I once found myself seated next to a noted writer of ghost stories and an eminent investment analyst.

The analyst asked the writer: "Whoever believes in your ghosts today?" The writer replied gamely: "All those who have despaired of your voodoo economics."

There was no rancour in their exchange. We all laughed at ghosts or riches lurking around the corner.

I am not laughing today. The viral pandemic highlights two perennials of the human condition: fear and greed - fear of the hereafter, and greed in the here and now.

Like ghosts, the coronavirus reminds us of death in our living midst. It infects the air that we breathe, the surfaces that we touch, and the company that we keep. Even ghosts wait for the dark: The virus works day and night.

Fear of the hereafter can provoke astonishing responses. They range from proclamations that the coronavirus is an expression of divine wrath, to frightening mass religious gatherings held in defiance of a highly infectious outbreak.

Such responses stretch credulity to its limits. Mercifully, the mainstream of all faith communities has not been swayed by sentiments expressed on the fringes. However, the ease with which divisive words were spoken and irresponsible acts performed is cause for concern.

The quest for wealth in this world is as powerful as fear of the hereafter. The accumulation of wealth in the form of property has entered mythical territory, embodied in an Indian residence becoming second only to Buckingham Palace in value. Since that palace is crown property, the Indian building was rated as the most expensive private residence in the world.

The super-rich lead charmed lives anywhere. Their measured steps in the global waltz of finance and power are so assured that they cannot imagine life without a ball every other week.

No material system survives without psychological rationalisation. Famines and festivals are spokes in the same wheel of time. The ballroom dancing which graced the aristocratic economy of Europe (when many Europeans went hungry) has mutated into globalised mega-entertainment.

International life has become unthinkable without the next pop concert, no matter that sub-Saharan Africa could be starved out of history or that civil war kills a bit of Syria every day.

An offshoot of lucrative entertainment is commercial sports, which converts athletic achievement into a commodity. American baseball, English football, Kiwi rugby and colonial cricket define nations through their signature sports. Play signifies the default rivalry of states when they are not at war or cutting business deals. That is no bad thing because sports diverts the competitive instincts of people from war into peaceful sparring.

The greatest global unifier is the Olympics, which reminds the world every four years that it exists in peace. However, how well the world has existed in the intervening peace is none of the business of Olympians or pop stars.

Meanwhile, the nuclear balance of terror keeps escalating. The colonisation and eventual militarisation of outer space is the next frontier. Spacecraft will pluck a lucky few out of the trap of terrestrial gravity and transport them to a world free of the laws of physics, of the environment, and of supply and demand. Global warming is for the plebes: Patricians are welcome to a colder planet. Neptune is not a bad choice: No climate change activists live there.

This is the state of play as Covid-19 arrives as an unscripted actor on the global stage.

The pandemic defies the intrusion of the afterlife into the health of living bodies, which belong to the secular ambit of science.

The virus mocks the logic of worldly accumulation as well. It has cut an unprecedented swathe through international laws of supply and demand. With no proved origins nor role in the quadrumvirate of land, labour, capital and information, it cannot be pinned down to any of these factors of production, isolated and neutralised. Like war, the virus has become an independent variable free of the known calculus of economic rationality.

The Covidean universe is new.

This does not mean that the laws of the world have changed. It means that the understanding of those laws must change, as it has done before.

Ptolemy and Aristotle inhabited what they believed to be a geocentric universe. Copernicus thought otherwise and proved the mathematical existence of a heliocentric world. It fell on Galileo, his telescope and on physics to justify the Copernican revolution.

Times do not change: People do.

Fear and greed are ancient tokens of human provenance. But they do not have to rule the future.

Fear of the hereafter destroys the human capacity for action if it is not anchored in a purposeful here and now. Greed, the endless accumulation of wealth and power accompanied by crafted displays of musical and sporting spectacle, undermines sustainable economic, aesthetic and moral relations among mortals along with their common stake in the environment.

Fear and greed are two sides of the same coin.

Perhaps the pandemic will create a new human currency. Perhaps not. The choice is up to us.

• Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times.