In March 2020, Europeans started
gathering on balconies and by windows to cheer, applaud and show gratitude to
their healthcare workers providing life-saving services during the pandemic.
The regular cheering and clapping became a symbol of hope: human solidarity
triumphing over fear and enforced isolation. Contrast that scene with another.
Following the remission of her COVID-19 symptoms in July, Jazmin Grimaldi
(daughter of Albert II, Prince of Monaco) told her thousands of followers on
Instagram: ‘I am so thankful that I am starting to finally feel like myself
today … I am grateful to be alive and healthy at this present moment.’
How were these situations different? Why is it
inspiring to hear about the people of Europe shouting thankfulness from their
rooftops, whereas Grimaldi’s message, while it induces sympathy, doesn’t
inspire?
Besides the obvious discrepancy in the magnitude of
the two displays, another clue is found in the question: to whom were
these people thankful? The gratitude of the European public toward their
healthcare workers is highly relatable. We understand the sacrifices that
medical professionals make, and know that we owe them a debt that can never be
paid in full. Our inability to adequately reciprocate their efforts only
increases our gratefulness. By contrast, Grimaldi’s gratitude, however
heartfelt, lacked an addressee – as do similar public utterances made by
countless others. It wafted into digital space and dispersed, clinging to no
one in particular. Grimaldi’s message conveyed an understandable sense of
happiness and relief, but her sentiment didn’t necessarily establish a bond
with other people.
Grimaldi’s style of gratitude is part of a wider
societal pattern. The disappearance of benefactors (or donors) from scenes of
thanksgiving has become particularly endemic to current American thought about
gratitude, as its focus has shifted from the interpersonal function of
thankfulness to its personal advantages. This is partly down to the influence
of positive psychology: in the past two decades, scientists have grown
increasingly attuned to the contribution of gratitude to both personal and
interpersonal flourishing, crediting it
with improving emotional wellbeing and promoting prosocial behaviours, changing our
brains to help emotion regulation, and even with relieving symptoms of asthma. However, only a minority of
studies have highlighted the social nature of gratitude, with most focusing on
its benefits for the grateful subject. The aforementioned studies privileged
personal rather than interpersonal aspects of gratitude. Test subjects were
instructed to keep a written record of things for which they felt grateful or
to perform a gratitude meditation, rather than to share their thankfulness with
anyone else.
Seen as a personal emotion with considerable
benefits, gratitude is increasingly marketed as a self-help instrument, as
epitomised in the popularity of gratitude journals such as Good Days
Start with Gratitude (2017): diaries designed to keep track of events,
people and circumstances for which one feels grateful. With promises that they
will bring a host of personal benefits, these journals translate some of the
scientific findings about thankfulness and wellbeing into a wellness practice.
And since the journal is a private document meant only for the writer’s eyes,
any benefactors mentioned in it will probably never learn about the
journal-keeper’s feelings.
The contemporary preoccupation with gratitude
as an individual experience, and viewing it as a path to psychological
wellness, is significantly different from how the emotion was understood
historically. Whereas earlier theories of gratitude also concentrated on the
importance of gratitude as an inward disposition, such theories nevertheless
emphasised that gratitude derived its value from its interpersonal nature. In
his treatise on religious affections, the 18th-century American preacher
Jonathan Edwards described gratitude as a natural affection felt toward another
who has benefited us. The power of gratitude is so great, according to Edwards,
that it can momentarily induce positive feelings even toward our enemies
(Edwards gives an example from the Old Testament with Saul’s thankfulness to
his enemy David for sparing his life). By this view, although our gratitude
might be rooted in a basic concern for our personal interests, its effect is
decidedly interpersonal. Edwards considered gratitude one of the ‘better
principles of human nature’ and viewed ingratitude as an especially heinous sin
for its unnaturalness.
Recognition of the importance of gratitude as an
interpersonal sentiment extends into antiquity, when bestowing gifts and
reciprocating them was a central aspect of economic life. The Stoic philosopher
Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s book On Benefits (composed after the
year 56 CE, and newly translated by Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood in 2011)
offered the most extensive discussion of gratitude in the ancient world, and it
continued to shape the Western concept of gratitude for centuries. In it,
Seneca treats gratitude as a virtue that ought to be cultivated for social
purposes:
That gratitude is an attitude to be chosen for itself follows from the
fact that ingratitude is something to be avoided in itself, because nothing so
dissolves and disrupts the harmony of mankind as this vice. For what else keeps
us safe, except helping each other by reciprocal services? Only one thing
protects our lives and fortifies them against sudden attacks: the exchange of
benefits.
