Ingratitude, Mob Violence, and Providence
by R J Snell, Public Discourse:
Our culture’s deep ingratitude is the long, nihilistic outworking of the logic of modern thought itself. When human experience is reduced to only will and power struggle, there no room for gratefulness. Those of us who have not renounced cosmic order and the providence that brings that order to fulfillment, by contrast, know that all things willed or permitted by God work for good. Thus we should be grateful—profoundly grateful—for everything.
A friend recently remarked on the absence of gratitude in contemporary political life. As he sees it, an inordinate disposition to critique and demand has all but destroyed thankfulness for the many benefits of living in the United States. I don’t disagree, even though our society is unjust enough to warrant serious critique.
I’d suggest, however, that ingratitude is not a momentary infection of the body politic, not the result of four years of Trump or economic inequality or any other specific political dissatisfaction. Instead, our culture’s deep ingratitude is the long outworking of the logic of modern thought itself.
Hans Jonas noted that “reason triumphant through science has destroyed the faith in revelation, without, however, replacing revelation in the office of guiding our ultimate choices.” Modern thought creates the “nihilistic situation” in which we find ourselves, and it’s very difficult to be grateful under conditions of nihilism. To whom, for what should we be thankful?
As Jonas puts it, the modern scientific view of nature sees itself as a negation of the biblical view of the world. If the Bible teaches that the world is created by God, for modern science, “by contrast,” the world “has ‘made’ and is continuously making ‘itself’… the world at every moment is the last word about itself and measured by nothing but itself.” Further, while the Creator declares the world to be “very good,” the world of “modern physics is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad,’ it has no reference to either attribute, because it is indifferent to that very distinction.” The world of fact, the world as it is, is utterly alien to the world of value, and terms such as good, bad, or value are entirely “human measures” that do not refer to anything in the world itself.
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