Christmas in Oaxaca

An oasis full of life in a world obsessed with death

“For the present age illusion only is sacred, truth profane. The highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” – Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity, 1848

Ciudad de Oaxaca, México

One of the most salient questions for me in the current pandemic is why so many people have so willingly given up core freedoms and rights that took their forebears three millennia of cultural-political achievement and sacrifice to attain.

Except for a virtual $14.4 billion consumer election spectacle staged for television and social media in the US (the most expensive in US history) in which 14 million TV ads were run, all political life has essentially been shutdown in 2020. Indeed, authentic political expression is now illegal as epidemiology supersedes politics.

Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito observes that, “Politics has become medicalized. Giving doctors the task of political decision-making radically transforms the political arena, making deviance a pathological condition.” The historic passivity with which this new medicalized anti-politics regime has been accepted raises troubling life and death questions that go far beyond public health policy.

A central theme in the work of social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm was the conflict between what he believed was humanity’s inherent attachment to life (Eros) and the incessant attempts of a sick society to lure the individual into an embrace of death (Thanatos).

To paraphrase Fromm from The Sane Society, “In the past, the problem was that God is dead; in the present, the problem is that man is dead.”

Gender pronouns aside, is Fromm right? Is humanity losing its vital erotic attachment to life? A pervasive fear of death or obsession with morbidity such as in the current time does not equate to an active embrace of living. It is the opposite, especially when coupled with nearly complete political capitulation.

As I’m thinking and trying to contextualize the current global crisis and working on three different books for 2025 (see covers below), I’m in Oaxaca, México. I’ve been here for nearly a month and am spending Christmas with friends. Being in this historic city is a joy. Every day and every night, the streets are full of life. The state of Oaxaca has one of the lowest incidences of Covid in México.