Inherited discussions of ‘science and religion’ too much assume an interaction between two historically constant phenomena in terms of stories of ‘progress’ and ‘conflict’. Instead, it is better to recognise long-term and varying modes of tension between three different approaches to nature, pivoted about attitudes to ‘enchantment’ and to transcendence versus immanence. Within such a perspective, it appears that the dominant model of science as ‘disenchanted transcendence’ is a Newtonian one that historically quickly proved inadequate. Alternative and earlier traditions of ‘natural magic’ later returned under new guises and are closer to the essence of the ‘ergetic’ or experimental attitude that lies at the real core of ‘science’. The Newtonian model also implausibly suppressed the realities of motion, time, change, substantial form and secondary qualities. But contemporary physics points towards their restoration and to nature as a vital habit and form-shaping process, as well as to the ‘magical’ character of powers and causes. Magic, rightly understood, is a necessary mediator between religion as theory and science as practice and is a crucial aspect of an ergetic understanding of ‘enchanted transcendence’ which is the most promising perspective for today.

Material for alternative framings of science is sought in the context of high medieval natural philosophy. The chapter reviews the work of thirteenth-century English scholar Robert Grosseteste on light and colour, as well as his reflective comments on a theological teleology of science, with additional reference to his patristic and early medieval sources. The visual metaphor of insight and imagination, and the restorative and reconciliatory purpose of engaging with nature, emerge strongly. A concluding section discusses which aspects of such a pre-modern framing might still inform a theology of science today, and reflects on other contributions in this volume from that perspective taken together with a personal experience of pursuing science

Can physics be beneficial for bringing about human moral and spiritual goods? Modern physics is perpetually in search for grand unification of our world-pictures, but its method is arbitrarily self-limiting in ruling out any place in its conception of nature for the human as spiritual and moral beings. But this estrangement between nature and the human has not always been the case. Drawing from Pierre Hadot’s pioneering work, this essay retrieves the notion of physics as ‘spiritual exercise’ from ancient philosophy and early Christianity for reimagining the enterprise of physics today. Envisaged as spiritual exercise, ancient physics goes beyond a mere acquisition of ‘objective’ knowledge of nature towards the fashioning of human moral and spiritual transformation. Illustrating from Origen of Alexandria, I show that this vision of physics is principally grounded upon a metaphysics that unites all parts of nature, including human nature, into a single whole. This chapter argues that it is desirable to retrieve the ancient vision today not as a displacement of modern physics but through the re-invention of natural philosophy alongside it. This retrieval should give urgency to the task of rethinking the desirability of a comprehensive and unified metaphysical account of nature for today.

The present literature on science and religion tends to be dominated by three genres: a conflict genre, according to which science and religion are locked into a relationship of perennial opposition; a disentangling genre, in which science does one sort of thing and religion does another; and a synthetic genre, in which science and religion are integrated, overlapped, or in some way related to each other in generally positive ways. While on the face of it these approaches could hardly be more divergent, in fact they share a common commitment to the idea that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are valid, trans-historical categories that capture more or less perennial features of human culture. If it is true that science and religion, albeit in various guises, have been the chief lenses through which the world has been interpreted, then posing the question of how they relate to each other makes good sense. But what if it is not true? The guiding principle of the present collection is that we can initiate a much more fruitful discussion if we begin by questioning these two basic categories that frame and delimit the current conversation about how to interpret the world. After Science and Religion is thus an exploration of how the discussion might be changed if we were to relinquish, or at least critically examine, these two categories ‘science’ and ‘religion’.

This chapter considers one of the major alternatives to reductionist, mechanistic philosophy in the seventeenth century, focusing upon three key English figures: Herbert of Cherbury, Robert Greville, and Anne Conway. While these thinkers have typically been relegated to the margins of the history of philosophy and science, they nonetheless represent a significant, if largely eclipsed tradition, and one that shows how, during this period, ‘disenchanted’ understandings of nature were not the sole option, and how they could co-exist with scientific conceptions of nature. Accordingly, these figures exemplify ways of being modern and scientific without abandoning an ‘enchanted’ view of the natural world.

The COVID-19 crisis has thrown a spotlight onto the lifeand-death stakes attached to how we humans know about ourselves, and what we know other humans to be. One might argue that the pandemic has recreated epistemological anxieties, ontological uncertainties, and methodological divisions. This section of the book will unpack some of these issues, tracing how the images, metaphors and models used by scientists and media, as well as the choices made by policymakers, are affecting how we are thinking about and experiencing the pandemic.

