The Art of Gratitude 1438469349, 9781438469348

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The Art of Gratitude

The Art of Gratitude

Jeremy David Engels

Cover image courtesy of Anna Sunderland Engels. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2018 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Engels, Jeremy David, 1979– author. Title: The art of gratitude / Jeremy David Engels. Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017023407 (print) | LCCN 2018011350 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438469348 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438469331 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Gratitude. Classification: LCC BJ1533.G8 (ebook) | LCC BJ1533.G8 E54 2018 (print) | DDC 179/.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023407 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my mentors, who inspired me to lead the examined life: Andrew & Kay Davis, and Greg Shepherd. •

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Gratitude’s Keywords

1

Chapter 1 Words Matter: On the Rhetoric of Emotion

19

Chapter 2 From “Charis” to “Gratia”: On the Political Origins of the Debt of Gratitude

47

Chapter 3 “Gratitudo”: On Christian Gratitude and Existential Debt

71

Chapter 4 “Indebted”: On the Contemporary Gratitude Literature

95

Chapter 5 “Santosha”: On the Yoga of Gratitude

115

Conclusion The Politics of a Sunset: From Gratefulness to the Common Good

145

Notes

161

Index

205 vii

Acknowledgments

In his strange, weird, perplexing essay “Gifts,” published in 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the paradox at the heart of gratitude—the paradox that I pursue and ponder in this book—with his typical wit. He observes that though Americans are taught to be grateful, when it comes down to it people hate receiving gifts. “It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be selfsustained. We do not quite forgive a giver.” The one who bears gifts is not, for Emerson, a benefactor; he is a malefactor, a bearer of evil, because “the expectation of gratitude is mean.” Emerson here reiterates the commonplace argument (which goes back to ancient Greece) that there is no such thing as a free gift. A gift given demands a return gift, which makes gratitude a synonym for indebtedness. I bet that all of us have, at one time or another, received a gift that was really a burden in disguise, a debt wrapped up in pretty paper with a nice little bow. Does this mean, however, that we should reject all gifts and gratitude, too? Certainly not. We wish to be self-reliant, self-sustained; we wish to go it alone, but in the end we cannot. All of us live, Emerson concludes, in a “condition of universal dependence.” We are empowered by our social world, by the earth on which we stand, by nature, by the common good, by those around us. We must be grateful for such support. The paradox, then, is that a virtuous human life demands gratitude. And yet we secretly recoil from gratitude, because we fear that to acknowledge a gift is to assume a debt. That is the paradox. The challenge is to change how we experience gratitude, moving away from the debt of gratitude to gratitude as thankfulness, or what I call in this book gratefulness. It is possible to give thanks without affirming debt, and it is possible to build a society, and

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a democracy, that is based on shared gratefulness rather than rituals of indebtedness. The Art of Gratitude, as I describe in this book, challenges each of us to recognize the many forms of support—mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, social, political, material, ecological, economic—that make it possible for us to live. We do not live in isolation. We did not build this alone. We stand on the shoulders of giants—and on the earth, which we share in common. I think my academic field is similar to many others in that we celebrate the lonely, tortured genius, who, working through the night, fueled by caffeine, comes up with a new and revolutionary idea all by him- or herself. This ideal has long haunted the humanities. Though we write with keyboards rather than fountain pens, and by electric rather than candle light, like our Renaissance and Enlightenment forebearers contemporary scholars celebrate the heroic creator-inventor-genius. I am proud of this book. I am under no illusions, however, that I did it by myself. I did not write this book alone. Though the words (and the errors and missteps!) are mine, this book is made possible by the fantastic research and institutional support I received while writing it. The book would not exist in the absence of the many friends and colleagues who read and commented on parts of the manuscript. And without my friends and family, I would have no words to write. To everyone, and everything, that made this book possible, I extend my deepest, most profound thanksgiving. Though one of my colleagues told me that writing about gratitude was like chasing windmills, The Art of Gratitude is the first thing I have written that genuinely represents the type of work I would like to do. To paraphrase Emerson, if you cut these pages they would bleed, especially given everything that happened while I was finishing this book. It can be a struggle to find your voice in academia, given the demand to publish or perish and the need to write in a highly specialized argot for an audience of professional critics trained in the art of destruction, not creation. As I wrote this book, I began to find my voice, in large measure because I talked with, and listened to, others. Thanks to my dearest love Anna, who is my everything, for everything. When I meditate on courage, I always call your face to mind, for you are a walking, talking example of true courage, the type of courage required to do what is right even when it is difficult and unexpected. I am blessed to spend my days by your side. Thanks to my family, and to Anna’s family, for their kindness, generosity, warmth, and smiles. It was

