2. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
2
Bling and You’ll Miss It:
Conspicuous Consumption and the Glittering Ouroboros
So far as Thanksgiving mornings go, this was a good one. The construction
crews working simultaneously on both the exterior of my building and the
unfinished shell of a flat next-door started later than usual. I do not know
what, exactly, they are doing to the façade of our tower, but it involves a gang
of four hovering around my fifth-floor window making noise and dust.
Radiating inwards from all sides, the whiz and whine of power-tools
reverberate throughout my 55 square meter eyrie nine hours a day, every day.
The steep overnight drop in temperature might have something to do with the
workers’ late start. Thanksgiving Day was the coldest day in these latitudes
ever since a mild-mannered Autumn began nudging a tenacious Summer into
the realm of balmier memories. It was cool, clear, dry, and windless, and
Shanghai is rarely all four at once. Where it succeeded in dodging the high-
rises, the sun shot sharp warm shards through the chronic haze of filthy
particulates and fluorocarbons. This, and the bright and cheery crack of
winter’s whip sent people outdoors. Down at street-level it did indeed feel
more festive than November’s three previous Thursdays. My own ecological
niche is smack in the middle of fashionista Ground Zero, and the fashion-
conscious people of metropolitan Shanghai were celebrating. Not celebrating
Thanksgiving Day, or gratitude, but their new winter ensembles – the coats,
hats, scarves, boots, bags, and gloves they bought on “11/11.”1
They were celebrating consumption, in a city built upon it.
The gold leaf atop of Jing’an Temple shimmered in the sun, glistening like the
scales of a gilded ouroborus -- choking to death.
1
“11/11” (shiyi shiyi 十一十一) is China’s equivalent of “Black Friday” and falls on the eleventh of
November. Once upon a time, and not too long ago, “11/11” was simply “Singles’ Day” (the ones
representing not being pair-bonded). But not anymore.
See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/black-friday/0/what-is-chinas-singles-day-and-how-does-it-compare-to-
black-frid/ and, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ahylee/2016/11/07/how-alibaba-turned-chinas-singles-day-into-
the-worlds-biggest-shopping-bonanza/#7addc5b620ba.
3. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
3
Polite Refusals
The Chinese for Thanksgiving is gan’enjie (感恩节), which may be parsed-out as
“Feeling-Kindness Festival.” That last character, jie, is alternately rendered ‘festival’
or ‘holiday.’ Christmas is shengdanjie (圣诞节, God-Born Festival), Easter is fuhuojie
(复活节, Resurrection Festival), and Halloween is wanshengjie (万圣节, 10,000 [‘All’]
Gods Festival).
The first character in gan’enjie, gan (感), is perhaps best rendered as to feel.2
The second
character, en (恩), can be translated into English as ‘kindness.’ De-parceled, the
constituent parts (radicals) of these two characters tell a lovely story, as many
Chinese characters do, even in their simplified forms. The top-half of gan 感 is xian
咸, which is in some instances used to mean ‘all’.3
It can however also refer to
something which is salted, as in xian cai 咸菜, ‘salted (pickled) vegetables.’ Beneath
xian 咸 is xin 心, ‘heart.’
I presume that the character gan was constructed so as to communicate ‘all-heart.’
And yet (I’m just playing here) the earlier peoples of China could have seen in gan 感
‘salted-heart,’ viz., a seasoned or preserved and therefore a non-perishable heart. In
Italian, salle nella testa (‘salted-head’) is a term of approbation, an allusion to wisdom: a
salted head is one which has endured through time, gained knowledge, and preserved
the fruits of experience. I see no reason why ‘salted-heart’ couldn’t imply much the
same thing.4
And then again, since gan communicates what Anglophones call ‘feeling,’ there is the
possibility too that salted + heart (once upon a time) recommended itself for the same
reason that one speaks of pouring salt into an open wound. (That certainly feels like
something.) If this sounds farfetched, consider that we translate fierce as meng 猛
(commonly: menglie 猛烈), which consists of the radicals for ‘dog’ (gou 狗), ‘child’ (zi
子) and ‘dish’ (min 皿). I’ve been told that I’m overreaching by reading ‘fierce’/meng
as “dog and child trying to eat from the same plate,” and I probably am. But I’m not
having a Quentin Tarantino moment when I see lots of visual parity between ‘blood’
(xue 血) and ‘dish’ (min 皿).
The en 恩 invites much less ludic guesswork. As with gan 感, the bottom half is xin
心, heart, and the top is yin 因, ‘because of’ (as in yinwei 因为, ‘because/on account
2
For reference: ganjue (感觉) = feeling (emotionally); gandong (感动) = to be moved (emotionally); ganxie
(感谢) thankful or grateful, which consists of gan and the character for ‘to thank.’ xiexie (谢谢) = ‘thank
you.’
3
Compare, for example supra “All Gods Day” (Halloween), wanshengjie 万圣节. The numerical unit 10,000
(wan 万) is sometimes used to mean ‘all’ in the sense of ‘all that is’ (cf the use in Laozi), or ‘a lot.’
4
‘Heart’ (xin 心) is often used the way English language users would use the word ‘mind,’ hence the Chinese
for psychology: xinlixue 心理学, ‘the study of what’s in the heart.”
4. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
4
of’). We could think of Thanksgiving, then, as “All-Heart-Because-of-Heart Festival.”
It is rather a mouthful, but by embracing the characters on these terms (which I
doubt anyone ever does) we get nearer to the robust (or is it merely hopeful?)
Anglophone conception of gratitude than we do with ganxie, “grateful.”
