The Abuse of Gratitude

We are often reminded these days of the wonderfulness of gratitude.

If it is not presented as the solution to all possible problems, then it is at least, we are led to believe, the next best thing, a vital ingredient in health and well-being and a sign of moral and spiritual correctness. If you have achieved fulfilling work and a comfortable life, then supposedly it is because you spent an hour a day listing fifty to a hundred things to be grateful for. If on the other hand you are stranded in misery, then what reason could there be, we are led to believe, other than that you are not grateful enough?

In short, so the story goes, if there is one thing that all right-thinking people show, and all wrong-thinking people do not, then it is gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.

It is time to correct this mistake.

Gratitude is not as magical as advertised. On the contrary it can be put to savagely destructive effect, and as a social tool to shame the vulnerable and the different it can turn into barefaced psychological violence.

That is not to say that gratitude is inherently a bad thing. On the contrary, when gratitude is sincere, deserved, and expressed without ostentation, then by all means let us celebrate it. It is good that we should feel thankful for blessings and kindnesses received from others, be they humans, other animals or plants, or the wider natural world. We are a social species living in interdependence with our planet and with one another, and through gratitude we recognize and value those relationships and encourage ourselves to reciprocate.

But this is already so ubiquitously proclaimed, from ancient religious and philosophical texts to endlessly regurgitated slogans on contemporary social media, that we need spend no further time on it. Instead, let us turn to our abuses of gratitude, of which it seems to me there are two types.

The first we may call gratitude-tripping. This seems a popular response to problems in this world, especially those we convince ourselves we can do nothing about. So instead we retreat into a psycho-chemical fortress of grateful feelings, as per the mantra: I am grateful for (x); I am grateful for (y); I am grateful for (z), and so on till the problems have been banished from our minds.

The word tripping is usually applied to the consumption of psychedelic drugs. The parallel is close enough to use that term here. I will not pretend to neurochemical expertise, but the behaviour changes that often come with intoxication on gratitude seem so stark that I am sure they reflect some chemically altered state of consciousness that bears comparison to the effects of mind-altering substances. Consider those ruthlessly euphoric smiles; that total imperviousness to attempts to engage in logical conversation; that instantaneous guillotining out of anything remotely construable as “negative”; and above all those steamrolling proclamations of gratitude for anything and everything possible, including things all people have rights to or were never actually given.

Of course, when gratitude-tripping affects no-one other than the individual, it is entirely in his or her rights, and we cannot fault him or her for it any more than we might for his or her private choices on smoking, alcohol and so on. As in those cases however we can still be alert to its potentially addictive excesses and scrutinize it as a widespread social phenomenon. As with other mind-altering exercises, escaping to gratitude is not a substitute for recognizing and solving problems and at worst can hinder efforts to do so. It can represent an acceptance of the “life’s unfair” and “nothing we can do about it” dogmas, and a forgetting that life is as fair as we together make it, and that most significant problems today are systemically caused by social structures we created: exploitative economic systems and working arrangements, gender and its full range of ills, a worsening politics of tribalistic violence and prejudice, climate and resource stresses, and so on. All of these are problems we can resolve, if we have the courage to acknowledge them and support each other in the struggle to improve the world.

Each of us has likely suffered incredible pains – and pain breaks people – from at least some of these nightmares. That they deal them out to us all on a massive scale has helped spread the myth that they are natural and inevitable parts of life, which could not be further from the truth. They are socially inflicted injustices: that is, we can do better than them, we are entitled to better than them, and in the face of any one of those ills, ingratitude is a totally justified response.

Gratitude-tripping is thus a problem in that it can drive us in the opposite direction, reinforcing the pressure to accept a broken world. But it becomes acutely cruel when it is practiced not merely as an individual’s own retreat from courage, but as something designed for other people to see – in particular to shame those suffering too much to be able to express much gratitude themselves, and to pressure them to join that gratitude-intoxicated illusion which holds that the world is fine. In other words, it becomes gratitude-shaming.

