Gratitude

What and odd and sweet and corny and good thing it is to have a holiday themed (loosely perhaps) around the idea of gratitude!

Maybe the gratitude-theming is a strike against Thanksgiving in your mind. The world is wrong, the world is bent. Why should we tell people to be grateful? It is patronizing and cruel to demand gratitude from the sick, the hurting, the oppressed. And those who have had better luck should be using their privilege to make this broken world a bit better, not luxuriating in a complacent gratitude.

These objections reveal a commendable desire for justice and equity. But they also betray a misunderstanding what gratitude is and why it is precious.

Gratitude is not the same as contentedness; it does not mean that you are satisfied with your lot or with the arrangement of the world.

I think that people imagine that life is like a pair of scales. One the one side you pile everything good and wholesome and lucky, and, on the other, you have everything wrong and bad and dispiriting; then you see which scale drops and which rises; and if the heap of good things drops then you can be happy or satisfied or grateful; and if the heap of bad things drop then you’re unhappy, and rightfully so.

But good and bad don’t cancel each other out like this. If your beloved child has cancer, the cancer doesn’t cancel the preciousness of the child, and the preciousness of the child doesn’t cancel the malignancy of the cancer. The child is lovely, and the cancer is awful. The good and evil coexist, each at full force. They don’t add up to neutral.

And so, gratitude is not a failure to acknowledge or account for evil. It is merely remembering to acknowledge good. It is easier to focus on evil anyway. The hard part is looking at the good.

A second misconception about gratitude comes in when people mix in notions of desert. Gratitude, someone will think, only applies to favors that you weren’t owed. If your friend picks you up from the airport out of the friendliness of their friendly feeling for you, you are grateful to them. But if your Uber driver, in exchange for their cut of the $45.08 your wind up paying, takes you home from the airport, it would be strange to be grateful. That was a transaction.

Add one more idea to this: everyone has human dignity and deserves adequate food and shelter, real human connection, some degree of personal autonomy, and many other things. (This is true.) But if everyone deserves these things, then (by the logic of our airport example) why be grateful? Especially when so many people do not even have what they deserve.

But when we say that everyone deserves to flourish, or when we say that gratitude doesn’t apply to transactions, in both cases we are thinking of the claims we can make on one another. I have an obligation to look out for your right to food and shelter and the rest; and you have an obligation to look out for me. But the universe doesn’t owe either of us anything. You don’t “deserve” to exist. Existence itself comes to us without our deserving or asking for it. That is a marvel. The totality of the good we encounter—comes as a gift, as grace. And good things—objects, health, friendships, life itself—are fragile. You have probably done without them in the past. There will certainly come a time when you don’t have them in the future.

We do not renege on the political claims we have on one another when we acknowledge that every good thing we have is precious, contingent, and undeserved.

Finally, a word about the notion that gratitude involves complacency. This is a mistake. People imagine that the restless discontentedness of a revolutionary is incompatible with gratitude. But it is just the opposite; the revolutionary needs gratitude most of all.

To change the world, you have to have values. I don’t believe you will do any good trying to change the world just because you want a clap on the back when you’re done. You might blunder into some good by accident that way, especially if you’re rich, but to really make the world better takes vision. You have to see what’s missing, understand why it’s important, and pursue it no matter the obstacles. You need to understand what is too important to compromise and what is ancillary. All of this comes from knowing how to love things.

And I believe that a lack of gratitude reveals a lack of values. If you really value health or housing or beauty or justice, you’ll delight in it when it’s present and not merely resent its absence.

Again, it is easy to focus on the negative, on what needs to change. And we certainly need to face problems to solve them. But I’m convinced that we’ll make mistakes trying to change the world from a place of resentment. We’ll do much more good by loving good things holistically: gratitude to the extent they have been secured, zeal to the extent they have been denied.

Gratitude equips us to see parts of the multifarious world that might otherwise escape our attention. It reminds us that good is fragile, precious, and needs to be fought for. In addition to all this, it builds our well-being. It is a pleasant and calming thing to feel grateful.

So do not distain this odd and sweet and corny holiday. It is an opportunity to practice gratitude, and gratitude is something well worth practicing.