Why? The xie 谢, which is used in xiexie (谢谢, ‘thank you’) and ganxie (感谢,
‘grateful’) means ‘to decline,’ in the sense of to refuse; and if I am not
misunderstanding my sources, xie 谢 in a botanical/agricultural context means ‘to
wither.’ Maybe it is perforce of the use-meaning of xiexie (谢谢 thank you) that
ganxie (感谢) is grasped as ‘feeling-thanks’ and not ‘feeling-refusal’ or ‘the feeling of
withering.’ In connection with this epistle on gratitude, however, it is precisely this
intentionally playful misreading (ganxie 感谢 as ‘feel-wither’) I wish briefly to explore.
I should make it clear that the text you are now reading is intended as a friendly
philosophical missive - a collegial essai, fresh and warm with Thanksgiving gan’en, and
not a research paper (as we generally understand these things). Before getting around
to affordances and withering-hearts, I’m going to leverage my holiday-infused
neighborly intentions as an excuse for telling you a bit about my previous enquiries
into the nature of gratitude. They are relevant.
Some Pulses Have Hearts
In the early winter of 1996, and perhaps around the time that my family back in the
United States were thawing turkeys and preparing to smash yams and potatoes and
cranberries into sturdy, spoonable seasonal dishes, my local greengrocer on St
Machar’s Road, Aberdeen, graciously let me off the hook when I was a couple of
pounds short. Some might deem this a very small gesture; and, since I was a regular
customer, perhaps the grocer’s generosity was due both to his fully-warranted
expectation that I’d pay next time, and his wish not to inconvenience himself by
recalculating my purchase and dealing with my re-disruption of stock once I’d
returned a few loose eggs, leeks, and a small collection of dried pulses. But whatever
the case may have been, I was moved, and I thanked him enthusiastically, perhaps to
the point of exaggeration.5
A moment subsequent, in exiting the shop, I had the opportunity to hold open the
door for an incoming patron. Damp from a lashing rain, with a formidable bag
hanging heavy from her arm, she was attempting to reach for the handle of the door
while simultaneously closing her umbrella. My effort cost me a still smack of the
Granite City’s granite-like raindrops (it delayed the opening of my own umbrella),
but I received a smile and a thank-you in the lingua franca. Being Aberdeen, it was
probably a slightly shrill cheers or blunt ta. I forget which. But she thanked me.
5
‘Moved’ in this sense translates nicely in Chinese: gandong (感动), dong 动 suggesting movement, both in
the sense of exercise (yundong 运动) and as an event in which people participate (huodong 活动).
5. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
5
I slogged up the road in a cold North Sea downpour, thinking about my giving-of-
thanks to the grocer, and about the thanks given to me by the patron for whom I
held open the door. In the trudge up St Machar’s Road with my leeks and dried
pulses, I attended (for the first time) to the difference between (a) acting so as to
conform to or comply with local cultural conventions regarding protocol for saying
“thank-you,” and (b) saying “thank you” in order to express one’s being moved. By the
time I turned right into The Channonry and made my way towards St Machar’s
Cathedral, I was reasonably confident of the following: whereas my fellow patron
was both conforming to cultural conventions for thanks-saying and probably
sincerely giving-thanks, my own thanks-giving to the grocer merely coincided with
conventional and ritualistic thanks-expression; it was a report of how I felt on account
of his beneficence, and not a ritualistic reaction based on the nature of our
transaction; and, though it would have been inappropriate in the circumstances not to
say ‘thank-you’ to him (or: her to me), even my thrice iterated ‘thank you’ was, from
my position at the time, barely adequate to express how much his gesture moved me.
Considered in this way, the convention of ritualized, automated thanks-saying deprived
my saying-thanks from communicating much. Protocol required I say thanks, but it
was something else which moved me to wish to report on how his kindness (恩)
affected me. From this, I concluded,
(1) that not every ‘thank-you’ necessarily expresses gratitude – viz., is not
necessarily a report that one is grateful;
(2) that saying ‘thank you’ merely is often insufficient to express adequately
one’s grateful feelings; and,
(3) that
(3.1) the absence of a proper susceptibility to the experience of grateful feelings,
and
(3.2) the lack of a sufficiently strong impulse (or susceptibility to being moved) to make
sure that there is such a report, thus ensuring that the expression of gratitude is not
confused with the merely conventional “thank you”-gesture, could possibly be
an indication of…
…well, an indication of what?
In 1999 I presented my one and only paper on the subject of gratitude, at a sparsely-
attended colloquium, at an American university you are unlikely to have heard of. I
addressed specifically ingratitude as treated by Seneca in De Benificiis, and if I
remember rightly I focused on those sections in which Seneca is analyzing the
question Can a son outdo his father’s beneficence? Can a son be more of a benefactor to his father
than the father is to the son? It was nearly a decade later, in half-turning once again to the
subject, that I discovered the work of McCulloch et al. (2001). I was pleased to see
Seneca quoted at the top of that paper.
6. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
6
Gratitude and Relief:
The Thin Edge of the Slippery Slope
The 1999 paper (“No vice more odious: Seneca and Ingratitude”), though, owed less
to the kind greengrocer than it did to my nearly crushing my daughter to death by
accident, on a footpath in Edinburgh.
The idea wasn’t merely to take my daughter with me on my walk up Calton Hill, but
rather to start as early as possible sharing life with her, and experiencing things
together. She was dressed snugly and strapped securely into one of those papoose
contrivances that one wears like a backwards backpack, and I fancied her safer there,
close to my chest and just beneath my chin, than she was in the outrageously
expensive car seat which cradled her during our short drive from Randloph Square.
I walked slowly, and with care, and kept a vigilant grip on my walking stick. We were
no more than fifteen or so steps up the hill when, ascending the next step, I slipped.
For an instant, the sole of my shoe – the shoes I’m wearing at the moment, I just
now notice - had all the traction of a frozen stick of butter on a ramp of solid ice, of
hot motor oil on cold marble. In failing to make a secure landing, the unusual chest-
heavy distribution of my bodyweight threw me off-balance more than it should have.