These days the likelihood that you have either seen or experienced this is surely not low. The gratitude-shamer hears a grievance or sees somebody suffering, and in response shames them for not being grateful enough. There is an active-passive spectrum for this. They might actively shame by directly attacking the sufferer for the selfishness of expressing his or her misery, and demanding he or she be more grateful instead. Or they might shame more passively by indulging in some very loud and visible gratitude tripping, as though ignoring the sufferer but with the clear design of inflicting on him or her, plus any witnesses, the same message. Other platitudes and clichés from the box of tools for trivializing other people's suffering are often deployed to accompany this: “everyone has problems”, “others are suffering worse than you”, “choose to be happy”, “be thankful for what you have” and so on.

The underlying fallacy at play here is often the suffering contest fallacy. It presumes that suffering is universal and inevitable, and that there is value in comparing one’s suffering with others, in particular to be grateful at the thought that others in the world – commonly stereotyped as “children in Africa” or “people in developing countries” – are suffering worse than you. A major thrust of gratitude-shaming is usually to gratuitously remind the target of this fact, seeking to make them feel guilty and selfish for their own pain and placing pressure on them to accept and be grateful instead.

In the first instance, this is rarely effective. For every case in which it relieves its target’s pain, there are countless more in which it drives them deeper into shunned and alienated agony, and it is no coincidence that suicidal people are among those most targeted by this kind of shaming. On top of that, the reasoning behind it is broken. Once more, those problems are usually society’s creation and society’s responsibility to solve, not things to be accepted; moreover you do not know how much that person is suffering because you are not them. Every person experiences things differently, has different strengths and vulnerabilities, and there is no honourable course other than to take at face value that he or she is suffering in proportion to his or her expressions of that suffering; to treat it as dramatic or exaggerated is an act of abuse. If you were going through the same ordeals as him or her you might find it trivial, but for all you know he or she could be experiencing it as the most horrific of all imaginable hells.

On top of that however the suffering contest fallacy is plain barbarous. Aside from its obvious ethical dubiousness (we are supposed to feel better at the thought that others are going through pain even worse than ours?), it can be wheeled out to trivialize and dismiss all suffering in the world except the very worst possible. Whatever your pains and grievances, you can expect no kindness, no compassion, no warmth: instead you are supposed to stop whining and be grateful, because there are always those more impoverished, more oppressed, more in danger of violent death; there are always more tyrannical governments, more violent police, more insufferable relatives, more disadvantaged classes and more bloody atrocities than whatever insignificant nothing you have the gall to complain about. Like this, gratitude shaming becomes a licence to cause – or worse, stand indifferent to – any person’s pain, then to kick them even deeper into it by trivializing it with a meaningless comparison.

Thus is gratitude abused into a tool found ever in the hands of the violators and oppressors: a thing not for mending hearts but breaking them into smaller pieces, not for healing wounds but for tearing them asunder. What does this really represent? In simple terms, a flag held high and proud to signify the shaming individual’s or society’s failure of empathy.

In an age when empathy has itself become a popular catchphrase and a thing we constantly insist others should show us, gratitude-shaming represents the barefaced hypocrisy with which we brandish that concept of empathy, and the hollowness to which we thereby reduce it. The real might and value of empathy is its power to show the miserable and the wretched that they are not alone: that we love them, we care for them, we recognize their suffering as unjust, and we will be there with them in deepest emotional solidarity in their struggle against the forces that caused it. Gratitude-shaming, in its capture of empathy, turns that on its head: empathy becomes the obligation to laugh when others laugh even if you or others present are sad, to join in with the gratitude-tripping chorus of intoxicated howling. It means to pretend you cannot see those who are struggling, and most of all to keep your pain to yourself, to never dare express it in the presence of others, lest you be judged and shamed as an ungrateful, empathy-lacking villain.

Perhaps in the end it is just another reflection of that greatest of humanity’s weaknesses: arrogance, especially the arrogance of large groups. To be there for those who suffer – to accept that they may have a point – is to open our minds to the possibility that the world, in particular those parts of the world we call our own, are not okay. It would be to admit that our societies have got things wrong, can do a lot better than they are, and must always be open to criticism.

