Thank Who Very Much?

Ronald Aronson

Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. We who live after progress, after Marxism, and after the Holocaust have stopped believing that the world is being transformed by reason and democracy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all. Alone as never before, in a universe scientifically better understood than ever, we find little in its almost-infinite vastness to guide us towards what our lives mean and how we should live them.

To answer these questions anew, agnostics, atheists and secularists must absorb the experience of the twentieth century and the issues of the twenty-first. We must face today's concerns about forces beyond our control and our own responsibility, shape a satisfying way of living in relation to what we can know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality even while, especially in the United States, religion is being trumpeted as essential to living ethically, formulate new ways of coming to terms with death, and explore what hope can mean after the collapse of Enlightenment anticipations.

The first step of such a project concerns paradoxically, the issue of giving thanks. Gratitude, central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is virtually absent from our secular culture, except in relation to the “oughts” of individual interactions. But this deprives living without God of much of its coherence and meaning. My thesis is that there is much to be grateful for. Exploring this feeling and idea, so little noticed from a secular point of view, opens a new way of experiencing our relationship with forces and beings beyond our individual selves.

Hiking through a nearby woods on a late summer day recently, I followed the turning path and suddenly saw a pristine lake, then walked down a hill to its edge as birds chirped and darted about, stopping at a clearing to register the warmth of the sun against my face. Feelings welled up: physical pleasure, delight in the sounds and sights, gladness to be out here on this day. But something else as well, curious and less distinct, a vague feeling more like gratitude than anything else but not towards any being or person I could recognise. Only half-formed, this feeling didn't fit into any easily discernable category, evading my usual lenses and language of perception.

The one immediately available way of experiencing my incipient feeling begins with thanking God. For many, religion provides a ready stock of lenses and language to identify such experiences, because much of religion is about gratitude. Orthodox Jews, for example, thank God dozens of times a day, both in formal prayer and in common expressions: for the sunrise, for waking up alive, for food and drink, for going and coming safely, for every pleasure great and small, for health, for completing the day's activities, for nightfall, for sleep.

This way of relating to our lives and world has undeniable power. Thanking God out here on the trail would tie together everything I see and experience, it would direct me towards its source, and would give me a personal relationship with that being. It would, moreover, unite my feeling of pleasure with my understanding and fill me with a sense of gratitude that points towards my life's meaning and its purpose.

But living without a supernatural being seems to rule out such feelings of gratitude. In a godless universe, wasn't Camus right to begin The Myth of Sisyphus under the silence, emptiness, and absurdity of a universe without God? He demanded that we confront our utter aloneness in a world where there is no divine being to pray to, to be guided by, to confide in, to seek consolation from, to be judged by, or to place our hopes in. In this disenchanted world, we are on our own, for better and for worse, even if, in the words of molecular biologist Robert Pollack, we become no “more than numbers in a cosmic lottery with no paymaster.”

Perhaps Camus tolerated the emptiness only because, like Meursault in The Stranger , he could stretch out on the beach and feel the sun's heat on his body. Camus's writing brings these experiences of nature home with a power equal to his descriptions of absurdity. Warmed by the sun, feeling no intention and no being behind it, seems to leave us with momentary pleasure but no basis for a feeling of gratitude. After all, how can we be grateful to what has no mind and no will, say, the sun itself?

Aside from our holy books, writings on gratitude are few and far between in Western society. A few scattered writers have clarified it over the years – Seneca, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Simmel – mostly by focusing on person-to-person encounters with gift-givers and benefactors, perhaps generalising a bit from these to society as a whole. In the words of Robert Emmons and Cheryl Crumpler in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology , gratitude is “profoundly interpersonal”, focusing us on “the intentions of the benefactor”. And so, discerning no intention behind the sun, the trail, and the lake, perhaps my quasi-feeling deserves to stay mute, a vestige of what Julian Baggini, drawing on Freud's analysis of religion, aptly calls the time before “we cast off the innocence of supernatural world views.” Once we have given up projecting “benevolent parents who will look after us” to the world writ large, perhaps we should also stop anthropomorphising natural processes. Accordingly, in keeping with Baggini's notion of humans growing up, aren't the kinds of gratitude so central to religion inessential to secular culture?

More at: http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/article.php?id=1009