I moved fast -- forward, and downward. To counteract the lunge, I whipped my
arms back, but I did so with too much panicky vehemence. I rocked to the right and
wobbled nearly off the steps and onto the greasy slope of Calton Hill, throbbing with
the horrible awareness that a minor spill for me could crush my infant daughter. The
lateral hyperextension of my right hand had positioned my walking stick nicely
perpendicular to the hill. The tip of the stick did not plunge deep into the topsoil,
and with a sturdy shove – something between a push and a poke – I tilted us upright,
allowing me a millisecond’s worth of balance and the sense that I wasn’t rolling off
the stairs. This was just enough to get my feet flat and steady on the step. The
grotesque choreography ended when I brought my left arm around the back of my
daughter, and kissed her forehead. We were ok. She seemed not to notice how very
near we were to being very far from ok.
All of this happened in less time than it took you to read about it. I don’t remember
exactly what I thought when I paused to assess what happened and shiver over what
might have been; but I do remember what I felt, and that was relief. I probably
expressed that feeling of relief by muttering a phrase spiced-up with an obscenity or
two, sotto voce, my face twitching with that weird wild-eyed half-smile one has at such
times, those times when we dodge disaster, or disaster dodges us, for reasons we do
not immediately comprehend. I very likely thought Thank Christ!, but thought it in
the profane rather than sacred sense. I do remember walking back down the hill,
very slowly, my left hand holding my daughter close to me, the tip of my walking
stick reaching each step a tiny bit in advance of my right foot.
7. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
7
The layers of her papoose-type rig, my waxed jacked, and the strata of wool between
by breast and my Barbour may have baffled the outbound report a tachycardic
heartbeat. But it throbbed in my ears all the way home.
Remembering it, my salty heart beats fast now, too.
Benefits Without Benefactors:
Gratitude Adrift
One should not allow adrenaline to determine entirely either the form or content of
a philosophical investigation; but sometimes one might be wrong not to let
adrenaline write the first line or two. On the slippery slope of Calton Hill, I felt
gratitude, and I was grateful that none of the very possible and very terrible outcomes
had materialized. But back at home I knew that this was the adrenaline speaking,
speaking to me in or at least through the language of layers of convention and a
lifetime of habit.
My own beliefs regarding a transcendent or trans-immanent omnipotent being - that
deus with the ever-ready machina, personally involved in keeping us out of the ER and
the obituary column - are such that I did not think my daughter had been saved. But
however I chose to identify my feelings and their causes, I knew I was constrained
somewhat by a repertoire of old, well-traveled speech-acts. In these sorts of near-
miss cases there are only a few ways to talk (to oneself or others) about the character
of the feeling of relief, about how it feels to feel that way.
It seems to me that, at such times, we cannot much help slipping into terms
indissolubly mixed-up with long standing conventions and dog-eared scripts for both
politeness and prayer – irrespective of one’s efforts to adhere to custom or to creed.
These are core components of a language many of us learn or at least pick-up
throughout childhood, the language of civility and courtesy. For some of us, these are
partially bundled into (or wholly enmeshed with) scripts for the rules of engagement
when courting the Omnipotent. Please. Thank you. I beseech thee. There might not be
any atheists in foxholes, but whether there are or not I’ve heard my share of atheists
say Thank God, and mean it as sincerely as they didn’t. She wasn’t saved, but I was
relived, and I felt fortunate. But it could not have been gratitude I was feeling. Or was
it? Could it have been?
Here’s a point which perhaps does not nowadays require too much emphasis,
especially in a letter to experts, but I’m going to make it anyway. Children learn from
adults to say thank you when they are given something, or when they are the targeted
beneficiaries of some service. Efforts to install the good habit of saying “thank you”
begin before the children themselves understand in any complex way the transaction
between beneficiary and benefactor, before they know what the words ‘beneficiary’
and ‘benefactor’ and ‘transaction’ mean. (Daddy? What’s an ‘etymology’?”) What’s more,
they learn to say “thank you” even when the thing they’re given or service rendered
8. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
8
unto them does not bring joy. The rules of the convention are simple, and one-
dimensional: if someone gives you something, or does something for you, then you
say “thank you.” You say “thank you” even if it is something you do not like or do
not want. You say “thank you” even if it is a service you do not fully appreciate or
understand as a service, and even if it brings you fear, discomfort, or pain. I was
taught to say thank you to the dentist after he drilled out my cavities and left my
mouth sore and lips numb. I thanked the barber, even though I hated my haircut
almost as much as I was creeped-out by the barber’s hairy knuckles, annoyed by his
AM radio, and nauseated by the stink of Clubman talc.
Eventually, though, the courtesy-convention begins to make sense to most children,
and one day the thank-you recalcitrant child reveals himself a kid prone to outright
exuberance in his thanks-saying – at least when he is a genuinely happy beneficiary.
He’ll thank you to death for the jackknife, and do his best to seem sincere in
thanking you for the limited-edition Hummel figure. It is as if he suddenly grasps a
big chunk of what all this “thank you” stuff is about. The awkward and almost
grudging cordiality of a child’s forced “thank you” – forced, because it is not a report
of happiness - gradually warms-up a bit, even if he’s yet to master squelching signs of
honest, unprocessed dissatisfaction or disappointment.6
Observe and Rapport
Acknowledgment of the intentions of benef-actors (or, of persons in the benefactor
role), and some appreciation of their feelings, might be essential to this grasping and
warming-up. Along the road to being grateful, youth learn to be gracious, or, graceful;
and gracefulness begins to take a bite out of self-centeredness when one begins to
understand some of the values involved in beneficent-acting. The youth and the adult
still slink out of the dentist’s chair in great discomfort; but once he understands the
value of the dentist’s skill and service (and grasps the value of braces, gum-scrapings,
and root canals), the thanks-saying is sincere in a way it wasn’t in childhood. If
everything goes well, the thanks-saying becomes a real thanks-giving – an expression
of gratitude (or: something which is approaching gratitude), and hence a report of
having been moved rather than a formulaic, ritualistic, semi-automated reaction.