In this age where raving tribalist nationalisms are emboldening themselves on every continent, baying for the blood of anyone who challenges the narrative that “we” are great and “they” are foul, it is clear that we still have a profound problem with finding this collective humility. Those who suffer within our in-groups remind us that we too are not all that great, and we loathe, abhor and ostracize them for it. We do not want to feel that guilt and shame, so instead we project it back onto them in punishment, and what more twistedly effective way to do so than to dress it up in all the magical smiles and starlight of gratitude?

May we be grateful when and where it is due. But may we learn that ingratitude also has its place: that there are times, and those times are many, when we have every right to say no to injustice and oppression that should not exist, and that it is in the public good that we do so.

Let us never demand gratitude of others, and never grace it to those who demand it of us. Rather, let us be there for those who suffer, show them compassion and love, and stand at their side in the struggle against the forces that have harmed them. Let us end the suffering contest, and instead take suffering as a problem to be solved together. Let gratitude be abused no more. 

The Problems (a short story)

This story is dedicated to the millions of people, past and present, broken by the madnesses of their societies then blamed for their own suffering – especially to those who did not make it.

The Problems

A short story by Ai Chaobang, 13th September 2015

They never listen. They never listen.

Happiness is a choice! I choose to be HAPPY!

...all in your head, you just need to sort yourself out...get over it...move on...

Life's unfair. Shit happens. No-one cares.

...making it far bigger than anyone wants it to be....

Happy happy happy...happy happy happy....

...you get hurt if you let yourself get hurt...

Oh, will you just LISTEN!

Like most people, Kenichi had heard of the organisation known as The Problems. From time to time he came across the rumours of their savage attacks on people, perhaps referred to by a colleague, hesitantly of course, or hidden in the depths of the morning newspapers.

But that was as far as his knowledge went. After all, The Problems only made trouble for those who went looking for it, so people said, and trouble was something Kenichi did his best to avoid. His was a stable life: a secure job, a sound mind, steady friends, and certainly no enemies. He was the sort who watered his pot plants before leaving for work each morning, gave up his seat on the train to those in need, and never ignored messages no matter how busy he might be. What could dubious types like The Problems ever want with him?

But the moment he stepped out of the station that morning, there they were, materialising from the commuters and fellow citizenry, and in an instant Kenichi was surrounded. In the blur of beating and thrashing that followed, he glimpsed the faces of some of the network's most notorious members. Of course though they all went by codenames – Injustice, or Heartbreak, or Prejudice, or Cuts, or Corruption – their true identities were a mystery, and for all he knew they could have been anyone.

In moments they had forced him to the ground, whereupon one of them – which one is not recorded – drew a horrific blade, long and sharp like a massive needle, and plunged it through Kenichi's heart with such force that it burst out through his back. With professional efficiency the assailant thrust the blade back and forth some six or seven times, then shook it and sliced it around before finally yanking it free, at which point The Problems dispersed into the crowds, leaving Kenichi, his blood erupting two ways, to collapse to the pavement with a disagreeable thud.

Dazed and in quite extraordinary pain, Kenichi struggled for his life. “Help!” he just about succeeded in crying out, though the dozens around him continued on their way, only a handful pausing to spare him an irritated glare. A few stopped and watched him with concern, though could not arrive at any straightforward answer to the question of whether they should do anything. “Help!” Kenichi gurgled again, blood now welling in his throat.

On Suicide, or Suicidogenic Societies

Warning: this article deals frankly with the subject of suicide. Some readers may find these themes distressing.

If you have come upon this article because you (or someone you know) is considering suicide, please click the header for the full article and go straight to the end for a crucial message I would like to give you (or them). I will not attack you, nor disservice you with the kinds of statements you have likely already had inflicted on you.

Currently, about 30,000 people commit suicide in Japan every year.

That is a harrowing enough statistic – double the number of deaths from the March 2011 Triple Disaster, every year – but it also confronts you directly in daily life here. I have yet to find myself on a Japanese train that gets traumatically stopped because somebody jumped in front of it, but a number of close friends have, and such incidents recur nigh-daily on my Facebook feed or in local news. I did, however, experience it in the UK, when a London-to-Newcastle train I was on last autumn got taken out of service because of it.

No human society is alone in this. Suicide represents about a million deaths a year across the world, spanning every country on the planet. This is a global problem of hideous proportions.

