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Most of us have been thankful for presents or for the gifts of love, help, and hospitality. We know what gratitude feels like. Everyone is in favor of it, or at least in favor of receiving it. Many children learn at an early age that it is good manners to say “thank you.” Even in cultures where verbal expressions of gratitude are not expected, acts of reciprocity are.
Virtually every language has a word equivalent to gratitude, and all major religions encourage expressions of it.1
The opposite of gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Our everyday life in a money-based economy heightens ingratitude because there is no need to feel grateful for a service we pay for. If we are staying in an expensive hotel, we feel entitled to a functional plumbing system and clean sheets and towels. We do not feel a need to be grateful for them; we take them for granted. If we pay for a product or a service, it is part of a reciprocal exchange.
When I buy apples from the fruit stall near my home, I pay the asking price in cash. The stallholder and I say “thank you” to each other, and we sometimes have a friendly chat. But we both know this is an economic exchange, not a gift. In the automatic checkout system at the nearby supermarket, when I buy food, there is no need to say “thank you.” The cash-taking interface is a machine, and the store is part of a corporation whose primary duty is to make profits for its shareholders, who expect regular dividends.
Depersonalization chokes off gratitude, and consumers soon develop a sense of entitlement; they have a legally enforceable right to expect products or services they have paid for and to complain when they do not receive what they expect. And they usually feel no gratitude for the land that produces their food, or to the farmers who grow it, or to the people who transport and prepare it, because they are so depersonalized and remote.
Disasters change our perspective. Often parents, husbands, wives, children, and friends are taken for granted. But if they die, especially if they die unexpectedly, their families and friends become aware of how much they depended on them and how much they received from them. If someone almost loses an eye in an accident, he or she feels very grateful to have eyes, when formerly the eyes were taken for granted. If someone loses a computer or smartphone full of personal information, he or she feels grateful if it is returned, even though it may also have been previously taken for granted. If there is a long power outage or a strike that prevents goods from being delivered to our shops, so that we cannot get food supplies, many of us are grateful when our supplies are restored.
As soon as we stop taking almost everything for granted, we begin to realize that we can be grateful for almost everything.2 We only exist because our ancestors survived and reproduced successfully, right back to the origin of life. As babies, we were totally dependent on other people for our survival. And simply to have survived to the age we are today took the support of hundreds, thousands, even millions of other people: farmers, teachers, builders, electricians, plumbers, doctors, nurses, dentists, grocers, the people who design and make our computers and our smartphones, the pilots and crew who fly us from one part of the world to the other, and so on.
Then all of us are here only because our planet exists, and life on earth has evolved over billions of years to give us this living planet on which we totally depend.
In turn, our planet is part of the solar system, and all life on earth depends on the sustaining light of the sun and its gravitational pull, which keeps us in a steady, life-friendly orbit.
Then the sun depends on the galaxy. It is one cell in the vast body of the Milky Way, along with several hundred billion other stars. At the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive, hyperenergetic galactic center shooting out ionized matter and vast electric and magnetic fields, with magnetic field lines and electric currents in the plasma of the galactic arms millions of light years long, sustaining the environment of our sun.
Our galaxy is part of a galactic cluster, which astronomers call the Local Group. It consists of more than fifty galaxies and is in turn part of the Virgo Supercluster. The electromagnetic radiation permeating the universe includes the light from all these stars and galaxies, some of which we can see with our naked eyes. And coming invisibly from all directions is the fossil light from soon after the Big Bang, known as the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Our scientific creation story tells us that the entire universe originated 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, starting very small, less than the size of the head of a pin; it has been growing and expanding ever since. Some ancient creation myths speak of the origin of all things as the hatching of the cosmic egg, and the contemporary scientific account is similar. Everything comes from a common source, and everything is related. Without this primal creative event, there would be no universe, and we would not exist. And if the properties of subatomic particles, atoms, and the forces of nature had been even slightly different from what they are, there would be no life as we know it, and we would not be here to think about it.
Gratitude and Worldviews
Should we feel grateful for all this? The answer depends on our worldview.
If the universe is nothing but an unconscious mechanical system governed by eternally fixed laws of nature, and if evolution occurs through the blind forces of chance and necessity—if the universe is entirely purposeless and biological evolution has no ultimate meaning—then what can we be grateful for or to? The galaxy and solar system were formed automatically and unconsciously through mechanical processes and chance events. Life began through a series of chemical accidents, or perhaps it first appeared on another planet, and germs of life were somehow carried to earth. However life originated, it has evolved ever since through chance mutations and the forces of natural selection. There is nothing to be grateful for here—and no one to be grateful to. We are lucky, but luck is not a personal force; it is blind chance.