Similarly for the process or processes of learning about gratitude. If one is taught
from an early age “to be grateful,” then it seems inevitable that such lessons are often
taught in direct if not explicit connection with learning the thank-you protocol: not
6
What might we conclude, or ask, about the child who is incapable of grasping that big chunk? It is here that
some of the framing-assumptions of ecological psychology (the concept of affordances chief among them,
see infra) might help us to understand anew some aspects of (eg) the behavior of autistic persons, those
diagnosed with schizophrenia, and those with problems of agency-attribution – see Lindler et al. (2005)
“Disorders of agency in schizophrenia correlate with an inability to compensate for the sensory consequences
of actions,” Current Biology 15: 1119-1124.
9. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
9
saying “thank you” would suggest or reveal ungratefulness. (Corollary: it is
bad/wrong to be ungrateful. “You don’t want grandma to think you’re ungrateful, do you?”)
But this is not instruction about what it feels like to feel grateful. It cannot be. It is
instruction about how to avoid appearing ungrateful. It is a learned and practiced
avoidance-maneuverer, and in early stages it is not yet unbound from local rules for
civility and courtesy, for attempting to seem “good.” Children, after all, are not
naturally ungrateful. They are naturally a-grateful.
One might also learn the gist of what the word ‘gratitude’ means – in preparation for
the discovery of what being-grateful feels like - if one is taught that all the good things
in life and in one’s own life flow ultimately from God, the Ultimate Benefactor.
Rudimentary grasp of this unique and eternally lopsided transaction between
benefactor and beneficiary is, I am confident, among the commoner starting points
for early lessons in gratitude, lessons that (in-)form roughly the parameters of the
emerging concept of gratitude. Although the process, here, is not necessarily
disconnected from civility-enculturation and the saying-thanks convention (etc.),
learning about gratitude in the context of an Ultimate Benefactor means that the
thanks-giving protocol is, surely, more or less immediately intertwined with the logic
or rationale of prayer. Given how we learn language (and protocol for interpersonal
relations), it couldn’t really be otherwise.
This I believe binds thanks-saying scripts with notions about appropriate
expectations of rewards and other benefactions in exchange for services (right-living,
abstentions, and obesiances), the former distributed or withheld by an invisible,
inscrutable, and not consistently predictable benefactor. Obesiances and right-living
will include prayer itself, which with children will often be no less formulaic and
meaning-anemic than ritual thanks-saying is. (Except, that is, when the prayer is a
petition for something one wants. In that case it is sincere in the way a thank-you is
sincere when a child is given a battery-powered toy and not a battery of bloodwork.)
Back in Scotland, 1998, I provisionally concluded (thinking grammatically and
without an acute surplus of adrenaline) that to be grateful means that one believes
one has received a good from a benefactor, from an agent who acted intentionally so
as to benefit one; or at least, that one has been intentionally targeted (as an individual,
or as the member of a class) as the beneficiary of a good from one who intended to
be a benefactor – even if the good fails to be a good, or bestowal (or receipt) doesn’t
materialize as planned, or the sincere would-be benefactor mismatched goods and
beneficiaries.7
I therefore concluded also that unless I believed an agent had intentionally saved me
from crushing to death my infant (or rather: saved my daughter from being crushed
to death by me), I could not have “felt” gratitude. What I felt was relief, and I
7
This kind of analysis stretches from Seneca’s De benificiis to Fred Berger (1975) “Gratitude,” Ethics 85 (4)
298-309.
10. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
10
misidentify that feeling when I call it “gratitude.” In the absence of a benef-actor,
there is no agent to whom gratitude can be directed.
William James might have put it this way: if I thought it was gratitude I was feeling,
that was only the tincture of the taste of medicine in the milk stored in what was
once a medicine bottle.
And of course, that milk tasted odd. How could it not?
Is Gratitude for Gratitude a Moral Affect?
Sixteen years have passed since McCulloch et al. (2001) addressed the question “Is
Gratitude a Moral Affect?,” a paper which appears to have done much to reignite
academic interest in gratitude and reaffirm the value of sustained analysis of the very
concept of it. It is irrelevant to this missive, but it remains for me a pleasing thought
that McCulloch and I were asking similar questions at roughly the same time. I have
often wondered whether or not the noosphere was, in the late nineties, bristling with
something which made it time to get serious about gratitude. Slight preoccupation on
the part of the (then new) generation of social psychologists et al. with “empathy”
might be one of those bristling somethings. A premiere fluorescence of one thing
never fails to illuminate something else.
The questions for which I wanted answers, though, had nothing to do with empathy.
They included: When there is no benefactor, but one feels “grateful,” can (or: should)
we attempt to forge and sustain a distinction between “feeling relief” and “feeling
grateful”? Could there be good reason to turn someone away from their prima facie
experience of gratitude and towards the analytically more accurate redescription?
No sir. You are not “grateful” that you did not drive into that jogger. You are fortunate
that you did not, and what you felt was relief. It was mere luck, and not Divine
Intervention. And, since it was not Divine Intervention, and since luck is not a benefactor
acting intentionally to benefit you, there is no agent that can lay a claim to your thanks-
giving, or be worthy of your gratitude. You, good man, are profoundly relived – and
nothing more.
The other side of the coin (or edge of the blade) is: When the lucky motorist (though
driving negligently) does not run into the faultless jogger, and thereafter experiences
relief as the only feeling, and does not immediately “feel” grateful, could there be any
good reason to insist that he should feel grateful – even though we know that this is
likely an analytically inaccurate description, which, in the reverse case, we might wish
to correct?
