Spanish paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga has made some interesting reflections on the coronavirus pandemic, focused mainly on moderation, realism and humanism. Arsuaga is a specialist in human evolution, Asturias Award and professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. crisis and, based on their experience, finds innovative solutions.
In one of his most striking phrases he declares that “life is a permanent crisis. “Juan Luis Arsuaga indicates that the extraordinary is not death, but life itself. It notes that all species are constantly on the brink of extinction and that none of them live in stable processes. Instability is an intrinsic property of life.
- “The optimist is the one who changes things.
- The pessimist doesn’t change anything.
- Not even the preacher?-Juan Luis Arsuaga-.
What worries Juan Luis Arsuaga most is the proliferation of magical readings brought by the pandemic, many people saw the virus as divine punishment, an announcement of the end of the world or something like the result of a curse. The situation has paved the way for many uninformed people to give a supernatural interpretation to what is going on.
Juan Luis Arsuaga insists on an obvious fact: epidemics and pandemics are so normal and expected that that is precisely why there is a scientific specialty called “epidemiology”. Similarly, viruses are so potentially dangerous that virology exists. The only difference with this pandemic is that it has made us question the model of society in which we live.
It is a fact that it is travelers who have spread the virus around the world, this has been possible because, in our reality, traveling around the world is getting cheaper, for this we must submit to board a crowded plane. , a place where a coughing person can affect at least five others.
According to him, life is about solving problems, in turn solving them means reaching an ever-unstable balance point, something like being able to remove a piece without collapsing the structure or putting a piece on it, without collapsing the base. “Only minerals and the dead have no problem,” says Juan Luis Arsuaga.
Arsuaga says that when there are concatenated crises, that is, crises in one aspect that cause a new crisis in another, there is a possibility that an entire civilization will end, as happened with the Roman Empire, which faced a series of crises that do not give them time to recover. Therefore, the key factor is not the crisis itself, but its recurrence.
The health crisis will surely be overcome, because there is potential for that, but if it adds to an economic crisis, a social crisis and perhaps a military or climate crisis, things may be different, together they can annihilate civilization like us. The right thing to do is to solve every problem wisely.
The important thing, says Juan Luis Arsuaga, is to learn from all this. When the coronavirus solution is found, governments should not overlook the importance of funding research and science. For this thinker, the protagonists of this whole crisis were not scientists. but political ones. Much of what happens will depend on the decisions of the powers added to each other’s decisions.
Like other thinkers, Arsuaga believes that the pandemic is not a change factor in itself, what it is doing is accelerating the processes that were already developing, including the tension between the neoliberal model and the objective need for a welfare state. Being.
He adds that every age has its crisis and that the pandemic was the one that corresponded to that time, it warns that such situations generate fear and that when people are afraid, they are more likely to give up their rights and freedoms.
Despite this, and with ups and downs, Arsuaga believes that the pandemic has activated a sense of cooperation among many people, this sense is concentric and oriented first to the immediate family, then to the extended family, then to friends and acquaintances, and finally to the region, the country and the world. In your opinion, the problems will not be solved after the crisis, but we will be more aware that we need each other.