In this final chapter we draw together some of the main themes emerging from the various chapters and reflect on what this tells us about being human in COVID-19 times. As outlined in the introduction, these essays have focused on three key issues during the pandemic that are fundamentally concerned with the experience, meaning and understanding of being human. Firstly, the marginalization of many groups of people and how they are de/valued in the response to the virus. Secondly, the role of new scientific knowledge and other forms of expertise in these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Thirdly, the remaking and reordering of society as a result of the pandemic and the opening up of new futures for work, the environment, culture and daily life. These themes were considered in the four sections of the collection, and the main points from each are summarized here, before a final consideration is offered on what this tells us about being human during and after the pandemic.

Knowing humans

This collection of essays starts by exploring how COVID-19 has been known and represented in different metaphors, models, representations, and media, as the pandemic has unfolded. In analysing these processes, new insights are provided about how we understand the human. While the virus was the same molecular structure the world over (at least before the onset of variants), this section shows the myriad of different methods and resources by which the resulting disease and its impacts became known to policymakers, professionals and publics, and how these differed across the world. Three key features of this emerge. Firstly, whether through science, metaphor or imagery, the ways in which COVID-19 became known could both exacerbate existing inequalities or provide the means to counter them (Nerlich; Ballo and Pearce; Rosvik et al). In this sense, they form the ground for contestation over the meaning of COVID-19. Secondly, citizens found themselves dislocated from established sources of knowledge about the virus, which they felt to be either incomplete or inadequate (Garcia; Vicari and Yang; Rostvik et al). These uncertainties about what risks they faced, how to respond, and their responsibilities to self and others, fed into high levels of distrust and confusion.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered and exposed inequality across society, and in few arenas more sharply than the education system. Disabled children have long been positioned as ‘outliers’ in a system created to embed neoliberal ideals – wherein success is presaged on a narrow concept of achievement, and anyone that cannot or does not meet these normative standards is deemed ‘less than’, and is, to adopt the parlance of critical disability studies, ‘othered’. This is despite the fact that for the past two decades, inclusion has been considered a cornerstone of national educational policy in England.

Even prior to COVID-19, disabled children in England were found to be having a poorer educational experience than their peers. The House of Commons Education Committee’s Inquiry into Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) in 2019 assessed the impact of the implementation of the Children and Families Act 2014, which was supposed to constitute the biggest reform of SEND education in a generation. Instead, the Inquiry identified not just structural issues (for example, inadequate funding, limited staffing capacity, absence of joinedup services) but also, in organizational and systemic behaviours failing to ensure accountability and inclusion, institutionalized ableism. The pandemic has served to exacerbate this trend, ushering in a raft of new practical, logistical and attitudinal barriers faced by disabled children. This active discrimination, perpetuated by the Coronavirus Act 2020, is symptomatic of long-term marginalization of disabled children in education, which focuses on making the child ‘fit’ normative systems, rather than being responsive to individual needs.

Therefore, despite its premise as a force for justice and equality, inclusive education often (unwittingly) perpetuates cycles of ableism: ‘as a humanist orientation, inclusion privileges human traits (thought, capacity, sense-making)’ (Naraian, 2020: 1). While this (at least superficially) egalitarian conception of humanism has fed into legislation that has sought to protect the rights of disabled children (for example, The UN Convention for the Rights of the Child, 1989; Children and Families Act 2014), it could also be argued that it fails to recognize the power and promise of individual difference, as well as our inevitable entanglement with non-human entities and systems. Therefore, this narrow concept of ‘inclusion as fitting in’ may, in actuality, be exclusionary.

The contemporary development of genomics – the decoding of our DNA – marks an important turning point in how we understand the human. This is nowhere more apparent than in the UK, which is leading the world in investing in and developing powerful genomic technology platforms that may have profound consequences for the future of healthcare, civil liberties and personal identity. While these developments have been gestating for two decades, they matured and moved centre stage during the pandemic with the massive increase in gene sequencing for tracking Coronavirus. This chapter will examine the social implications of the growing use of genomics and gene-based screening technologies, and analyse how they are contributing to an important shift in how we understand human health. This emphasizes the biological and individualized nature of disease in contrast to the social determinants of health and illness, supporting an increasingly biomedicalized understanding of the human.

A vision of genomic medicine to improve personal and population health

The massive public and private investment in genomics over recent years is inspired by a vision of so called ‘personalized medicine’, where treatment is guided by a knowledge of an individual’s genetic makeup. This is used to assess the risk of disease, design better treatment regimens and predict response to therapy. It is being enabled by the growth of targeted therapeutics and gene-based diagnostics that stratify patients and diseases into discrete sub-populations. This utopian imaginary also aims to improve public health by enabling new forms of population surveillance based on genetic risk profiling and reproductive ‘choice’ through improved antenatal screening. For its advocates this offers hope for a new kind of medicine which identifies the underlying cause of many diseases as being within the body, rather than in the external environment.