Ah! You’re “relieved,” you say. Is that all? Relief? You reckon yourself (and the jogger)
no more than “lucky”? You should be nauseas! You should be tearful, joyfully-tearful,
that you didn’t kill that jogger. How dare you not feel grateful?! Are you not moved?
11. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
11
I’ve never made a systematic attempt to answer these questions. I do, though,
periodically browse the journals, read abstracts, skim papers, and maintain a faint
sense as to what the current ideas and research priorities are. But I’m not exactly on
top of the literature, or the studies and developments reported therein.
Measuring how an aptitude for the experience of gratitude (or: gauging the extent to
which one’s susceptibility to and capacity for feeling gratitude) improves life-quality,
or subjective-wellbeing (etc.) might be a worthwhile errand. Likewise for projects
which seek to divine the existence (or note the absence) of non-trivial correlates or
key causal connections between, say, amenability to gratefulness and empathetic
engagement of others (etc.). We might not need an immediate moratorium on surveys,
questionnaire validations, and the amassing of data. But there is still room for some
phenomenological bullwork, and philosophical assumption-busting too.
And yet, given the current distaste in the social and behavioural sciences for
normative pronouncements – even when wrought as wryly as
“Given that ‘gratitude’ = G, then,
in circumstance C it is wrong for any X not to feel G.”
- I remain doubtful that merely descriptive discourse is worth the effort. Unless
there’s grant money (g) in it.
In that case:
Where X [C (g)], X should be very G.
But surely we want people to experience gratitude, and to be grateful (for some but
not all things), and not to be ungrateful – don’t we? How can serious enquiry into
gratitude not have a strongly and nakedly normative side?
Flame-Retardant, Gratitude-Resistant
Thanks-saying is both learned and deployed in metropolitan China more or less as it
is in New England, and in Scotland -- these being the only places and local-cultures I
know well enough to discuss confidently and without a distracting string of
footnotes. When and to whom one says xiexie (谢谢 ‘thanks’) in China depends,
among other things, on where you are in China, and I’m very cautious about
generalizations. (Shanghai is “representative” of the PRC the way that San Francisco
is “representative” of the USA.) In both Shanghai and Hangzhou (the cities in which
I’ve spent most of these past 16 years), middle-class children are taught to say
“thanks” the same way that I was taught in rural Massachusetts, and the same way
my daughter was taught in rural Scotland. Chinese children, youth, and adults in
Shanghai have their scripts for thanks-deployment, and they are similar but not
identical to the one’s I know and deploy.
12. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
12
How the local thanks-saying protocol works in China, and how it may relate to
experiential gratitude in this language-culture (just in case it does) is a question that
seized me first in 2007, when I was based in the city of Hangzhou. I entertained for a
while the idea of surveying how often my native Sinophone neighbors thought about
or in terms of gratitude, and how often (if at all) they were so profoundly moved - by
good luck, by their improving fortunes, survival of near-misses, etc. - that they
thought to themselves:
Wow, I am grateful for that!, or, Gee, I have a lot in my like to be grateful for.
The idea never became a project. But I have done a lot of real-time situational
probing, ever since I began to sense palpably that certain elements of traditional
Chinese culture, and some aspects of the Chinese language, leave less room for being
grateful than one might otherwise conclude from (e.g.) the nation’s wonderful treasure
of wisdom literature, and the post-Reform-and-Opening revival of Buddhist
ceremonial activities.8
This is a terrific paradox, because in contemporary China life is
lived in an arena fraught with risk, fortune-reversal, and near-misses – and none
knows this better than the Chinese themselves.
There is one bit of datum which corroborates my suspicion that the majority of
contemporary Chinese are gratitude-resistant. Among my many friends, colleagues,
and acquaintances, a very small number only are emphatic about the importance of
organizing the significant parts of their life around an active principle of being grateful.
Two things distinguish this tiny subset.
First, not only are they emphatic about the importance of gratitude, but they are quick
to point out that their own marrow-deep acknowledgment of the value of being
grateful is not shared by many other Chinese.
Second, they hold that widespread non-amenability to experiential gratitude, and a
nearly pathological cognitive-unreadiness for it on the part of most Chinese, is one
of the saddest aspects of contemporary Chinese culture, and greatest hazards to
genuine social development here.
8
For example, in Chinese xiwang (希望) can be translated into English as either to hope or to wish. This is
not inconsequential. In English, ‘wish’ allows one to opine or to express a desire for something impossible,
and to look backwards in time (eg, “I wish I had done/not done/chosen,” etc.), whereas the concept of ‘hope’
is often future-oriented. I might wish I had wings, but I cannot really hope to have wings. The Chinese
xiwang 希望 is used as an Anglophone would use both ‘hope’ and ‘wish,’ and I doubt this is entirely
immaterial to understanding how native Sinophones understand, think about, and experience gratitude.
13. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
13
Acquired Non-Immunity
The people-watching this Thanksgiving Day has been exquisite. Whatever the tensile
strength of the current bubble of boom and bling, the bubble itself was today bathed
in unflinching sunlight, and the fashionistas inside of it were looking sharp. I did not
find myself in the mood to leverage the occasion of my favorite national holiday to
talk to anyone about gratitude. I do not anticipate launching anytime soon a one-man
program of cross-cultural analysis. But a few scenes on the road back to my flat
remind me of the direction in which I once thought I might travel, should I ever set
out on that path.
There’s a lot of “municipal beautification” going on along Yuyuan Road these days.9
One worker drives past me with long sections of rebar hanging from his electric
scooter. These extend more than a meter beyond the bow and stern of his 60 watt e-
moped. Not skewering pedestrians is going to prove a challenge for him, but he
doesn’t appear concerned. Neither does the traffic cop at the intersection. Above me,
on a tower of bamboo staging, a man is cutting something metal with a radial saw.
