Gratitude Is a Conservative Virtue, and Ingratitude Fuels Every Revolution

Here is a test you can run at any family gathering. Ask the room what is wrong with the country and watch the hands go up. Ask the room what they are thankful for and watch the hands hesitate, as though gratitude were a trick question or a piece of embarrassing sentimentality left over from a greeting card.

I think that hesitation tells you more about our politics than any poll. We have become fluent in grievance and clumsy in thanks, and I want to argue, as a matter of political philosophy and not just of manners, that this is backward. Gratitude is not the soft, nice-to-have decoration of the conservative outlook. It is the foundation. And ingratitude, the settled conviction that you were handed a rotten deal by people who owed you better, is the fuel that every revolution burns.

Defining the terms

Gratitude, as I use the word, is the recognition that you have received something of value that you did not earn and could not have made yourself, together with the disposition to honor the giver and to take care of the gift. Three parts: a gift, a giver, a duty to look after what you were given.

Grievance is the opposite posture. It begins with a debt that someone else owes you. It starts from what you lack, finds the party responsible, and organizes politics around collecting.

A conservative, in the American sense, begins from the first posture. He looks at a country that he did not build, with institutions he did not design, a constitution he did not write and freedoms men and women bled for, and he says: this is a gift, and the right response is to keep it. A revolutionary begins from the second. He looks at the same inheritance and sees an unpaid bill.

Neither mood is only a mood. Each produces a politics. Let me set out the argument in numbered premises.

The argument in five premises

1. Nobody makes himself. Every person is born into a language he did not invent, a family he did not choose, a law he did not write and a stock of knowledge he did not discover. Even the self-made man was made by parents, teachers, a country with courts that enforced his contracts and neighbors who did not burn his shop.
2. An inheritance is held in trust. What we receive from the past we owe to the future. We are borrowing the country from our grandchildren as much as we inherited it from our grandparents.
3. Gratitude produces stewards, and grievance produces claimants. A man who feels grateful for something takes care of it. A man who feels owed something takes what he can, and has little reason to preserve what he is taking from.
4. Stewardship favors repair, and claimant politics favors demolition. If what you have is a gift, you mend the roof. If what you have is a fraud, you burn the house.
5. Therefore the conservative disposition rests on gratitude, and the revolutionary disposition rests on ingratitude. The two do not just disagree about policies. They disagree about what kind of thing a country is.

I do not claim that every conservative is grateful or that every critic of the government is a revolutionary. A grateful person can be furious at a particular law. What I claim is that where the baseline mood is thanks, reform stays inside the house, and where it is resentment, the house is the target.

Two proclamations

The Americans who founded this country saw gratitude as a civic duty, and they put it in writing. On October 3, 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation setting aside a day of public thanksgiving, at the request of the House and Senate. In it he wrote that "it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor."

Look at the structure of that sentence. Acknowledge, obey, be grateful, implore. Gratitude is listed as a duty, not an option. And it comes first among the things a nation owes, before the request for further help. It is the posture of someone who knows he has been given more than he has earned.

Seventy-four years later, on October 3, 1863, in the middle of a civil war that was killing Americans by the tens of thousands, President Abraham Lincoln issued another. It begins by remarking that "The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies." He then did something remarkable. He turned to the war itself, with its casualties and its fury, and he said that in spite of the waste of the camp, the siege and the battlefield, the country was "rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor." And he invited his fellow citizens in every part of the United States to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and praise.

Think about the timing. In the third year of the bloodiest war in American history, with the outcome unknown, the president asked the country to be thankful. If gratitude were only for good times, it would have been the one season in which Lincoln could not have asked for it. He asked because he thought thanks was an act of national character, not a response to circumstance. See Washington's 1789 and Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving proclamations side by side and Thanksgiving Proclamations of 1789 and 1863, Read as Lessons in Gratitude for both texts read passage by passage.

Burke's partnership

The deepest statement of the conservative case for gratitude comes from Edmund Burke. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he described society as a partnership. It is, he wrote, "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

The phrase is usually quoted as a defense of tradition. I want to read it as a statement about debt. If society is a partnership across generations, then each living generation holds a share it did not buy. The dead built the roads, wrote the laws and fought the wars. The unborn will inherit whatever we leave. Our place in the middle comes with obligations in both directions: to honor those who handed us the thing, and to leave it in as good a condition for those who will receive it.

A generation that regards its inheritance as a fraud has no reason to pass anything on. It consumes. A generation that regards its inheritance as a gift feels the weight of the chain and does not want to be the link that breaks. That is the practical meaning of gratitude in politics, and it is why Burke, watching the French Revolution unfold, saw in the rejection of the past a sign that the men making it would have nothing to hold onto when they were finished. See The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now and Burke Versus Paine, the Argument That Defined Left and Right for Good.

What ingratitude builds

Now follow the opposite mood to where it leads. I will be careful here, because I do not want to turn a serious point into a cheap one. I am not saying everyone who criticizes the country is ungrateful, and I am not saying that gratitude forbids complaint. I am saying that a politics built entirely on grievance has a characteristic shape.

First, it needs a villain. Grievance cannot exist without someone who owes the debt, so the politics of grievance always searches for the guilty party: a class, a group, a generation, an institution. The enemy list never shrinks, since a movement that runs out of enemies runs out of purpose.

