The Human and Nonhuman Entanglement During COVID-19

By Sophia Jacober

 

The human species has depended on connectivity with others for millennia. We build families, tribes, bands, towns, and cities to create communities of connectedness between ourselves and others. We rely on these communities for support systems, company, and to fulfill the desire for human closeness. A podcast produced by Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel on NPR suggests that the connection that we have with other humans goes beyond these reliances and is actually ingrained in our atoms through entanglement. Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon that occurs when two particles or atoms share connected photons that allow them to remain entwined even when the two atoms are apart. This connection makes it so the two are no longer independent entities; when one is affected in some way, the other will instantly be affected too. Miller and Spiegel brought up the interesting idea that entanglement happens everywhere in Nature. Despite the idea that we are all independent entities, we can become entangled with anyone we encounter (Miller and Spiegel). This entanglement embeds itself in shared emotions, actions, and fears, suggesting that all human bodies are interconnected to some extent. Scott Gilbert also suggests that there is a sense of entanglement between all living organisms. In his chapter “Holobiont By Birth,” Gilbert points out that every human body relies on bacteria and microbes to evolve and survive; thus, we are entwined with the nonhuman as much as we are with the human life forms on Earth. 

Since the industrial revolution, humans have considered themselves separate from Nature. The bond between the natural world and the human body has been a fragile coexistence, shrouded in fear and the desire to disconnect. The human experience has prided itself on its ability to thrive without depending on the nonhuman natural world, but Scott Gilbert suggests that this assertion is incorrect. Gilbert calls the human body a holobiont, “an organism plus its persistent communities of symbionts” with the symbionts being bacteria and microbes that live inside our body and assist with our bodily functions, such as digestion (Gilbert 73). The human body is considered an independent entity, but in reality we are evolving and coexisting with nonhuman organisms that our body hosts and relies on. For the most part, the body does not notice the presence of its symbionts, but occasionally a bacteria or virus will offset the balanced, interdependent entanglement of the two. COVID-19 has become a nonhuman life form that has taken to the human body as a host. The presence of this virus has increased our fear of the nonhuman residents inside of us, resulting in the desire to purge our bodies of the organisms that have the ability to break down our bodies and make us face our morality. Gilbert’s idea of interspecies entanglement raises the question, what is considered part of the human body and what is its relationship to the natural world? The coevolution with the body’s micro-biome has allowed the human species to survive for millions of years; thus, becoming part of our evolutionary history, yet we fear the vulnerability of our bodies in becoming hosts to unwanted organisms. The current pandemic has increased the fear of human interaction with Nature and the desire to be independent from the nonhuman organisms.

Most people find comfort in the closeness of other human bodies. It provides a sense of security and support that our societies rely on. Recently, with the rise of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the view of the human body has shifted vastly. The body’s ability to be a host to the nonhuman virus has resulted in a change in our bodily awareness. The comfort that was once sought for from the closeness shared with another person has transformed into a fear of contact. A classmate, Audrey, spoke to her grandmother about the ways she has been interacting with people she cares about. Her grandmother mentioned that she was comfortable spending time outside with her friend and distancing themselves less than six feet apart without masks so they could talk. However, while hiking, they ran into a man from their neighborhood that they didn’t know very well. During her friend’s conversation with the man, Audrey’s grandmother maintained a distance of six feet from him and was hesitant to make conversation. While most of us feel comfortable being close to the bodies that we know, we are hesitant to interact with those outside of our scope of familiarity.

  We have become more aware of the dangers that our bodies can present to others and theirs to ours. The human entanglement that Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel spoke to is validated by the COVID-19 experience. People are afraid of one another, yet we need each other. Our class witnessed this conflict while observing people in public settings, such as grocery stores, where people have become more aware of their body and the spaces they hold between theirs and others. For the most part, shoppers are more hesitant to reach over people for their desired item, and they distance themselves during checkout. We have come to fear the bodily closeness within our communities. Despite the fear that this pandemic has invoked, entanglement does not allow us to separate from the people we care about. “Without being completely aware of it, we are all one organism, a heaving, swirling organism, contracting the feelings and thoughts of the people around us” (Miller and Spiegel 40:00). We find ways to be close to each other while keeping our bodies apart. For example, my two grandmothers who are in their seventies are both afraid of the Coronavirus and their aging bodies’ higher risk to contract the virus, but their entanglement with their families is conflicting with this fear. They are trying to follow social distancing protocol by refusing to interact with each other, however, they still spend time with my family almost every day; thus, exposing themselves to each other through extension. It is not just my family who is making exceptions to the guidelines. Most people are finding ways to spend time with those they care about most. We fear the body and its ability to host nonhuman organisms, but the entanglement that we have developed between humans keeps us together despite the precaution of social distancing for self preservation. 

Anna Tsing wrote in her book Mushroom at the End of the World, “human DNA is part virus; viral encounters mark historical moments in making us human” (Tsing 143). While we consider the human body to be independent of natural reliance, it depends on nonhuman encounters to help shape its existence. The crossing of life paths between the Coronavirus and the body is not new; the human body has encountered dangerous viruses in the past and those experiences have shaped the ways we interact with ourselves and the bodies around us, both human and nonhuman. The current pandemic is no different; it is changing the way we look at the entanglements we have, and it is pushing us to reconsider what it means to be human and the connections we cannot live without.

 

 

References Cited

Miller, Lulu, and Alix Spiegel. “Entanglement.” NPR. NPR, January 30, 2015. https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/382451600/entanglement.

Gilbert, Scott. “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and … – JSTOR.” Holobiont By Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1qft070.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.