Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  “I wonder if anyone is out there listening to me? No, on second thought, let’s not indulge in vain wish-making. Here in Finland, our government collapsed ten days ago, and the citizenry is also lost. The tiny number that are still surviving are no longer the citizens of any nation, but the people of the country of the dead …

  “The topic of today’s lecture is a simple one. Over the past decade of lecturing in universities all across Europe, I have never once said plainly what I will say today. It was so obvious that it was too obvious—nothing more than a zero, a point of departure, and something that couldn’t have been changed no matter what anyone did. And also, it was the destination point in my field: the history of civilization. It was the simple fact that human beings have always been animals. Nothing more than animals.

  “To be honest, I no longer really know what I should say. Or perhaps I should say instead that there is nothing left to say. By this point, it is meaningless to make funerary speeches over the sudden end at which humanity has arrived after three and a half million years. It is with heartrending emotion, however, that I find myself unable to refrain from speaking across these airwaves to which no one is listening to a deserted world that has become filled with empty, vacant houses. God is dead already. In the late nineteenth century, we killed Him with our own hands. Spreading out before me there is nothing but darkness and black emptiness—a meaningless ding an sich. The consciousness of a destroyed human is nothing, and the ancient darkness is again falling across this beautiful—but meaningless—astronomical body. Will the earth again give rise someday to highly developed intelligent life? Will it be observed and interpreted by nonhuman consciousnesses someday? How many hundreds of millions of years will it take? Or was the life span of humanity, in the period from its birth to its death, the only chance that this dark and lonely body in the heavens will ever have? Through the loss of the human race, was it just humanity that lost its only chance, or was this also the only chance for this grain of dust drifting across the great sea of the universe?

  “You’ll have to excuse me—my mind is a little confused from the fever … do forgive me, please. Ah, anyway, my vision seems to be growing blurry. I feel I am no longer able to speak logically. Eventually, probably in the next few minutes, I am going to die, so please, just let me say whatever comes to mind.

  “Truly, this is an unspeakable end for humanity. Who in the world of the twentieth century could have ever predicted that the brilliant human race—so full of life, that had been climbing up the last few stairs to a new stage of civilization—would meet with this kind of unexpected, unbelievable demise? It’s a completely meaningless end. You could say that it’s pure nonsense. There’s no dignity about it, no hope. We were not given the slightest forewarning that death itself was at the gates. While humanity was looking up toward the future, it was unexpectedly attacked at its feet. Without even time for bewilderment or panic, we all just suddenly dropped dead. How can such a thing be? How can such a stupid thing as that really be possible? Our destruction is already a fait accompli, but whatever you do and however you think about it, isn’t this … isn’t it just too sad for the human race?

  “No, shouting and lamenting over it won’t do any good at this point. And yet, just before the end, perhaps the most human thing we can do is to resist, to hold on to hope even in the face of the deep blackness facing mankind.

  “But even so, this deep blackness we face … what a hopeless deep blackness it is! And humanity has clung too tightly to human things. Already more than half a century has passed since Nietzsche wrote Human, All Too Human. Over half a century has already passed since the syphilitic genius named Friedrich Nietzsche—having adopted the idea that God was dead from the fin-de-siècle thinkers, from A.V. de L’Isle-Adam, and from Dostoyevsky’s declaration—predicted the ubermensch who with groping hands must challenge the fierce void that is itself the rugged material world into which we are born naked, with no one to help us, all alone in a bare, godless, material universe, with neither help nor rest. Though over half a century has passed, human beings, in their weakness, have held fast to themselves—in other words, we have held fast to human things, standing on the brink of the depths of the void and the ding an sich. Ultimately, we lacked the courage to face up to our own true selves—our bare forms noble though petty, everything though nothing, almighty though powerless, filled with all the cruelty of matter and all the infinite kindness of spirit. Human, all too human.

  “The love, the bittersweet romance, the seductive, sweat-scented sex, the saccharine humanism, the gossip, the pleasure, the harmless spectacles, the average days of everyday life that come rolling in like peaceful waves filled with gentle exhaustion, the beauty and honor and praise that are entirely domesticated by humanity, that tear rents in reality, never showing us even glimpses of the true terror of the world; the foolish jealousy, the vanity, the foolish quarrels, the ‘face,’ the pleasure, the hostilities of nations, the greed, the exploitation, the hatred, the superstitious racial discrimination, the mutual and groundless senses of superiority and exclusionism between peoples; the ignorance, the distrust, the fear, the self-satisfaction and conceit, the obsession with comfort, the sordid antipathy we feel toward any who excel, the unconditional optimism that comes of excessive faith in civilization—ah! There is much to praise among these human things. Even unto nature, which is fundamentally a meaningless void, we project our own kindness. The deep darkness of good-natured humans, which causes the noble things of humanity to spoil—the affection for a worn-out, grimy lifestyle, the quarrels between husbands and wives, the cronyish, bureaucratic formalism. What foolish things we humans have consumed ourselves with! Overlaying these most trivial of things with our joy and anger and sorrow and pleasure! This is … this is simply pitiable.

