Gratitude
What the Devil cannot feel.
“Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” Roger Scruton
I love Christmas, always have. Love Christmas movies, even the bad ones. If only I could get my wife to watch them with me. In the past, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why I loved Christmas, but I understand it better now, it’s a celebration of gratitude.
Peterson circled me back to the Bible, its stories, it’s value and meaning via his The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. One of the most important 40+ hour investments I’ve ever made. I’m grateful my son made the same investment.
What circled me back to this, is I had heard him talk about Cain and Abel, and on hearing that I felt like I had a glimpse into some of the meaning within that story for the very first time (I was 50 at the time).
As Peterson himself has said, and I have experienced, that story is a bottomless pit of wisdom, that keeps revealing new things to you about the human condition.
Here is it (King James version).
Genesis 4:1-15 : Cain and Abel
1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.
4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering:
5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.
6 And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?
7 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
10 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.
11 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;
12 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
13 And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear.
14 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.
15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
The simplest of stories, and I think the shortest story of the whole bible.
One way to understand this story, at least for me, is that the brothers are representations of the two spirits that swirl the world, that swirl inside us. They are there in every moment (remember The Mandorla from yesterday).
The spirits of Gratitude (Abel) and Resentment (Cain).
Which bring me to Murray’s the War on the West. A friend recommended I read it about 6-months ago, and the chapter, towards the end, that stuck with me was that on Gratitude. Murray talks about The Brothers Karamazov (I still haven’t read that book!), and how gratitude is the one emotion that the devil cannot feel. It was the first time I had come across that idea but because of Cain and Abel I was ready to understand it (the teacher arrives when the student is ready).
It’s a stunning insight.
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas, great holiday break and happy New Year!
With thanks to Douglas Murray.
Gratitude
Toward the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky writes a chapter of pure terror. Earlier in the novel, one of the brothers—Ivan—has laid out his own deeply conflicted views on the nature of mankind, God, and the devil. As the novel develops, Ivan’s mental state deteriorates. Those around him seem to believe that he is slipping into delirium tremens, usually associated with alcohol withdrawal. But the cause of Ivan’s fear is left unclear and unexplained. His younger brother, Alyosha, only realizes how bad things are when he meets his brother one evening by a lamppost and says something that causes Ivan to grip him and begin to tremble. “You have been in my room!” Ivan accuses his brother. “You have been in my room at night, when he came.” Alyosha misunderstands who he is talking about. Ivan howls at him, “Do you know about his visits to me? How did you find out?” Later, when questioning the man who he thinks has killed his father, Ivan becomes seized with fear that this unnamed person is once again present in the room. He begins hastily looking in the corners for him.
Eventually the reader is allowed to be there when Ivan is visited by the devil, who is sitting in his rooms, dressed like a Russian gentleman, using French phrases and clearly from “the class of former lily-fingered landowners who flourished in the days of serfdom.” Apparently the two have conversed before, but whether the devil is part of Ivan’s consciousness or is actually before him is left unclear. The devil says that he wishes to be agreeable but that he is misunderstood—a “slandered” man. He philosophizes but complains that people do not want to hear from him. And then Dostoyevsky gives his devil a passing observation that only such a genius as he could throw in so casually. The devil explains, “My best emotions, such as gratitude, for example, are formally forbidden me solely on account of my social position.”
Why should “gratitude” be an emotion that is denied to the devil? Dostoyevsky leaves this unanswered. But it is worth reflecting on.
For acts of deconstruction and destruction can be performed with extraordinary ease. Such ease that they might as well be the habits of the devil. A great building such as a church or a cathedral can take decades—even centuries—to build. But it can be burned to the ground or otherwise brought down in an afternoon. Similarly, the most delicate canvas or work of art can be the product of years of craft and labor, and it can be destroyed in a moment. The human body is the same. I once read a particular detail of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. A gang of Hutus had been at their work and among the people they macheted that day was a Tutsi doctor. As his brains spilled out onto the roadside, one of his killers mocked the idea that these were meant to be the brains of a doctor. How did his learning look now?
All the years of education and learning, all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things.
It is one of the saddest realizations we have as a species: not just that everything is transitory but that everything—particularly everything we love and into which love has been poured—is fragile. And that just as the line between civilization and barbarism is paper-thin, so it is a miracle that anything at all survives, given the fragility of all things plus the evil and carelessness of which men are capable.
What is it that drives that evil? Many things, without doubt. But one of them identified by several of the great philosophers is resentment (or “ressentiment”). That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy: blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserved more.
