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The impulse 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 work as-is, without having undue distractions of the type that may be recognized as “romantic.”
But in most other aspects of life a substantial amount of individuals are wont to ascribe meaning to the arbitrary and, in Goethe’s famous warning, assign meaninglessness to the semantically significant.
Thus, imagine if that same mechanic, the one undertaking some AC electric motor repair or other, should then attribute anthropomorphic features to some factor of the project involved.
Say a sudden spark was taken to be an omen of divine discomfort, or a mysteriously crushed bearing should somehow propose unseen supernatural agencies.
We’d regard these proclamations baseless and, furthermore, absolutely ridiculous – yet for some reason we accord undue respect to very similar pronouncements composed of rather parallel circumstances.
As a result, 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 unsaid is why the good Lord should ever hassle them with such a danger 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 curious quality of our human psychology, we feel the need to give thanks – to something.
It isn’t 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 designed to, as it were, imagine an agent behind every action worldwide.