Author explores gratitude’s dark side — and how being grateful might still rescue us

For the author of a book on gratitude Diana Butler Bass has what might be a surprising admission: Gratitude didn’t come naturally to her.

Bass published “Grateful,” her 12th book, five years ago. But before writing it, “I would not have considered myself a naturally grateful person,” she says. “I always struggled with cultivating gratitude, or even trying to understand why I should.”

Writing the book has helped change that for her, she says. She came out of the experience “realizing that gratitude is both a feeling — one that arises naturally as a response to beauty or wonder or an unexpected gift — and it’s also an ethical choice,” Bass says in an interview with the Wisconsin Examiner.

As she redefined gratitude for herself, she also redefined it for her audience in provocative new ways.

Gratitude is a spiritual practice, “and like any other practice it takes time. It’s hard,” Bass says.

Nevertheless, writing the book pointed her to evidence that historically, gratitude has had a darker side. It has often been part of a system of hierarchy, she writes, that reinforces social divisions and solidifies power in the hands of a few at the expense of many.

At the same time, Bass says, as a form of personal spiritual discipline, gratitude can be a call to social justice on behalf of everyone, everywhere, at a time when social ties are fraying and severed.

“If more people pursued it with seriousness — both in being open to when that feeling of gratitude shows up in our lives, but also in cultivating it and nurturing it in families and communities — that’s a very practical way that some of what has been broken may be restored,” Bass says.

A historian and public theologian, Bass has been a leading liberal Protestant chronicler of contemporary American Christian thought as it intersects with culture, politics and generational change.

Her research for “Grateful” began in 2015 and kicked into higher gear when she saw a survey reporting that 78% of Americans told pollsters they felt “strongly thankful” in the previous week.

That astonished her. She’d read research about the beneficial impact of gratitude. “There’s great social science evidence that says that gratitude helps people create and bind communities,” she says.

Yet in political surveys leading into the 2016 presidential election year, she saw little evidence of that sort of outcome. Instead, campaign rhetoric and public responses revealed “a really fraying political and social culture and the level of stress and unhappiness that Americans were experiencing,” Bass says.

Viewing the poll in which eight in 10 Americans professed to be “strongly thankful” against the backdrop of that political discourse, “the numbers didn’t match the reality.”

The subsequent election of Donald Trump as president made the disconnect even sharper for her. “And those questions, those concerns we have about our culture have not abated,” Bass says. Indeed, the dissatisfaction and dislocation, “loneliness, isolation, fear — all of the things that gratitude should address, have done nothing but increase in our culture.”

Digging into the “gratitude gap,” as she dubbed it, Bass came to an eye-opening conclusion.

In American culture especially, “we don’t recognize that we have tied gratitude to an invisible structure,” she says. “We think about it as a transaction — somebody gives me something and I have to do something in return. There’s a real quid pro quo mentality that we’ve attached to gratitude.”

Besides being transactional, this sort of gratitude system also has a hierarchy. “Benefactors, the people who give gifts, are on the top. And beneficiaries, the people who receive gifts, are on the bottom,” Bass explains.

Judgment colors both parties to that transaction. “Benefactors are richer, better, more moral,” she says, acting out of a sense of obligation, with the implicit superiority that carries.

Meanwhile, “beneficiaries are somehow poor, or needy, or maybe freeloaders to be more negative,” Bass says. “And the poor should be grateful for what they receive from either the government or from private individuals.”

This hierarchy of gratitude wasn’t a Yankee invention. Bass traces it back to ancient Rome and that culture’s economic system with a structure of gifts given from rich to poor that bound the poor to the wealthy. And it went on to be replicated in the civilizations that followed.

Throughout history, however, the ritualized system of gratitude and bondage has also sparked challenges. In ancient Rome, critics warned that “it binds the poor to the system of dependence and transaction,” Bass says, so they are “essentially enslaved by their debt of gratitude for their entire life — there will be no way they could ever discharge the debt.”

The critics also charged “that it corrupts the wealthy,” she adds — enabling benefactors giving away their wealth to “target it to places where they feel like they’re going to get the most back.”

Bass sees just such a critique in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus tells his disciples not to give a banquet for rich friends or family members who can repay them. Instead, he tells them to “go out in the streets and invite the poor and the outcasts and the lonely because they cannot repay you,” she observes. “Jesus is directly critiquing the Roman practice of quid pro quo around the practice of gratitude.”

Adam Smith, author of a foundational text on capitalism, was another critic, writing in the 18th century, that “the hierarchically structured quid pro quo, would eat away at the foundations of what he perceived to be moral capitalism because it allowed the rich to rig the system so that it would benefit them almost solely,” Bass says.

“That whole structure is very much part of the United States culture,” she says — and is especially strong among American men, who surveys show are the least likely to report gratitude.

“You’re supposed to be an individual and stand on your own,” Bass says. The ideal of American individualism modeled on the characters portrayed by movie star John Wayne “undermined the ability for us to see that there was any different structure to gratitude.”

In her book Bass offers such an alternative structure: a round table. “There is no head of the table, but instead everyone is seated at the table,” Bass says, with the bounty there for everyone to share.

Seeing the gifts of the universe that way, “the issue is the fact that they’re not distributed correctly,” Bass says. “They’re hoarded, they’re not shared. The image of the table takes away the idea of a single benefactor. Instead, it places benefaction in the nature of the universe, or the nature of God.”

With that change of perspective, she says, can come an understanding “that our job is to make sure there are enough chairs around that table, and to make sure that the food is passed to everyone who is seated there. Everyone is a beneficiary, and all are called to invite and share.”

She hopes theists, humanists and the entirely secular can all share in seeing that they live “in an abundant universe,” regardless of whether they believe the bounty is the work of God or generous humans.

It is possible, Bass says, to see occasions for gratitude in the worst times. “You’re never thankful for injustice or evil or sin or disease,” she cautions. “Those are not the good gifts of the universe. Those are not the good gifts of God.”

But there can still be moments when people encounter gifts “even in the worst of circumstances,” she says. She notes that the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote that “by keeping a sense of gratitude through the worst possible experiences of human existence, he held on to his own humanity.”

Bass has been rereading the New Testament “through the eyes of a nonhierarchical vision of society and gratitude,” she says. “That’s been revolutionary, to understand that my own sacred text has a deep criticism of hierarchical and transactional gratitude, and it has it at its heart.”

She has friends of other faiths — Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim — who have told her that they see the same critique in their scriptures. “I think that at the heart of our religious traditions, there really is this nonhierarchical vision,” she says — one that gives “a very important call to learn to see the world in a new way.”

For Bass, exploring gratitude has brought special joy for the potential for interfaith and even “post-religious possibilities” — “of people really being able to sit around the same table,” she says, regardless of creed or lack of one.

Whatever their faith, they can “understand that we, all of our lives, are guests,” Bass says. “And that we each bear wisdom, the wisdom of our ancestors, the wisdom of the traditions we inherited, the courage of our own convictions — all of those things. And that we can sit and share and eat together.”

This story was originally published in the Wisconsin Examiner.