In certain young people today (U: it’s not just young people!)… I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship. I find it obscene. - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Among those who have been interested in the question of ressentiment was Friedrich Nietzsche. It is alarming how specifically he diagnoses the type. At one point, he writes that any psychologist who wishes to study the subject must recognize that “this plant thrives best amongst anarchists and anti-Semites today, so it flowers like it always has done, in secret, like a violet but with a different scent. And just as like always gives rise to like, it will come as no surprise to find attempts coming once more from these circles, as so often before to sanctify revenge with the term justice—as though justice were fundamentally simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged—and belatedly to legitimize with revenge emotional reactions in general, one and all.”
For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery!’” This is something that must be averted, for the sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too, or make the healthy “confuse themselves with the sick.” He returns to the subject again and again, as though circling to get exactly to the root of the thing he is attempting to diagnose. Eventually he makes the central insight, which is that ressentiment is at its heart a yearning for revenge motivated by a desire to “anaesthetize pain through emotion” (italics Nietzsche’s own). One needs “the wildest possible emotion,” he says, in order to arouse oneself to the crucial claim of the resentful person: “Someone or other must be to blame that I feel ill.”
What answer is there to this devastating situation? Only one that Nietzsche can see. The men of ressentiment rip at wounds that have closed and open scars “and make themselves bleed to death from scars long-since healed.” Such people may drag down their friends, family, children, and everyone else around them, says Nietzsche. And the only answer is that someone must stand over the person (an “ascetic priest” in Nietzsche’s telling) and say the most difficult thing. Which is that they are quite right. It is true. “Somebody must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it, you yourself alone are to blame for yourself.” Nietzsche recognizes that this is difficult, but if this was to be said, then if nothing else, one thing at least might be accomplished, which is that “the direction of ressentiment” could be “changed.”
Others responded to Nietzsche’s insights—notably Max Scheler and Helmut Schoeck. They added to it by noting that resentment relies always on playing A off against B. In particular, where A is praised solely and wholly in order to denigrate and devalue B. In all matters, whether to do with money, sex, or anything else, no man feels that the scales are weighted in his favor. And so just as the men of resentment talk about “justice” while meaning “revenge,” so it is that something is disguised within their talk of “equality.” For anyone who talks of “equality” will find an inbuilt problem. Only a person who “fears he will lose” will demand equality as a “universal principle.” It is a speculation, says Schoeck, “on a falling market.
“For it is a law according to which people can only be equal in respect of those characteristics having the least value. ‘Equality’ as a purely rational idea can never stimulate desire, will or emotion. But resentment, in whose eyes the higher values never find favor, conceals its nature in the demand for ‘equality.’ In reality it wants nothing less than the destruction of all those who embody those higher values which arouse its anger.”
This is another deeply pertinent insight. For all talk of “equality,” like the talk of “justice,” presents itself in one light—not least a disinterested light, as though its proponents only want an abstract thing and hardly notice whether or not this thing will ever benefit themselves. But very often it is no such thing. A set of far more fundamental issues are working themselves out.
In other words, it may be worth recognizing what we are up against when we hear the critics of the West today. For just as we are not up against justice but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction.
An only vaguely milder version of this has existed in plain sight for decades. That is the obsession that started in the academy and then spread elsewhere that is given over to the veneration of “deconstruction.” This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.
Those who have made a career out of this find a number of things in their favor. One is the fact that their task is potentially endless, as the possible subjects appear limitless. It is a career for life for the deconstructionists. But still nothing is created or even produced at the end of this process. The only possible demand at the endpoint of deconstruction is to deconstruct some more. And it seems possible to pull apart and find cause for resentment endlessly. Certainly, that is the hope of the deconstructionists, who now scour the world of art and look for symbols of rape, male dominance, privilege, racism, and much more. And of course they find things to occupy their time.
For you might easily look at a painting and ask what errant thoughts might have been behind it. You might also ask what labor went into it and whether any forced or unpaid labor was involved in it. You might look at the paint colors and question the origins of the pigments, whether they were legitimately or sustainably acquired. You might ask what pay the apprentices in the artist’s studio received and whether everyone had been adequately compensated by their superior to produce this work for a man of even greater power. You might pull its subjects apart, and “interrogate” its meanings in the light of things that have come after it. You might see all manner of things. You might lament the lack of representation of any kind. Or you might step back and see the Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci, the Annunciation by Sandro Botticelli, or any number of other works of art stretching back across centuries of creation by the masters.
