Gratitude

Friends,

This Thursday, millions of families across our country are going to sit down together, share a meal, and give thanks.

While this may feel like a natural tradition, being grateful is anything but.

The world we live in—the way we interact with one another in structured, ordered formats inside of our four walls and under our rooves—is not natural.

Natural is a lifetime of horrific poverty ended by a terrible, violent death. Natural is subsistence hunter/gatherer behavior culminating in tribal warfare for finite resources. Natural is having so much of your day dedicated to the very act of surviving that you don’t have the time to be grateful, lest your life be ended prematurely by a tiger from the brush or an arrow from an enemy’s quiver while you ponder.

Our unnatural lives are worth being grateful for. But even more so, we should be grateful for the great miracle by which our ancestors moved beyond tribalism to build the mediating institutions that make these unnatural lives possible.

And let’s be clear about what gratitude means.

It’s defined as “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.”

Readiness to return kindness.

I think when most of us think about gratitude, we end our thoughts at the simple act of pondering our great fortunes—of reflecting and saying to ourselves “maybe I am kind of blessed.”

But true gratitude demands so much more.

To be grateful for something is not just to acknowledge its benefit to you; to be truly grateful for something means that you are ready and willing to preserve it. For example, being grateful for our unnatural lives means upholding and defending the institutions that make them possible.

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This commitment, much like the lives we live, is perfectly opposed to our natural instincts. Our evolutionary history has caused us to develop a bias toward the negative. If our ancestors didn’t see that tiger in the brush, or the archer on the hill, they would not survive to pass down their genes.

But today, there is no real tiger in the brush. Where, then, are we to point our worries and our fears?

Those in power and those that vie for it would have us point it at one another. In focusing on the negative, fearing our neighbor, and scorning those different than us, we elevate the voices of the fearmongering populists at the cost of gratitude.

As Charles Lane wrote in the Washington Post:

It is easy to fear the “other”—Democrat, Republican, immigrant, Christian. It is all natural. And when the “other” is in charge of our institutions, it is natural to rage against them. Those in power outside of our tribalistic in-group can be as frightening as a foreign army sitting on our doorstep.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln gave a prescient speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. In it, he focused on this fear, and how it gave rise to the mob violence and extra-legal vigilantism that would eventually lead to the American Civil War. Lincoln warned that the fear of brother posed a far greater risk to our young nation than any frightening foreign army:

Lincoln saw the writing on the wall: if we as a nation cannot be grateful in the face of uncertainty, we are doomed to fall apart as a country.

But we didn’t fall apart in the Civil War—barely. We didn’t fall apart during the political upheavals of the 1960s. We didn’t fall apart in 2017, 2020, or 2021 despite all of the political and social disruptions that put chaos on the center stage of our lives.

We didn’t fall apart as a country all of these times because the flame of gratitude did not go out. We as a people chose to keep it burning in the frigid face of fear.

And if we want to continue to thrive as a nation of freemen, we must choose gratitude over fear. We must choose our institutions over our politicians. We must choose to keep the lamp lit.

Because the winds are blowing