Seneca argues that the generosity of benefactors
and the gratitude of recipients are the glue that holds society together and
guarantees its survival. As a Stoic thinker who prioritised inner dispositions
over outward circumstances, Seneca emphasised that feeling gratitude was more
important than acting to reciprocate benefits received, but that the feeling
was morally virtuous only insofar as it was directed at a benefactor. This
interpersonal aspect of gratitude is essential: if a person only feels fortunate
without crediting anyone for their good fortune (as in the social media
messages and gratitude diary entries written by so many), they are not really
being grateful at all. Contemporary philosophers even propose that being grateful for general states of
affairs, rather than to any specific person, is a misnomer: when I am grateful
for my general health, or grateful that it didn’t rain on my wedding day, what
I’m actually feeling is not gratitude but appreciation.
Aside from positive psychology’s influence, why
else is gratitude coming to be understood as a personal rather than
interpersonal emotion, and even less as a virtue? Another part of the answer is
surely that the interpersonal bonds and duties with which true gratitude
saddles us are not always pleasant.
I remember a time when I was visiting my hometown
in Israel and ran into a relative with whom I had a strained relationship. I’d
popped into a coffee shop to change a large bill for coins for the bus, and she
was there waiting on her order. Surprised but happy to see me, my relative
insisted on giving me the change herself. It was a modest act of goodwill on
her part but I found myself struggling to receive it: as I suppressed my
instinct to refuse the gesture and cupped my hands to take the coins, an image
of holding burning coals flashed through my mind. Why was I reacting so
dramatically to such a small kindness? It wasn’t the monetary value of the gift
that made me reluctant to accept it, but rather the interpersonal bond that
accepting it would imply.
The French sociologist Marcel Mauss captured the
essence of my predicament when he wrote in 1950 that a gift is received ‘with a
burden attached’ because it binds the recipient to the donor. My mother tongue,
Hebrew, reflects this hold of benefactors over their recipients in the
expression assir todah – the equivalent of the English word
‘grateful’, it means literally a prisoner of thankfulness. The coins my
relative gave me had little value, but taking them placed me in a debt of
gratitude that, given the history of our relationship, I found hard to accept.
On this occasion, gratitude did not feel good.
Literature too sometimes pushes against
the claims of positive psychology about the personal benefits of gratitude. For
example, in Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951), the titular
protagonist, old and disabled, is apprehended by the police and interrogated
aggressively at the police station. At last, he is approached by a woman whom
he suspects to be a social worker. When she offers him a cup of tea, Molloy
reflects:
Against the charitable gesture there is no defence, that I know of. You
sink your head, you put out your hands all trembling and twined together and
you say, Thank you, thank you lady, thank you kind lady.
The feeling that Molloy identifies with effusive
thanksgiving is not gratitude in the contemporary sense, nor appreciation even,
but rather humiliation. Even if he hadn’t wanted a cup of tea in the first
place and preferred to be left alone, the cultural expectation to reciprocate
the social worker’s kindness with an equal or greater measure of gratitude
placed him in her immediate debt. To be grateful, Molloy says, is to cede power
to the benefactor. By extension, Beckett’s protagonist offers a troubling
alternative to Seneca’s egalitarian vision: for Seneca, gratitude offers a way in
which even the poorest members of society can reciprocate the greatest benefits
bestowed on them, simply by being thankful. But Molloy suggests that the
expectation of gratitude risks deepening existing social gaps, since the less
powerful in society will be forced into perpetual humiliating indebtedness,
with the more powerful left to enjoy the role of charitable benefactors.
A similar concern about this aspect of gratitude is
blown to an epic scale in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).
After leading an unsuccessful rebellion against God that cost him his heavenly
position, Satan is on the brink of repentance:
What could be less than to afford him [God] praise,
The easiest recompense, and pay him thanks,
How due! Yet all his good proved ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I sdeign’d subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me high’st, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude, …
Satan faces a difficult problem: he understands
that he ought to be grateful to God for everything he has received from him,
but he can’t bear the emotional consequences. To be grateful would mean being
burdened by the endless, joyless debt he owes his creator.
The recent popularity of gratitude as
an instrument for enhancing personal wellbeing has obscured some of the
complexity of this mental phenomenon: far from being only a personal emotion
that points us to our blessings, it is primarily an interpersonal emotion that
points us to our benefactors. This doesn’t mean that gratitude can’t feel good.
More often than not, it does feel good to acknowledge others’ kindness toward
us. But like any emotion that connects us to other people, gratitude can also
be psychologically challenging. If as a society, we can recover the
interpersonal significance of gratitude, it will confront us with the extent of
our dependence on other people and their power over us. At the same time, and
as Seneca argued, recognising this aspect of gratitude has the potential to
bind us closer to one another, to strengthen our communities and relationships.
True gratitude is a communal emotion, not a wellness practice | Psyche Ideas
