I’ve been grasping, like you perhaps, for a way to make sense of the chaos of the last few months. And in my reflection, a thought occurred to me. Over the last few months, we’ve been humbled. As societies, as nations, as cities, as families. As a human race.

I think that the great lesson of this pandemic is — or at least should be, if we can learn it — humility. Hasn’t Coronavirus been, first and foremost, a humbling experience? We tend to imagine, unquestioningly, especially in these days of demagogues and despots, we’re “great” and strong and mighty. Really? Is that what we are? Then how is it that something so tiny as a little virus…growing for just a few weeks…brought our whole magnificent civilization to a standstill? We must be much less of a big deal than we imagine, I think. And maybe all that macho stuff…it’s the wrong direction to go in the first place, because it’s how we got here, in this mess of a decade, to begin with.

So. Humility. One day, I think, we thought ourselves as something a shining globe-spanning civilization of sleek skyscrapers and gleaming machinery, all steel and light, muscle and might. And then…think for a moment of how suddenly life changed. Snap! Like that. Here we are now. Wondering about our real place in the universe a little bit. Or at least discovering that it’s not what we thought it was, just a few short weeks ago. How many strange — in fact, impossible — things have happened between now and then — before and after Coronavirus?

The animals came back to inhabit the world — forgetting, after just a few weeks, that we were there anymore all. How funny, how beautiful — how sad. We draw neat dividing lines between us and them. These are our places and spaces; here are yours. The zoo, the night, the wild. Not so these last few days and weeks. The fish swim in the canals where the boats don’t go. The animals sun themselves in the parks that used to be ours alone. There’s a strange kind of warmth in that, no? Humility. We learned, perhaps, that this earth doesn’t belong only to us — or at least not in the ways that we divide and cleave it.

Then there was the morning my aunt called me up and said: “Do you know that you can see a blue sky in Delhi?” Her voice was astonished, marveling. It was impossible! How long had it been since smog hadn’t covered the sky? Since the air was sweet? And yet here it was. Just like that. In that, too, we learned the resilience and tenacity of nature. Just a few days without us — a few short days. And the world returned to a different rhythm. It moved in an ancient way. It began to heal itself that fast, as if we’d never been there at all. Isn’t that, too, strangely beautiful?

But also scary. You’d be forgiven if all that didn’t make you a little anxious. A little more anxious, anyways. How disposable are we, really? How…transient? What the? Just a few weeks…and everyone else on the planet, from the foxes to the fish to the trees to the clouds says, “Hey guys!!! Remember those humans? LOL — my God, were they arrogant!! Selfish, cruel! They hogged everything!! Right down to the land itself. Phew, isn’t it so much nicer now that they’re gone?!! Woohoo!!”

I can’t help but think that…they’re right. Forgive me — grandpa mode is on for a moment.

What does it say about our “economy” that, well…the whole planet…seems to come out of hiding…back to life…the moment…it stops? What does it say about our societies that it was different and striking when people stopped to appreciate doctors and nurses…or even just each other, from their balconies…for even a moment, at last? What does it say about our culture and politics that the only way we can really imagine living is in opposition to…everything else on planet earth…including each other…because, well, apparently “money” is something we just can’t seem to give each other, let alone trees and rivers and animals? What the? It says that we live in a kind of predatory, ruthless, careless, and maybe even thoughtless kind of way.

Think how an alien species might see us. Here’s a group of beings who are so busy bickering with each other, they can’t even take care of their home. They can’t care for the little ones — the birds, the fish, the insects — or the old ones, the rivers, forests, reefs — or the big ones, the mountains and skies. I’d wager they’d say that we’re a species without respect. Without wisdom. Without self-understanding, maturity, insight. Without a clue, really, about what matters. But they need to grow up fast, because this pandemic is just one of many, many catastrophes — from climate change to ecological collapse to economic stagnation — that are arriving sure, deadly, and swift.

And so, maybe smiling wickedly, they’d say we need to be humbled.

How did we get here? I often think how aboriginal peoples the globe over have always thought that dividing up the earth into property made about as much sense as trying to teach a fish to wear trousers. See how the animals just calmly walked back into those parks? Who was right?

How we got here, in my estimation, was that a way of thinking set in amongst us, long ago. It’s gone by many names. Slavery. Capitalism. Empire. The logic has always been the same, though. We walking apes — we are supreme. Everything belongs to us. And even among us walking apes, some are the strong — whose rightful place in time and being is to exploit the weak. From the animals and the plants to each other, the rule is the weak deserve to perish.

