curmudgeonly confession

I do not like thanksgiving. I do not like prayer. I realize that success for humans -- being productive, reaching goals, doing good, feeling good, maintaining healthy relationships -- depends on a kind of auto-hypnosis, training oneself to think positive thoughts -- and that thanksgiving, and prayer, and votive offerings, and praise of the divine, are for many if not most people essential means of putting themselves in a frame of mind that enables them to do good of any kind. 

But still, the whole effort seems dishonest to me -- or at least to part of me, or in some frames of mind (in other frames of mind I do suspect that those endowed with the religious chip may be onto something).  Islam captures the core impulse in its name -- submission.  People may have powerful impulses to dominate, but how we love to submit, to imagine an authority that will bless us for our submission, a heavenly parent who is well pleased with us.  Many of those who are most confident that they have obtained this blessed status then turn it around and use it as a stick to bludgeon those who don't perceive the universe or their place in it in the same way.

I do realize that the placatory and worshiping impulse that makes us feel in sync with the universe or at one with the will of a benevolent deity is one of the most powerful motive forces for action that makes human life better.  Perhaps some version of this feeling of connection, however obtained, is indispensable to productive action. No one, really, should disparage any activity, social or psychological, that helps to gin this feeling up.  So disregard this post. It just expresses one powerful strain of feeling, or perception, or maybe you could even call it thinking, that won't go away.

A Wrinkle in (Presidential) Time

A bit of free association below, keying off George Packer's musing about the disillusionment he's hearing on his book tour from young Obama supporters (h/t Andrew Sullivan). Packer:

The most disappointed people I meet are under thirty, the generation that made the Obama campaign a movement in its early primary months. They spent their entire adult lives under the worst President of our lifetime, they loved Obama because he was new and inspiring, and they felt that replacing the former with the latter would be a national deliverance. They weren’t wrong about that, but the ebbing of grassroots energy once the Obama campaign turned to governing suggests that some of his most enthusiastic backers saw the election as an end in itself. The Obama movement was unlike other social movements because it began and ended with a person, not an issue. And it was unlike ordinary political coalitions because it didn’t have the organizational muscle of voting blocs. The difficulty in sustaining its intensity through the inevitable ups and downs of governing shows the vulnerability in this model of twenty-first-century, Internet-based politics.

The triggered memory is of the disillusioned twelve-year heroine of the children's fantasy A Wrinkle in Time after she catches up in a far-off galaxy with her adored, longed-for, long absent father:

She had found her father and he had not made everything all right. Everything kept getting worse and worse. If the long search for her father was ended, and he wasn't able to overcome all their difficulties, there was nothing to guarantee that it would all come out right in the end. There was nothing left to hope for. She was frozen, and Charles Wallace was being devoured by IT, and her omnipotent father was doing nothing. (Ch. 10: Absolute Zero).