It is the same with buildings. You might look at the great cathedrals and other monuments of Europe and ask who carried all these stones or winched them up, whether they were appropriately paid for their labor and whether the conditions at the time were consistent with modern standards of worker safety. You might ask why people of only one skin color appear to be represented in the monuments or why people only of European background appear to be mentioned on them. You may even ask whether the act of building a structure to a particular God, in the name of a particular religion or denomination, is not in some way exclusive, even exclusionary. You might ask where the money for these great structures came from, whether that money was honestly acquired or whether some portion of the money was taken illegitimately from the poor, the needy, or even from other countries and peoples who had no say in where these finances went. You could do all these things and more. Or you could stand back and admire the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the Cappella Sansevero in Naples, the Duomo in Florence, or tens of thousands of cathedrals, churches, chapels, and other monuments. Why should we not simply stand back and credit our good fortune to have inherited these things and enjoy the great good fortune of being able to live among them?
These are a gift from humans to all humankind.
The reason is that what we have seen in recent decades in the West has been a grand project of deconstruction and destruction fueled by resentment and revenge. In this process, the West has been settled on as “the evil one” in the global search for blame. Obviously, many people inside the West have found it comforting to settle into this mindset as well. The men of resentment have had an easy time pointing to things that the West has done, pointing to bills unpaid and outrages forgotten or insufficiently atoned for. Such people have enjoyed reopening ancient sores and claiming to feel hurt for wounds and wrongs done long before they themselves were ever alive. They have felt contentment through opening up these old wounds and demanding that people pity them afresh as though they themselves were the victims. Because to do so is to place themselves at the center of all things, to expect recompense forever, and never to have to look to themselves to address anything—even if it is something they could only address themselves.
Such people have nothing to say about themselves, or about anyone outside of the West, because to do so might lead them to change the direction in which their resentment is funneled. It might in fact cause them to finally turn their gaze on themselves. If the West is not responsible for all ills in the world, in its past and in the past and present of others, then other actors must be held responsible. And some people would have to look to themselves to explain their lack of outcomes, achievements, and more. They would have to look into the causes of their discontents and see that at least one of them is themselves. How much easier it is to keep claiming that another party—and a vast, historic party at that—is responsible for all the ills of the world and of their own lives.
In recent decades, the sick have indeed infected the healthy and dragged them down into a demented discourse of their own invention. They have pulled almost everyone around them into the zero-sum discussion that insists that the history of the West is a history of patriarchal oppression, sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, larceny, and much more. These people take an interest in other societies solely in order to play them off against the West. They are interested in native tribes solely in order to try to demonstrate how bankrupt the West is. And they are interested in every other civilization in no serious sense. They do not learn the languages of other civilizations or study their cultures in any depth—certainly to nothing like the extent that the much-derided “Orientalists” and others from the Western past did. But they praise any culture so long as it is not Western solely and simply in order to denigrate and devalue the West. As a result, they reach their final end argument, which is to demand why anyone should admire or wish to continue a civilization that has done so much wrong and had such bigotry and hatred built in throughout its history.
Of course, there are many responses that can be made to this. And there are also some answers. For if someone offered me this litany of wrongs of the West, I could reply most easily in a few words. Paris. That is one that I would select early. Venice, I might say next. Rome is not nothing. Nor is Florence a dump. In fact, just to stay with cities, surely Vienna, Prague, Madrid, Lisbon, and Budapest count for something? What about New York or Chicago? The list could go on endlessly. You might linger on any one country for hours. But this points to a fact that is missing. For if you are to weigh a thing up, then you must not simply pile things up on one side of the scale. You must put something on the other side too. If you put the fact that the West has had racism in its history and leave the scale weighted only on that side, then of course you will come out with unbalanced judgments. And that is what has been allowed to happen. But must the good things not count for something? What about the great cathedral and university towns of the West: Oxford and Cambridge, Heidelberg and Regensburg, Ely and Salisbury, Bologna and Valencia?
Why is it possible to discuss the whole history and guilt of the West and not linger on these jewels even for a moment?
It is because the people of resentment are intent on forbidding the best emotions. What are those emotions? The most important, without doubt, is gratitude. The reason Dostoyevsky’s devil cannot feel gratitude is that only a person intent on great evil would be denied, or deny themselves, this crucial human attribute. Without an ability to feel gratitude, all of human life and human experience is a marketplace of blame, where people tear up the landscape of the past and present hoping to find other people to blame and upon whom they can transfer their frustrations. Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment. Because if you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed on to you, then all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got. Bitterness that everything did not turn out better or more exactly to your liking—whatever that “liking” might be. Without some sense of gratitude, it is impossible to get anything into any proper order.
For of course it is possible to lament what did not come to you or did not happen for you. That process could be endless, and everybody on earth could play it. The more important task of life is to recognize what you do not have while being grateful for what you do.
