I entered this calendar year with some fear and trembling. It’s likely to be bumpy. On New Year’s Eve, chopping shallots for our oysters, I found myself reflecting back on memories from 2016, a very bad year in which I found myself, for the first time in my life, establishing personal rules to keep from drinking too much. I can’t quite remember the details now. Should I have written them down? We seem to be headed back into that maelstrom of posturing, backstabbing, gaslighting, and deceit. 

Uplifting reading is highly recommended, as an alternative to alcohol. I spent the early days of 2024 pro-actively assembling a pile, and the first to hand was a lovely new book from the Hildebrand Project, entitled simply Gratitude. I read the whole thing in a single evening and felt refreshed, and even a little hopeful. It was more than just escapism. Gratitude contains salutary lessons which are highly applicable to our present moment. As Yuval Levin has long stressed, “conservatism is gratitude,” because it is gratitude above all that enables us to appreciate the real value of what we have inherited from others before us, which in turn motivates us to conserve. It was a pleasure to reflect more deeply on this profound truth.

Gratitude brings together four essays, from Dietrich von Hildebrand, Balduin V. Schwarz, Joseph Ratzinger, and Romano Guardini. As a philosopher working in the personalist tradition, Hildebrand is carefully attentive to human psychology and experience. Schwarz, as a student and protégé, employs a similar approach. They consider a series of questions, all revolving around gratitude, that may arise in the course of ordinary life. For instance: How do we prevent a healthy gratitude for good things from making us complacent about bad ones? Is it possible to be grateful even for sources of real suffering, and should we try? Should we be grateful for things we receive that are owed to us in justice, or is that demeaning and slavish? Can an atheist be grateful for blessings not received from another human being (such as a fine spring day)? 

Each section contained worthwhile insights, but for the present, I want to look at a question of particular relevance to the conservative conversation. How can we maintain a posture of gratitude towards the world around us, given the strong human tendency to take things for granted? 

When particular goods have become integrated into our daily life, we easily come to see them simply as our own, not as gifts or blessings for which we should be grateful. That tendency to take things for granted can have dire consequences, in our personal and family lives, but also in society at large. Without gratitude, people are easily drawn into resentment, envy, and a perpetual sense of grievance. Politicians can be quite skilled at exploiting those feelings. 

By a similar token, without gratitude, people tend not to be properly motivated to conserve the good things they already have. Gratitude instills a sense of indebtedness and then, following from that, responsibility. When something is taken for granted, people tend not to reflect on the real value of the thing, or on what needs to be done to preserve it. 

The problem is familiar to us from experience, but it’s worth fleshing out nevertheless. Schwarz considers a scenario in which I drop something I value without noticing (my driver’s license, say) while walking down the street. A stranger sees and runs after me to return it. Feelings of gratitude naturally well up in me as I consider how narrowly I avoided a soul-destroying morning in the DMV. I feel compelled to make some return, if only in the form of profuse thanks. Why is this feeling so strong, when the stranger was in all likelihood only minimally inconvenienced? Schwarz argues that it is because the gratuitousness of the gesture draws out the intrinsic value of both my personhood and his own. It’s unlikely that he expected to get any material benefit for his trouble. The gesture is therefore “an actualization of his own recognition of humanhood, and has transcended the mere utilitarian realm.”

This is an affirming encounter. There is a reason why we take particular pleasure in “random acts of kindness.” However, after offering my profuse thanks to the kind stranger, suppose that I return home to find that my husband has prepared a meal that happens to not appeal to me. Suppose, further, that the house is colder than I prefer. My children’s schoolbooks are spread out chaotically all over the kitchen table. I am looking forward to receiving a book in the mail, but the mailbox has nothing but bills. 

Quite possibly, I may now get cranky and start berating people. This is understandable on some level; like most people, I was craving peace and comfort upon my return home, and the reality was disappointing. But of course, I really have far more reason to be grateful in my home than I did on the street. The stranger’s service, kind as it was, took less than a minute of his time. My family’s efforts to please me or meet my expectations were far more onerous. Even beyond that, I might reflect gratefully on the wonderful fact that I have a house, a family, nutritious food, and money to pay the bills. I am literally surrounded by blessings on every side; by any reasonable account, I should surely be grouped with the world’s most fortunate people. But instead of feeling grateful for all of that, I am fuming about a cold room and a messy table. 

The problem here partly comes back to expectations. The stranger on the street rendered a gratuitous and unexpected service. But I expected my husband to prepare a meal; we likely discussed this plan in advance. The children were expected to do their homework. Cold rooms in winter and bills in mailboxes are hardly unusual (or intolerable) hardships, but I was hoping for warmth and a new book, so the less-pleasing reality feels like an affront. The good things were already factored into my expectations, so they don’t inspire that joy of gratuitousness, and anyhow, my family also expects things from me, so it’s easier to view their contributions as merely “fair.” Oddly, the stranger’s small kindness may feel more affirming to me than those of the people who genuinely love me, simply because it comes out of the blue from someone who can’t really be expecting anything in return. 

