Giving Thanks

Tis the day to feel gratitude. It does not cost anything, so there is no real excuse for not showing how grateful we all are.

And yet, gratitude now seems more to be the exception than the rule. We have gotten over the urge to feel grateful because we have gotten over the cultural imperative to connect with other people.

And, not because I have not analyzed the problem. Four years ago, on Thanksgiving, I wrote this:

Given how obsessed we are with our Selves, we refuse to accept the generosity offered by others, and certainly not the generosity offered by God. We are no longer grateful because we no longer want to feel that we depend on anyone but our Selves. We are so independent and autonomous, so thoroughly atomized, that we refuse to enter into the most elementary transactions with other people. We trust no one. We rely on no one. And we cannot figure out why we are so isolated.

We do not feel gratitude because we have overdosed on therapy. Even if we missed out on therapy sessions, we have embraced the values that therapy has been promulgating-- beginning with radical individualism. We imagined that it was a good thing to be independent and autonomous, but we failed to recognize that such a deviant cultural precept has a very high price.

Gratitude is about other people. David DeSteno explained it well in the New York Times:

Research by the psychologist Sara Algoe has shown that when we feel grateful for other people’s thoughtfulness, we consider that they might be worth getting to know a little better. Gratitude pushes us to take the first steps in forming relationships with new people. And once we know people better, continued feelings of gratitude strengthen our ties to them. Feeling grateful to one person for a favor also makes us more likely to “pay forward” favors to others we don’t know — a phenomenon identified by the psychologist Monica Bartlett — which, in turn, can lead them to want to get to know us.

Similarly, Joel Kotkin explained that young people especially have lost the habit of gratitude:

Most Americans, according to a Templeton Foundation survey, feel they receive little gratitude at home or the office. The feeling of gratitude appears to drop with age. Today’s millennials are the least grateful. This is not surprising given the new generations’ low levels of interest in the very things we are likely to feel grateful for, such as family, religion or America itself.

Kotkin is surely correct to see that losing religion has caused us to lose a sense of social connection. Again, therapy culture has aided and abetted this disaggregation. It is opposed to religion and works to undermine community ties.

We have lost religion. Since religion turns isolated individuals into a community, losing it is hardly inconsequential.

Religion, for all its undoubted spurs to divisiveness, underpinned their sense of gratitude that extended well beyond the Puritans. It later inspired even outsiders, such as Jews, Latinos and African Americans, to celebrate the New England experience. As Americans, we all embraced the notion that we were all fortunate for the blessings of home and family, even when paltry, that divinity bequeathed to us.

With the decline in religious observance, Thanksgiving, not surprisingly, seems to have lost its spiritual essence. It is a holiday now more identified with football and gluttony than anything of spiritual value.

Kotkin offers Mary Eberstadt’s analysis, based on identity politics. She argued that the loss of patriotic loyalty has forced people to cling to factions, to identity groups, based on victimhood and grievance:

With family and community ties weakened, Eberstadt notes, more people, again particularly the young, seek to embrace not the overall community, but an “identity” group. These are often based on grievance ideology built around sexual preference, race, gender identity or physical disability. Such identarian ideology is particularly common in our key intellectual centers such as Manhattan, where a majority of households are single. The hotbeds of identity politics — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston — all have among the lowest rates of family formation in the nation.

All of this to say, I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving.