on thanks giving
I spent a good part of the Thanksgiving Weekend trying to puzzle out how the disparities in the world view that 21st century folk entertain and the world view of the Pilgrims cash out for the problem of gratitude.
To play fast and loose with the philosophical tradition of the linguistic turn, gratitude seems to be a ternary relationship between two agents and a situation of some sort, where the first agent is grateful for the involvement or contribution of the second agent in bringing about the situation directly or indirectly (e.g. by contributing to its preconditions).
Most people in not too terrible circumstances are not too hard pressed to identify events or situations that they are grateful for--in my friends' blogs, the continued well-being of various family members was a popular and easily understood one. It is the second agent slot, the auteur position, that gives pause.
Not to the Pilgrims of course. Standing firmly in the Calvinistic tradition, their potential for free will had already been sacrificed to the majesty of their Lord, who had pre-ordained the successful and the failed lives before the beginning of time and was merely enforcing that Divine plan on a day-by-day basis, not unlike a watch wound up winding down. (There are more sophisticated forms of this argument to take, but the basic structure appears to me to be appropriate and befitting the pilgrims' self conceptions.)
In this setting, gratitude was also not a voluntary contribution of the human being, potentially even heart-felt, that had been gifted with salvation by the Divine, but an appropriate response that was befitting the majesty of the Divinity. Just like modern taxes are not a vote of confidence or even an expression of consent in the spending patterns of the nation state governments that extract them, the gratitude of the believer was a way to bring themselves in line with the Divine plan, even if that Divine plan did precisely not contain what they had wished for or wanted. The mere fact that fasting was required before it was possible to show ones gratitude properly points in that direction.
Between that stance and the present times lies like two consecutive gaping pits the Enlightenment and the Romantic era, if nothing else. The Enlightenment eliminated the notion of the day-to-day involvement of the Divine in the actual mechanics of existence. The Romantic era replaced the cognitive approach to dogmatic validation once and for all, through borrowing from the Pietistic and the Mystical traditions, with the heart-felt justification of whatever topic happened to be under discussion.
This inverted the relationship, in that the expression of gratitude was now a fundamentally personal and emotive act of the agent, akin to a commemorative charitable donation, instead of an act of self-submission that brought the individual in realignment with the Divine plan. The liturgical pattern of self-denial and sanctification through the Divine intervention was replaced by a heightening of the individual self-experience that finds additional emotional pleasure in "counting its blessings".
At the same time, the Deistic drift (Spinoza's deus sive natura, "god or nature") eliminated any agentive power to put into the position of the auteur to whom thanks were due, or even possible. To be thankful to Nature for a forest in spring bloom becomes more an expression of a lack of appreciation for how inevitable the physics and chemistry of plant growth are than an expression of cutting-edge, modernist piety.
This Romantic tacking runs fully aground on the criticisms of underlying conceptualization of the idea of God, as expressed by Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and continued, though with very different emphasis, in the writings of Dawkins and other evolutionary atheists. The Calvinistic conception of the (almost orientally) despotic God as the Supreme Ruler of the Universe (in all-caps) is a useful device to ward off alternate claims, typically from nation states, to ultimate rulership--be it by the 17th century absolute monarchs or the 20th century fascistic states in Europe. With their God, the pilgrims could at least be certain that the Godhead actually cared about them (even if through the indirection of its Majesty). But in the modern democratic polity, which does not permit such forms of despotism from anyone, the construction appears bizarre and unhelpful.
Which leaves the whole setup vulnerable to the problem of theodicy. It is only the maximally involved Godhead that can demand gratitude for the absence of deeds that would have seemed exceedingly desirable to the potential beneficiaries. It is only the Divine master plan that can justify the absence of intervention in a situation where the suffering of the world is plastered across every news website. (How successfully the demand and or the justification are received coram publico remains a separate issue.)
Thus, the 21st century person finds themselves stuck with the dilemma of either lacking a recipient for their heartfelt gratitude for the acceptable aspects of their life, or lacking a moral justification for why what they are grateful for is all that their Godhead could muster.
