Our desire to romanticize something – anything, really – is innate to the human species.
Now the typical mechanic working on AC electric motor repair, for instance, probably just deals with their own work as-is, without having undue distractions of the kind that may be characterized as “romantic.”
But in other aspects of life a considerable amount of individuals are wont to ascribe meaning to the randomly and, in Goethe’s famous warning, assign meaninglessness to the semantically significant.
As a result, imagine if that same mechanic, the one undertaking some AC electric motor repair or other, should then attribute anthropomorphic features to some aspect of the job involved.
Say a sudden spark was taken to be an omen of divine displeasure, or a mysteriously crushed bearing should somehow recommend unseen supernatural agencies.
We’d regard these proclamations baseless and, additionally, absolutely ridiculous – yet for some reason we accord undue respect to very similar pronouncements produced from rather parallel circumstances.
Therefore, an accurate prediction of a volcano eruption results in a successful evacuation with no lives lost, as in the case recently on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
The people praise God in their churches but left unspoken is why the good Lord should ever inconvenience them with such a threat in the first place!
Isn’t this rather like our mechanic working on AC electric motor repair mistaking natural forces for divine ones?
Yet by a interested quality of our human psychology, we feel the necessity to give many thanks – to something.
It’s not good enough to feel grateful; the term itself implies an object of our gratitude.
Every verb must have a subject, after all: “it” rains…in European languages, there’s usually something that does something.
Hence, our very minds are built to, as it were, imagine an agent behind every action worldwide.
