Thanksgiving Redemption 2020

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“Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”—Jesus on the Cross

At the end of the day, it’s not our science and advanced technology that matter. It’s the stories we tell ourselves.

The vast majority of us are not scientists. We don’t have the interest, the training, the education or the obsessive dedication to precision and realism. So our fate, our future—our destiny as a species—depend on the stories we tell ourselves.

Thanksgiving is one of America’s greatest stories. A small band of pilgrims endured a terrible months-long voyage across a stormy ocean, all alone. They had fled persecution in their homeland. They sought a better, freer life in a new and unknown land. Yet they were about to endure a winter longer and harsher than any they had known before.

The Native Americans turned out to be friendly. They knew the native plants and animals and how to cultivate them. This they taught the Pilgrims, so as to help them survive. To seal the deal, the Natives and the Pilgrims had a great feast after the fall harvest. It was a tableau of cooperation: inter-racial, intercultural, the old world and the new.

In the annals of human holidays, Thanksgiving is practically unique. It’s not religious. It celebrates no military victory or loss, no battle, no political achievement, no martyrdom. It lauds the simple act of cooperation between two very different human cultures. That act gave the Pilgrims their shaky foothold in the New World.

The genocide came later. Part a deliberate land grab and part a transfer of European contagion, it ultimately wiped out an estimated 90% of the native population of North America.

But on that bright day, the agony lay far in the future. From the smallpox-infected blankets on the Trail of Tears to Custer’s Last Stand in the far North—all were unknown. On that November day so long ago, the Natives misnamed “Indians” and the Pilgrims acted out Jesus’ advice to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

The story is one we recall every year. It’s so compelling that many will risk sickness and death in the pandemic to celebrate it this year. Love and family are powerful stories, too.

This year two other stories also vie for our attention. One is a story of anger, grievance, mistrust, conspiracy, and treachery. It’s a story of magic, disorder, chaos, hate, and revenge—of racial groups and immigrants bent on destruction. It’s a story of a stolen election and a good people under seige. The other is a story of science, reason, tolerance, empathy, equality, and democracy quietly and effectively at work.

This year’s two stories differ as starkly as the age-old paradigms of Hell and Heaven. The people of the United States turned out in their greatest numbers ever to choose between them.

The dim vision of Heaven won. It won decisively but far from overwhelmingly. Nearly 74 million voted for the darker story.

So here we are, on our joyous and most secular American holiday, divided against each other, looking over our shoulders at our neighbors and a deadly contagion. Which story will ultimately prevail?

The story of Jesus on the Cross also raises questions. If God is all-powerful and all-good, why let Jesus die? Why not save Jesus before his death rather than resurrect him afterwards?

There are many answers to these questions. Among the most prominent are two. Sins have consequences. Sacrifice brings redemption.

We can understand these points of faith in modern, evolutionary terms. Causes have effects. Cooperation and sacrifice are our species’ chief evolutionary advantages, not our grapefruit-sized brains, our bipedal locomotion or our opposable thumbs. What led our species to dominate our small planet is our ability to empathize and cooperate and to sacrifice for the common good.

Science tells us that we can’t be unique. There are undoubtedly other intelligent species in the Universe, probably billions. But they are very far away.

Early in physics graduate school, our class calculated what it would take to reach Alpha Centauri, the star nearest to our own Sun. To the travelers, the trip would take about a dozen years. Due to special-relativistic effects, nearly four centuries would elapse on Earth before the travelers returned. When they got back, everyone they had known would be dead. Their dead contemporaries’ great-great-great-great (twenty times in all!) grandchildren would greet them. As for fuel, the voyage would take seven times the mass of our entire Sun, all converted into energy in accordance with Einstein’s formula E=mc².

So notwithstanding our engaging stories of Star Trek and Star Wars, we’re not likely to get any help—or any hindrance—from other intelligent species anytime soon. We humans are on our own. Our little blue world is ours to preserve or destroy.

On this Thanksgiving day in 2020, we face existential threats. We face global warming, which positive feedback may make run away. We face nuclear proliferation. We face vast internal strife as our climate changes. And we Americans face our greatest and most hostile division since our Civil War, driven in part by the very same forces of racism and domination. We face all this plus the worst pandemic in a century.

Yet in our mostly non-violent confrontation among ourselves, we Americans have chosen the lighter, happier story. We have chosen love over hate, decency over domination, cooperation over discord, and science over magic and rage.

Not all of us made these healthy choices. But most of us did. On this solemn day in 2020, when the fate of our American experiment, our health, and perhaps our species hangs in the balance, that act of redemption is something to be thankful for.

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