Happy Contingency Day
Professor Myers has little use for Thanksgiving Day:
This whole notion that one should have vague and aimless feelings of gratitude for the nature of one’s existence is just too weird, and the bow-your-head-at-the-table and radiate-blessings-at-the-cosmos tradition is pointless and silly.
I disagree. Remembering the contingency of our existence helps us avoid the hubris of believing that human consciousness—”star stuff contemplating the stars,” as Carl Sagan said—is the source and end of being. Maybe that’s not the “gratitude” that the professor abhors, because the recognition of contingency is not directed to anyone but ourselves and that seems to be his real complaint (that is, the outwardly directed “feelings of gratitude”), but I think “gratitude” and “thankfulness” are still useful words. The contingency of being predated the human penchant for personifying existence and worshiping it, but our sense that we receive benefits to which we did not and cannot contribute arises from the fundamental truth of reality, that everything we know depends on something else—including our ability to know that we are dependent. Why not express gratitude and thankfulness, not vaguely directed to “the universe,” or our fundamentally false idea of the universe, but for the benefit to ourselves of expressing it at all?