To play fast and loose with the philosophical tradition of the linguistic turn, gratitude seems to be a ternary relationship between two agents and a situation of some sort, where the first agent is grateful for the involvement or contribution of the second agent in bringing about the situation directly or indirectly (e.g. by contributing to its preconditions).
Most people in not too terrible circumstances are not too hard pressed to identify events or situations that they are grateful for--in my friends' blogs, the continued well-being of various family members was a popular and easily understood one. It is the second agent slot, the auteur position, that gives pause.
Not to the Pilgrims of course. Standing firmly in the Calvinistic tradition, their potential for free will had already been sacrificed to the majesty of their Lord, who had pre-ordained the successful and the failed lives before the beginning of time and was merely enforcing that Divine plan on a day-by-day basis, not unlike a watch wound up winding down. (There are more sophisticated forms of this argument to take, but the basic structure appears to me to be appropriate and befitting the pilgrims' self conceptions.)
In this setting, gratitude was also not a voluntary contribution of the human being, potentially even heart-felt, that had been gifted with salvation by the Divine, but an appropriate response that was befitting the majesty of the Divinity. Just like modern taxes are not a vote of confidence or even an expression of consent in the spending patterns of the nation state governments that extract them, the gratitude of the believer was a way to bring themselves in line with the Divine plan, even if that Divine plan did precisely not contain what they had wished for or wanted. The mere fact that fasting was required before it was possible to show ones gratitude properly points in that direction.
Between that stance and the present times lies like two consecutive gaping pits the Enlightenment and the Romantic era, if nothing else. The Enlightenment eliminated the notion of the day-to-day involvement of the Divine in the actual mechanics of existence. The Romantic era replaced the cognitive approach to dogmatic validation once and for all, through borrowing from the Pietistic and the Mystical traditions, with the heart-felt justification of whatever topic happened to be under discussion.
This inverted the relationship, in that the expression of gratitude was now a fundamentally personal and emotive act of the agent, akin to a commemorative charitable donation, instead of an act of self-submission that brought the individual in realignment with the Divine plan. The liturgical pattern of self-denial and sanctification through the Divine intervention was replaced by a heightening of the individual self-experience that finds additional emotional pleasure in "counting its blessings".
At the same time, the Deistic drift (Spinoza's deus sive natura, "god or nature") eliminated any agentive power to put into the position of the auteur to whom thanks were due, or even possible. To be thankful to Nature for a forest in spring bloom becomes more an expression of a lack of appreciation for how inevitable the physics and chemistry of plant growth are than an expression of cutting-edge, modernist piety.
This Romantic tacking runs fully aground on the criticisms of underlying conceptualization of the idea of God, as expressed by Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and continued, though with very different emphasis, in the writings of Dawkins and other evolutionary atheists. The Calvinistic conception of the (almost orientally) despotic God as the Supreme Ruler of the Universe (in all-caps) is a useful device to ward off alternate claims, typically from nation states, to ultimate rulership--be it by the 17th century absolute monarchs or the 20th century fascistic states in Europe. With their God, the pilgrims could at least be certain that the Godhead actually cared about them (even if through the indirection of its Majesty). But in the modern democratic polity, which does not permit such forms of despotism from anyone, the construction appears bizarre and unhelpful.
Which leaves the whole setup vulnerable to the problem of theodicy. It is only the maximally involved Godhead that can demand gratitude for the absence of deeds that would have seemed exceedingly desirable to the potential beneficiaries. It is only the Divine master plan that can justify the absence of intervention in a situation where the suffering of the world is plastered across every news website. (How successfully the demand and or the justification are received coram publico remains a separate issue.)
Thus, the 21st century person finds themselves stuck with the dilemma of either lacking a recipient for their heartfelt gratitude for the acceptable aspects of their life, or lacking a moral justification for why what they are grateful for is all that their Godhead could muster.