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Anna who first introduced me to the physical practice of yoga over a decade ago—and wow, who knows where I would be today without it! I shudder to think—and this ultimately proved a philosophical homecoming of sorts for me. I wrote an essay on nonviolence in high school that drew on yoga philosophy and that won a medal at National History Day under the guidance and direction of Andrew Davis, my all-time favorite teacher and my greatest inspiration. Every time that I enter the classroom, I think to myself, if I can only be half as good a teacher as Andrew, I will have done my job today! To Andrew and Kay Davis of Wichita, Kansas, you are my academic family, and I love you. Thanks to everyone who has supported me on my yoga journey. A special thanks to Lara Heimann, who came into my life at a real low point, my back broken, my spirits low, and who taught me a sustainable, smart asana practice for life. And a hearty gratitude to the yoga teachers in State College who joined together to form Yoga Lab: Anna Sunderland Engels, Ariel Xu, Mark Agrusti, and Kristen Boccumini Thwing. I am proud and humbled to teach yoga alongside you and to run a studio with you. It has been fun to do something together to make our little town a better place. I am blessed to work for a great university that values, supports, and nurtures the humanities. The Art of Gratitude was made possible by the generous support that accompanied my appointment as the Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State—and also by the support of my academic home, the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences. I have learned so much from the wisdom, patience, and curiosity of my colleagues at Penn State, in countless brief conversations in the halls of Sparks Building, and over many joyous hours spent drinking coffee at Webster’s Bookstore and Saint’s Cafe: Kirt Wilson, Matt Jordan, Chris Moore, Amy Allen, Chris Uhl, Don Thompson, John Christman, Michele Kennerly, Eduardo Mendieta, Aaron Krempa, Josh Wretzel, Derek Aggleton, Mary Beth Oliver, Matt McAllister, Daryl Cameron, Rosa Eberly, Brad Vivian, Anne Demo, Steve Browne, Abe Khan, Debbie Hawhee, Nancy Tuana, Len Lawler, Rachel Smith, Denise Solomon, Ted Toadvine, Tom Benson, Sophia McClennan, Lori Bedell, Mark Greenberg, Mike and Lisa Hogan, Shannon Sullivan, and Phillip McReynolds (we miss you in University Park!). Thanks to everyone who read parts of the manuscript and provided me with feedback, including the two anonymous reviewers at SUNY Press and the anonymous expert in Indian philosophy, and also Bill Keith, Mary Stuckey, Amy Allen,

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Nate Stormer, Daryl Cameron, John Minbiole, Billy Saas, Joe Rhodes, Ira Allen, Jansen Werner, and Jim Vining. Thanks to my editor, Andrew Kenyon, for taking a chance on an admittedly idiosyncratic book that crosses intellectual disciplines, boundaries, and languages. Thanks to my academic mentors, David Zarefsky and Stephen Hartnett for their good advice, and to Greg Shepherd for inspiring me to go to graduate school in the first place, and for instilling in me a deep love of American philosophy. Thanks, finally, to my dear friends Jess Kropczynski and Joe Johnson for traveling the world with me and Anna. Without question, many of the best ideas in this book were developed as we hit the cafes of Cusco and hiked the Inca Trail together! To everyone mentioned here, to everyone who I forgot to mention, to everyone who supports me, to everyone who contributes to the commonweal and fights to defend the common good, I extend my love, my kindness, and my gratitude. I do not owe you a debt of gratitude, because I believe we must move beyond thinking about gratitude as indebtedness. Instead, I pledge to work with you and alongside you to make sure that everyone has the support they need to live, because, ultimately, we are all in this together.

Introduction

Gratitude’s Keywords

Once the answer was love. Today it is gratitude. Over the past two decades, scholars and writers and pundits, from academia to morning talk shows to self-help books, have touted gratitude as the single most important emotion for living happier, healthier, more fulfilling lives.1 Gratitude’s proponents make very big claims. They say gratitude will fix our personal problems. They say it will fix our health. They say it will fix our world. Gratitude is pitched as a “magic key,” an antidote to the violence, division, hatred, and resentment that characterize our broken political culture.2 Few today would argue against gratitude. Before we jump on the gratitude bandwagon, however, we should take a moment to consider what we are being sold. Anytime something is framed as a panacea, we must look extra closely to make sure it is not snake oil. It is when words become automatic that we must be at our most vigilant, because it is in such moments that it is easiest to abandon critical thought and be lulled to sleep. It is high time we took a closer look at the gratitude that is so popular today. Why this explosion of interest in gratitude right now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century? I believe it has to do with our current personal, political, and economic situation. We live in a time of rampant egotism and self-centeredness. It is hard for us to see beyond our narrow interests and worldviews, and so we are often shockingly blind to the suffering of others. Politically, Americans are fractured and divided. We are not e pluribus unum but e unibus duo, two countries made out of one, Red States and Blue States, The United States of Canada and Jesusland,

1

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Makers and Takers, engaged in a culture war at the ballot box and on the streets.3 Though Americans pledge allegiance to the same flag, we are united as a people in name only. We have forgotten how to put aside our differences and work together toward the common good. Economically, we are on our own. Forty years of privatization has destroyed the social safety net that my grandparents took for granted. We are guaranteed almost nothing, other than the chance to compete in the free market. For far too many Americans, the world looks like Thomas Hobbes’s nightmarish “state of nature” in which life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”4 Left to fend for ourselves, we have lost a sense of what it means to work together to make the world a better, more just, more democratic place. Enter gratitude. Proponents tout gratitude’s personal health benefits—it will lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and improve psychological health.5 They also champion gratitude’s political benefits. They say that gratitude will encourage us to be kinder, gentler, and more loving toward our fellow citizens. Looking through grateful eyes, maybe, just maybe, we will stop being such jerks to each other. I am trained as a rhetorical scholar, and I have studied some of the nastiest, darkest forms of rhetorical violence in American politics. So I’m not going to lie: I began this book about gratitude with genuine excitement and a belief that gratitude might indeed be the answer to our problems. Dutifully, I sat down to read everything that I could on the subject—and the literature on gratitude is quite voluminous, with hundreds of books and scores of articles written on the subject in the last two decades. However, over the period of a few weeks, I found that reading one self-help book about gratitude after another had the opposite effect on me. The more I read, the less grateful I felt, and in fact the more resentment I felt toward what people were calling “gratitude.” The problem, I quickly realized, is how gratitude tends to be defined in the contemporary literature: as a feeling of obligation and indebtedness toward those who give us a gift or help us out in some way. The gratitude literature tells us to count our many blessings, to focus on what is good in our lives, and to acknowledge our debts. One of the most striking things about the contemporary gratitude literature is how consistently gratitude is described as a feeling of indebtedness to another person, an economic system, a divine being, or a political state. For most contemporary writers, gratitude means indebtedness. The contemporary gratitude literature reminds us of