You might regard it as a terrible thing that not everybody in the Western past always held views wholly in accordance with the social and moral values that we happen to adhere to in the 2020s. You might deride that fact or otherwise pick over it. But it makes no sense to do so unless you also recognize, for instance, that to live in the West in this time is to enjoy a piece of historical good fortune unlike almost any good fortune in history. You might feel some regret that things happened in the eighteenth century that people are not proud of today. But you might balance that out by feeling some gratitude to be part of a civilization in which all human life came to be regarded as sacred, in which people are regarded as being endowed with innate dignity, in which peace is the normal state of affairs and where wrongs done in the current day can be remedied through the application of the law. I have been to many parts of the world where some or all of these things are missing: where life is able to be ended with exceptional brutality and with no recourse to any courts or other system of justice. I have visited many countries where peace is the exception not the norm and where young people who want to make a difference in their society have absolutely no chance of ever doing so. The world is full of countries, outside the West, where the things that people in the West take for granted are ideas that seem centuries in the future, if they are conceivable at all. Places that, unlike the West, are not interested in openness to the world and are not remotely concerned with self-criticism, progress, or any other form of betterment.
People who have the good fortune to live in the West are not just the inheritors of comparatively good economic fortune. They have inherited a form of government, justice, and law for which they ought to feel profound gratitude. It may not always be perfect, but it is better by far than any of the alternatives on offer. And when it comes to what we in the West have inherited all around us, this must count as one of the greatest gifts, if not the greatest gift, that any civilization has left for those who came after. A gift not just in liberal order and beautiful cities and landscapes but in artistic achievement, cultural inheritance, and a wealth of examples of how to live. Examples never exceeded anywhere on earth.
And we do not defend these things because they are created by white people. Any more than we would wish to defend Thomas Jefferson or David Hume simply because they were white males. Such people, ideas, buildings, and cities of the West are worthy of respect not because they are the product of white people but because they are the inheritance of all mankind. It is possible today to fixate on the identity of these people and to demand that we “tear this all down.” Or, more moderately, that we tear some of it down. But a saner, more reasonable approach would be to look at what we have inherited that is good and try to build on top of it.
In the last year of his life, the English philosopher Roger Scruton underwent a set of trials and misfortunes inflicted upon him by others. Perhaps distracted by these trials, he discovered too late that a cancer had grown inside him and would end his life in not much more than six months. The last thing he wrote was a reflection on that year of his life—what he had been through and all the terrible things that had happened to him. But he said, and they were the last words he published before his death, “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.”
There are many attitudes that we all take in our lives, some of which dominate at one point in our lives and recede in another. But a life lived without gratitude is not a life properly lived. It is a life that is lived off-kilter: one in which, incapable of realizing what you have to be thankful for, you are left with nothing but your resentments and can be contented by nothing but revenge.
And lastly, some thoughts from our new AI assistant.
Gratitude has been shown to have a number of neurophysiological benefits. Research has shown that practicing gratitude can:
Increase activity in the hypothalamus and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). These areas of the brain are associated with the regulation of stress, emotional responses, and reward.
Increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with decision-making and problem-solving.
Reduce activity in the amygdala, which is associated with stress and negative emotions.
Increase levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is associated with feelings of well-being and happiness.
Increase levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is associated with motivation, pleasure, and reward.
References:
Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377-389.
Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 890-905.
Froh, J. J., Sefick, W. J., & Emmons, R. A. (2008). Counting blessings in early adolescents: An experimental study of gratitude and subjective well-being. Journal of School Psychology, 46(2), 213-233.
Bachman, M., Kashdan, T. B., & Fincham, F. D. (2012). Gratitude and well-being in daily life: Examining the effects of daily gratitude interventions on daily subjective well-being. Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(4), 312-323.
Seligman, M. E., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421.
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So much to delve into here. I'm saving this one for after Christmas. Just wanted to say thank you for all you have done this year. When I think back to the start of all this I realise how much you've grown both as a person and as a writer. I'm sure reading your work has pushed my IQ up a couple of points - you have taught me so much and I'm grateful to you for that. Merry Christmas and blessings to you and your family for the year ahead.
THIS commentary from you is something I was suppose to read today. It is a superb, rich, uplifting “word of advice” and wisdom.
I always say, I’m thankful to God even for my bad days. Thank you God my Father for another day in Your beautiful world. How often I catch myself ruminating on the negative and bad...then I see a flock of seagulls flying in perfect synchronicity. Or a flower just starting to bloom, as well as those flowers that have given their beauty already. So utterly beautiful...and it sets me straight, again.
This is a keeper for me. Thank you and may God bless you and guide you always. Amen!