**8. Science & Society**

In the second volume of his bestselling trilogy on human history, society, and future, *Homo Deus*, Yuval Noah Harari ponders what our new human agenda might be now that we have solved the pressing problems of hunger, disease, and war. The book presents broad historical trends demonstrating how today's world has, statistically speaking, less violence, less hunger, and fewer deaths from curable diseases than in the past. Whereas the plague was once considered an act of God, simply to be endured until God so decides to

lift the affliction, today we consider it a technical problem. "[F]or modern people", Harari says, even "death is a technical problem that we can and should solve" (Harari 2017, p. 22).

Harari's eccentric account of possible human futures was published prior to COVID-19. "No one can guarantee that plagues won't make a comeback," he foretells, "but there are good reasons to think that in the arms race between doctors and germs, doctors run faster." (ibid, p. 12) Does this narrative still hold water as we transition back to a post-pandemic era? In a Ted Talk viewed forty-five million times, Bill Gates warned that humans were not ready to manage a global pandemic (Gates 2015). As COVID-19 was waning, he repeated: "We'll have another pandemic" (Gilchrist 2022).

There is no way to predict what will come next; historians can at best offer post hoc explanations if we survive. What is impossible to argue against is that the global response to COVID-19 should at least give us pause. Our response in many places across the globe was far from ideal, if not altogether inept everywhere. The world is not a controlled laboratory, scientific research takes time, and consensus does not come easy (Latour 1983; Schrader 2010). Even with a shared view of science, policy prescriptions vary depending on what is prioritized. Communication of evolving guidelines is often iatrogenic, creating mass confusion and facilitating the unintended spread of infection, especially when society provides market or political incentives to exploit our differences for short-term gain. Science is embedded in messy human cultures. "Man is a storytelling animal" (Gottschall 2012). Muslim responses to COVID-19 are no more and no less complicated than the responses of other communities. Seeing our differences as an illustration of our shared humanity enables us to empathize with each other, whether China or Sweden, red state or blue, secular or religious.

Sociologist of religion Robert Bellah deepened our understanding of the story-side of religion by couching religious life within the context of "big history." In his final synthetic work, *Religion in Human Evolution*, Bellah, drawing on the framework of neuroanthropologist Merlin Donald, structures his account with the "mythic" (narrative) as the middle of three stages in the development of religion, between the "mimetic" (ritual) and "theoretic" (philosophical) (Bellah 2011). Although the cultural evolution of human beings moves from one stage to the next, "nothing is ever truly lost," informs Bellah. (ibid, p. 13). Human societies that have transitioned to the third stage of theorization are incapable of jettisoning ritual and myth, even if they pretend otherwise. We filter reality through narrative. Even scientific truth is embedded within some kind of narrative, what philosophers of science prefer to call "paradigms" (Kuhn 2012). Facts are intelligible in the backdrop of worldviews, whether these are explicitly stated or not. "Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology)," says Bellah, "know who they are by the stories they tell" (Bellah 2011, p. 35). Change the story, change the reality.

The chaotic global response to COVID-19, on both individual and collective levels, can be understood through the "deep stories" behind these responses (Hochschild 2016). Deep stories give rise to deep complexity, what Savoj Žižek calls "heaven in disorder," by which he means "a radical and even exclusive division of the very (symbolic) universe in which we dwell" (Žižek 2021, p. 2). The disorder in heaven is, for Žižek, what explains disorder on earth: "Caught between two (or even three) sides—medical experts, business interests, and the pressures of populist COVID deniers—governments adopted a politics of compromises, proposing often inconsistent and ridiculously complex half measures" (ibid, p. 93).

Global problems need global solutions. In a free-for-all world, governing responsibly has become next to impossible. "The situation is hopeless," argues Žižek. That is why "it's time to act ruthlessly ... we need in Europe a version of something that cannot but be called 'wartime Communism.'" To those who think this is bad, Žižek warns of the alternative: "If we stick to our old way of life, we will surely end up in a new Barbarism." (ibid, pp. 93, 96) It is impossible to deny the resonance of this analysis with the famous Arab proverb: "Better sixty years of tyranny than one night of anarchy" (Feldman 2009). What is commonly presumed from this statement is Arab tolerance for tyranny, in contrast

to Western love for freedom. "I think that's exactly backwards," argues Noah Feldman. "I think the point of the phrase is to tell you just how bad anarchy is" (ibid, p. 143). In other words, "obedience to authority," under the right circumstances, may be a recipe for social salvation.