The development of genomic medicine is an international phenomenon, being actively pursued in North America, Europe and East Asia. It is driven by major government investment, as well as novel forms of public-private collaboration, and is best illustrated in the UK, which is establishing itself as a global leader.

Over recent years, a series of large-scale projects have started to develop the core infrastructure for the widespread adoption of genomic medicine in the UK National Health Service (NHS).

Introduction

Over the past couple of years, a growing number of studies have investigated the social responses and environmental, social, psychological and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (Jasanoff et al, 2021; Harambam, 2020). As with other contributions to this volume, these studies suggest that the current planetary crisis will generate profound transformations in paid and unpaid labour, mobility, energy use, democratic government, law enforcement, and trust on media and expertise. Some commentators even argue that COVID-19 involves an important reshaping of contemporary globalization, characterized by ‘intensifying dynamics of instability, disintegration, insecurity, dislocation, relativism, inequality, and degradation’ (Steger and James, 2020: 188). While large-scale and long-term implications of COVID-19 have been explored, the literature has paid less attention to the early days of the pandemic outbreak, when these important and profound transformations were mostly out of sight and had only started to manifest.

Intending to make a modest contribution to fill this gap in the literature, this chapter focuses on the days that followed from 11 March 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. The research method and the data presented here are rather unusual. The account I provide draws from my own experience as the host of an international wedding scheduled for the 21 March 2020 in my hometown, Pachuca, Mexico. Although unexpectedly and unintendedly, organizing an international wedding turned out to be an exceptional way of documenting early responses to the nascent pandemic of a very diverse group of people. Since my partner and I are a German-Mexican couple that lived and studied in the UK for about six years before moving to Germany, our guest list included around 40 people travelling from nearly a dozen countries. Since we were in constant communication with people exposed to different news, local concerns, regulations, health policies and travel restrictions, we were able to get a sense of the rapidly transforming attitudes from individuals and governments in different corners of the planet towards the spread of the virus.

The account I provide here, however, cannot be taken as that of a neutral and innocent observer. The ways in which my partner and I communicated with our guests contributed to some extent to how they perceived and exposed themselves to the risks.

When the UK government switched its COVID-19 strategy from mitigation to suppression on 17 March, it seemed a case of ‘new data, new policy’. News reports cited how modelling from Imperial College’s Centre for Global Infectious Disease projected between 410,000– 500,000 deaths, prompting the government to implement stringent lockdown policies, and upending the UK’s political economy. Unsurprisingly, given the stakes involved, public debates about government policies and their effects have been intense; for example, the time taken for the UK to introduce a lockdown policy and the unequal effects on health and wellbeing. However, two broader questions regarding the relationship between science, politics and publics now demand reflection: how is science advice being formulated, and how is that advice being used to justify policy decisions in the public interest? We attempt to answer these questions by focusing on whether the models that lie at the heart of COVID-19 science can become ‘public objects’, helping to foster both public debate about policy and trust in the institutions that we rely on to make life-and-death decisions.

What’s missing from evidence-based policy?

Despite the UK government’s recent rocky relationship with experts, scientific advisers were placed at the forefront of the public response to COVID-19, both rhetorically, through phrases such as ‘following the science’, and visually, with the Prime Minister being flanked by scientific advisers at daily press conferences. The government and its experts appeared to be working harmoniously on ‘evidence-based policy’, the rational ideal of creating knowledge for decision making. However, relying on science for the public validation of policy conceals an array of judgements about what that science includes and excludes, and what this in turn says about how, and for whom, the state cares.

In the early days of the pandemic, epidemiological modelling dominated UK science advice. On the surface, the government’s response to the Imperial College report seemed like the ideal of how evidence-based policy should work. Yet, if this modelling was decisive in prompting policy change, then it should also be acknowledged that models imagine human experience as a rather homogeneous affair.

This book centres on questions of the human that are raised by the pandemic which began in 2019 and addresses these through a series of short, accessible and thought-provoking essays that range across disciplinary boundaries and intellectual silos.