 

When people talk about somebody jumping in front of their train, it is typically with the deepest sympathy for those affected. The thousands of passengers inconvenienced; the driver who could not brake in time, and will watch those gruesome images play out for the rest of his or her days; the bystanders who caught sight of the carnage; the police and rail staff who have to clean up the entrails and blood; and any friends or family resultantly bereaved.

But I have noticed that any reference to the person who jumped, in contrast, tends to lack compassion. The suicidal person, one hears, is selfish. “Why couldn't they have just done it somewhere else?” The sentiment is of cold disdain for his or her apparent weakness, cowardice, lack of concern for others. And it may be expressed with a certain passivity, the language of shrugs and avoidance and “well, you know”s, as though the act of suicide morally cheapens the deceased, makes them somehow too distasteful to merit the privilege of entertainment on the commentator's tongue.

Stuck on that train so disrupted at Durham station on a late autumn evening, the passengers around me saw fit to joke about it. Together they openly mocked that unseen, unknown, invisible someone who had departed from our world in circumstances they had no concrete information on.

“Why couldn't they have done it somewhere else?” This feeling was bounced around with humour. With the most unhesitating amused contempt.

Still don't see my concern? Consider this account by Jay Griffiths in her Orion article, 'Artifice v Pastoral', in 2009.

This morning on the radio...I heard of an unhappy lad, only seventeen, who climbed up a multi-story car park and for some three hours he delayed, agonizing about his life and wondering whether to jump, a strange, sad Hamlet of suicide. A crowd of some seven hundred people gathered, and people in the crowd began jeering, cruelly goading him to jump. “Jump, you ****, jump,” it was reported...He jumped to his death. People in the crowd shoved forward to take pictures of his dead and mangled body, and the local chief constable reported that people in the crowd posted pictures of the scene on the internet after the event.

Perhaps you begin to see what I am getting at. But I want to make this real clear.

To those baying and bloodthirsty mobs; to those observers or commentators who casually remark about the patheticalness or selfishness or weakness of people who commit suicide as though they have half a bloody clue what they are talking about; to those who gallivant on their moral high horses and speak of suicidal people as though something of the dust and filth beneath them; and to those contemptible wretches on that train in Durham, who were mildly irritated by the delay but found that person's death funny: I say – enough.

That assault on suicidal people. That normative massacre. Enough. It stops. It finishes, today.

This is an article I have waited to write for years. I have only waited because I did not want to do it until I could do it properly.

Because you see, I've been there too.

Because I have known what it means to hanker for the freedom of my own demise for years on end, and to make an attempt on it.

Because I have stood at the brink, reached across the frontier, and shaken hands with death.

Because I knew then, as I already did, that we, the human species, have created horrors in life infinitely worse than anything death could present us.

And because, having turned my back on that frontier as circumstances contrived, I am not going to waste that experience by not bringing it down upon the sausage-machines of living hell our societies have created, which condemn millions, millions too many to a fate as soul-rippingly miserable as any we make films about or build monuments to or craft human rights treaties about – yet whose victims we jeer from that company with unparalleled scorn.

So I do not write on this lightly. The agony of knowing only to seek your own death is something no living being should have to experience. Not one. If you know it, or have known it, you know it is something you could not wish upon the vilest of your enemies. And a world in which this agony exists is suspect enough, but a world in which it exists for millions of people is a disgrace of metaphysical magnitude.

I write this because I want this travesty to end. I write this because I want no-one to ever have to go through it ever again. I write this because we, humanity, keep doing this to people, systematically, while denying our role in it. And because of my own experience of this, you will excuse me if I occasionally come across as just a bit furious in the following evisceration of all those people who, in their ignorance, their sanctimoniousness, or their desire to feel superior, have yet to recognise that their self-satisfied supercilious attitudes to suicidal people are actually quite a fucking contemptible thing.

That compassionlessness, that callousness, is precisely what transforms this into a world which drives people out of their lives in the first place. That is what I write this to assert.

Too long have we relegated suicide to taboo status, an inconvenience best not discussed, so that when it happens it can swiftly be blamed on the moral or cognitive poverty of the suicidal individual, as though all the rest of us are alright and suicidal people are just unwelcome anomalies in an otherwise functioning society.