The sparks are beautiful, and two people have stopped to take photos of the
spectacular shower of bright haephestial orange. I too slow down, but only to
confirm what I suspect: the man is wearing neither gloves nor goggles.
A few steps ahead, on the opposite side of the street, another crew on the sidewalk is
prefabbing some frame-like structure. The man doing the welding has neither gloves
nor eye-protection, and everyone is wearing either green or camouflage tennis shoes
-- jiefangxie (解放鞋, “liberation shoes,” after the People’s Liberation Army). The
stretch of Yuyuan running between Wulumuqi Road and Zhenning Road is beautiful,
even with all the rancor, detritus, and hazards of construction. It is also 500-odd
meters of OSHA’S worst nightmare. I have long since become used to it. I have not
become indifferent to it.
If you ask a local to comment on, say, the man delivering 3’x5’ panels of plate glass
on his scooter, and using his forehead to hold them steady against the scooter’s
steering column, you’ll likely be told: meibanfa (每办法). Literally, this means ‘no
method,’ but idiomatically it means Whataya gonna do?, or, That’s just how it is. I’ve
asked laborers (many times, over many years) why they don’t wear boots or thick-
soled shoes on jobsites. If I ask in the summer, they say such footwear is too hot. If I
ask when the weather is not too hot, I’m assured that there is no safety issue at stake
(mei shi 没事, ‘it’s nothing’/’natta thang’). It’s exactly the same answer I get when I
ask about work gloves. (When you do see workers wearing gloves, the gloves are
9
Construction, demolition, and extensive refurbishment are all virtually non-stop throughout most of China’s
cities. There’s even a joke about it. The character chai (拆) is spray-painted on buildings and walls to indicate
that a structure has been slated for destruction. It is so ubiquitous that someone once suggested the name of
modern China should be read as Chai’nar (拆那儿 chai na’er). This is an interrogative phrase meaning
“Where are we demolishing?”
14. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
14
made of cotton – basically facecloths with fingers.) Goggles, visors, and safety-
glasses for welders, and for people operating high-speed spark-spewing cutting tools?
Mei shi.
Pindar’s Vine and Thinking Reeds
Initium Sapientiae Timor Domini – “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
This cheery gem from Proverbs is the motto of the University of Aberdeen and a
swell counterpoint to its favorite tune, Gaudeamus Igitur. I mention it now, because it
relates directly to how I wish to draw together the seemingly disparate threads from
which this missive is woven.
Gratitude, I have come to believe, can grow only in soil nourished with the
knowledge of the fragility of goodness, to borrow from Nussbaum (1986). To feel
grateful, or, to feel gratitude to the degree necessary for a semi-chronic state of being
grateful to become an axis for one’s valuations, is to feel small. Not to feel hunted or
harried by Misfortune, but to know that one is not immune to its slippery steps and
snares, its sparks, splinters, and sharp edges. Nietzsche’s many remarks about
gratitude (and revenge) read differently if one sees Nietzsche as a man wrestling with
(among other agency-issues) the suspicion that he is a proud flowering weed, and not
the alpine pinnacle upon which it grows. The abundance of botanical and naturalistic
imagery in plain sight throughout Nietzsche’s works shows us a man who was not
only keen-scented, but one who could see small and subterranean things as clearly as
he could see uber-things. I suspect Nietzsche understood Pascal’s words about
thinking reeds better than most:
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The
entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to
kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than
that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and [of] the advantage which
the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
It could have been otherwise, and it was not because of my own agency that it was not otherwise.
This is my a-theistic restatement of initium sapientiae timor domini. I did not slip and fall
and injure or kill my infant daughter – I am humbled by my good luck. In that vast
moment of cosmic tininess there upon the steps of Calton Hill, my relief felt like “feeling
grateful.” When I sorted through my lexicon of terms for “affective states,” gratitude
was the one which fit best. In calm reflection, that grateful-ness was most intelligible –
not as relief, and certainly not as salvation – but as an opportunity to feel
insignificant, microscopic. When I recovered from my long pause, I moved with
greater care, and improved attunement to hazard – enlivened to the presence of more
hazards.
My daughter, hanging from my chest, felt much heavier.
15. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
15
Because I did not fall, I discovered gravity. Later at home, I paused again:
For these insights, for this new sense of moral gravity
which I have extracted from that fateful moment,
I am grateful.
The questions Grateful to whom, to which benefactor? should be allowed to arrive when
the rush of adrenaline subsides, and permitted to wander where they wish when one
dares to analyze them, and to deliver in time answers which – whether arriving on
wings, or creeping on their bellies – come to us as responses, as environmental feedback,
and not as answers merely.
Affordances for Gratitude:
The Other Thinking Reed
If there is a causal relationship between (a) amenability to experiential gratitude (etc.)
and (b) “subjective well-being” (or: a “life-affirming attitude” towards the business of
life), then we might learn even more about it by asking questions about an
individual’s sense of agency and his beliefs about the limitations of his efficacy as an
agent. I believe, too, that an inability (whatever its cause or provenance) to
apprehend a hazard as a hazard serves to debride everyday life of opportunities to see
in bolder relief both the limits of one’s agency and the non-immunity we have to loss
– our fragility, or, our witherability. Debrided experience can keep a heart from getting
salty.
I have twice now used the word ‘opportunity’ in connection with occasions for
learning about one’s own agency and fragility, and thereby developing a habit of a
grateful response – a gratitudinous response. A word better than ‘opportunity’ would
be affordance, and I direct readers to EJ Gibson (1988), Greeno (1994), and Reed
(1996). Looking at gratitude through the framing-assumptions of ecological
psychology, I believe we way think about it as a cultivated response to affordances, through
which affordances one learns more about one’s efficacy as an agent, and more about one’s
vulnerability to hazards in a non-empathetic environment and indifferent universe.
