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Machan's Musings-On Thanking God and Paying Heed with good fortune I squirm. Does this person not imply by such gratitude that those who are hit by the disaster—say suffer from various medical maladies they caught without being responsible for it, or casualties of the tsunami—were picked by God to get it good and hard? Doesn’t this imply that God is quite capricious, sparing you but not the others? Yet exclamations along those lines—“Thank God I wasn’t on that ship that sank or plane that crashed or my kid was spared from the flue epidemic”—are all around us, often uttered by devout believers. Or should we just dismiss these as ill formed outcries, with no attention whatsoever to the meaning the exclamation has in the English language, kind of the way we do not take seriously the meaning of “How are you” and “I am great”? Of course, we do not always actually make statements, or ask questions even when that’s the form of the utterance being used. I walk in from a cold evening and say, “My hands are freezing” but no one is calling 911 to summon an ambulance to rush me to the emergency room. “It was just an expression” is the appropriate response if one is needed at all. Still, there is something theologically disturbing about thanking God for when one lucks out. Some devout people say prayers for their favorite team, especially if they are competing with them. Do they seriously expect that God will look with favor on them but not on the other side? Just why would this make any sense at all? But then I have always worried a bit more about whether we mean what we say than many others I know. That’s because I consider the sound use of language something of a responsibility. If one misuses it, lots of trouble can follow. Sloppy language usually reveals sloppy thinking, which can lead to conduct that’s confused, is at cross purpose, vague, imprecise and so forth. This may stem from my having taken up my profession nearly forty years ago—teaching philosophy. Not that I fancy myself in the ranks of Aristotle or Locke but taking up this discipline amounts, in a way, to taking an oath to try to think clearly about most important matters, at least most of the time. Yet it is not only professional educators who take such an oath, at least implicitly. People in general, once they get going with their lives on their own, would probably do well to see themselves as having made a commitment to paying attention to their lives and the lives of their intimates. If they follow through on that commitment, it is likely that they will produce less havoc around them than if they proceed out of focus, in a haze. It is safe to say, I think, that one reason prudence—or wisdom—is deemed to be the first of the cardinal virtues human beings should follow is that it guides a person to take a long-range view and make sure what’s come into view is carefully attended to, not left neglected. In our time, of course, there is a lot denigration of such an attitude—one is often urged to live for the moment, indulge in present pleasures in preference to thinking things through. It is said, too, sometimes that one loses out by being a disciplined individual, guided by the classical virtues—it restricts one, robs one of spontaneity. It doesn’t have to at all. Spontaneity is best, when it is surrounded by reasonable care. One can then enjoy it guiltlessly—as one can the pleasures of moderate drinking, for example, if one has made sure one need not drive a car around much afterwards. I tell my students that they would be happier if they did their work before they go out to have fun, instead of afterward. It dampens one’s enjoyment if a bunch of reading and other work is hanging over one all the time. In any case, these reflections seem to me worth considering, because often today folks speak thoughtlessly and people’s troubles are increasingly ascribed to any fault on their part but to fate. Yet with some care they might indeed be in the best position to make sure trouble stays away.
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