  “Everyone … right now, I … am crying. I am unable to stop the flow of tears. Humans—the species—should have been able to evolve into something different. This deep darkness gradually … gradually, of course … it would have been a pathetically slow walk, but … a little at a time, the signs of learning and of advance were there. At that rate, a grace period—though who would give us a grace period I don’t know—probably a grace period produced by coincidence, by one of the strands of fate that control the universe. If we could have continued for at least a thousand more years at the present rate, humanity, at long last all of humanity might have reached some higher level.

  “Everyone … everyone who is most likely … no longer here … I am crying for a species called ‘humanity’ that carried such a wellspring of untold possibility. And furthermore, as a minor scholar, I am … finally, until the very last instant, suffering from remorse for the fact that I avoided my responsibilities. I … I can’t help crying … Those for whom these tears should be offered are probably no longer here. And moreover, again, I am unable to keep from crying. Because, again, it is my responsibility as a scholar.

  “My eyes can no longer see … my chest … my heart feels like it is being squeezed …

  “But I’m still alive! Everyone, I’m, still alive! Yes, it’s a scholar’s responsibility! The reason is … at the very least … as intellectuals … we should have known the true nature and the precise meaning of the intelligent life-forms on the third planet of this solar system … of humanity. They knew … I knew … what it was. At this time, there is no justification in saying things such as ‘intellectuals are only human too.’ That simply means closing our eyes to that which our intellects unavoidably reveal to us. I’m sorry, what I mean is that to go along with the general trends, to shut our mouths … is for an intellectual a failure to perform one’s responsibility. It’s no different from watching a fire burn and telling no one, or remaining silent as you watch someone drown. Intellectuals have seen this already—Empedoklēs did, Aristotélēs did, Kant did, Newton did, Dostoyevsky did, Nietzsche did, Buddha did, and the Jainists did. If you can just be faithful to your own intellect, unavoidably, you should run into this simple tr
uth: that in facing the material world, the human race—and this is nothing to either wonder or despair at—the human race’s intellect is as nothing before the universe. I mean, it’s affiliated with a system other than this immense universe. It has been given no seat in any kind of hierarchy within this universe. The fact that it was born from life and by life is sustained, and yet is something other than life … the fact that in the order of the universe, humanity, as a form of life, is ever suspended in midair between an eternal reprieve and the void that appears an instant later—these simple yet self-evident facts … why didn’t we appeal to the people again and again regarding the given conditions of the human race? Why didn’t we openly hold up these facts—which we have probably only arrived at through fierce opposition, sophistry, ridicule, naive self-deception, and false consolation for humanity—and battle against our deep darkness?

  “Everyone! Oh, everyone! It may be in this that the true seeds of catastrophe were planted. Humanity, which developed its science to the degree that it has and that enriched itself through the production of material goods, has been annihilated in the space of a few months by a mere virus. This kind of thing can’t happen! It’s true. That which should not have been possible has taken place. We did not stand up to face this disaster head-on. Oh, there were a number of scientists who took it seriously and issued warnings, but … this battle was not one that could have been won through the strength of scientists alone. There were a great many societal factors in play. Our statesmen, for example, and the public … the bureaucrats … did they join forces and pour the full force of their strength into it? Did the intellectuals? The white-collar workers? The journalists? Certainly, this was a bolt from the blue that caught us by surprise. Even the scientists were unable to predict it. It came all too suddenly, and humanity had no time to draw unified lines of battle. But still, even so, wasn’t it at the same time true that we were fundamentally incapable of mustering our full strength for the battle? If the human race had opened its eyes more quickly to the situation it was in, had it been committed to cultivating the knowledge needed to evaluate accurately the scale of disasters as the common property of all mankind, had some system been put into place by which the entire human race could come to its own defense … might not the battle against this calamity have taken a different turn?

  “I do not know from whence this virus originally came. As an outsider to the field of microbiology, I have no way of knowing what mechanism could suddenly give rise to this kind of savage virus. However, the science of humanity—the scientists of humanity—to have climbed to so high an altitude, to have achieved the automatic mass production of consumer goods, to have launched rockets to the stars, to have held discussions about the world’s end, to have created fearsome weapons powerful enough to destroy all humanity in one fell swoop—even now, they still haven’t fully understood the nature of the virus or found drugs that can stop it. Instead, a few dozen percent of the entire production output of the human race was being poured into weapons dedicated to humanity’s love of killing humans.

  “Somebody once said that war encourages the development of the sciences—the applied sciences in particular. Sad as it is to say, I cannot deny the contribution that war has made to civilization. War has given us radar, jet airplanes, rockets, computers … it has unleashed the power of the atom. But—can there be any theory as stupid as this? Was it only in the name of war and armaments that humanity was capable of the large-scale manufacturing and investment needed to encourage the development of such marvelous scientific discoveries? Was it not possible for humanity to have made these wonderful things more quickly and more efficiently without relying on the Grim Reaper’s sponsorship? That which with God’s blessing fights to prevent death is made sinister and evil. The radar used to maintain air traffic safety is also a device for detecting enemies. Powerful rockets that should be used to explore the universe become missiles that deliver death itself. The computers that have revolutionized every aspect of civilization are used for ‘operations.’ Chemistry produces gunpowder and poison gas. Lasers are used to aim the sniper’s rifle. And finally, the atomic power that promises boundless energy to humanity … is born into the world as a doomsday weapon.

