As parents tasked with civilizing three very
young children, my wife and I make a daily effort to instill in them an abiding
sense of gratitude. We consider it a virtue critical to fashioning their
character, particularly as 21st century middle-class Americans, who
are more materially blessed than probably 99% of all humans who have ever
lived. My wife and I want our kids never to take that for granted, especially
amid the material frenzy of the Christmas holiday.
Thus I found it strange that Barbara Ehrenreich
rang in the new year with a New York
Times opinion piece recently in which she actually complained that the holidays reeked inescapably of thankfulness, and
that it signaled an “onanistic” degree of self-centeredness.
In “The Selfish Side of Gratitude,” the author of such bestselling social
studies as Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile)
Pursuit of the American Dream acknowledges that “[i]t’s good to
express our thanks, of course, to those who deserve recognition.” Gratitude is
at least somewhat “prosocial,” she concedes, in the sense that “[y]ou have to
be grateful to someone, who could be an invisible God, but might as
well be a friend, mentor or family member.”
But Ehrenreich laments that the
self-improvement industry has warped this potentiality into something “all
about you, and how you can feel better.” “Gratitude gurus” like Oprah Winfrey
and other motivational figures have hyped the physical and spiritual benefits of
expressing gratitude, such as a stronger immune system, increased joy, and
boosted self-esteem, all of which has been legitimized by scientific
researchers like Martin Seligman, “the father of positive psychology.”
The result is that the emphasis has shifted
from gratitude as “the moral memory of mankind” to gratitude as “a surefire ticket to happiness
and even better health,” as Ehrenreich puts it. She finds this inward
development contemptible:
All you have to do is to generate, within
yourself, the good feelings associated with gratitude, and then bask in its
warm, comforting glow. If there is any loving involved in this, it is
self-love, and the current hoopla around gratitude is a celebration of onanism.
Wow. Granted, there is a danger of excess in
this rise of gratitude to “self-help celebrity status,” and she may have a
point with such examples as the Harvard Mental Health Letter suggesting you “thank
someone mentally,” or the CNN yoga instructor encouraging students to write in “gratitude
journals.” But it’s an overreaction to get worked up over such seemingly
narcissistic techniques which nevertheless can foster a deeper sense of
gratitude, and it’s hard to see how a happier, healthier, more self-aware, and more
altruistic society is a bad thing.
Ehrenreich’s contempt stems from her passion
for social justice. For her, “[s]aying grace to an abstract God is an evasion”;
gratitude is wasted on an invisible God and should be reserved for the “whole
communities of actual people, many of them with aching backs and tenuous
finances, who made the meal possible”: “Who picked the lettuce in the fields,
processed the standing rib roast, drove these products to the stores, stacked
them on the supermarket shelves and, of course, prepared them and brought them
to the table?”
Her version of meaningful gratitude is social
justice “solidarity” – by which she means actively supporting economic
equality to bridge “the wealth gap” in “our divided society.” We need, she
asserts, “a more vigorous and inclusive sort of gratitude than what is being
urged on us now” – in other words, less spiritually and psychologically
transformative, more outwardly engaged in class warfare.
She cites the theoretical example of a lowly
Walmart employee who gets a raise, and asks if that employee should “be
grateful to the Waltons, who are the richest family in America?” For
Ehrenreich, the employee grateful for a steady job and a raise is a “chump” as
long as the family that employs him and is wealthy. Well then, at what point should the employee feel gratitude? How
much of the Walton family wealth should be divvied up among their over 2
million employees worldwide before Ehrenreich believes gratitude is appropriate?
One gets the feeling that Ehrenreich believes
that until economic parity is fully achieved, gratitude to God and man is for
chumps. But thankfulness is about acknowledging our blessings, not coveting the
blessings of others. It is about personal humility, not societal equality;
contentment, not resentment. This is by no means to say that we should not
strive to better the material lives of all, only that gratitude is not entirely
dependent on our material circumstances.
Yes, of course gratitude is, as Ehrenreich
notes, to some degree “prosocial.” Yes, of course it should result, whenever appropriate
and possible, in a repayment of debt to others, or an act of paying it forward.
But by diminishing the meaningful spiritual and psychological dimensions of
gratitude, and reducing it to a measure of social justice, Ehrenreich is
distorting and devaluing it as much as the self-help gurus.
From Acculturated, 1/8/16
