More than half of the population of Afghanistan is facing a shortage of food. Over 1,500 people died trying to flee to a safer environment in the Mediterranean in the year 2011. Severe flooding in parts of the UK in the coming decades is predicted to be a risk similar to the likelihood of wildfires. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, about one person in 1,000 has received the vaccine. The continuing background of loss and fear still casts an enormous shadow over the challenge of the Pandemic.
The low-level anxiety, unexpected personal losses, and the sheer confusion experienced by everyone caught up in the Pandemic have all been given a little flesh by the statistics. The human story is not looking like a smooth ride. We are more fragile than we were led to think. This means that we are less different from our ancestors than we would like to think, and that the more secure and prosperous members of the human race are less different from their fellow-human beings than they are comfortable with.
Our ancestors were aware that they were fragile. A brief period of dazzling technological achievement combined with the absence of a major global war made the belief that our environment was safe and controllable. The same technical achievements that generated this belief were among the major destabilising influences in the material environment. Civil wars that followed on for decades were often the result of bitter and vicious local struggles. In the past two decades, we have caught up with the realization that global crises are not focused on national boundaries, political convictions or economic performance. The vulnerability can't be neatly pinned down.
We are going to need a lot of imaginative resources to cope with this fragility for the foreseeable future. People have found resources like this in the past. It is important to learn to see the sciences as a resource, not a threat or a rival to what the older elements offer. It's time to forget about the phoney war between faith and science. The view that sees the arts as just a pleasant extra in human life, or religion as an outdated kind of scientific explanation is as fatuous as the one that sees the imaginative inspiration of authentic science. It is easy to forget why and how it matters, and to be lured into the bizarre world of science where the minority report in science is given inflated importance just because we are interested in it.
Scientific research isn't done to prove an existing view correct, but to reinforce the existing power or advantage of some over others. People look with skepticism at research that claims to show that racial, social or sexual privilege is somehow grounded in the natural order. The method of meeting each other in a shared exploratory conversation that will not be derailed by the presence in the room of non-negotiable convictions about the natural world that would make discussion on is what scientific discourse offers.
Science helps us live with our fragility by giving us a way of connecting with each other. We need to forget our self-protective habits in order to discover our challenges. Science alone does not build the motivation for a deeper level of connection. We act effectively when we find a language in common to identify problems, but also when we know that those who share these challenges are profoundly like us, and we can feel their frailties as if they were ours.
This is where the art comes from. It makes us stop focusing on ourselves. We open doors to experiences that are not our own by listening to music, looking at an exhibition, reading a novel, watching a theatre or television drama. If science helps us discover that there are things that aren't decided by the people talking, then art can help us understand how strangers feel.
A further level of motivation is what religion adds to this. Different religious traditions claim that the Other is someone we must look at with reverence because they are someone we can recognize. The person before us has a claim on our attention, even our contemplation. The religions of south and east Asia question the idea of a safe and stable self with a territory to protect against others, while for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the claim of the stranger is based on the belief that every human being is a vehicle of God.
Being more deeply connected will not take away the fragility of our condition, but it will help us see that it is worth parking the obsessions of tribes and echo chambers so that we can actually learn from and with each other. One of the saints of early Christian monasticism said that their life and death were with their neighbour. If we are not to be paralyzed by the fragility we cannot escape, then we need humanism.
The former archbishop of Canterbury is named Rowan Williams.