Keep this up, and we will continue, day after day, to lose hundreds of thousands of human beings – all their love, all their dreams, all their diversity, all their contributions to making this a better world – until we lower ourselves to consider that our societies are causing suicide.

And let's be completely clear what causing means. It does not mean the “romanticisation” of suicide, as has become a popular scapegoat. It does not mean things like “positive cultural interpretations” of suicide, a charge so frequently hurled at Japanese heritage, for example. Scapegoats - all scapegoats. Thirty thousand shattered salarymen, alienated youths and miscellaneous tortured souls do not jump in front of Japanese trains or hang themselves in Aokigahara because they believe it brings supreme honour upon them in the name of the emperor or some such. That seventeen-year-old did not jump off the car park because he had taken on romantic ideas about the transience of life and eternal mystery of death or suchlike. And I did not walk into the Thames on that January afternoon because of any of that shit. I did it because other people had tortured me to death, while the social norms and structures established my suffering as 100% my fault, inscrutably and comprehensively, while completely ignoring all those others' malicious deeds, holding up those cruel norms and structures as though they were absolute and commonsense laws of the universe, and castigating me simultaneously for ethical failures and for mental disorder for not accepting those judgements without question.

There are few matters where I accept that you have to have directly experienced something to properly comment on it. That's usually too easy an excuse to silence criticism. But suicide is the singular exception. If you are capable of attacking suicidal people, then you simply do not know what it means when existence itself becomes a twisted abomination of torment devouring all time, space and reason. (Worse still there are known to be people who simply do not care, surely be the very originators of evil.)

So I am going to confront some popular myths here, myths as preposterous as they are shameful for ever entering our suicide discourse in the first place.

• The myth that suicide is necessarily a choice;
• The myth that suicide is necessarily selfish;
• And the unspoken assumption that suicide is principally a problem with suicidal individuals, which reflects no further on the societies around them.

Bristol - To Bear an Unbearable Burden

Here's a challenge. How do you find the right tone to discuss a city of lively waterfronts, picturesque woods, stunning rock faces...and a foundation of half a million foreigners tortured to death and the heart of humanity split asunder?

In Bristol, the principal city of southwest England, the hopes of present and future generations were doomed by their ancestors to play out forevermore in the shadow of the hellish horrors those ancestors loosed on the world, in the form of the triangular Atlantic slave trade. The Bristol industrialists made a choice, to profit from the ruin of humanity; and made it so that their city would in the first instance be defined, then and now and forever, by a burden no-one should wish on the heritage of any society.

The result bears some comparison to Japan's Sapporo, a very different city with a nonetheless similar burden at the depths of its conscience. How do you do justice, to the agonized and humiliated ghosts of nightmares that should never have been made real, in a city which once grew by feeding on their cries – but without dragging down those who live there now, hundreds of years on, who had no hand in those atrocities?

How do you celebrate and support the good things that present generations strive to build, while not permitting the suffering of those broken, so that Bristol could rise, to fade from memory? How do we keep those memories alive, that they may stand down the ignorance, the pride, the xenophobic nationalistic supremacism which twists the prospects of Britain today, and which still swaggers, blustering that no lessons were ever there to be learnt?

It is a tightrope, a trial of balance: one that must test even a city as Bristol of hill slopes, cliffs and gorges.

Refuting West-Centric Narratives of Human Rights: A Three-Pronged Critique

Happy new year everyone. Here's a present.

Refuting West-Centric Narratives of Human Rights: A Three-Pronged Critique
Ai Chaobang, Tokyo, 4 December 2012

CONTENTS

Overview

1) Narratives of ESSENCE: the Universal Origins of Human Rights

a) The "Right" Human Rights – Who Decides?

b) Contributions to Human Rights

c) Contributions Against Human Rights

d) Strengths and Weaknesses

2) Narratives of FORM: the Universal Establishment of Human Rights

a) The Western Declaration of Human Rights?

b) The Universal-Except-The-West Declaration of Human Rights?

c) Resonance and Dissonance

3) Narratives of RELEVANCE: the Universal Enemies of Human Rights

a) Charybdis: The Whirlpool of Universal Human Wrongs

b) Scylla: The Multi-headed Monster of Inhuman Diversity

c) Through the Straits and Around the World: A Tool for Global Problems

Conclusion: In It Together

Overview

Human rights are many things simultaneously. What looks at first a simple concept is loaded with highly contextualized theoretical, political, and normative agendas, beliefs, aspirations, dreams and passions. In the wider story of humanity, human rights have their own story which as any story, can be told from multiple perspectives.