Introduction / 3

our duties toward others by demanding that we account for our many debts. In the most influential and popular contemporary self-help book on gratitude, Robert Emmons’s 2007 New York Times bestselling Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier, to be grateful “is to feel indebted.”6 Emmons is one of the leaders of the positive psychology movement, and it is hard to overestimate his influence on contemporary conversations about gratitude. His work is everywhere, and gratitude is, he writes with his co-author Michael E. McCullough in The Psychology of Gratitude, “an acknowledgement of debt.”7 In the contemporary literature, gratitude is most often a synonym for debt—and debt, of course, is one of the primary means by which we are governed, managed, and controlled today.8 Debt is one of the principal reasons we suffer, and also why we lash out at our fellow citizens with hateful words. And so the question becomes, does this gratitude as indebtedness help or harm us? Today we are taught to consider gratitude as a kind of transaction, and thus being grateful means keeping score—I give so that you give back to me, or, in the words of the theme song to the popular television show “Friends,” “I’ll be there for you, because you’re there for me too.” This is the debt of gratitude. The gratitude literature defines people as debtors and the givers of debt. The contemporary gratitude literature teaches us to see gifts and kindnesses as economic gestures that must be repaid with reciprocal gifts. Furthermore, we are taught to judge the value of others by what they can offer us, and the cost of such gifts to the giver.9 Gifts that cost nothing are said to be less valuable than a gift that results in real, genuine loss to the giver. Consequently, our interpersonal relationships are judged by economic criteria of gain and loss, and the popular gratitude journals become little more than a place for recording our debts. One prominent author goes so far as to compare the gratitude journal to a checkbook registry in which debts of gratitude are recorded and categorized so that they might be more efficiently repaid.10 Gratitude as indebtedness is at the heart of how many of us think about our personal relationships, our ethical responsibilities, and our duties as citizens today.11 The debt of gratitude encourages us to see life in economic terms, as a transaction, and to see our relationships as economic contracts that can always be renegotiated if a better deal comes along. As it teaches us the debt of gratitude, the contemporary gratitude literature also affirms key aspects of neoliberalism, the dominant economic paradigm of the

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present, and the source of so many of our political, social, and economic problems.12 Neoliberalism applies the logic of the market to every facet of our lives, even those that have nothing to do with economics (like friendship, love, and citizenship). Neoliberalism says that Americans are consumers, not citizens. Neoliberalism denies that there is a common good above the market. Its proponents take aim at the social safety net, privatizing public goods because, they claim, the market, not government or “the people,” is the best custodian of public health. Neoliberalism has been called “the debt economy” because one of its effects, as my college students know all too well, is rising personal debt.13 To put citizens in debt is also to promote obedience to a political and economic regime that is unhealthy and harmful to us, our families, our community, and the world. Debt ensnares us, drawing us into a very dangerous, unstable, and violent neoliberal world.14 While there have been a number of helpful studies of neoliberalism, no one has yet studied the emotions that tend to be associated with neoliberal rule—emotions including gratitude (I will talk more about what emotion is, and how it may or may not be distinct from affect, in chapter 1). It is not easy to live a life in debt, especially when life itself becomes a debt. Enter the contemporary gratitude literature. By teaching the debt of gratitude, this literature inadvertently acts as neoliberalism’s staunch ally. The contemporary gratitude literature normalizes indebtedness. Reading one self-help book after another, I’ve come to believe that a central purpose of gratitude literature is to make Americans more comfortable living lives in debt. Intentionally or not, the work of contemporary gratitude authors serves to mollify the American citizenry, so that as we count our blessings and take stock of our many interpersonal, social, and political debts we are less likely to speak out about social and economic injustice. Barbara Ehrenreich, the progressive, muckraking journalist author of Nickeled & Dimed and Bright Sided, raises some serious concerns about the type of gratitude being preached by Professor Emmons and many of his peers in the self-help business.15 The trouble with their gratitude, she contends, is that it often little more than a call to accommodate ourselves to privation, scarcity, inequality, and injustice. The gratitude industry tells us to be content with what we have, however little it is and how much less than it should be, rather than to act in concert with others to change the world and make it a better, more just place for all.