This is the perspective of the believer in contemporary scientific materialism. Most materialists are atheists, and most atheists are materialists. They believe that the entire universe is nothing but unconscious matter, fields, and energy, governed by impersonal, mathematical laws. Everything happens automatically. All evolution is unconscious.
Meanwhile, as brains grew bigger, minds evolved in advanced animal lines, and most of all in humans. However wonderful human minds may be, though, they are nothing but the physical activity of brains, confined to the insides of heads. They are extinguished when brains die. All religious ideas about the conscious survival of bodily death are fantasies.
Through our minds, we can form models of the whole of nature, including a vision of the vastness of the universe and of its great age. Our theories reach much further in space and time than our unaided senses, but these scientific models are products of human minds, and hence can only exist as conscious thoughts inside human brains. If and when humans become extinct, these theories will become extinct as well, unless humans can pass them on to some other species that survives.
Thus for materialists, although nature is mathematically and physically amazing, it is not deserving of gratitude, because it is not a gift or an act of choice or purpose; it is an inevitable consequence of blind laws and forces. It should be taken for granted. So should the existence of minds, imaginations, and scientific thought itself. There is no one to thank for this. To feel gratitude to nature, the cosmos, or the power of creativity is to fall prey to anthropocentric thinking, attributing being, purpose, or meaning to inanimate nature. This is permissible in romantic poetry, as long as we understand that it is merely a manner of speaking. As far as objective, scientific truth is concerned, we have no need to feel grateful to nature or the source of nature; instead, we should feel grateful to the great scientists who have elevated us to our higher and more objective point of view. Gods do not exist, but through science and reason, humans now have godlike powers.
By contrast, in many religious cosmologies, the entire universe has come forth through the creative power of God. In one of the Hindu interpretations, the world is the dream of the god Vishnu and is all in his mind. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the primary metaphor for divine creativity is speaking. Words give structure, form, meaning, and interconnection. To be spoken, they require breath. As we know from our daily experience, the flow of the out-breath propels all my spoken words and yours. The word for breath in Ancient Greek is pneuma; this word also means wind. The equivalent Hebrew word, ru’ach, which is feminine, can be translated as wind, breath, or spirit. In China, qi or chi has a similar meaning, and in India, prana. In science, this universal flow of activity is called energy. God continually creates the world, us, and our minds through the flow of cosmic energy and through the shaping of forms, patterns, and meanings.
If we believe that God is the source of all things and that God’s being sustains the universe—a belief shared by Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus—then our ultimate gratitude is to God for the very fact of existence. Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucians do not use the word God in the same sense, but all have their own conceptions of ultimate reality. Our gratitude is also due to the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and our earth—on which our lives depend; the microbes, plants, and animals that provide our food; and the human societies and cultures that sustain all human lives.
In religious traditions, there are many ways of giving thanks to the ultimate source of everything, or God.3 The Jewish psalms, in the Old Testament, are full of praise and thanks to God. In Christian services, these same psalms play an integral part, and there are many specifically Christian hymns of praise and forms of thanksgiving. Traditionally, Christians said grace before meals, and some still do. The same goes for Jews, Muslims, and people in many other religious and national traditions. In the United States, the Thanksgiving festival is an important part of the national culture.
For a materialist or an atheist, this is all nonsense, or at best a kind of poetic make-believe. Reality is not a gift of God, nor are harvests or fruits of the land. They have come about through chance and necessity, and through human science, technology, and hard work. Even the care of parents for their children is a genetically programmed response, manipulated by selfish genes that are interested only in propagating themselves. So there is no need to feel grateful even for parental love, since it is programmed by the genes for their own selfish ends.
Personal Differences
Research by psychologists has shown what we all know anyway: Some people are temperamentally more grateful than others. A familiar way of recognizing this difference is through the way people respond to a glass of water filled to fifty-percent capacity. For the grateful, the glass is half full. For the ungrateful, the glass is half empty. Of course, most of us are both grateful and ungrateful, or optimistic and pessimistic, in different situations. And sometimes it is important to be pessimistic. If I notice that the gas tank in our car is almost empty, it is better to expect the worst and try to fill it up soon, rather than pressing ahead in the hope that gas will materialize magically, or that the gas gauge is wrong.
Since around the year 2000, gratitude has been studied scientifically thanks to the growth of positive psychology. Psychologists have developed questionnaires and scales by which they can rate people’s gratitude or ingratitude. They can also assess their well-being and happiness. Study after study has shown that people who are habitually grateful are happier than those who are habitually ungrateful; they are less depressed, more satisfied with their lives, have more self-acceptance, and have a greater sense of purpose in life.4 They are also more generous.5
These are correlations. Are people grateful because they are happy? Or are people happy because they are grateful?