Perceiving affordances as affordances, as opportunities for (inter alia) experiential
gratitude (and therefore: moral growth), serves I think as a hint that, while our
indifferent universe is made-up mostly of non-malevolent parts, it can be full of
potentially beneficial relationships – if one sees things the right way. And we are fortunate
to have, now, an excellent guide to an “ethics of attention:”
[T]here does seem to be something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative
to us. ... That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities and
giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this
way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty
(Crawford [2015] p.254).
16. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
16
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Matthew B Crawford’s (2015) The World
Beyond Your Head is the extent to which it resembles Edward S Reed’s The Necessity of
Experience (1996). Like Reed, Crawford is worried about the extent and the degree to
which modern life is increasingly forcing mediated, secondary experiences upon us,
and how non-engagement of primary experience seems to be affecting us. As with
Reed, Crawford draws upon the concept of “affordances” articulated and developed
by JJ Gibson. Both Reed and Crawford blame Descartes, dualism, and “scientific”
representational theories of mind and consciousness for the subsequent sins of older,
cruder behaviorism, and for some of the new sins committed in the name of
cognitive science and “neurophilosophy.” Both attempt a resuscitation of the
concept of eros, and both offer hymns to the pedestrian erotic. If there is anything more
extraordinary than the structural and thematic similarities between Reed (1996) and
Crawford (2015), it is this: although Reed was once Gibson’s greatest champion and
apostle, there is no mention of Reed at all anywhere in Crawford.
This is a point I take up elsewhere (“Anemic Agents,” forthcoming). The point now is
to recommend to gratitude researchers to both Reed and Crawford.
And this is my reason, too, for reminiscing about the slippery slope of Calton Hill. I
extracted meaning from a real, primary, non-digitally-mediated experience, in a real
(and not “virtual,” hyper-social) environment. Extracting that meaning was an action. It
was my imperfect proprioception and flawed perceptual judgment as a self-mover
which nearly killed my child. No agent or agency acted to protect or to save her. But
my agency - as a thinking self-mover, and not some rooted “thinking reed” - was
adequate to get something out of the experience. The near-miss was an affordance: it
afforded me an opportunity to grow as a moral-agent. I was amenable to this affordance
because of my sum of experiences as a thinking self-mover, and because I am a
thinking self-mover who explores the world justifiably believing three things:
(1) I move in a world filled with both hazards and potential affordances;
(2) I have a reliable if imperfect sense about where my efficacy begins and where it ends; and,
(3) my causal efficacy, insofar as I know something about its extent and limitations, includes
the ability to find and to make use of affordances in order to grow. And: I can sometimes feel
when I might be growing. These are both doings – my doings, in a world indifferent to me but not
inhospitable to such activity.
Crawford (2015) says it is “something benevolent in the disposition of things.” I say,
that the non-malevolent disposition of things affords opportunities for extracting value,
thus making our environment a partner in the experience of benefaction. Is there a
benefactor? Yes: everyone who taught us something about the language of “thanks-giving” and
the basic concept of gratitude, and who thereby prepared us to extract for ourselves (and
others) beneficial experiences – to extract them from both our successes and from
our near-misses, from both joys and hazards.
Of this, both the universe and the rooted thinking reed know nothing.
17. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
17
Good Vibrations
I believe that we take too narrow a view of gratitude if we contemplate it solely from
the perspective of interpersonal transactions, or assume that what is most distinctive
about it is that it is as an outward-reaching affective state, based on and/or guided by
human empathy and its soft, fuzzy, Other-seeking tendrils. Appreciating another’s
beneficence is how we “get” to the deeper meaning of out rote-learned semi-
automated thank-yous. It seems certain that one first learns about gratitude, being
grateful, not being ungrateful (etc.) during those lifestages in which one is too young
to have enough conceptual equipment to be able to experience gratitude as gratitude.
The a-grateful child is happy to have a balloon, just happy. He is still beyond grateful and
ungrateful. We teach him to take care not to appear ungrateful, and that “being grateful”
has something to do with a social convention that requires one to say “thank you,”
and that “thank you” should be a report that one is moved for having been given something,
which “something” may or may not make one happy. We nudged towards learning to
how to be moved when another independent self-mover tries to move us.
What really matters here, though, and what the child needs to learn, is that the child’s
getting something (or: the happiness he experiences in getting something he likes)
was not the result of something the child himself did intentionally to bring himself
pleasure. Learning how to recognize the feeling identified by the word ‘gratitude’ entails
the child working-out that he might not have been given a balloon at all, and that all
of the balloons of life might pop in an instant – and: that sometimes there’s nothing he
can do to stop that from happening. Real gratitude isn’t based solely upon
acknowledgement of and enlivened empathy for the benefactor, for that benef-acting
Other. Empathy – or: compassion, to use the word we all should have stuck with - is
merely part of what it takes to understand why (sometimes) our thanks-giving is
meaningful in a way that most automated thanks-saying isn’t.
Gratitude, I suggest, is based on attenuated fear. It is knowing warmly and not just
propositionally that all your balloons might pop at once, that no one might ever love
you enough to give you a Hummel figure, and there is nothing you can do to ensure otherwise.
Your agency does not extend that far – whatever your levels of adrenaline, or
oxytocin.
Consider, too, the early entanglement of these three things: ritual thanks-saying;
appearance-of-ungratefulness avoidance behaviours; and prayer-activity. Since the
child-friendly “primer” scripts for these conventions are all other-directed, it is
perhaps easy to assume that interpersonal empathy is necessarily part of the nature of
gratitude. I suggest that it is only when the specifically other-regarding habit of
benefactor-directed thanks-giving is turned inwards, and reflected upon, that “being
grateful” becomes more than meaningful thanks-saying, more than the slightly
inchoate byproduct of the raw, uncooked feeling of relief after its filtration through
18. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
18
vocabularies and scripts, all of which are based on protocol for Other-engaging, be it
common courtesy or divinity-courting.