Second, it cannot be satisfied. Gratitude has a stopping point, since a gift can be fully received. Grievance has none, because the debt is defined by the feeling of being owed, and that feeling can always be renewed. Every concession is followed by a larger claim.

Third, it dislikes what it inherits. If the Constitution is merely an instrument of the powerful, there is no reason to follow its restraints, and the restraints are the first thing to go. This is the quiet link between ingratitude and the growth of unchecked power. Rousseau's general will, the doctrine that the people's true will can be discovered and imposed on the unwilling, is a perfect expression of it. See Rousseau's General Will Is the Idea Behind Every Power Grab for the People.

None of this is a law of nature, and some revolutions did not turn out this way. The American one is the great exception, and it is worth asking why. The Declaration of Independence, which opens with grievance, does not stop there. It lists the injuries done by a king, but it argues from the old rights of Englishmen and from natural rights that existed before the king, and it closes with a pledge: "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." That is not the language of a people who despise their inheritance. It is the language of a people who think the inheritance is being stolen and are willing to pay to get it back. The American Revolution was a conservative one, in this sense, because it claimed to defend rights already owned.

The strongest objection: gratitude means accepting injustice

Here is the best argument against everything I have said, and it is a serious one. Tell a person who has been wronged to be grateful, and what you are telling him is to be quiet. Gratitude, says the critic, is the language that the comfortable use to silence the people who were left out. Slaves were told to be thankful for their masters' kindness. The poor are told to be thankful for charity. A demand for thanks is a demand for submission.

That is a real abuse, and it has happened, and I will not pretend it has not. Answer it in four steps.

1. Gratitude is not owed to a wrong. You can be thankful for the good in an inheritance and still refuse the evil in it. A man grateful to his father for his education is not thereby obliged to excuse his father's cruelty. Gratitude attaches to what is good. It does not bless what is bad.
2. The inheritance includes the promise that condemns the wrong. The same Declaration that Americans are asked to be grateful for says that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. That sentence was an indictment of slavery on the day it was signed, and the men and women who fought slavery used it as their weapon. Frederick Douglass, in his Fourth of July oration at Rochester, delivered on July 5, 1852, said some of the hardest things ever said to Americans, and he said them by appealing to the founding documents and to the principles of the Declaration. Gratitude for the promise and anger at its betrayal were the same impulse. See Unalienable Means You Cannot Even Give Your Rights Away, and Here Is Why.
3. Lincoln himself shows the combination. The same man who issued the thanksgiving proclamation of 1863 said in his Second Inaugural Address, in March 1865, that the war might continue until "every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword". He did not think thanks required him to excuse slavery. He thought a people could thank God for its blessings and still tremble at its sins. That is what mature gratitude looks like.
4. A grievance that is aimed at repair is not ingratitude. Complaining that the country has not lived up to its creed is the most conservative thing a person can do, because it holds the country to its own standard. The line I am drawing is not between people who complain and people who do not. It is between people who say "we have failed what we were given" and people who say "what we were given was never worth having."

What a grateful citizen actually does

Gratitude that stays a feeling is cheap. The conservative version has consequences.

• He keeps his promises. A person grateful for a system of contracts keeps his contracts, pays what he owes and shows up on time. The rule of law runs on millions of small acts of this kind.
• He passes things on. He teaches his children the history, the song and the story of how the country got here, because an inheritance that is not taught is lost in a generation. See Self-Government Starts With Governing Yourself, the Founders Insisted.
• He serves. Voting, jury duty, school boards, the volunteer fire department, the church food drive. Citizenship is the way a grateful person pays something back.
• He argues without contempt. A man who thinks his country is a gift treats his fellow citizens as co-heirs, not as enemies to be defeated.
• He defends the fragile things. The institutions that hold a free society together, the family, the congregation, the town, the court, are easy to ignore and hard to rebuild.

There is also a personal fact that the philosophers of every age have noticed. A grateful person is happier than a resentful one, and a country of grateful people is harder to divide. I cannot give you a statistic and I will not make one up. But ask yourself which kind of neighbor you would prefer to have, and you have already answered it.

The Founders and the habit of thanks

Notice how often the Founding generation reached for the language of thanks. The Preamble to the Constitution says its purpose is to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Blessings, not entitlements, a word that points to a giver. The framers saw liberty as something received and handed on. And the Declaration's closing appeal to "the protection of divine Providence" is the same note.

That is worth remembering because we have gradually shifted from saying that we have been blessed with liberty to saying that we are owed things. The shift happened a bit at a time, and it is not a partisan observation, since people on every side talk this way. But a country that thinks of itself as a debtor to its past will defend its liberty. A country that thinks of itself as a creditor against its past will spend it.

The case in brief

1. Gratitude is the recognition of a gift you did not earn, with the duty to honor the giver and keep the gift. Grievance starts from a debt someone else owes you.
2. Washington's proclamation of October 3, 1789 called gratitude "the duty of all Nations," and Lincoln's of October 3, 1863 asked for thanks in the middle of a civil war.
3. Burke described society as a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn, which makes each generation a steward and not an owner.
4. Politics built on grievance needs a villain, cannot be satisfied and dislikes what it inherits, which is why it so often ends in demolition.
5. Gratitude does not excuse injustice. It holds the country to the promise it inherited, which is the creed Douglass and Lincoln pressed on a nation that was falling short.

What you can do: this month, write down three things you inherited from the people before you, then tell one of them, or the family that carried them on, thank you.