I think that you can summarize the first few brutal, stupid, and pained millennia of human civilization up into those few sentences. Like this: believing fervently in the supremacist logic above, the tribes of walking apes who imagined themselves the strong and supreme soon enough went out and enslaved and tortured and destroyed whole others who they despised as the weak. You know who I’m talking about, and here we should all hang our heads in shame, because it was our forefathers, as Americans, as Anglos, who built an international slave trade. Don’t think for a moment, though, I’m just speaking about “the past.”

How much has really changed? Think about what “the global economy” really is for a moment. We, the rich West, pay poor nations as little as we possibly can — and that’s after having destroyed and enslaved them for generations. American economists think it’s a wonderful thing that we finally pay the Chinese. I think any sane person should reflect for a moment and ask why we imagine getting away with the least fair arrangement possible makes any kind of moral or ethical sense. Or even social sense. Because when we in the rich West pay those poor people as little as possible, as little as we can get away with, to do our labour for us, do you know what the result is? That they’re too poor to afford societies with things like healthcare, sanitation, clean water, decent food. And guess what the consequence of that is? Pandemics — which come back with a vengeance upon us, too.

Our world is still built on ancient forms of supremacy, which are barely disguised, yet still very much with us. They’re not always just racism — but the deeper belief that I can and should exploit you, pay you pennies on the dollar, work you to the bone, not treat you as an equal. We in rich countries do it to poor countries, believing ourselves moral — and we do it to nature, too, which we still treat exactly like a slave, working it to the death, with zero protection, recompense, dignity, or humanity.

So the kind of humility I think that we need most — what you might call global humility, historic humility — that isn’t really with us yet. The limits of our humility so far, even amidst this pandemic, still stop at our national borders, at our tribes. That is just what the nationalists want, of course — and in that way, we are playing into their hands by not recognizing one of the most fundamental lessons of Coronavirus is the need for a much, much fairer world. We are only as strong as our weakest link now.

Remember how I said that human arrogance could be distilled into this age-old way of thinking, that the strong deserved to exploit, abuse, and possess the weak? Ah — the idea that we are only as strong as our weakest link is precisely the opposite, isn’t it?

Think about us, for a second. What are we? We’re tiny, desperate, lost things, on a mote of dust, spinning through the endless darkness. One thing I know from staying up all night every night — the light can kill me — which always makes me smile is that at night, we’re all exactly the same. Either we’re clinging to someone we love — or we’re aching to.

What are the three conditions that make us human? Not just mortality — but our terrible knowledge of it. Not just our loneliness — but our strange and special loneliness, as self-aware beings. And the ignorance, which, added to loneliness, creates what Camus called absurdity: we’re aware, self-conscious, but as far as we look, there are no answers. None. Why are we here? Who made us? What are we made of? Where did we come from, and where will we go?

We ask the universe. It answers with a deafening silence. Is there anything more terrifying than just being alive? There isn’t. Just being you and me is the most frightening and desperate and wretched thing of all.

In that precise instant, that recognition, lies the birth of the true gift of the human being. The capacities for empathy, love, truth, grace, wisdom — they all begin there. Everything that makes us noble ignites in that spark of terrible, endless pain. There is nothing — nothing — more painful in this universe than being us. And so every life deserves a certain set of things: dignity, meaning, safety, all so that it can express all that, and thus realize itself. Do you see how far we’ve come from simpler forms of humility — to the most complex kind of all, the one that we need, yet can’t quite seem to accept, because the pain is too much to bear?

So maybe it’s no surprise that when I look at us, I see a species that’s lived in avoidance of the simplest facts about itself. In a kind of deep denial of its own mortality, ignorance, and fear. Not just with the fundamentalist messes which organized religions became — but later with our newer forms of worship and devotion. We tried to fill the holes in our soul with stuff. Thanks, capitalism. It seduced us by promising that at least if there weren’t answers to the great questions — then we could put off their anxieties for a whole lifetime. As long as you had more stuff than the next person — money, houses, cars, stocks — you didn’t need to worry, really, about anything bigger. The only point of life was consumption, acquisition, profit — in order to acquire status, which was the symbolic slaying of the next guy, weaker than you. Hey, at least you weren’t doing it with a spear, right?

But how empty and shallow all that seems right about now — this foolish game of symbolic mortal combat, me trying and make myself feel better than you, and you feel smaller, by me having more stuff — when we’re all sitting here worried about our families and livelihoods and lives. The reason that we accepted it — and here I use the large we, we across generations, nations, time, space — is because capitalism gave us something that we crave. Power.