The COVID-19 crisis poses massive challenges for many citizens, businesses, policymakers and professionals around the globe. The pandemic has highlighted the deep divisions and inequalities that already existed, while at the same time opening up new fissures and fractures in society. However, as many have commented, the crisis also presents new opportunities to fundamentally rethink many aspects of social, cultural, psychological and economic life. Three key issues have emerged in this context that are fundamentally concerned with the experience, meaning and understanding of being human. Firstly, the marginalization of many groups of people, most notably members of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities, disabled, young, older and displaced people and how they are de/valued in the response to the virus. It is vital that their experiences are included when thinking about life after COVID-19. This collection pays special attention to the experience of disabled people, a group often neglected in many discussions of the pandemic. Secondly, the role of new scientific knowledge and other forms of expertise in these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Little critical attention has so far been paid to the central role of science in shaping our understanding and experience of the pandemic. Thirdly, the remaking and reordering of society as a result of the pandemic and the opening up of new futures for work, the environment, culture and daily life. At the same time, the relevance and applicability of human and social sciences have been debated as we enter a period of knowledge generation that has emphasized the biomedical over the socio-political or psycho-political. These critical understandings of how we might better make the future are still missing from public discussion of the post-COVID-19 world.

The focus on ‘the human’ as a central analytical heuristic is a defining feature of the approach taken here. This owes much to ideas coming out of the broader field of what has become known as the critical posthumanities.

Introduction

Despite long-standing warnings about the likely emergence in the near future of a novel coronavirus to which humans had no immunity, the pandemic caused by COVID-19 caught most countries unprepared. As of 18 April 2021, the world had recorded three million deaths due to COVID-19. The series of lockdowns adopted by most countries in an attempt to slow down the spread of the virus resulted in about 255 million full-time job losses in 2020 (ILO, 2021) many of which are likely to become permanent even after the pandemic is brought under control. Controlling COVID-19 has further challenged the fundamental human right of freedom of movement and ushered in a range of new methods of surveillance and control of public behaviour. It also underlined long-standing inequalities, with the burden of illness falling disproportionately on already disadvantaged groups, who tend to be more precariously employed (Warjri and Shah, 2020).

As worrisome as these trends are, it is also possible to imagine a future where COVID-19 leads us towards something more equitable, more humane and beneficially globalized (as well as better preparation for pandemics to follow). Although the future is deeply uncertain, and as of the time of writing the pandemic is far from over, we have also identified some positive trends which are worthy of discussion. We argue that the pandemic has shown us the possibilities which might be derived from shifting our focus from an economy based on always increasing monetary exchange of goods and services, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), to an economy focused on increasing social resilience and wellbeing. Key to this is a shift away from our present obsession with market-based indicators and a movement towards a growth-agnostic approach to innovation. In previous work, we have called this ‘responsible stagnation’ (de Saille et al, 2020), a term which could also describe the global halt to economic activity which occurred in March 2020 as the only means of stopping the spread of COVID-19. In this chapter we highlight some trends towards growth-agnostic, social innovations that occurred during 2020, focusing on human flourishing rather than economic growth.

How is new scientific knowledge, as well as its popularization and application in various biomedical technologies, changing ideas of what it means to be human in the 21st century? These include the reworking of long-established ideas of biological determinism in understanding both health and behaviour. The pandemic is shifting these discourses and the way in which we value the life of different humans, reinforcing existing social divisions and creating new ones.

In the following, I invoke the experience of disability, my blindness, and of ageing, and I will show how scientific responses to COVID-19 have rendered the combination of the two not only as a site of vulnerability, but also as a life barely worth living. I will explore how vision together with its sister, the virtual, have diminished touch. Touch has become a method for vision to elevate itself to the ‘master sense’. Vision is thus regarded as the best way to experience the inter-human, constituting blindness, with its ‘master sense’ of touch, as not merely second best, but as beneath notice by and irrelevant to the human project. Finally, I will show how blindness and old age co-mingle and how science has used COVID-19 as the occasion to emphasize the diminished humanity of both.

Austin Clarke once told me that he was ‘getting old’ and that he ‘hated it’. And now, I too am getting old and like Austin, I hate it. When you think about it, really think about it, there isn’t anything good about getting old. And, blindness doesn’t help old age get any better.

One day at a time; live life one day at a time. This is an admonition that old age often casts our way. Harsh as it is, it does seem as though it is our only choice; not that anyone, regardless of age, can live life more than one day at a time. But, in old age – this becomes a conscious choice. Living today as though it were the last day of your life takes on an eerie poignancy in old age. This is captured very well in an old joke; a person of 85 years is asked, “How do you start your day?” They reply, “I read the obituaries in the newspaper. If my name does not appear there, I get out of bed.”

Perhaps the situation is not as drastic as this, but only perhaps. The sense of time being short and quickly passing, as well as the dread of wasting what time remains and the need to grab it as it passes by, haunt us in old age. A lament – I won’t get those two hours back – takes on the brilliance of a clear bitterly cold winter’s day and has the same humbling effect. Time, we realise in old age, is indeed precious.