Thanksgiving and the Collectivist

by Micah Tillman

Thanksgiving is one of our more adaptable religious holidays. You can be an atheist and still celebrate it in (almost) its original sense.

It is completely possible to be thankful without needing a deity, in other words. Each of us has plenty of “real live” people to be grateful to. And there’s something right about having a day set aside to remind us of this fact, whether we believe in gods or not.

In contrast, one has to completely alter the meaning of Christmas and Easter if one wishes to avoid their religious origins, purpose, and meaning.

Instead of Christ’s birth, one can celebrate family. Or presents. Or Santa Claus. But that’s not Christ, nor is it mass.

Instead of Christ’s resurrection, one can celebrate . . . pretty eggs and magical bunnies. But that’s not Easter. That’s not even the non-Christian (“pagan”) “version” of Easter.

Thanksgiving isn’t like that. Take the God out of Thanksgiving, and you’ve still got plenty of thanks to give.

It is completely possible for even the most anti-religion of atheists to authentically and whole-heartedly celebrate Thanksgiving. Instead of lifting or bowing our heads in thankfulness, we can look into each other’s eyes.

And even for the religious person, one would think there should be a little of both the bowing and the looking around.

The person who cannot celebrate Thanksgiving is the collectivist. I did some thinking last Thanksgiving about “the ontology of Thanksgiving,” and came to the following conclusion:

“To give thanks to someone, you have to be different from him/her. I guess that’s the case whenever you give anything.

“But to give thanks is special, in that it is an acknowledgment that the other person has done something that you did not do. If you had done it, you wouldn’t be thanking the person in question.”

For the collectivist, all “responsibility” is “shared.” No man is an island because we all form one continent.

There is no you or me, because we are first “us.” We only exist as functionaries of the collective.

There is, for the collectivist, nothing you do that I am not somehow responsible for. And there is nothing I do that you are not somehow responsible for.

We are simply modes of the group being. The collective (the nation, the state, the town) works through us. What we do, it does. And what it does, we do.

The collectivist cannot feel gratitude, therefore. He cannot celebrate Thanksgiving. To do so, he would have to acknowledge that he and others are not one. He would have to acknowledge separation, distinction, individuality.

He would have to admit that people are persons first (that they are others for each other, not appendages of one another).

And the collectivist cannot do this. The drive for belonging, the fear of solitude, and the weight of individual responsibility are too great.

To be grateful this Thanksgiving, we must be personalists, if not outright individualists. We must be willing to look each other in the eye and say:

“You are you, I am me, and we are—in a fundamentally important way—not us. Therefore, what we do for or to each other, we do gratuitously. I can make no claim on your actions, and neither can you on mine. Therefore, I thank you for doing for me what I did not do for myself.”

In celebrating Thanksgiving, therefore, we need neither accept or deny a deity. But we must accept or deny certain propositions about the nature of the human being.

The threat to Thanksgiving comes not from atheism, but collectivism.

Micah Tillman is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.