Not just power to billionaires. But power even for the average prole. Even the average prole could feel as if he wasn’t really in all that terrible pain. The pain of just being this tiny, lonely, lost thing, condemned to ignorance, death, futility, nothingness. Even they could soothe it all away with a big TV and a shiny new toy every now and then. And so arrogance, I think, became the hallmark of our civilization — which was, in truth, declining with age, growing feeble and old and paralytic.

The arrogant, as the ancient fables tell us, end up in a few predictable ways. They grow lazy and indolent, like the lotus eaters — who are forever drunk on nectar. Or they come too close to the sun — but their wings are made of wax. Or they simply turn to stone — and then dust. Which of those three destinies awaits us? We’re choosing, even in our inaction, that much is for sure. Some days, it feels like our civilization is turning to dust. Others, like our wings were made of wax, and we’re plunging into the sea. And still others, like the addictive pleasures of hate and likes on a screen — both cheap substitutes for love — have left us as impotent as any lotus eaters.

So I, for one, celebrate the return of a little humility. I don’t like the people we became. What does that mean? Something like this.

My puppy looks up at me. “What even are you, Snowy?!” I ask him. I ask him this a lot. He cocks his head, in that funny little way. That’s his answer. What he’s really saying is this. “What am I? What are you? When you can answer that question, then ask me. Until then, let’s only say as much as we really know. We’re here together. Neither of us really sure about much. Now, where are my treats?” I laugh. Because…

I’ve had many great teachers in my life. My dad, my first psychology professor, the econ prof who encouraged me not to give much of a damn. But among these teachers too is little Snowy. You see, he knows something vast and true and beautiful that I don’t.

He walks closer to the soil. He knows the way the seasons breathe. The earth is something he tastes with his little tongue. His tiny teeth rub against my finger, sometimes, gently, as he sleeps. And it all teaches me this. He has never learned to stop being humble. He is the littlest thing in his tiny world. Us? Me? Sometimes I’m seduced, too, by these foolish myths of human supremacy. That we are the biggest things of all, the top of the food chain, the rulers of the earth, the masters of the universe. Who else is there, after all?

And then I remember how those myths wrecked our worlds. How they caused us to enslave and war with each other for centuries. How they turned empire after empire to dust.

I think, at last, of how, one day, suddenly, the animals suddenly walked out of their hiding places, and came out to sun in the parks — as if we’d never been there at all. How many centuries had it been since they’d done that? How the fish swam in the canals again. How you could taste the sweetness of the air in Delhi. How many decades had it been?

I think of how all that arrogance that money seduced us with, made little grasping consumers and managers and busybodies of us — all that was always just a poor, threadbare defense mechanism against the terrible truth of our condition. Strong? Mighty? Powerful?

LOL. The truth is that we’re so helpless, that even for all our powers, all it took was one of the tiniest things on earth, growing for a few weeks…to upend everything we know. We’re so unremarkable that after just a few weeks, even the animals thankfully forgot all about us. We’re so small, really, that all it took was a few weeks of being locked down at home for the skies themselves to clear up.

The last few weeks have been a great, historic, global object lesson in humility. One so powerful that I think it will take us all a while to really begin to process it. But it has been trying to teach us this: the truth of who we are, and how recognizing it is so vital, if we are to be better people. More empathic, loving, grateful, gentle, wise, generous people. What other kinds of people, by the way, do you think can make a civilization capable of surviving this century?

Our place in the universe. The world. Ourselves, even. What is it, really? We should be humbler, my friends. Humility is the birth of all the gifts which make us truly human. With humility, we become a little more grateful for this strange, unwanted curse called life, so full of beauty and grace, even in all the terrible pain.

When we kneel and kiss the soil. When we know that every life holds endless possibility. When we know that we are only as strong as our weakest link. Then we are understanding our place in the universe, at last. It was never at the top, looking down, in scorn. It was always at the bottom, looking up, in wonder, in curiousity, in gentleness. Just like Snowy does, every moment of every day. Sure, he gets nervous. But guess what? He doesn’t think he owns the world. He doesn’t want to trade his treats on the stock market, and make a killing, which symbolically gives him a sense of power, a rush of ego. He just wants to kiss the soil at the park tomorrow, and laugh, at the sheer impossible joy of one more day, alive, breathing, loving, being.

I told you he was wiser than me. That, my friends, is the best definition of humility I know.

Umair

April 2020