  “Could these wonderful inventions have never been created without first going down the road of armaments and warfare? Was it acceptable that we scholars accepted this as fate—as ‘civilization’s capitalism—the unavoidable state of the utilitarian stage,’ and simply cast our hopes on the future?

  “To tell the truth, on this point both Einstein and Fermi, who were driven from Nazi Germany and fled to the United States where they recommended the Manhattan Project, and Von Braun and Heisenberg, who stayed with the Nazis, are worthy of denunciation. These men—actually, it wasn’t only these men—all scientists bore a certain moral responsibility for the wars and the international politics of the second half of the twentieth century. But these men didn’t have the insight to choose their sponsors wisely. Also, they thought that their research had an intrinsic value that had nothing to do with who was paying for it. Or perhaps they were overconfident in their own political skills and thought they would be able to manipulate their sponsors for the sake of their research. Actually, there were more pressing circumstances that forced unavoidable decisions upon them. When I think of the skill of the Nazis in leading Heisenberg’s brilliant pupils and acquiring the heavy water factories in Norway and Rjukan, you could say it’s obvious that ‘for the victory of freedom, peace, and democracy,’ the Allied scientists had no other choice than to recommend the construction of the atom bomb. And yet, their moral responsibility remains. Or rather … from that point forward, it is proper that we intellectuals as a group, we scholars as a collective, be called upon to make an accounting of our historic responsibility.

  “Yes, it is there that the historic responsibility of all intellectuals emerges. We absolutely cannot foist all the responsibility back onto the scientists. No, from that point on it was the responsibility of the philosophers who, compared to the glorious scientists, remained hidden in the background of this century and unable to accomplish anything remarkable. Einstein had his limits as a human being. Whether or not you call them ‘the limitations of the petit bourgeois’—for there was not a single flaw in his genius as a scientist—he was, however, from beginning to end a consistent Machist who to the very last never believed in Heisenberg’s theory of uncertainty. And in this, there is a subtle correspondence to his limits as a human being. Just like Newton’s limitations were subtly delineated by his emotional side as a devout Christian …

  “No genius is omnipotent. The Renaissance concept of the Homo Universalis was nothing more than self-confidence laced with the worship of vitality. And as for the concept of the whole, it needs to be rethought in terms of all of mankind, and of all intellects. Individual intellects are themselves not universal, but should be thought of as complementing one another. By forsaking the notion of the almighty genius, the idea is not to break down scholarship into ever-smaller specialties, nor is it simply to bring about the loss of the genius’s prestige. Rather, intellectuals and the scholars must revive a dialogue that transcends their areas of specialization and fully cooperate with one another. And then once more, by way of a Cartesian trust in intelligence—the ability to understand—there would have at least been something to link the intellectuals and the masses together again.

  “Einstein did not specialize in politics. Although his epistemological side went deep into metaphysical territory, he was neither a scholar of philosophy. And who can blame him on that account? Rather, it was the philosophers who should have aided him most—not dismissing his enormous discovery as a nigh-incomprehensible event that had occurred in a different field of study in a laboratory far away from the university, but readily acknowledging it as an event in the history of civilization, translating its human meaning into their own systems, and drawing generalizations about it.

  “Every person is a fragment of a con
tinent … truly, on the continent of intellect, all events are bound together by a common destiny. The philosophers should have known that, and in their position been bearing the responsibilities that they should keep revising regularly. Just as Einstein worked with a mathematician in order to generalize his theory of relativity and by introducing the concept of Riemann space was able to complete it for the first time, couldn’t his discovery, his theory’s meaning for civilization, have been made all the more universal by working with a philosopher? And at the same time, couldn’t the philosopher, unafraid of stepping out of his area of specialization, have attained a more universal understanding by actively incorporating that discovery into the foundation of a new worldview? And not only that … wouldn’t it have been possible to change the fundamental meaning of the world, of humanity—of the world that lurks in the depths of the collective subconscious of all humanity? Of humanity’s self-image? And in so doing, might we not have led the history of the twentieth century … of civilization … into a fundamentally new dimension? A new … view of the univer—

  “Please forgive me … how long … was I unconscious, I wonder? It’s obvious, isn’t it … that a new view of the universe … would usher in a new morality. The Aristotelian … the Platonic view of humanity and the world … morality … was learned from the science of those times and was completely inseparable from that era’s view of the universe. This kind of thing goes without saying now. Ptolemaios’s astronomy and medieval theology … that ‘rose on the ceiling’ and the order of the highest heaven … they are inseparable from one another. So when the twentieth century made such astonishing progress in the natural sciences, what new way of looking at humanity, what new way of looking at the world, what kind of new morality should we have received from Einstein and Hubble’s model of the universe?