Gratitude and Thanksgiving: Building Character and Community

Introduction

Gratitude is a moral emotion of appreciation and thankfulness. It is considered a moral emotion because it promotes a social attitude and behavior that is deemed virtuous and positive both for one's character and for one's community (Buck). But why is gratitude deemed important? What value does it bring to the community, and what development does it enable in the human character?

Gratitude is evidently important enough in American society that the holiday of Thanksgiving was long ago set aside so that Americans could remember to express gratitude for life's blessings and to recall how the Pilgrims came to survive their first harsh winter. However, as the modern world turns away from its traditions and embraces newer, more politically oriented philosophies of life, can one say that gratitude still plays a meaningful part in one's life or community?

The answer is a resounding yes. In spite of how the political climate changes from one generation to the next, gratitude is an ancient and universally accepted moral emotion that transcends present-day politics and enables one to conform to a higher system of ethics than that derived from the politically correct platform of today. This paper describes the features of gratitude that make it distinctive, discusses the role it plays—or should play—in one's life as one tries to live well and serve as a member of a moral community, and explores the important moral and social implications of gratitude in our lives.

What It Means to Live Well and Why Gratitude Is Unique

The idea of living well is a question that philosophers and teachers have addressed the world over for thousands of years. One ethical system as ancient as Aristotle and Confucius is virtue ethics, in which it was taught in both the East and the West that the best way to live well was to live virtuously—that is, in harmony with the virtues that enable one to develop one's character. Developing one's character virtuously was considered the best path toward happiness in this life.

Yet today, the idea of living to develop one's character is a concept that does not receive the level of attention it did in former ages. Krista Thomason, for example, argues that envy on her part is wrong "simply because it is morally wrong for me to feel" (37). In other words, it is wrong just because. That is the level of analysis that Thomason brings to a discussion of "the moral value of envy" (36). There is no discussion of the impact that behavior has on one's character; character has become something that is far too subjectively discerned for anything resembling objective analysis to be conducted with respect to it. Indeed, subjective assessment is what characterizes the modern notion of political correctness, in which a thing is wrong because the person with political power says it is—end of discussion.

What makes gratitude unique is that it necessitates an objective standard outside ourselves by which we can make judgments. If one is thankful for something, there must be a reason for it. There must be something external to oneself to which a person can express thanks. Thanksgiving in and of itself is an act of demonstrating, objectively, one's appreciation—whether it is to God, to the universe, to the past, to one's family, to the community, or to friends. One sees the good and expresses gratitude for it.

Of course, there can still be disagreement about what is good and what is not, and even within some families or groups there may be disagreement over what constitutes the good. But this does not mean that gratitude, when it is expressed, is any less real. When one perceives the good—even when one is challenged by another or when the objective goodness of a thing is disputed—one can nonetheless still be gracious. Gratefulness is a show of humility, an act of selflessness, in which one acknowledges a small debt of gratitude, of thanks, of appreciation, and of respect to something other than oneself.

In the modern world of self-righteousness, self-assertion, self-love, self-entitlement, and self-obsession, a little gratitude could go a long way toward bringing communities and families back to their senses.

Thomason's argument that people should feel envy when they see others with goods or traits they wish to possess is flawed from start to finish. Her argument is that the feeling of envy shows that an individual values those goods and traits that another possesses. She argues that one's feeling of envy is appropriate because it means one does value good things and want them for oneself—and that one can use that feeling of envy as an impetus to develop oneself and reach goals that would allow one to obtain those goods and traits.

But is this a good argument? No. It is flawed because when one is motivated by envy to achieve a goal, one's motivation is inherently impure and will taint the character of the individual who nurses it and allows it to serve as a driver—even if the end goal of attaining some positive good or trait is desirable in and of itself. The motive for attainment has not been good. Charity is the opposite of envy, and when one is motivated by a feeling of charity, one's entire orientation, character, and disposition changes. It goes from being self-directed to being other-directed. The feeling of gratitude corresponds with the feeling of charity: it, too, is other-directed rather than self-directed.

The system of virtue ethics is, in fact, entirely about cultivating virtues that are other-oriented. The very concepts of community and family cannot be comprehended without being rooted in the notion of the other. The reason so many politically correct justifications generally fail is that they come across as self-serving and contradictory. The reason Thanksgiving is attacked by certain pundits is that it orients one toward the existence of the other in a real way, whereas in the politically correct worldview, one's orientation toward the other is meant merely to be performative and self-serving: by signaling one's virtue, one appears superior to others. There is no real gratitude in that realm, for if there were, it would collapse under its own lack of an inner core of objective goodness.

Conclusion

Gratitude is an emotion and attitude that one should strive to cultivate, as it truly does develop one's character in a positive manner. Surely everyone can point to times in his or her own life when he or she did something that caused unintended offense—and the offended party took it personally and accused the other of deliberate malice. Undoubtedly one did not like being accused of deliberate viciousness and felt the judgment to be unjust. Now think about how many times one judges others in a similar manner. The ancient maxim "judge not lest ye be judged" has stood the test of time for good reason. One does not benefit from making snap judgments. One does benefit from showing gratitude at all times and in all places. One develops a reputation for being a good person, and in doing so contributes to a more gracious and humane community.

References

Buck, Ross. "The Gratitude of Exchange and the Gratitude of Caring: A Developmental-Interactionist Perspective of Moral Emotion." The Psychology of Gratitude (2004): 100–122.

Nussbaum, Martha. "Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance." (2004).

Srinivasan, Amia. "The Aptness of Anger." Journal of Political Philosophy 26.2 (2018): 123–144.

Thomason, Krista K. "The Moral Value of Envy." The Southern Journal of Philosophy 53.1 (2015): 36–53.