It is snowing hard.  The stone buddha on the hill  is shrouded with white.  Nature is “what it is.”  There is no mask, no screen of projection, a proffered interpretation which Nature offers to the human mind.  There is no wrap of culture with regard to Nature, as is the case with human affairs. 

If you find yourself lost in a upper Michigan woods on a frigid day such as this, without the right apparel to maintain body heat, without waterproof, insulated boots…  In a short time you will succumb to hypothermia, your awareness will fade, the precursor to losing consciousness.  Nature will kill you.  The real of Nature is hard-edged.

Not so with human affairs.  There is always the screen of culture, our emotions are projected upon: the Flag, the Bible, the Constitution, my professor, the president of the United States, and yes, even Jesus.  Culture is the superfluity of meanings, the penumbra of feelings surrounding these elements, which I learned along with language, when I was about two years old or so.  Not that I, in full awareness chose this collection of feelings/meanings as I would have chosen a 120 count box of Crayola crayons.  (The 120 count box is the biggest box.)  That is culture, the inherited screen upon which I project received feelings, and meanings. 

 It is no surprise that I hardly know what I think, what I feel.  I am for most part a passive observer, hardly active at all as a knower, — since culture, the Big Other “believes” and “knows” for me.  I think and believe and feel  obsessively, especially when I engage social media.  Images, and rhetoric prompt me to feel intensely, usually rage and revulsion for the “usual suspects.”  If by upbringing or by chance I happen to live in a “red” state, it’s the pointy-headed liberals, the Black Lives Matter Movement, etc. all those opposing the world which we will make if/when we have more power.  Or consider the pleasant, all enveloping sensation of being cared for by Jesus, of having my feelings of ill-will toward my spouse or my sabotage of my co-worker in order to get the promotion, etc. all pardoned by the Lord and Savior.  You know the feeling when singing the hymn “Amazing Grace” in church on Sunday morning?  Perhaps you know what I mean. 

Of course this works just as well for the Liberal-Humanist tribe. Those rituals, and routines function similarly.

Yesterday I found time to review notes which I took not long ago on How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek.  Zizek brings the reader face to face with Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis. 

Why the interest in Lacan you ask?  I wanted to understand better the inflammatory rhetoric of  Senator Ted Cruz, understand better the image of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.  With a fist raised in a gesture of defiance on the steps of the Capitol, Hawley denies the legitimacy of the election of November 3rd. Hawley urged on thousands who stormed and trashed the halls of Congress.

What is found when the screen of culture is ripped asunder, and humans act out, literally, directly what “they believe that they believe?”  Culture, the screen of the Big Other, the mediation of what we believe, of what we feel — keeps us responsibly engaged in dialog about our different views.  The debate of democracy is an exchange that grounds a relationship with those whose experience is different from my own.  What happens when the tools, the screen of culture no longer mediates, and we directly act out our passion, our deepest beliefs?

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Culture is but our screen.  And we assume there’s “a man” behind the curtain: the Flag, the Bible, the Constitution, Jesus etc.  Criticism of  the Big Other (the Flag, the Bible, the Constitution, Jesus) is not permitted.