That's how the light gets in
To truly give thanks this week is to celebrate the world. But for all of our obsession with success and self-fulfillment, Americans don't celebrate very well.
By Gary Kamiya
Read more: Thanksgiving, Gary Kamiya, Opinion
Nov. 21, 2006 | The festival of historically sanctioned gluttony is upon us again, and soon families across America will be sprawled in their living rooms, idly watching the Detroit Turkeys lose for the 72nd straight year and contentedly sniffing the aroma wafting up from the basketball-size fowl roasting in the kitchen. I spend Thanksgiving every year at my mother's house in Berkeley, Calif., with my extended family. Our clan is relentlessly unreligious, but we say a kind of secular grace every Turkey Day, bowing our heads and holding hands, a sweet, unfamiliar ritual that always makes me feel a little shy. My mother usually speaks. She gives thanks for the fact that we're all here, and then often says a few words about the state of the world. Because our family is also relentlessly Democratic -- we are a veritable blue-state cliché -- her remarks on the latter subject are usually quite pointed. In fact, in recent years they can claim only a tenuous link to the theme of Thanksgiving, coming closer to Old Testament jeremiads or other sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God outbursts. This year, though, I'm expecting Mom to give heartfelt thanks for the return to sanity of the American people. And then, having given our thanks, we will begin to gorge.
The fact that America has a holiday dedicated to giving thanks is lovely, and unexpected. Ours is not a particularly grateful culture. The Pilgrims may have seen fit to give thanks after bringing their first harvest in, but that was a different country. Now that our survival is not at issue and we're the big dog in the world, hogging all the ears of corn and kicking in the doors of neighbors we don't like, our national expressions of gratitude tend to run along the chest-beating lines of "Thank God I'm an American." Things may be a little better in the private sphere: Religion provides a ritual framework in which people can give thanks, which from my atheist's perspective is one of its more admirable qualities. But the deepest currents in American life run away from giving thanks.
To thank is not simply to express obligation or gratitude, although it is both those things. An act of thanking that goes beyond the merely formal starts with an act of appreciation. But appreciation isn't easy. It requires perspective. You have to get outside yourself, turn off the endless mental scribbling that covers everything with cheap verbal graffiti. To do this, however, you have to stop, and we Americans are going too damn fast all the time -- going where? -- even to slow down. In an aphorism called "Tourists," Nietzsche nailed our frenzied, goal-obsessed culture: "They climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating -- one has forgotten to tell them that there are beautiful views on the way up."
I don't believe in a white-bearded God, and take very few of my spiritual precepts from Bush administration schemes, but I do cling to one faith-based initiative. I believe that to truly see the world is to celebrate the world. And for all of our obsession with pleasure, money, success, power and self-fulfillment -- or maybe because of it -- we Americans don't do celebration very well. We're good at partying and gloating, but they're not quite the same thing. The French have joie de vivre, the Italians la dolce vita; "he who dies with the most toys wins" doesn't quite measure up.
In fact, our toys, especially our high-tech toys, are part of the problem. By insidiously leading us to value process more than experience, technology runs the risk of hollowing out our lives. The more we become obsessed with the clarity and speed of the signal, the less time we have to appreciate the message. Pure process is a powerful drug; it swallows up experience. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger anticipated this problem 57 years ago in a bleak essay titled "The Question Concerning Technology." I'm far from certain that I understand him correctly -- reading the cryptic old Nazi is like taking a Germanic, footnoted acid trip -- but Heidegger seems to argue that technology is not merely a neutral tool, but is a kind of coercion over and shrinking of the world, a process he called "enframing." By framing the world through technology, man is losing touch with it.
We can illustrate Heidegger's point with a humble example: the iPod. As Farhad Manjoo pointed out in these pages, the blessing of the iPod, the fact that it allows you to draw on a vast musical library, is also its curse. The more choices you have to create the perfect soundtrack for your life, the jumpier and more uncertain you can become that you've made the right choice. As Manjoo writes, "Am I the only one who worries that for all its wonders, the iPod has also tremendously complicated our relationship to music -- has made us more mindlessly consumptive of songs, less attentive to the context and the quality of music, and concerned, constantly, with just always getting more, more, more?" Heidegger would have scoffed at the idea of writing a sentence this succinct, but it's the same idea.
Whatever the reasons, the fact is that the art of living -- for that's what we're really talking about when we speak of gratitude -- doesn't come naturally to most people. Numb repetition seems to be hard-wired into the human condition. Being madly in love helps, if you're lucky enough to hit that jackpot. Or almost dying, as long as you don't. But for most of us, those big numbers on the wheel of fortune don't come up, or we've already hit them, blown the spiritual winnings and proceeded to fall back into our old, heedless ways.
Next page: I learned the hard way. Seventeen years ago, at the age of 36, I was diagnosed with cancer