Introduction / 5

Not incidentally, she observes that Emmons’s research on gratitude at the University of California−Davis was supported by a $5.6 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which also funded the creation of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California−Berkeley (to the tune of a $3 million grant). Ehrenreich contends that one of the core purposes of the Templeton Foundation is to “promote free-market capitalism,” and this philosophical goal shows up in the type of gratitude work it supports with big checks. About Greater Good, she writes, “the foundation does not fund projects to directly improve the lives of poor individuals, but it has spent a great deal, through efforts like these, to improve their attitudes.” This is the ultimate problem with the contemporary gratitude literature for Ehrenreich: it calls for an attitude adjustment on the part of the individual, a reorientation of our mental state so that we are content with fewer opportunities than previous generations. The current prophets of gratitude do not aim to alleviate poverty. Instead, they aim to teach us how to be content with poverty. Gratitude, Ehrenreich concludes, is a draught we drink to remain calm and carry on. Calling for acquiescence, not action, “the current hoopla around gratitude is a celebration of onanism.” Ehrenreich worries that the contemporary gratitude literature, with its talk of warm feelings and positive thinking, encourages political complacency. I worry that the cold, hard talk of debt has a similar, icy effect. As talk of indebtedness crowds out appreciation, I think we can safely say that all is not well with gratitude. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that “words sometimes get sick and we have to heal them.”16 Gratitude is sick; it is sick with debt. To experience the social and political benefits of grateful living, gratitude must be cured. The purpose of my book is therefore twofold: first, to get to the root of the contemporary experience of gratitude, which is, I argue, deeply colored by the rhetoric of debt; and second, to develop an alternative rhetoric of gratitude that heals this emotion—and our democratic culture, which is based on rituals of gratitude-as-indebtedness—by setting it free from debt. My goal, in short, is to help my readers relearn the art of gratitude. Of course, there have been hundreds of books published on gratitude and other positive emotions over the past decade. Why should you read this book, when there are so many others available? My work makes a unique contribution to contemporary conversations about gratitude in two ways: (1) I understand gratitude not just as a private experience but also

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as a political and rhetorical emotion common to contemporary American politics; and (2) I greatly expand the art of gratitude by drawing on Eastern philosophies that counteract the dominant Western conception of the debt of gratitude. I recognize from the outset that “rhetoric” is one of those difficult words. When I meet someone for the first time and tell them I teach classes in ethics and deliberation, they understand. But when I mention that I am also a professor of rhetoric, I tend to receive a slightly quizzical, slightly skeptical, slightly bemused look at once curious and disbelieving in response. Anytime I mention rhetoric, it leads immediately to what one of my favorite professors in graduate school called “the cocktail party problem”—how to explain a discipline so ancient and complex to someone in a few short sentences. This challenge is especially vexing given that the word has such a negative connotation in our culture. Most people tend to think “rhetoric” means either fluff or deception (or worse). But really, rhetoric is the skillful use of language and other symbols to get things done. Anytime we build a relationship or a community or a team, anytime we pump up the troops for war or persuade them to put down their arms for peace, anytime we inspire people to rally for justice, we use rhetoric. Anytime we speak the truth, we use rhetoric. We use rhetoric to express ourselves. We use rhetoric to change minds. We use rhetoric to alter behaviors. We use rhetoric all the time. Rhetoric is the basic building block of social life. It is folk wisdom in our culture to say that if you can dream it, you can do it, but that’s not quite true—you also have to be able to express it, and it is here that so many people fail, for they have not yet learned to harness the power of rhetoric. Like any art, rhetoric can be used for good or ill. There are plenty of examples of it being used badly (look around you, and you will see rhetoric being used badly). When used well, rhetoric allows people to live together in harmony and to work together toward a common good and a better future.17 For Aristotle, rhetoric is the art of leadership. To study rhetoric is to learn common strategies for motivating people to change how they are thinking, feeling, and acting. Aristotle claimed that there are three ways to motivate people: with character (ethos), reason (logos), and emotion (pathos).18 When we employ rhetoric to get things done, we necessarily make use of all three types of proof—it is not as though we can choose to speak rationally and ignore emotion. Rhetoric is always emotional. I would wager that our emotions are also always

Introduction / 7

rhetorical—our culture and our language profoundly influence our emotional realities. Emotions are premised on our shared beliefs about the world.19 Emotions cannot be located in a particular region of the brain or reduced solely to biology because emotions are social.20 Today, many psychologists understand emotion primarily as an evolutionary adaptation that facilitates the navigation of a dangerous environment so that humans can defend themselves from their enemies, find a mate, reproduce, and stamp their genes on eternity. Rhetorical scholars from Aristotle and Cicero to those of the present day understand emotions to be much broader than this—emotions are how we relate to the world in all its facets. Emotions disclose the world to us. Aristotle was perhaps the first biologist in Western history; he originated the scientific study of animals. Yet his most substantive discussion of emotion is not found in his biological works, including the Posterior Analytics or the History of Animals, but instead in his Rhetoric. Emotions for Aristotle are social because they are based on shared judgments of good and bad, right and wrong, guilty and innocent.21 Emotions are rhetorical because they are shaped by our social reality and, oftentimes, can be altered by the words we say to ourselves and the words others say to us.22 Emotions matter because they orient us toward the world. We see the world through the lens of our emotions, which means that we see the world differently depending upon our emotional state. The world does not look the same to someone who is resentful and someone who is grateful. Rhetoric is concerned with motivating people to change how they think, how they feel, and how they act. In ancient Greece, rhetoric was the first of the liberal arts.23 Today, rhetoric remains one of the foundational social and political arts. There is no democracy without rhetoric. Rhetoric makes democracy possible. At the same time rhetoric enables all manner of violence, coercion, deception, and emotional manipulation. According to David Zarefsky, there are “two faces” of democratic rhetoric—rhetoric aimed at helping communities come together to hash out solutions to shared problems, and rhetoric aimed at manufacturing consent through propaganda and the manipulation of emotion. These two faces, which he calls the “open hand” and the “closed fist,” are ever-present possibilities in democratic culture.24 Because we cannot have democracy without rhetoric, we had better get our rhetoric right. My previous work has focused largely on the rhetoric of the closed fist. My first two books—Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution

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in the Early Republic (2010) and The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy (2015)—mapped two popular forms of rhetoric commonly used by politicians in the United States to manufacture consent, to render citizens acquiescent and weak, and to justify forms of political and economic organization harmful to the public. Enemyship leverages the political emotions of fear and anger to demand that Americans unite in opposition to a shared national enemy. Though such unity is rarely achieved, enemyship creates the perfect rhetorical situation to silence protestors and smear dissenters as traitors who are in league with the enemy.25 The mantra of enemyship is you’re either with us or against us. Enemyship demands unity, but in the end it is a strategy of division, for it transforms the political landscape into one of loyal citizens versus traitorous protestors. In the process, enemyship dampens down the possibility for democratic deliberation by denying that there can be a loyal opposition and legitimate dissent. Moreover, enemyship is a rhetoric that constantly ratchets up the pressure and the tension, forcing us to make quick decisions concerning our safety. Enemyship says there is no time to talk, no time to deliberate, there is only time to fight, and so we had better heed the words of the rhetorical generals directing the fight. Looking at the world through the lens of fear, Americans are more likely to obey and less likely to dissent, even when this assent proves harmful. For much of Western history, the wealthy elite feared resentment more than any other democratic emotion, for when the masses were resentful, they tended to rise up in revolution against the powers that be. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American elites did all that they could to calm and redirect democratic resentment, often by counteracting it with enemyship. During the twentieth century, however, politicians realized that if they could capture civic resentment with their rhetoric, they could transform this resentment into electoral gains. The contemporary politics of resentment seeks to capitalize on the ever-escalating civic resentment unleashed by neoliberalism’s war on democracy and the common good. It does this by splitting Americans into two camps—the Silent Majority and its vocal oppressors; Red States and Blue States; Makers and Takers; “Real” America and its opposite (whatever that may be); the hard workers and the 47 percent; those who want to “Make America Great Again” and those who do not—and then framing one camp as victims, the other as oppressors. Politicians who practice the politics of resentment seek to position themselves as the leaders of

Introduction / 9

victimized Americans by voicing the unvoiced outrage of the outraged masses. This strategy channels civic resentment, engendered by economic exploitation, political alienation, and a legitimate sense of victimhood, into a hatred of our neighbors and fellow citizens.26 The mantra of the politics of resentment is blame the other side. By doing this, politicians avoid discussing the genuine causes of our suffering—neoliberalism’s destruction of the common good—and instead encourage open political warfare between citizens. Fractured and at each others’ throats, and looking at the world through resentful eyes, Americans find it difficult to come together to do the difficult work of democracy. Many contemporary authors pitch gratitude as the answer to our broken political culture. I do not believe that the debt of gratitude solves anything. The debt of gratitude calls on us to acquiesce to the current state of things, to be okay with things as they are, to push all thoughts of change out of our heads and instead focus our attention on accounting for our many interpersonal debts so that they can be more efficiently repaid. I am the first to admit, alongside many contemporary writers, that there is a gratitude deficit in contemporary America. The debt of gratitude is not the answer to this deficit. Moving forward, Ehrenreich believes that we must articulate “a more vigorous and inclusive sort of gratitude than what is being urged on us now.” I agree, and it is my goal in this book to move beyond the debt of gratitude and to describe a different rhetoric of gratitude that lives up to the highest standards of social justice and the democratic common good. In fact, it is the democratic side of gratitude that interests me most in this book. The Art of Gratitude is my attempt to theorize a democratic politics that will result in better forms of civic engagement that counteract the hateful talk that is all too prevalent in contemporary politics. By reconceptualizing gratitude, it becomes possible to counteract powerful political emotions such as fear, anger, and resentment that dominate our political landscape. The art of gratitude represents a new politics that is not based on malicious rhetorical strategies such as enemyship and the politics of resentment that fracture the polis and turn citizens against one another. The art of gratitude represents the possibility for a democratic politics oriented toward the common good. In this book I reconsider the art of gratitude. My goal in the opening chapters is to explore how the emotional experience of gratitude has been coopted and enlisted in neoliberal governance through the rhetoric

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of debt. We can understand how the debt of gratitude has become a tool of power and social control only by studying its history—and this history is much older than we generally assume.27 To better understand the contemporary debt of gratitude, I offer a genealogy of how Westerners have conceptualized gratitude beginning with Aristotle and Cicero, continuing through medieval Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy, and ending with the contemporary self-help and positive psychology literature. I call this a genealogy, as opposed to a simply a history, to emphasize one key point. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault explains that his genealogical method for reading the past stands contrary to the anachronistic reading practices of most contemporary philosophers and psychologists. He is not motivated “par un pur anachronisme,” “by a pure anachronism.”28 Most scholars “write the history of the past in the terms of the present.”29 Most scholars, in short, project the conceptual categories of the present onto the past, as though ideas and the meaning of words remain constant. The contemporary gratitude literature is guilty of this presentist fallacy. The trouble is that such scholarship creates the appearance that our present reality is beyond contestation, that this is how things have always been and therefore how they will always be. But that is untrue. Foucault wants to demonstrate the fractures and fault lines in our social world, because once we recognize these fissures, we see that change is possible.30 Foucault’s goal is “writing the history of the present,” and this is also my goal in The Art of Gratitude: to write the history of the grateful present.31 Genealogists study the past in order to demonstrate how things came to be what they are today. The goal is to illuminate the history of conflict and political warfare behind what we today accept as a given. The genealogist hopes that revealing the present as a rhetorical construction will loosen the hold of conventional norms over us and create space for alternative futures. To illuminate the history of gratitude’s present, I focus, specifically, on the three classical words that form the rhetorical heritage of our contemporary English word “gratitude”: the Greek word “χάρις” (charis), and the Latin words “gratia” and “gratitudo.” By studying these keywords of gratitude in their original philosophical contexts, I confront a whole history, and a whole literature, that teaches us to experience gratitude as a feeling of indebtedness. By studying these words, I am able to draw out the political, rhetorical, and psychological implications of the central keyword of the contemporary gratitude literature: “indebted.” When we