The process of becoming a compassionate human being (or: an “empathetic agent”)
possibly begins somewhere along the journey between mastery of culture-appropriate
deployment of “thank-you” scripts and appearance-of-ingratitude avoidance
maneuvers, and the eventual emergence of the kind of gratitude-feeling that can be
an Archimedean point in our ever-expanding moral universe. But I doubt that the
emergence of a truly compassionate person ever precedes the emergence of the truly
grateful one.
Re-treads. Re-souled.
Since it is Thanksgiving, I’m going to conclude this letter by suggesting that, like
Thanksgiving cooking, gratitude is all about the salt. A whole-heart, or a salty
“preserved” heart, is one which now and then withers in fear, awe, wonder, and
relief, and regains its rigor through self-nourishment -- insight, humility, and an
improved appetite for observation, attention, and taking-care. That is a heart which
can be grateful, and which will be.
I am home, now, and the power tools are as loud as they have ever been. I wish it
was quieter. I am thinking of my family in the States. For more than 300 years my
tribe has lived and died and eaten turkey within 50 miles of Plymouth, and I know
they’ll soon be waking, dressing, and gathering for a feast that could feed a few
dozen hungry Pilgrims. I miss them, and I’m sad I won’t be with them today. But I
am clothed, shod, fed, and beneath a dry roof. And I know it could easily be otherwise. I
do not know the very real contingency of my comfort as a cold hypothetical, but as a
very warm one. A very near one.
Acknowledging fragility is not the secret to strength, but to preservation. The habit
of attending to possible affordances for experiential gratitude is how one keeps one’s
fragility fragile but intact, witherable but capable of growth.
And so, I utter my one and only Thanksgiving benediction:
For this vibrating roof over my head,
and these (resoled) shoes on my feet,
I am grateful.
Gaudeamus.
Thursday 24 – Sunday 27 November
Jing’an District, Shanghai, China
Sincere and very warm thanks to Jennifer Tang
for her feedback and assistance in the development of this letter.
19. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
19
References and Notes
Berger, Fred R (1975) “Gratitude.” Ethics, 85 (4) 298-309.
On JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380087
Crawford, Mathew B (2015) The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming An Individual in An Age of
Distraction, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY. See also Crawford (2009) Shopcraft As Soulcraft: An
Inquiry Into the Value of Work, The Penguin Press.
Emmons, RA & McCulloch, MA (2003) “Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental
investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
84: 337-389
Not cited in this letter, but among the papers I had earlier consulted when revisiting the subject of
gratitude. Here: http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Gratitude_Page.htm.
Gibson, Eleanor J (1988) “Exploratory Behavior in the Development of Perceiving, Acting, and the
Acquiring of Knowledge.” Annual Review of Psychology, 39: 1-41
Greeno, James G (1994) “Gibson’s Affordances.” Psychological Review, 101 (2): 336-342
Jullien, Francois trans. Janet Lloyd, (1995) The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China,
Zone Books
-------------------- trans. Janet Lloyd (2004) A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Chinese and Western Thinking,
University of Hawaii Press
Although I have not cited Jullien, these are extraordinary works which have exerted a tremendous
influence upon my thoughts about agency generally.
Lindler et al. (2005) “Disorders of agency in schizophrenia correlate with an inability to compensate
for the sensory consequences of actions,” Current Biology 15: 1119-1124
Mace, William M (1997) “In Memoriam: Edward S Reed,” Ecological Psychology, 9 (3): 179-88, and here:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380087
McCulloch, ME et al. (2001) “Is Gratitude a Moral Affect,” Psychological Bulletin, 127: 249-266.
For a list of McCulloch’s work, see
http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Gratitude_Page.htm.
Nussbaum, Martha (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy,
Cambridge University Press, New York
I have been inspired and informed both by The Fragility of Goodness and The Therapy of Desire: Theory and
Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NY.
Reed, Edward S (1996) The Necessity of Experience, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
The other works in his magnificent trilogy are: Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology
(1996) and From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychological Ideas from Erasmus Darwin to William James
(1997), both Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
20. Cameron-Perry, J Ellis (2016) “Gratitude. Agency. Affordances.”
20
On Cross-Cultural (Sinophone/Anglophone) Studies
Those undertaking cross-cultural (Sinophone/Anglophone) studies might also wish to keep in mind
the fact that most Chinese live their lives within a topolect and within the culture of that topolect, and,
that many topolect-first speakers speak Mandarin only when necessary. Questionnaires and surveys,
whether translated into simplified or traditional characters, do not seem capable of capturing
important information about how, say, a native-speaker of a Hangzhou, Shanghai, or Taiwanese
topolect lives experiential gratitude. In China, many are talking to family and to one’s closest friends
(and: reflecting upon things) in their topolect. It is the life-sounds of the topolect, and not the sounds
of Mandarin, which are likely to be informing what a speaker really feels, and thinks about what (s/he
thinks) s/he really feels. Written text (hanzi 汉字), however, is generally read as Mandarin, and
Mandarin might at times be at one or more degrees of variance with the mood, sense, reference, and
extension (etc.) of words and phrases used in the topolect.
The World Beyond Your Organ: Motorcycles and the Art of Zen Maintenance
I suspect (and hope) that, if Crawford graces us with another book, he will develop themes present in
both The World Beyond Your Head and Shopcraft As Soulcraft (2009). Those themes are: there is a
relationship between skill, insight, wonder, and gratitude, and this relationship should be attended to,
both for an enriched, happy life and a healthy (if not always happy) democracy.
The takeaway of that future book will be, I predict: a healthy democracy requires a lot of grateful
people; skilled-people are insightful people; insightful people are robustly discriminating and
evaluative, and thus amenable to feelings of awe and wonder; and that awe and wonder are necessary
for real gratitude – and for seeing things the right way, in the real world beyond your head.
