" god, who takes care of all beings. God is abstract in the sense that we cannot see him or feel him, we have to trust the messanger via whom he communicates. Christianity and Islam like to denigrate pagans and people of Jahiliyyah respectively who believe in multitude of (more concrete) gods.
If at all the world has been created by some sentient beings, it looks like the outcome of a large team of incompetent gods rather than a single competent god. It is like the work of a team of engineer gods which has somehow managed to get a product out of the door. It is like the CEO god's directions were misunderstood by the team of product managers which were fighting amongst themselves for influence and those product managers passed on self contradictory requirements to developers who coded up a buggy software world. Bugs found by QA were patched rather than fixed and a barely functioning product was shipped out.
Only that explains the agony through which everyone has to through from life to death.