Some have dominated unduly. In this paper I seek to comprehensively refute a set of influential narrative forces in the human rights story: those which draw its centre of gravity towards the "West".¹ I will argue that such Western-centric narratives, or indeed any territorializing narratives regardless of who is at their centre, are neither an accurate nor a helpful telling of the human rights story. Rather, I will present that human rights are, and should be, universal, and in so doing will overarch and consider some of the major ongoing debates in human rights discourse.

That discourse is enormous, and the territorializing narratives in question occur throughout. We shall confront them on three levels:

1) Narratives of essence: of humanity's development of the human rights idea;

2) Narratives of form: of twentieth-century attempts to implement human rights in practice, and the modern international human rights framework of laws and norms; and

3) Narratives of relevance: of the place of human rights today in relation to diverse human cultures, histories and problems.

At each level I aim to critically assert the universality of human rights, as well as the inaccuracies or dangers posed by elevating the story's Western characters above others.

Throughout, we must bear in mind the essential problem. Thomas Paine lamented in 1776 that 'Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart.'² He might as well have said that this morning. Every society, today and in the past, has abused human beings in ways that any meaningful concept of human rights must embody. Every society, regardless of location or culture, has had its politically, socially, economically, and/or spiritually pernicious orders, that in innumerable ways have forsaken people within them or aggressed those outside. Every society has had its descents into madness, and most display an abysmal record in facing up to those disasters with humility. Therefore, when this paper considers the human rights contributions of any given society, this should not at all be taken as an absolution of that society for whatever grievous treatment of human beings it once authored or still does now.

This is nowhere a pure academic question, but an emotively-charged core of political agendas and clashing superiority complexes. The academic community and its human rights commentators, as humans too, are not insulated from this, but are themselves affected by human rights politics and value preferences, and affect these in turn by their choices of how to regard them. We should note that disciplinary academia as we know it, now globalized across the world, is itself a constructed and politicized unit, itself of Western extraction, and itself a culturally loaded tool of legitimating – or refusing legitimation to – ideas and knowledge, according to rules not necessarily objective in direction.³ It is vital that in assessing global issues, we be actively conscious of the norms and assumptions influencing us, and look past their clout in academic politics so as not to unfairly exclude contributions.

I take the trouble to state this because in the politicized paradigm of international relations today, any human rights discussion runs the risk of having all meaning drained off into a competitive morass of ulterior agendas, where participants divert attention from their abuses by stating "no, you". As is really the overarching message in this paper, to territorialize human rights is to play straight into this contest, and turn a concept which was meant to help us escape that paradigm into a rhetorical instrument that sinks us deeper in it – and buries our efforts in shame.

Thus the argument I seek to make here is as normative as empirical. Human rights not only are universal, but should and must be. Only then can they represent not our determination to persist with self-interested conflict and mutual contempt, but a universal will to overturn that order, to get past divisions which should never have been dug, and to re-found our globalized world on a basis of sincere responsibility and mutual care: to show, indeed, that humanity can do better.

To understand a country, you must look at its prisons

Pencil sharpener crafted by a prisoner and sold in the Fuchu Prison shop.

Yes, you must look at its prisons. Do not look at how it behaves to those it considers 'normal'. Look at its treatment of those over whom it has the most power, those it considers inferior; those at its mercy, concealed from the public eye. Only then can you learn of a country's ethics.

Today I had the chance to attempt just that, on a visit to Fuchu Prison in Tokyo. So first and foremost I would like to thank the Warden and his team for providing the presentation, tour, and direct and thoughtful answers to challenging questions, and the UN University for organizing and leading the excursion.

Prisons

But first, some context about where I'm coming from, with the obligatory tirade against a particuarly nasty vein of humanity's corruption.