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.
