Cultural Coping Strategies

Abstract With the help of cultural coping strategies, adversity is incorporated into a given worldview in a way that creates meaning, gains resilience, and helps generate spaces of freedom, often with the help of justice. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the most important ancient strategies in creating areas of free scope when coping with disasters. In order to grasp the strategic pathways to keep up realms of freedom under disastrous circumstances, I explore the concepts of contingency and meaning. The cultures of antiquity developed worldviews that integrated disasters in a meaningful way. The hands of gods or demons are always involved in the events, avoiding the idea of meaningless “coincidence”. Contingency is transformed into “meaning” in the sense of teleological concepts such as intention, plan, or purpose. This also applies to disasters when they are explained by the intention and plan of the gods. By personalizing the relations of human beings to the world, disasters are understood in the form of personal relationships and thus filled with meaning. There are three prominent strategic mental pathways for creating meaningful worldviews and for coping with disastrous events: aestheticizing, ritualizing, and moralizing. Especially the last pathway, moralizing, gains new leeway by using, among other concepts, the idea of justice in the understanding of re-establishing order.