Month: July 2021

People complain about “mandates” imposed on them to cope with the resurgence of covid virus.  At the same time,  people dread and complain about climate change—though the earth has been changing all along. Media always emphasizes human control.

Culture  makes things seem stable.  From  infancy we grow up in culture, not nature,  although we confuse the two.  Even many moralistic environmentalists prefer culture to nature.

White  supremacy in this country apparently  fears that minorities—especially blacks and Jews—will “replace’  them,   as in the Charlottesville torchlight chant “Jews will not replace us.” 

“Replace” in this use means fear of extermination—economic competition—and death anxiety.   it seems to me that casual use of “existential”  has increased in mainstream news writing: whether the pandemic or economic circumstances—or both—is responsible.

This sounds to explain this scapegoating that  always accompanies fantasies of supremacy.  At the same time, ambivalently, “replace”  means that you regard yourself as superior: as the culture hero.  Naturally, supremacy—however .buried—means you  you can skip  vaccination for ambivalent reasons.   You’re too strong to need it;  and you don’t like to be dependent on elites or scientists who after all invented the vaccination.

It’s a hysterical moment that Trump and social media popularized.

Another way of looking at it  is to see that cultural certainties are growing stale.   At least until noon certainties form,  people are nervous.   I remember being struck by Sebastian Hafner’s discovery at age 7 in newsprint that Germany had lost the first world war—and doing his homework with the sounds of gunfire registering the disintegration of Victorian Germany outside the house in 1920s Berlin.

Makes you think that the world is changing.