Thanks for nothing

Perverse incentives and the waning of gratitude

Gratitude is one the most important life skills, and the cheapest. As I repeatedly tell my children, you might not think much about the magic words ‘thank you’, but other people notice it, and remember who says it.

It’s also very useful advice that gratitude is a healthy emotion and its opposite, resentment, is crushing to the soul. I don’t doubt that one of the major contributing factors of Christianity’s enhancement to personal wellbeing is the central importance it places on this message: that you should be grateful for all the good things in your life. This has been imitated by successful quasi-religious movements like Alcoholics Anonymous, which understands that resentment in particular eats away at those afflicted by addiction.

Resentment, unfortunately, is a useful form of social currency – indeed it has always driven political movements – and this has become more notable as both competitive grievances and status-seeking have come to dominate political debate. The rewards of gratitude, in contrast, are limited.

Take Zohran Mamdani, most likely the next mayor of New York. Mandani was born in Uganda, a member of the Asian minority which endured persecution under Idi Amin, and his family moved at first to South Africa and then to New York when Zohran was seven. In 2018 he became a naturalised citizen of the United States, the country that had given his family a new start; within two years he was campaigning to tear down statues in his adopted homeland, at war with its past, and quite literally giving it the finger.

To many people, and to most older immigrants, this is an almost incomprehensible attitude. When you’re in someone else’s country, you don’t insult its sacred values, its memories or the ancestors of the people who live there, as these instructions given to US military personnel in Britain from 1942 illustrate.

I’ve been in the United States for two weeks now, as a visitor and guest, and I’m conscious that it is rude to insult your hosts, and especially their history, heritage and heroes. Despite visiting Monticello and Richmond State Capitol, I’ve shown incredible restraint in saying nothing critical of Thomas Jefferson - a literal traitor to his anointed king.

People generally don’t like their country being criticised by foreigners, even when the criticism has the ring of truth. The great Lee Kuan Yew once said of newcomers who criticised Singapore that ‘Their advice is worse than useless. They have no sense of shame, or they would stay and help their own countries progress and their fellow countrymen live less wretched lives. Instead, they flee to greener pastures and give us advice.’

Mamdani, of course, is an American citizen, with an American’s right to critique its past. In a legal sense that is entirely true; in an emotional sense, it’s not, and the social contract is built on emotion as well as law. It is the difference between the spoken and unspoken rules of belonging, and in some ways the latter matters more.