Introduction / 11

practice gratitude today, we feel the full weight of this history bearing down upon us in the form of the norms and rules and definitions long associated with this emotion. My goal is to narrate how gratitude became a political emotion designed to promote obedience through the adoption of economic language, especially the rhetoric of debt. In chapter 1, I navigate a middle ground between those who draw a sharp distinction between affect and emotion by describing what it means to take a rhetorical approach to the study of emotion. Inspired by the rhetorical tradition and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, especially Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, I view emotion as foundational to persuasion—and also to human being. The world is disclosed to us through our emotions. We see the world through the lens of our emotions. This means that if we are going to understand contemporary democracy and all its myriad problems, we must study the emotions that are most conducive to democracy and those that can be used to frustrate the democratic impulse. In this chapter, I side with those contemporary psychologists who take a social constructivist position on the mind and who argue that our emotions are influenced by the words we say to ourselves and that others say to us. Words shape our emotions, and with our emotions, our worldview—which makes rhetoric a practice at the heart of politics and also human being. I argue in this chapter that training for democratic citizenship requires something that is not typically provided to citizens: an education in the awesome, worldshaping, soul-shaking power of rhetoric. Only when we understand how to control our rhetoric can we develop some control over our emotions and hence how we see and interact with the world. Building on my understanding of the rhetoric of emotion, in chapter 2 I consider the divergent judgments of Aristotle and Cicero about gratitude. Aristotle trashed gratitude (charis) in his Nicomachean Ethics, but Cicero, who generally concurred with Aristotle on most matters related to rhetoric, disagreed. He pronounced gratitude (gratia) foundational to morality and justice in On Obligations (De Officiis), which has been called the single most influential work of political philosophy in Western history.32 Most accounts of gratitude in the West begin with Cicero and assume that his vision of gratitude is both right and true. Here I demonstrate how Cicero transformed gratia into a rhetoric of social control. I then outline how Seneca made the shackles of gratitude even tighter in On Benefits (De Beneficiis) by theorizing a perpetual debt that can never

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be repaid. Continuing my genealogy, in chapter 3 I describe how the words of St. Paul and Jesus in the New Testament elevated the stakes of grateful living by making the debt of gratitude a matter of heaven and hell, and then how the Medieval Scholastics invented a new word, gratitudo, to signify both the heavenly and the worldly debts owed by humans. Our English word “gratitude” is most immediately derived from the late Latin “gratitudo,” and its early French equivalent “gratitude,” words that retain this ancient sense of indebtedness. Finally, in chapter 4 I demonstrate how deeply the debt of gratitude continues to shape the current gratitude literature through the keyword “indebted.” Here I illuminate some of the most shocking political lessons pronounced by the contemporary prophets of gratitude, and I critique how this literature encourages us to see the world from an economic perspective in which indebtedness is a marker of moral virtue. Emotions are polyvalent, which is one reason why rhetoric matters so much. Rhetoric does more than simply leverage emotions that already exist in the audience. More fundamentally, rhetoric is constitutive of how an audience experiences certain emotions. We experience gratitude as indebtedness because we are taught by the contemporary literature to associate gratitude closely with debt. I maintain that it is possible to break this association, severing gratitude from the keywords charis, gratia, gratitudo, and indebted. The debt of gratitude is not the only experience of gratitude available to citizens today. In chapter 5, I pivot away from the debt of gratitude to describe a very different rhetoric of gratitude that I’ll call gratefulness. This gratitude is an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness for life and a recognition of the support that makes life possible. It is to gratefulness that Walt Whitman alludes in Leaves of Grass: It seems to me that everything in the light and air ought to be happy; Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.33 Whitman’s poetry is not a demand for accommodation to present injustice. Whitman calls, instead, on his readers to feel gratitude for life and to walk around and notice the ground on which we stand. Whitman’s rhetoric in Leaves of Grass represents a very different way of reaffirming

Introduction / 13

our human nature as social creatures whose individual fates are tied to the fates of others than the debt of gratitude.34 Whitman encourages his readers to celebrate life, because, he reminds us, life itself is good, even if our lives are not. Whitman challenges us to focus on what we have—lungs to breathe, feet to walk, a mouth to laugh and talk and sing and argue—and then to look on the world with gratefulness for how it supports our lives. Whitman reminds us that no one does it alone. We are all supported, because we are alive.35 Whitman’s gratefulness reminds us of our embeddedness within community life by focusing our thanksgiving on the people, places, public goods, and things that support our ability to live and thrive and flourish—remember that Whitman expressed his thankfulness in “Song of Myself ” with a long catalogue of all the motley characters who were, he affirmed, as much a part of himself as his eyes or hands or bones (“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”). This gratitude reveals that the good life can only emerge from our shared commitment to the common good, because there are goods on which all of our lives depend that we as human beings share in common. This gratitude reminds us that the common good is not a threat to our individuality but is in fact a prerequisite for joy and success. William James believed Whitman to be the paragon of American optimism—he recognizes no evil, and “he is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it.”36 James was right about many things, but he was wrong about this. Read the early editions of Leaves of Grass, and it is clear that Whitman recognizes the reality of sin and evil and privation. Gratefulness reveals to us that it is good to be alive, however, at times life is full of pain and we do not have all that we need to live well. Rhetorically, Whitman reframes privation not as something to be feared, but instead as something to be collectively confronted and defeated by a grateful demos committed to equality and working together to ensure that everyone, not just the privileged, can live and live well. By noticing the personal, social, and material support that makes life possible, Whitman expands our democratic vistas and encourages us to see democracy anew—democracy is not just about people gathering to vote in common; democracy is about defining and defending “the common” itself.37 It is this Whitman-esque vision of democracy that I defend in The Art of Gratitude. Deliberation is not always about the future; at times we must deliberate about what is happening right now,