Positive psychologists have done experiments to try to find out. In one kind of test, the participants were divided at random into three groups. In one group, people were asked to briefly describe five things they were grateful for in the previous week. In another group, people were asked to describe five hassles from the previous week. In the third group, they were asked to describe five events that had affected them in the previous week. These exercises were repeated for ten weeks.
In the gratitude group, the test group, a wide range of experiences led to gratitude, including cherished interactions, good health, overcoming obstacles, and simply being alive. The researchers found:
Participants in the grateful condition felt better about their life as a whole and were more optimistic about the future than participants in either of the other comparison conditions [those who described hassles or just wrote about events]. In addition, those in the grateful condition reported fewer health complaints and even said that they spent more time exercising than control participants did.6
Other experiments that involved counting blessings gave similarly impressive positive results.7
In another kind of test, participants in one group were asked to write letters of gratitude to people who had helped them in their lives but whom they felt they had never properly acknowledged, and then to deliver these letters in person. The control group was asked to write about their early memories. The gratitude group showed a large increase in happiness compared with the control group, lasting for at least a month.8
There are now many self-help books on how to be more grateful, how to count your blessings, and how to improve your relationships through gratitude. These methods work, not for everyone all the time, but for many people much of the time.
What’s Wrong with Gratitude?
Grateful people are generally happier than ungrateful people, and also tend to be better liked by others. So are there any disadvantages to being grateful?
Perhaps there are. Gratitude, like other human emotions and dispositions, can be exploited by others. In our capitalist society, there has been a big incentive for corporations to learn from positive psychology in general, and from gratefulness research in particular. Many companies give free copies of positive psychology self-help books to their employees; some sponsor training courses and motivational lectures. Having positive, compliant, and grateful employees is good for business. And if employees have to be laid off, then people trained in positive psychology can be hired to try to make them feel that losing their jobs is a great career opportunity, so they feel little or no resentment against the company that fired them.9
The writer Barbara Ehrenreich is very critical of these practices because she feels they offer solutions in the form of mental disciplines that involve screening out negative thoughts, rather like old-style Calvinists keeping watch for sinful thoughts. Ehrenreich argues that we need negative thoughts if we are to fight against injustice and environmental destruction.10 I agree with her.
Gratitude can be manipulated and abused, just as love can be manipulated and abused, but this is not an argument against the importance of gratitude in itself. In general, it is better to be loving and grateful than unloving and ungrateful. Most of us prefer to be with loving and grateful people, rather than with unloving and ungrateful ones. But being compulsively loving and grateful can blind us to danger and to destructive human behavior, and stop us from doing something about them. We need an appropriate balance.
Gifts and Obligations
We are often resistant to receiving gifts. Why? Because receiving gifts implies an obligation to give something in return. We feel indebted. Lobbyists and marketers know that giving gifts induces a sense of reciprocal obligation that they can use to their advantage.
A seminal book on this subject is Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, first published in France in 1925. He showed that, in a wide variety of traditional societies, there was no such thing as a free gift. When one tribe or clan gave gifts to another, the receivers were under an obligation to give gifts in return relatively soon. Sometimes they were expected to give them with interest, as occurred in the Native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest. If one group gave ten blankets one year, the other felt obliged to return twenty the next, and so on. This ceremonial gift-giving, or potlatch, system often became competitive and unsustainable, and one outcome was the conspicuous destruction of accumulated wealth, including burning the houses of princes, putting slaves to death, burning precious oils, and casting precious copper objects into the sea.11
In religious contexts, sacrificing human or animal lives or giving food or other gifts to goddesses, gods, or God was—and still is—a way of reciprocating the gifts received from them. Or maybe it is a way of giving something while expecting a gift in return, as summarized in the Latin phrase do ut des: “I give in order that you give.”
Although our secular, modern lives are so strongly influenced by the money-based economy, we are still familiar with the dynamics of gifts and reciprocity. Gifts create social bonds. We are all aware that at least a conventional expression of gratitude, like saying “thank you,” is part of normal social behavior.
If gratitude is a social virtue, ingratitude is a social vice. In many social circles, people who are ungrateful are unpopular. A sense of entitlement or failure to appreciate others properly is tolerated in aristocrats, oligarchs, and other powerful people in hierarchical societies. But in more egalitarian social groups, a sense of entitlement is not a recipe for being liked. Some people feel entitled to be served and helped by others, without expressing gratitude. This is the only way very young babies can exist, but by the age of about six weeks, most babies begin to smile, and their smiles are often thanks enough. Many young children are soon taught to express their gratitude verbally and in other ways.
What if our life is a gift of nature? What if nature herself is a gift? Then we have our deepest obligation to the powers that brought us and everything else into being, and our greatest cause for gratitude.
In all religious traditions, hymns of praise and expressions of gratitude toward the divine source of all being are part of reciprocal interaction; thanksgiving links us to the source of the gift of life itself, and all the other blessings in our lives. One expression of this gratitude is to share our gifts with others, to become part of the flow on which we ourselves depend.
