Is humanity at the mercy of nature, science and technology? Comment in the light of the pandemic situation. (2020)
The question assumes three external masters. Sociology’s answer is that the pandemic revealed none of them to be external: the “natural” hazard was socially manufactured, the science was institutionally governed, and the technology was distributed by power. Humanity is at the mercy chiefly of its own arrangements.
The case for helplessness: the risk society
- Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) argued that modernity’s characteristic dangers are manufactured risks — products of decisions, imperceptible to the senses, indifferent to borders, and no longer insurable. A zoonotic spillover amplified by land-use change, intensive livestock rearing and aviation is exactly such a risk.
- Anthony Giddens (Runaway World, 1999) separates external risk, which comes from nature, from manufactured risk, which comes from our own interventions; the pandemic belongs to the second, and modernity is a juggernaut we can steer only partially.
- Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents, 1984) showed that in systems that are both interactively complex and tightly coupled, failure is a normal property rather than an aberration. Just-in-time supply chains and hospitals without slack failed on schedule.
- The vulnerability was not rhetorical: the World Health Organization estimated roughly 14.9 million excess deaths worldwide in 2020–21, of which about 4.7 million were in India — a figure the government contested, which is itself Beck’s point about who controls the relations of definition.
Why “mercy” is the wrong frame
- Risk is stratified, not democratic. Beck’s claim that “smog is democratic” failed the test: infection, income loss and mortality followed occupation, housing density and migration status. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky (Risk and Culture, 1982) had already argued that societies select which dangers to fear according to their institutions and moral commitments.
- Scarcity was institutional, not natural. India and South Africa proposed a waiver of intellectual property obligations at the World Trade Organization in October 2020; the decision finally taken in 2022 was narrow and late. Vaccines existed; access was rationed by patents and purchasing power.
- The instruments of rescue were the instruments of exposure. The same aviation network that spread the virus in weeks carried vaccines and reagents; the same laboratories that make gain-of-function work possible identified the pathogen. Risk and remedy are produced by one apparatus, which is why abolition is not an option and governance is.
- Agency was decisive and fast. The genome was sequenced and shared within weeks and vaccines followed within a year. States that combined testing, income support and credible public communication had outcomes very different from those that did not — an extension of Amartya Sen‘s finding that catastrophic famine does not occur in functioning democracies, because the mediating variable is governance.
Conclusion
Humanity is neither nature’s victim nor technology’s master. Modernity is reflexive in Beck’s sense: it must continuously confront the consequences of its own successes, and the instruments that produce risk are also the only instruments for containing it. The pandemic therefore reads less as a verdict on human helplessness than as a rehearsal for climate change, where the same question will be settled by the quality of institutions, the distribution of protection, and the willingness to act on knowledge already in hand.