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in this present moment. Citizens deliberate to determine what is necessary for individuals and communities to flourish and what goods must be held in common, above the market. Deliberation is foundational to democracy because it is through talking with our fellow citizens that we understand what goods we hold in common and how these goods support us and those who are dear to us. I will argue in chapter 5 and in the conclusion that gratefulness is the proper emotional state in which to conduct democratic deliberation. Some democratic theorists—especially those scarred by the social justice movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, after which they began to believe that the cure for democracy is actually less democracy—view deliberation as a replacement for, and an antidote to, activism. I do not. Deliberation and activism are the systole and diastole of democracy. Having talked and argued and laughed and cried and prayed and chanted and jammed with our fellows, then we organize and take to the streets to ensure that everyone has the goods necessary to live and to flourish. Americans practice democracy whenever they band together to defend the common good, because to attack the common good is to attack life itself.38 No rhetoric can cure all. Gratefulness will certainly have limits, and we must therefore think critically and deliberate openly about what it means to practice thankfulness in the face of power inequities, active subjection, and hatred. So long as it does not fall prey to the “hyperbole of hostility” and the politics of resentment, strategic ingratitude might well have its place in democracy.39 That said, I believe that gratefulness is the best emotional frame through which to practice democracy. As Whitman well knew, gratefulness is a vital element of a progressive, democratic politics committed to upholding the inherent dignity of all beings and defending the common good from those who would sell it off to the highest bidder. This political value of such gratitude is that it enlarges our perspective on the world so that we can recognize the true nature of both the individual and of individual agency as inherently democratic. We conceptualize agency too narrowly in the United States when we fantasize about going it alone.40 A foundational assumption of rhetorical studies is that agency is interdependent, both impersonally and ecologically. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell writes, agency is “communal and participatory, hence both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic.”41 Rhetorical agency, in turn, “refers to the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a

Introduction / 15

way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community.”42 Agency is a capacity derived from our being-with-others and the supporting world around us. Following Laurie Gries, we might say that agency is an “act of intervention” made possible by the world into which we intervene. “Agency,” she writes, “is a doing, an enactment generated by a variety of components intra-acting within a particular phenomenon.”43 Though we tend to laugh off the common saying that “there’s no I in team,” it is true. Alone we are weak and feeble. Alone our words are meaningless. But, of course, we are never really alone. We exist together, collectively, in, on, and through the world. It is only by joining with others that we gain the capacity to effect change in the world. When we act, we act with multitudes. Gratefulness is the recognition of our inherent possibilities and limitations as individuals and an acknowledgment of all that we are capable of, when we act together, democratically. Moreover, the practice of gratefulness fundamentally alters the meaning of democracy, for it changes the types of action and speech that can be recognized and heeded as appropriate, moral, and praiseworthy. It has become common in contemporary critical theory to attack the concept of “the individual.” It is said that the individual is a fiction—a cruel delusion of a bygone era of shattered hopes and failed promises— and so we must turn our attention, and our hope for social reform, to the group, to the demos, to the multitude. I refuse this argument. The reason the concept of the individual has received so much criticism is that it is understood primarily through the language of political economy, as the maker and bearer of debt, and not as a site of ethical responsibility, moral imagination, and communal commitment. Despite the obvious problems with how it is often conceptualized today, the individual is not a dispensable category. Today, we desperately need a revitalized conception of individuality that is not selfish or econocentric but instead is deeply communal and committed to the common good. I believe that the individual is a lived art. Each of us has the capacity to reimagine and refashion and remake ourselves, but such recreation requires a solid emotional and ethical foundation. I will argue that gratefulness provides a foundation for a democratic ethics of the common good. It has become fashionable in academia to use the methods of critique and deconstruction to rip into our commonplace assumptions about the world, leaving our reality in shambles. This book does not fall into the trap of critical nihilism. Instead of endless critique, I offer an alternative