The downside is that by recognizing our total dependence on powers beyond ourselves, we can be filled with an overwhelming sense of religious obligation and guilt at not fulfilling it. One way out of this sense of inadequacy is to become an atheist. If everything happens automatically and unconsciously, if there is no purpose or providence in the world, then there is nothing to feel grateful for.
But this liberation comes at a high price. Being ungrateful is often accompanied by unhappiness. For believers in the materialist theory of nature, living unhappily can seem like an act of heroism, an unflinching fidelity to objective truth. But philosophical materialism is not the truth; it is a worldview, a belief system. Though it has many committed followers, to believe in it is not a matter of intellectual, logical necessity. It is a matter of ideology or personal or cultural habit.
Grace and Gratitude
The Latin word for gratitude is the noun gratia, from which our word grace is derived. The closely related Latin adjective gratus means “pleasing.” And from these roots come a range of English words, including graceful, disgraceful, gracious, gratification, gratuitous, and congratulate.12
Grace itself has several meanings. First, in Christian theology, it is a gift of God, a divine favor. For instance, in the prayer “Hail Mary, full of grace,” Mary is a channel of God’s grace, which flows through her and through her womb:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus . . .
Second, grace also refers to proportions or actions that are pleasing, as in graceful movements or gracious manners. Likewise, it means attractiveness or charm, as in elegant proportions. In Greek mythology, the sister goddesses the Graces were bestowers of beauty and were of exquisite beauty themselves.
Third, grace also means thanks or gratitude, as in saying grace before meals. There are similar words for thanks in other languages: In French, grace à, “thanks to.” The word for “thank you” in Spanish is gracias, and in Italian, grazie.
What unifies these meanings is a sense of free flow in both directions, and from this flow comes graceful movement or beauty. The giver and the giver of thanks are connected; they are in a mutual relationship, as in a bond of loyalty, love, and trust. This is also a theological description of the relationship between God and those who love, trust, and give thanks to him. Likewise, it describes the widespread pattern of human interaction through the reciprocal giving of gifts and services. This mutuality of giving underlies relationships in families and other social groups.
These mutual relationships still exist, and they long preceded organized trade and money-based economies. The process of buying and selling quantified and systematized networks of reciprocal giving. But whereas buying and selling follow quantified rules, giving gifts, gratitude, and something in return are voluntary. They are more free and personal, less automatic and unconscious. Spirit (which I think of as the flow of conscious life) flows through us when we give, and when we give thanks. In my view, this flow is a fundamental aspect of all human societies, and also of human relationships with ancestors, saints, spirits, angels, gods, goddesses, and ultimate reality, which Jews, Christians, and Muslims call God.
The bestselling author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was an atheist who was put off God as a young man when his Jewish family disapproved of his being gay. His last book, published posthumously in 2015, is called Gratitude and was written when he knew he was dying of cancer. He summed up his feelings as follows:
I cannot pretend that I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return . . . Above all, I have been a sentient being on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.13
Being grateful makes us part of this mutual, life-enhancing flow. Being ungrateful separates us from it. When we are part of this flow, we generally feel happier than when we are not part of it, whether we call ourselves atheists or not.14
The practice of gratitude connects us to the graceful flow of giving and returning thanks in the human realm, and also to the flow of life in nonhuman nature: in plants and animals, ecosystems, the earth, the solar system, our galaxy, and the entire cosmos.15 And if we are open to it, gratitude can connect us directly to the conscious source of all being, the source of all consciousness, form, and energy, which Jews, Christians, and Muslims call God and which Hindus call sat-chit-ananda: being-consciousness-bliss.16
Two Ways of Practicing Gratitude
COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS
Try to make this a regular practice, for example, every day before you go to bed. Or once a week: on Friday if you are Muslim, on Saturday if you are Jewish, and on Sunday if you are Christian by ancestry. Other traditions have their own special days. If it helps you to write things down and make a list, then do so. You can give thanks for your own life and health; for your family, your teachers, and other people who have helped you; for your language, culture, economy, education, and society; for plants and animals; to Mother Nature in her many forms; to the entire universe; and to the source of all being. This practice connects you to that which is given to you. The greater your gratitude, the greater the sense of flow and the greater your desire to give.
SAY GRACE BEFORE MEALS
In my own home, we hold hands around the table before we eat. Sometimes we sing a grace, sometimes someone says a grace, and sometimes we spend a short period in silence together. If I am on my own, I give thanks silently. I suggest making this a practice in your own home.17 If some of the members of your family or your friends are not comfortable with a grace, then hold hands silently. Or provide a space where anyone can express their thankfulness in their own way, through speaking or singing.