Friends as Enemies, Enemies as Friends: On Civilization and COVID-19

Estragon: "Let's go."
Vladimir: "We can't."
E: "Why not?"
V: "We're waiting for Godot."
E: "Ah, yes. (Pause) This is the place, isn't it?"

The play "Waiting for Godot" was written shortly after World War II.

Two homeless men waiting for a savior named Godot continue their listless exchange on a breezy roadside. They are also at a sufficient distance from the crowds.

But Godot, whom they have been waiting for, never arrives. There is no drama, no feast, just time dragging on.

It is a scene I have seen somewhere before. Yes, it is the daily life of May 2020, when we are supposedly fighting a "Third World War" against COVID-19.

Most individuals can do little more than practice self-restraint and wait. The spectacular fanfare of a "world war" cannot be heard there.

There is only an unusually drawn-out daily life, sitting in a chair at home, waiting for a savior called "the end of the pandemic."

This is not the first time. Humanity has been waiting for the end since ancient times. This seemingly pathetic and passive self-restraint and waiting is a traditional technique that humanity has been building upon for 1,000 years.

Take, for example, the plague epidemic of the 17th century. Leibniz, one of the greatest modern scientists and philosophers, wrote "Proposals for Plague Prevention" to a duke.

Since the invisible "enemy" cannot be struck directly, he argued that one must "resort to political preventive measures," and that "since suspicious substances are carried by humans, one must be wary of humans above all else." This proposal from over 300 years ago is close to that of today's experts.

Because danger lurks between people, one should not interact with others, but stay still and temporarily suspend being "human." It is rare for an "expert's" plea to be this straightforward and unconditional.

The behavior of citizens is also repeating. Consider "The Decameron" (Ten Days), which is said to be the origin of Italian prose art.

Written in the wake of the 14th-century plague, this work is set as a ten-day conversation between ten men and women who fled from Florence to the suburbs to avoid infection.

What made possible the new language that crystallized human sensibilities—grief, humor, irony, and love—was likely the flavor of the human material itself, which had nothing left to do but chat.

The ten days of "The Decameron" from nearly 700 years ago also resemble the current world. The wealthy in Tokyo quickly evacuated to Karuizawa or Hayama, and after revving their engines in traffic jams on the way, they indulged in feasts and idle talk amidst nature.

Creators driven out of studios and theaters have turned their isolation to their advantage, letting remote plays and ZOOM movies bloom. How will today's digital remote creation appear to humans, robots, or aliens in the 28th century?

Watching history go around in circles like a merry-go-round, one begins to feel that humans are tracing some immutable providence.

And I think: the virus is us, and we are the virus.

The interaction between humans and viruses, often described using metaphors of "war" and "enemies," is, upon closer inspection, a mutually dependent symbiosis.

Viruses lack cells (membranes) and behave like particles of matter that have no boundary between self and other. At the same time, however, viruses possess nucleic acids (genes such as RNA or DNA). Viruses inject these nucleic acids into a host, such as a human, and use the host's cells to replicate their genes.

They are like freeloaders who hijack a person's home and interbreed with humans to grow their family.

Humans have vast numbers of viruses living on their skin, in their hair, and even in their breath. These clouds of viruses differ from person to person, and there is even an idea that they could be used for identification.

Interestingly, it is said that internal viruses may even be useful for health, such as by maintaining the balance of gut bacteria. As a result of our interaction with viruses, it is said that about half of the human genome is derived from them. It is viruses that have reshaped humans and made us the humans we are today.

COVID-19, in particular, is "smart" and keeps humans in a state of moderate life-and-death. This is in contrast to those over-the-top ones like Ebola, which kill both the host and themselves with an excessively high mortality rate.

By not killing too much and not being killed too much, and by hurting each other in just the right way, humans and COVID-19 have built an inseparable relationship. They are like old friends who sometimes hurt each other and sometimes support each other.

Viruses are one with us. It seems that our ancient ancestors were also aware of this.

The word "immunity" originally comes from the Latin root meaning "exempt from munus (duty to others)." In contrast, "community," which shares the same suffix, is said to come from "sharing the munus."

This would mean that a community is, from the start, "a gathering of people without immunity, people who share the danger of infecting and being infected by one another."

This etymological play whispers to us that the infections created by human communities, which leap over the walls of immunity, are not a problem that can simply be brought to an end.

For this society, where viruses and humans are inextricably intertwined, exchanging, mating, and interacting, the possibility of infecting others and being infected is a fate inscribed from the very beginning.

The Japanese language also hints at this fate. It is the term "sanmitsu" (three Cs). Another meaning of sanmitsu is "in Esoteric Buddhism, the three secrets of the Buddha's body, speech, and mind. They are called 'secret' because they transcend human understanding" (Daijirin).

The sanmitsu we were taught to avoid are a cursed essence of humanity that we can neither avoid nor forget.

When we think of humans as being fundamentally one with viruses, our relationships with friends and family suddenly take on a sense of tension. The loving relationship with those close to us is also an adversarial one, pregnant with the danger of infection precisely because of that closeness.

Friends and enemies are two sides of the same coin; for both viruses and humans, to live is to hurt others and be hurt by others.

And above all, if we broaden our perspective, humans themselves are viral beings.

They multiply in massive numbers on the Earth they inhabit and spread to every corner. They extract materials from within the Earth and burn them up. They scrape the surface, mow down forests, and expand the deserts.

If we compare the Earth to a person, humans are like a violent virus that causes the Earth to run a fever, go bald, and suffer from skin irritation. Whether by chance or necessity, the size of a human relative to the Earth (approximately one in a million to ten million) is close to the size of the COVID-19 virus relative to the human body. Humans, too, are both friends and enemies of the Earth.

What we thought were enemies are actually friends, and what should be friends become enemies. COVID-19 illuminates the essence of a society that turns and shifts like a kaleidoscope.