There is the story of a tiger which disrupted a tribal ceremony by leaping into it regularly. So predictable did the tiger's appearance become that the tribe incorporated it into the ritual. The ceremony continued, tiger or no tiger.
Unlike the anthropological tiger, which presumably was a single animal, its epidemiological cousin has changed hues to catch the world off-guard every time it has leapt into lives.
Epidemics and pandemics struck in 1918 (the Spanish flu), 1952 (Zika), 1957 (the Asian flu), 1968 (the Hong Kong flu), 1976 (Ebola), 2003 (Sars), 2009 (H1N1), 2012 (Mers), 2014 (Ebola), 2015 (Zika), 2018 (Ebola) and 2019 (Covid-19).
This time, the world is confronted literally with an economic disease. Covid-19 presents a nasty choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods. Even when the pandemic passes, if ever it does, its infectious afterlife may infest the limbs of maimed economies and fractured societies for years to come.
Confronted by a tiger of a pandemic, modern tribes could embark on new rituals of behaviour. They could do so by recalling a global village once inhabited by two disconcertingly radical thinkers.
In 1946, the physicist Albert Einstein warned that the "unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking". That statement forms the basis of the broader view attributed to him, that no problem can be solved at the same level of consciousness which created it.
John Maynard Keynes personifies the material consequences of that view. The economist rejected the Treaty of Versailles that had concluded World War I in 1919 because of the war reparations and other demands that it had imposed on a vanquished Germany. He did not believe that the punitive peace settlement would hold.
It did not. Burdened by reparations and for other reasons, the German economy collapsed in the Great Depression, the Nazis rose to power, and Germany ignited World War II, if only to lose it in 1945.
In the meanwhile, however, global statesmen had grasped the manifest failure of the Versailles settlement in the inter-war years. In 1944, the Bretton Woods Conference visualised a global economy premised on a monetary system that would break with the mercantilism and protectionism of the past.
Combined with the Marshall Plan of 1948, the Bretton Woods system helped to incorporate the Western half of a divided Germany into the post-war liberal order instead of punishing it for its provenance in pre-war fascist Europe. Keynes, his opposition to the Versailles Treaty vindicated by events, helped to shape the Bretton Woods order. Its institutions inaugurated an enviable period of peace and prosperity in the non-communist sphere.
Einstein and Keynes lurk like ghosts in the annals of the world today, their new thinking consigned to the dusty inheritance of an amnesiac present, a library with as many books as absent visitors.
That would have been a universal threat at any time but no more so than when the post-Covidean future deserves and demands urgent intellectual action.
That future lies now in the contending hands of two sets of global vandals. On the Right, ethnic barbarians offer racial and religious supremacy as a means to economic salvation to the discontents of globalisation. On the Left, anarchist vagabonds invite the same discontents to destroy the structures of the world because they will never own them. Globalisation is the common enemy of Right and Left.
The coronavirus pandemic will accentuate both tendencies. That is because the global mainstream cannot co-opt the tiger of change - in this case a virus - into the benign continuity of national and global life.
The evidence for this dismal conclusion lies all around us. Research institutes and companies are not cooperating to improve the chances of discovering a vaccine for the coronavirus. Instead, the search for a prospective cure has become a matter of fame and profit, not a way to meet possibly the greatest challenge to the known order of things short of a great-power nuclear exchange or imminent and total ecological extinction.
At the strategic level, the United States and China are not treating Covid-19 as a common threat to their global primacy. Instead, they are seeking to expand their material reach and ideological influence even in a stricken universe. The South China Sea has resurfaced as a flashpoint in their relations.
Other nations are watching in disbelief as the infected chalice of supremacy goes around the table of the great powers from hand to outstretched hand.
Einstein and Keynes must be laughing out their dead guts at the mediocrity of the living who refuse to learn the lessons of physics and economics.
Why should they not?
Einstein remarked wryly: "Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater." No less elitist, John Maynard insisted that his surname, Keynes, rhymes with "brains" and that "there is no harm in that".
Those two geniuses of the 20th century could guide us in the 21st. What is required is a reset of fractious material relations based on the graceful laws of physics, in celebration of Einstein and Keynes.
Otherwise, the tiger will kill the ritual itself.
• Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times.
