Don’t Grumble. Say Thanks Instead
Gratitude, co-opted (for better or worse) by the ‘wellness’ movement, is good for us, good for others — and true to reality.
‘Gratitude is the sign of noble souls,’ wrote Aesop, who is famous, like another great artist of classical antiquity, Sappho, for being fantastically ugly, as well as quite brilliant. Plato, who had a great deal to say about beauty, not all of it very generous, echoed Aesop when he said that ‘a grateful mind is a great mind.’ Cicero, Seneca, Meister Eckhart, G.K. Chesterton, Maya Angelou—the Western artistic and intellectual tradition is brimming with people who had good things to say about being grateful. But how best should we think about gratitude today, when it is mixed up in that odd-tasting porridge of efficiency hacks, common sense, psychology, utter quackery and Insta-therapy that we call ‘wellness’?
Perhaps we should begin by acknowledging that some are suspicious of this kind of gratitude—gratitude sold as a personal practice beneficial to the practitioner. The common attack on it, and indeed on any other act that implies the individual has the power of bettering her lot by herself, is that it makes her personally responsible for dealing with the emotional pain caused by the perceived failings of her culture. As one Marxist podcast claims in its title, ‘It’s Not All in Your Head’. It is an attractive suggestion, for it frees us from the burden of having to grapple with whatever it is that ails us. But that is not to say it is completely unsound: if your male boss brings up the topic of sex apropos of nothing and it makes you feel uneasy, then your response is perfectly reasonable, and casts light on the relations of the sexes in the surrounding culture. In any event, we all know that we are shaped by our circumstances.
Some are suspicious of this kind of gratitude — gratitude sold as a personal practice beneficial to the practitioner.
But still, the attack is curious. For one thing, all problems really do only exist in our heads, in the sense that a problem is a ‘mere’ perception about an event. (‘You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will,’ said the Stoic slave Epictetus). For another, it is disempowering: it keeps us down by suggesting, at best, that we are powerless to resist the emotional force of our surroundings. And we will be unlikely to have any real sway over those events we find troubling (in fact, we will be of little use to anyone) if we are emotionally off-kilter. The socialist may be well-attuned to the social causes of personal distress, but he knows that he is going to struggle to bring about the hoped-for social change if he is run down, stressed, worried, sad and all the rest of it. Regardless of whether we put the blame for our suffering on ourselves or on our society, some level of self-possession will be needed. Per Lenin: ‘You must have your heart on fire and your brain on ice.’
Now, reader, I could assail you with all of the evidence drawn from psychological research (for there is quite a bit of it) that casts light on what gratitude ‘does’ for us. It makes us happier. It strengthens our relationships. It improves the quality of our sleep; it lowers our blood pressure. It makes us more likely to exercise. And the benefits gather with time. In other words, the more often and more sincerely we express gratitude, the more strongly we feel the benefits. Dr. Laurie Santos of Yale, who hosts the podcast The Happiness Lab, describes how simply writing a letter of gratitude and giving it to someone gives rise to extraordinary increases in well-being for both the writer and recipient that lasts months.
Regardless of whether we put the blame for our suffering on ourselves or on our society, some level of self-possession will be needed.
But I do not want to reduce this topic to narrow utilitarianism. To be thankful is to acknowledge — and this might hurt our pride but it is evidently true — that we are, to quote the title of a book by the great Alasdair MacIntyre, dependent rational animals. We are where we are and who we are and how we are, able to enjoy whatever it is that we enjoy, thanks to others. Simply ponder the sheer number of people involved in the process that permits you to pour yourself a very large glass of wine at the end of a very long day (as I am doing now): choosing the right location, planting the vineyard, managing the vines, harvesting the grapes, crushing and de-stemming and fermenting and pressing and ageing and … Should I go on? And now contemplate your frustration (for you know you have felt this way; I have too, believe me) when something you took for granted is no longer available. Is this reasonable?
I would suggest, then, reader, that to be thankful rather than unthankful or even bitter is not to make some arbitrary choice for the sake of our well-being, but to live in closer correspondence with the truth. We should be grateful even to be alive. The very existence of our species, after all, let alone our individual existence, is so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. Eugene Koonin, Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, has said that despite using a model in which he assumed a ‘deliberately inflated rate’ of the mechanism by which life could appear, the probability of life emerging was 10⁻¹⁰¹⁸ — less than 1 in a number expressed as 1 followed by 1,018 zeros. The entire number of subatomic particles in the observable universe is thought to be a mere 10⁸⁶— by comparison, so small as to be practically non-existent. (This is discussed in The Matter with Things.) And once not just life but human life emerged, things were not so straightforward. Our forebears suffered in ways that would make our hair curl. We may not elect to ‘extend democracy through time’, as Chesterton described respect for tradition; but we must surely acknowledge that almost none of us — because of course there are exceptions — have had to (for example) club someone to death just to stay alive.
To be thankful rather than unthankful is not to make some arbitrary choice for the sake of our well-being, but to live in closer correspondence with the truth.
It is no surprise to me that every mature faith puts at its heart not just a reverence for reality and a belief in the importance of kindness towards others, but gratitude. A real irony, in my view, is that it seems as if often, those who have the least for which to be thankful and the most about which to feel aggrieved express gratitude the most freely. I worked for a time with a man who had grown up in unthinkable hardship in West Africa, saw his father and brother killed in brutal fashion, and yet, somehow, found his way to Harvard and the highest level of national politics. He was grateful for his experiences, including the time he spent in a tough Islamic school, where in classrooms overcrowded with pupils he and others were made to stare at a wall and learn by rote, chanting facts until they were impossible to forget.
None of this is to deny the reality of suffering. As the same philosophical and religious traditions that laud gratitude have since the dawn of time known, and often stated explicitly, life is suffering: the central symbol of the West is of a man strapped to two planks of wood being tortured to death, for goodness’ sake. Nor is the expression of thanks intrinsically quietistic — that is, a way of saying we should feel no righteous anger upon witnessing injustice and just go on our merry way. Gratitude equips us with the strength to confront what we must confront and resist what we must resist. It stills the turbulent waters of the mind so that we are not overwhelmed by anger or despair or, a common affliction, a loss of a sense of proportion. There is a great deal of gratitude expressed in the speeches and writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, those great 20th century liberators. So here is a radical idea: next time you are tempted to shake your fist at the heavens and bewail the awfulness of the world, be thankful instead.
