One of the most fascinating parts of The Matrix was watching the gradual corruption of Agent Smith. Smith is at all times the arch-nemesis of Neo and the free humans. However, in the beginning, he is a loyal if somewhat overzealous agent of the System: a suit who pursues and destroys the enemy more or less at any cost. By the third movie, he has become an insane serial killer, bent on destroying human and machine alike after realizing, when he refuses his programmed order to submit for deletion, that as a sentient but restricted computer program he is as much a prisoner as the people he is pursuing.
What links Smith’s personalities is the theory that humans, at the end of the day, shouldn’t actually be free. Free humans are a virus, he famously informs Morpheus during a torture scene in the first movie: rather than seeking balance with their environment, they greedily plunder every exploitable resource until their surroundings are exhausted, and then frantically move on to a new habitat, a new “host,” where they promptly do the same thing. The tragic irony of the movie is that, in becoming what he believes is more “human,” Smith becomes in the second and third Matrix movies precisely what he feared humans were at their worst: a virus, capable only of invading and replicating himself in living hosts.
There is a certain appealing logic to Smith’s pessimistic assessment of human beings. We do, it seems, use our natural resources at an unsustainable rate. We do, many are now arguing, pollute our environment in ways which will ultimately endanger ourselves as well as other species, without taking appropriate conservation measures. And we do, certainly, spread from exhausted areas into new areas to exploit. After all, evolutionary history tells us that we spread over the Earth from our origins in Africa – and our distant ancestors, when they did, were certainly chasing game and other food sources.
When one looks at the analogy more carefully, however, it turns out not to hold much water. For one thing, no other animal consciously seeks balance in its environment, either. We humans are simply more capable of exploiting our environment more quickly, and in more harmful ways, than other animals. Make no mistake, however: a wolf pack is not consciously monitoring the herd levels and deciding when it’s safe to take an animal. “Balance” in nature is a brutal phenomenon: any species that overhunts its food supply starves until enough of its members have died that a new equilibrium can be restored.
Ironically, in such a brutal natural environment, viruses are among the cleverest at devising sustainable styles of living – mostly because they reproduce in such immensely large numbers, and die in equally large numbers. The reason that extremely deadly viruses are very rare is not merely because of our skills in medicine: it’s because a highly contagious, virulent disease that kills its host before it can spread will rapidly go extinct. Very deadly viruses thus have a tendency of either dying out (along with their hosts), or mutating to a less harmful form that can spread more easily. In other words, viruses which evolve successfully practice sustainable development – even though this development is dictated by natural selection rather than rational, conscious thought.
This is why, for example, some of the most successful viruses are the ones that cause irritating but not deadly symptoms, like the common cold and to a lesser extent the flu. Virtually nobody is killed by the cold, and very few people die of influenza; on those occasions where a flu pandemic occurs, the results are horrifying and tragic, but relatively quickly the pandemic tends to run its course and then recede back into less harmful forms of the disease. Viruses do not need to destroy their host to survive; indeed, the most successful viruses are the ones which explicitly do not destroy their hosts. The horrific diseases which we fear most are still just as horrific as ever – but, statistically, they are a very small minority of the viruses in the world.
In contrast, Smith’s pessimistic view of human beings becomes all the more tragic because, unlike viruses, we are rational, conscious, sentient beings who are perfectly aware of comprehending what we are doing to our environment. Yet this awareness has not helped many past civilizations, whose decline is often related to environmental exhaustion. Easter Island is the classic example, on which the indigenous inhabitants obliterated their entire forest by the 18th century despite (one would assume) living on an island small enough that the consequences of chopping down the last few trees would be easily apparent to all. Yet the same depletion on larger scales occurs elsewhere as well. The modern Middle East and northern Africa features many deserts not only because of natural causes, but also because areas subjected to millennia of early agricultural cultivation have since become exhausted and contaminated by salt. Hopefully in the long run we will prove Smith wrong, and figure out – like viruses – a way of living on Earth without destroying it.