As Hildebrand explains, “It is much more difficult to appreciate the many gifts and assistances of the lover than the extraordinary gifts or benefits on the part of strangers. One is much more inclined to overlook the former.”

Hildebrand refers to this indifference as a “falling asleep” of love, and the effects can be crippling. If I take my family for granted, and treat their kindnesses to me as merely expected, I consign myself to an existence in which it is impossible for my loved ones to show me love. With this glass-half-empty approach to human relationships, I will have set myself up for a life of perpetual grievance. Of course, those precious relationships are also likely to be strained if it becomes evident to my family that their gestures are not valued. Human beings have a sad tendency to recognize the true worth of their intimate relationships only after they have damaged them through indifference and neglect. 

Things need not be this way. It is possible, with deliberate effort, to cultivate a posture of gratitude towards our loved ones, such that we do feel that same sense of delight even in response to gestures that they regard as obligatory. Perhaps my husband feels obliged to make a meal, that being our plan for the day, but if I can maintain my awareness of the value of his continued effort and concern (and especially if he reciprocates as appropriate), we may find ourselves in a much happier space in which each of us makes the other feel loved just through the faithful execution of our daily tasks. This has further salutary benefits, because we may then both feel appreciated as well, thus creating a virtuous cycle. “Man is that strange creature,” says Ratzinger, “that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist.” Gratitude builds up the people around us, even as it enables us to be more sustained by their service and concern.

These principles are not applicable exclusively in a familial context. Consider the bitterness, recrimination, and widespread discontent that have dominated the political sphere in recent years. Consider the Flight 93-style despair, and the many who insist that conservatism “hasn’t conserved anything.” Grievance has been the primary fuel of both political parties for some years now, which seems odd when one considers that there are billions of people alive today who would almost certainly see American citizenship as a gift of immense value. Do we feel that way? Why not? 

Our fractious immigration debates, to my eyes, demonstrate the point in a particularly poignant way. On the policy questions I see excesses and inconsistencies to lament on many fronts, but what truly amazes me is how little any of the major participants seem sensible of a point poignantly illuminated by would-be immigrants themselves: that we are all extremely blessed just to be Americans. People come here because they desperately want what we have. Nevertheless, in the immigration debate, the hardliners of both sides speak as though our nation is morally bankrupt and careening towards collapse. An ignorant observer might be excused for wondering: why does anyone even want to come here? Maybe Americans should be begging for admission to Honduras, Venezuela, or Ecuador.

No one is doing that, because we know perfectly well that we have it much better. Regardless of whether one cares most about physical comfort, freedom and opportunity, or the ability to worship God in peace, Americans are extraordinarily blessed. But a large share of our populace seems not to think so, or at any rate, they’re not dwelling on the point. They’re thinking about cold rooms and messy tables, not the blessing of having a house. 

This is a serious problem. Without gratitude for the good things in life, we will not be properly motivated to conserve them. Even if we still think of ourselves as patriots, our love will easily come to rest on a romanticized vision of the America we feel entitled to, not the one that actually exists. The good things will be taken for granted, and the bad ones deemed intolerable. No one with that sort of perspective can ever truly be content, no matter how many elections they win. But of course, over time, they may find that they can’t win very many. Like the surly family member who is never appreciative, grievance-obsessed citizens tend to find themselves isolated. Their company is depressing, and their fixation on personal injury makes it nearly impossible for them to articulate a vision of the future that their fellow citizens might wish to help realize.

It doesn’t have to be like this. If, as I believe, conservatives are “tasked” with preserving a legacy or tradition that has been handed to us, we must remember how to enshrine gratitude as a defining virtue of our movement. Our forebears were flawed humans like ourselves, so they shouldn’t be worshiped, but we can recognize how their struggles and achievements have made our own lives possible. We can value those contributions instead of taking them for granted. Working to preserve the best of America’s culture and traditions for our own children and grandchildren can become a meaningful task, not just a quest for revenge, when our political goals are motivated by an appreciation of our history and political traditions, and by the ties of custom and lived traditions. 

“True asking and giving,” says Guardini, “true receiving and thanking are fine and are human in the deepest sense of the word. They are based on the consciousness that we stand together in our need. Accidentally here and now, one person has something, the other does not; one person can and the other cannot. Tomorrow it may be the other way around.” 

This insight is crucial to the flourishing of any human community, including a political one. We cannot really hope to extort from one another all the things that we genuinely need. Gratitude is the crucial ingredient that can tame envy and resentment, and encourage the combination of solidarity and innovation that has distinguished America in her finest hours. I don’t expect to see much of this in 2024. But, in the spirit of gratitude, I am glad that our nation has had such moments, and I will live in hope that they may come again.