What do COVID-19, Brexit, the Trump presidency, climate change, and “woke” ideas have in common?
The answer: all of them have been described as “existential threats”. So prevalent are such dangers nowadays that there are several memes and cartoons about them. One features Mike Myers as Dr Evil making air quotes above the words: “Not a regular threat, but an existential threat.” As Austin Powers would have said: “Yeah, baby.”
In a case of bad timing, the online lexicon Dictionary.com chose “existential” as their word of the year for 2019. At the time, they said that the word “captures a sense of grappling with the survival—literally and figuratively—of our planet, our loved ones, our ways of life.” Little did they know that the pandemic was around the corner.
To be fair, their choice was dictated by events relating to climate emergencies, gun violence, and democratic institutions. Further, as they pointed out, Bernie Sanders helped searches for the word shoot up when he called climate change “an existential crisis that impacts not just you and me and our generation but our kids and our grandchildren.” (Undeniable.)
The use of the word has been bothering people for a while, though. In 2007, language maven William Safire wrote in the New York Times about Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and others gravely calling global terrorism an existential threat. He went on to unpack the meanings of the word, starting with Kierkegaard’s notion that that “the need to make painful ethical decisions was the source of mankind’s dread and despair; that man was solitary, existing in isolation.”
This is existentialism as the philosophers know it: the condition of being free and responsible for our actions, which causes profound feelings of anxiety. For Kierkegaard, what was needed to overcome this was a “leap of faith”.
Others like Sartre and his associates took it to mean that freedom and authenticity were at the core of the human experience; thus, the ways in which we act define our identities. In the famous formulation: existence precedes essence. (For those interested, Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café is a superb, readable account of their lives and ideas.)
It was seen as cool to be an existentialist in the years following World War Two. Many young men and women donned black turtlenecks, smoked unfiltered Gauloises and spoke impenetrably about being and nothingness in shabby-chic cafes.
A recent cartoon by Mark Stivers connects that lifestyle to our current use of the word. It’s captioned ‘Existential Threat’, and shows a goateed, beret-sporting youth languidly holding a cigarette and warning a bank teller: “Hand over the money, or I’ll explain the absurdity of all human activity.”
Existentialism and its adherents mostly fell out of favour with the coming of structuralism and with Sartre’s attempts to reconcile his thoughts with Marxism. There the matter might have rested, if not for its linkage with threats all these decades later. How did the term come to mean what it does today: a danger to our very existence?
In a 2019 article in The Atlantic, John McWhorter writes about the attraction of “the sheer drama in the term, with its flavour of darkness.” Because threats of the past were not often described in this way, he goes on, an existential threat feels “not only highbrow and portentous, but novel.”
He connects it, rightly, to the need to say old things in new ways in order to “grab the lapels and register our sincerity and passion.” Take the expression much heard nowadays in conference rooms: “a big ask”. This simply means a difficult request or large undertaking, but putting in in this manner makes it sound au courant. McWhorter has another example: “hack”. Instead of tips or pointers, we now rush to tell others of “cooking hacks”, “wardrobe hacks” and more, ad nauseam.
Such semantic changes are a feature, not a bug, of thriving languages. The word “awe”, for instance, initially meant fear or dread, before it took on overtones of reverence in the face of divinity. Another example is “disease”, which simply referred to a lack of ease before it acquired its current meaning. And one doesn’t need to elaborate on the contemporary significance of the word “toolkit”.
With “existential”, it looks like the process is going to continue for a while. A forthcoming book, for example, has the title Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power. The publicity material helpfully goes on to explain that it contains a method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't. One can imagine Sartre muttering, “hell is other people”.
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