Toward better politics and life.
Toward better politics and life
C ommencement season is upon us. And if I were giving one of the addresses this year, I’d begin with a quote from William F. Buckley Jr.: “We are basket cases of ingratitude, so many of us.”
That’s one of the most memorable quotes from National Review’s founder, as far as I’m concerned. In a 1988 speech, he said: “Our offense, . . . the near universal offense, . . . is that of the Westerner, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, who accepts without any thought the patrimony we all enjoy, those of us who live in the Free World.”
Patrimony is a common theme for Buckley. We are not the ones we have been waiting for. Buckley himself was uber-talented, and yet he did not think that all of human history had been waiting for him to come on the scene. We all have dignity, gifts, and purpose. But it’s in gratitude — which requires humility — that those can all be best drawn out and brought to service. He continued:
We cannot hope to repay in kind what Socrates gave us, but to live without any sense of obligation to those who made possible lives as tolerable as ours, . . . without any sense of gratitude to our parents, who suffered to raise us; to our teachers, who labored to teach us; to the scientists, who prolonged the lives of our children when disease struck them down — is spiritually atrophying.
WFB, as we fondly remember him at NR, further said:
We cannot repay in kind the gift of the Beatitudes, with their eternal, searing meaning — Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. But our ongoing failure to recognize that we owe a huge debt that can be requited only by gratitude — . . . our failure here marks us as the masses in revolt; in revolt against our benefactors, our civilization, against God himself.
But it’s not just a religious thing:
To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak or . . . to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends.
I repeat all of this from Buckley because we need to hear it. It’s not nostalgia for the pages of a conservative-movement gratitude journal. More recently, in an essay in First Things, Carl R. Trueman wrote about ingratitude as an “unnoticed pathology of our troubled era.” He expressed his own gratitude for his parents, who were not able to go to college themselves but worked so their children could. They loved each other and stayed together, so his upbringing is considered “privilege” by some, something to apologize for. To do so, though, Trueman writes “would be to sin against my parents.” To apologize, too, would be to not want the same good for others.
He quotes the insight of British philosopher Roger Scruton, as Scruton was nearing death from cancer: “Coming close to death, you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” Trueman concludes that ingratitude “has dehumanized us.”
It has dehumanized our politics, too.
What do young people setting out into adulthood (we hope) need to hear? The Tim McGraw song “Always be humble and kind” comes to mind. I’ll include all previous generations in this address to college graduates this year: You are blessed. You have no doubt struggled and will struggle more. But you have been given great gifts — the opportunity for education is not a given in the world today. What you don’t like in the world today, on social media today, in politics today — you have the power to combat with the civic virtue of gratitude. Yuval Levin, from the American Enterprise Institute, reflecting on “Gratitude in an Angry Time,” writes: “To be grateful is, in part, to know you have a lot to lose, and therefore also that you have a lot to offer the future, through acts of conservation and refinement, not just through acts of demolition.”
In the same essay, Levin writes:
To be struck first by the good, on the other hand, is to begin from low expectations, and to assume that instances of human beings consistently rising above barbarism must be the result of intense effort and noble commitment over time. . . . We ought to be impressed by justice, order, freedom, and prosperity where we find them. We should be grateful for those, and work to protect them and build on them, because they are bound to be precious and vulnerable.
G. K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy that “the test of all happiness is gratitude.” That’s a message that young people, maybe especially having lived through the jarring experiments of the Covid era, could afford to hear. We live in a time of a lot of yelling, with a divisive and destructive spirit. If we choose gratitude for the good in our lives — and our country — the injustices and the wounds can make us more compassionate toward the often-hidden pain of others.
We do our young people an injustice when we let them get a degree and don’t tell them about the greater things in life. Graduation is an achievement. But love is a greater one. And gratitude, which requires humility, is a sure path to the self-giving of love.