Gratitude and the modern condition

Our obsession with control obscures the goodness of what is given

We feel gratitude when someone does something for us outside the realm of exchange. One wants to mark it, this arrival of something that overflows what is expected, and recognize the  source of it. In acting outside necessity, our benefactor shines.

Or one may feel gratitude without a counter-party to receive it, in response to some fortunate condition that could have been otherwise. Having good health or good looks, for example. Life itself. Something for which we are not responsible, a gift.

Whether in response to good fortune or to some identifiable benefactor, in taking note of this gift one feels that one has regained a proper coordinate system. It is a calm feeling. One shucks off that irritable, constant background sense of not receiving one’s due -- the sense of a self inflated beyond its true proportions. For it does feel like a little dose of truth, this moment of reorientation. Seeing oneself from the outside as one who receives rather than demands is also liberating -- from resentment, entitlement, grievance. You feel lighter, as well as smaller. And more ready to act with grace toward others -- that is, to be larger. For grace and gratitude have the same root, whether one is speaking etymologically or psychologically.

I think our condition as modern people makes the experience of gratitude especially elusive, so when we feel grateful it has an effect that is all the more powerful, bumping us out of a deep spiritual rut. I believe that is because it is an experience that cannot be made sense of in a way that accords with the grand metaphysical picture that we live within most of the time. If we can understand why this is so, it will give us a critical vantage point from which view our historical moment. It may also help us identify the source of our sourness, and point the way toward something better.

Most simply, gratitude requires that there be another, an outside world that is not under one’s control and not of one’s own making. Of course, it is simply the case that there is such a world. But there are different ways of responding to this fact.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote two essays which, if you put them side by side, offer a contrast between two personality types, one he called the rationalist and the other he called the conservative. Here, “conservative” does not refer to a political ideology. Instead, it names a disposition. What distinguishes the conservative is not hankering after the past, but rather affection for the present; for what actually exists. He has an eye for all the ways his surroundings afford a good life, or provide raw materials for the building of such a life. He wants to preserve the present world, not out of fearful, small-minded rejection of the possible, but because he has a greater awareness of the resources of the actual, which may be lost if we are not careful. In other words, he feels gratitude for the world, and a sense of obligation to it.

The rationalist by contrast looks at the world and is offended by the waste, the inefficiency, the chaos, the suffering, the grotesque failures of optimisation, and wants to set it right. He has a vision of a better world, and that is where he lives, in devotion to his vision.

Probably you need both types, to have a healthy society. But in the present order, one of these types is full of confidence and speaks well into a microphone, while the other is apologetic and defensive. One has the wind of history at his back, and is well capitalised. The other sometimes doubts his own sanity.

Our own time has seen the emergence of a third type, the transhumanist, who is perhaps just an over-the-top caricature of the rationalist. Like most caricatures, it brings into relief the defining features of the original through exaggeration.

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Read the rest at Unherd or listen to the audio there. (I delivered this as a talk at Unherd in London earlier this week.) And speaking of gratitude, I would like to thank all my subscribers. It has been very encouraging to see my efforts here begin to get some traction.