"Have you already thanked him, Mr. Zelensky?" the vice president of the United States asked the president of Ukraine a few days ago. Some say that gratitude is an emotion, others argue that it is a virtue, and there are even those who propose that it is a moral sentiment. But, in any case, for all of them, expressing gratitude is a good practice both for the reasons that drive us to do so and for its effects.
We live in a context devoid of gratitude. Expressing gratitude is not just a matter of politeness. Being grateful is an act of acknowledging that the other person has tried to help me. For there to be real gratitude, the other person must have tried to do me good. That he really succeeded in helping me is not an indispensable requirement of gratitude, but that he did try is. I leave it to political analysts to decide whether the United States is really trying to do good in Ukraine or not. What I would like to say is that, even if Mr. Zelensky has reasons to be grateful, the insistence that he express it reveals a disturbing aspect of the kind of political life in our world.
There are people who experience gratitude only occasionally, but others live in a state of permanent gratitude, whether they believe that their benefactor is another person or a divine entity, or, in what is called cosmic gratitude, the Universe. In the case of people who experience permanent gratitude, gratitude can become a very deep feeling. I think that we need this kind of deep gratitude because it is not only a form of recognition. It also indicates the awareness of interdependence or, in other words, that my merits and fortunes are never exclusively mine. And this awareness seems fundamental to me because it is an antidote to the worst risks of the neoliberal vision of existence, according to which the luck and misfortune of each person is one's own merit and fault. In reality, there has always been the previous trace of some other instance that has contributed to it.
It is not surprising that, for Western philosophers who have emphasized the importance of being autonomous beings, such as Kant, gratitude has been an uncomfortable phenomenon, to which they have dedicated words of a certain disdain, insisting that experiencing gratitude is an indicator too dependent on others.
We are not autonomous beings. But even from that perspective, gratitude has a dark side, which anthropology has studied in depth. Depending on how it is practiced, gratitude opens up an asymmetry: the benefactor places himself morally above the recipient, which can lead to servility. In addition, the recipient feels indebted and may feel obliged to perform an act of recognition and even to reciprocate, when perhaps he neither wants nor can. This is not the case when what is given is done selflessly. But some of the philosophers who have dealt with the issue, such as Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), go so far as to question whether pure gift really exists.
In a highly original book entitled Gratitude: an intellectual history (2014), theologian Peter Leithart argues that the evolution of Western political philosophy can be explained, in large part, by the role that gratitude has historically played in the public arena. I will try to be brief. In ancient Greece and Rome, relations between people, and between people and the gods, were an endless circle of exchanges of gifts and counter-gifts. I give you this, or I do you that favor, because you have done me that other favor, and so now you are indebted to me. This type of trade was not regulated, but Leithart goes so far as to say that it was the heartbeat of society. Broadly speaking, political life followed this dynamic, with the benefits that this entailed for whoever could offer more. Today we would call it corruption, of course. But then, Leithart insists, corruption was not a deviation, but rather it was the system. In medieval terminology, we would speak of vassalage.
In various historical contexts, attempts have been made to free the political sphere from the infinite circle of reciprocity that characterizes antiquity. One of these attempts was the Greek democratic revolution, says Leithart, in which an attempt was made to free the political sphere from debts, from the obligations of reciprocity of gifts and counter-gifts of gratitude. But the decisive turning point did not come until John Locke (1632-1704), according to Leithart. One of Locke's merits is, for him, having removed gratitude from the public arena and relegated it to the private sphere. His innovation is having conceived a political order freed from the bonds that gratitude implies. Democracy, of which Locke was a relevant promoter, has to do precisely with this rupture. For Locke, the source of the ruler's authority cannot be that he has given you something. It comes from radically different sources - which I cannot dwell on now, for reasons of space.
This does not mean that no we can feel grateful towards some institutions, of course. In fact, I think it is good that we feel this, because it points towards the awareness of interdependence that I spoke of above. What I mean is that theexpectation The fact that citizens, or institutions of one's own country, or institutions of other countries express their gratitude cannot be one of the driving forces of politics. Political modernity, and with it, democracy, has to do with this structural separation between gratitude and political life. On this point, Leithart is sceptical: he believes that this separation is a fantasy of liberalism because, despite the genius of the idea, political life has never been purged of the dynamics of gratitude.
Whether we share Leithart’s pessimism on this point or are more optimistic, I think his view on the place of gratitude in politics helps to understand why the American vice president’s urging of Zelensky to be grateful was much more than a flippant gesture. Urging a citizen, an institution or a country to be grateful is an anti-modern, i.e. anti-democratic gesture.
