Gratitude: An Intellectual History

Conclusion: A Theistic Modernity

217 conclusion A Theistic Modernity What a long, strange trip it’s been, and it will be helpful to summarize at this point by returning to the illustration I offered in the introduction. Grandma has given you an ugly and useless soup tureen as a wedding gift. Should you put it away in a closet? Should you use it to feed the cat? Should you bring it out and serve soup from it when Grandma visits? Grandma’s soup tureen provides a handy symbolic way of identifying different conceptions of gratitude across the centuries. WWAD? WWCD? What would Aristotle do? What would Cicero do? • Aristotle would warn you that receiving the tureen puts you in a position of inferiority and that, if you want to be a virtuous and independent person, you should pay Grandma back with a bigger gift as soon as possible. Then forget you ever received the gift in the first place. • Cicero would tell you to follow accepted custom, take the gift, look for a chance to reciprocate, and expect that your good offices will advance your political career. • Seneca would encourage you to exaggerate the quality and beauty of the gift, to appear at Grandma’s door every morning to accompany her on her way to the grocery store, loudly celebrating her generosity at every stoplight. He would encourage you to look for the right time and way to repay her. • Jesus and Paul would tell you to honor and love Grandma, thank God with sincerity, and move on. 218 ⌣ gratitude • The Beowulf poet would encourage you to pass out soup tureens to your employees to display your largesse. • Aquinas would do his Seneca imitation. He would tell you to receive the gift, express gratitude, and look for the right time and place to requite her gift. • Calvin and Luther would tell you to thank God, while recognizing you do not deserve the tureen or your grandmother’s love. They would remind you that grace is a gift that can never be repaid. • Hobbes would tell you that you should receive the tureen in such a way that Grandma will never regret having given it to you, which means,do not use it to feed the cat. • Locke would say you should thank her and show esteem for her, so long as her gift was not an attempt to influence your decision to vote Democrat. • Adam Smith would tell you that gratitude is a proper sentiment in response to something that gives pleasure, like a tureen. • Kant would tell you that since Grandma gave first, you are obligated to her by a sacred duty, a debt that can never be repaid. • Kierkegaard would remind you that we are to thank God even in suffering. • Nietzsche would urge you to show gratitude especially if the tureen is ugly, to show Grandma how powerless she is to harm you. • Heidegger would mumble something incomprehensible in German, hike up his lederhosen, and leave with a Nazi salute. • Mauss would be at the head of a gaggle of anthropologists warning you that there is no such thing as a free gift, that Grandma might return later to reclaim her property, and that her display of generosity is likely a power play intended to put you in her debt. • Derrida would say that you soiled the gift as soon as you said thank you. • Marion would strip the tureen to its essence of pure givability, and you and Grandma would both disappear into phenomenological vapor. Where Are We Now? Where does all this leave us? Where are we with gratitude now, in the early twenty-first century? There is a widespread sense that the “Enlightenment project” has run aground,1 and there is a growing sense that the malaise of contemporary culture has something to do with our forgetfulness of gifts and our ungrateful conclusion ⌣ 219 marginalization of gratitude. Some see it as liberalism gone to seed. Liberal theory (expressed, for example, in the Declaration of Independence) posits an original gift, a bestowal, even a bestowal from a Creator. But the bestowal is a gift of rights, and over the centuries that bestowal has inspired only greater and greater demands for wider and wider rights. “Every day,” José Ortega y Gasset complained in 1930, “a new luxury [is added] to their standard of living.” In earlier ages, one’s status and personal gifts “would have been considered one...