Our need for control has been shaken by the coronavirus

By Kent R. Kroeger (May 18, 2020)

Phyre2 model ribbon diagram rendering of the 2019-nCoV M(pro) protease as a target for antiviral drugs. (Courtesy of Innophore; Lawrence A Kelley, Stefans Mezulis, Christopher M Yates, Mark N Wass, Michael J E Sternberg; Use licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

Social scientists have long recognized that humans have a psychological need to control their environment and individual perceptions of one’s ability to exert such control affects one’s sense of well-being and happiness.

On a macro-level, Anthropologist Leslie White once wrote that human cultural evolution is the “process of increasing control over the natural environment” through technological progress.

He even proposed a simple equation, known as White’s Energy Formula, to summarize his neoevolutionist view:

C = ET

where E is a measure of energy consumed per capita per year, T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilizing the energy and C represents the degree of cultural development.

The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has shaken one of our most durable assumptions about human history: the near uninterrupted progress of human society over time.

Today, we live better than our parents, who lived better than their parents, who lived better than their parents…and on and on it goes.

If we view progress as our ability to produce greenhouse gases and consume heavily processed foodstuffs, we’re kickin’ it like never before. If we take a…