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rhetoric of gratitude that, I believe, can help us to overcome the debt of gratitude. Inspired by Whitman’s meditations on gratitude and politics, my goal, in chapter 5, is to add a new keyword to the contemporary conversation about gratitude: the Sanskrit word “santosha.” Having first mapped the Western rhetoric of the debt of gratitude, in this chapter I describe a different rhetoric of gratitude as santosha inspired by the language of Eastern philosophy and spirituality including, especially, the yoga philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The fact that yoga is so popular today—thirty-two million Americans practice yoga each year, spending $27 billion on workshops, retreats, equipment, and fancy clothes44—is a triumph of marketing, consumerism, and capitalism. The wild popularity of yoga in America is important precisely because the yoga most Americans practice is divorced from its philosophical, religious, and ethical foundations.45 In chapter 5, I discuss santosha, one of the ten ethical practices of self-discipline mandatory for the yogi. Building from the keyword of santosha, I describe gratefulness as an emotional experience of overwhelming thankfulness for being alive. Gratefulness is not about debt. The power of gratefulness, I will argue, is that it discloses the preciousness of life to us and returns our focus to how we are living right now. Some emotions lead us to devalue life. Gratefulness brings us back to life, and to the world. Gratefulness brings us face to face with the thatness and forwhatness of our existence. Moreover, it directs our focus toward those goods we all hold in common that are required for freedom and joy. The virtue of gratefulness, I argue, is that it reveals the common good. Gratefulness leads us to see our being with others differently than as a debt of gratitude—we become collaborators in the common good, rather than the givers and receivers of debt. In the end, I hope that The Art of Gratitude can model the type of humanistic education we must engage in if we are to reinvigorate democracy in the United States. This education is less interested in transmitting information and more interested in assisting students in the age-old quest to care for themselves. In the late 1930s, with democracy under siege by ideological enemies including fascism, and the United States on the cusp of world war, John Dewey wrote that “powerful present enemies of democracy can be successfully met only by the creation of personal attitudes in individual human beings.” Defending democracy does not mean building military arsenals—such weapons are democratically useless. Defending democracy requires the education of civic character. Dewey

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concluded, “we must get over our tendency to think that its defense can be found in any external means whatever, whether military or civil, if they are separated from individual attitudes deep-seated as to constitute personal character.” Democracy is “a way of life” grounded on the ability to see beyond our narrow, individual interests to the common good. It is based on “the democratic faith in human equality,” on the “belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has.”46 Democracy is “the idea of community life itself ” because it recognizes that individuals are empowered in and through their shared lives with others.47 Democracy is lived in common; it is a life of common goodness. In the absence of a deep-seated belief in equality, a deeply rooted democratic faith in the capacities of individuals, and healthy practices of civic deliberation, Dewey believed that democracy was doomed and its enemies would triumph certainly.48 Dewey’s warning has lost none of its bite in the early twenty-first century, as old enemies of democracy, such as fascism and totalitarianism, and new enemies, such as neoliberalism, again mass at the gates, chipping away at our democratic inheritance, making true democracy seem like an impossible dream. To fight back, we must cultivate new attitudes and better ways of engaging the world. We must transform how we feel. To live in fear, anger, and resentment is to pave the way for totalitarianism. The debt of gratitude does not defend democracy. Debt has no political allegiance; it serves the agents of empire as easily as the custodians of freedom. To me, any hope for contemporary democracy rests squarely on the rhetoric of emotion. We must ask, what emotions are conducive of democracy? And then we must work assiduously to cultivate such emotions. I believe that gratitude is one such emotion and, to continue Dewey’s project of developing “personal character,” we must do a better job of teaching citizens what it means to live gratefully. Teaching citizens to care for their emotional lives is a political act because emotions are political. This is precisely the point of Martha Nussbaum’s wonderful recent book Political Emotions—the central values of a decent, democratic society (such as equality and freedom) must be supported by political emotions that win citizens’ allegiance to these principles.49 In the end, I will argue that gratitude is one such political emotion, and so I see my project in this book as complementary to Nuss-

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baum’s. However, whereas she puts the norms of a good society first, and then discusses emotions that can help to uphold popular commitment to these norms, I try to do the opposite—I put the emotion up front, and then see what political and rhetorical commitments are illuminated by that emotional experience. Gratefulness encourages us to see ourselves as part of a broader ecosystem (what Advaita Vedanta philosophy calls “the All” or “the whole,” tat ekam). The virtue of gratefulness, I will argue, is that it reveals the good, and it discloses this good to be a common good. If democracy has a future, it will be in collectively fighting to secure those common goods we collectively share so that all of us can flourish. The future of democracy rests on gratefulness. The contemporary gratitude literature instructs us how to think, how to act, and how to live a life in debt. This literature invites us to see debt as inherently praiseworthy—as a marker of moral virtue—thus acting as a subtle justification for “the debt economy” and a pernicious neoliberal rationality that undermines democracy and diminishes the value of life.50 The Art of Gratitude challenges the assumption that debt must reside at the heart of our relationships and our politics. This book therefore involves a fundamental reconceptualization of the nature of the individual, and of democratic politics, by describing an alternative art of gratitude that is not premised on debt. I contend that it is possible to build communities based on the common goods that we as citizens share—that is, if we first relearn the art of gratitude. To rethink gratitude is to rethink how we relate to each another and how we act together. To rethink gratitude is to rethink individualism and democracy. To rethink gratitude is necessary for our future on this earth.

1

Words Matter On the Rhetoric of Emotion

Si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme, c’est le sentiment que le conduit [“If it is by reason that man is made, it is his feelings that guide him”] —Rousseau

It is often said that it is our capacity for reason or politics or economics that makes us human, but I believe that our humanity is located equally in our ability to feel, and to feel deeply, with tender hearts and open minds. The central lesson of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, according to Martin Heidegger in his early lecture course “Basic Concepts of Aristotelean Philosophy,” is that the world is disclosed to us through our emotions. How we feel shapes how we see, how we act, how we know, what we understand to be true and false.1 If we are resentful or afraid or depressed, we do not experience the same reality as someone who is grateful. Some emotions skew us toward violence and discord. Others encourage us to promote peace, cultivate compassion, and reduce suffering. Interestingly enough, gratitude is both. In this chapter, I navigate a middle ground between those who sharply distinguish affect from emotion by describing a rhetorical approach to the study of emotions. Such an approach denies that our emotional reality is biologically predetermined, as scholars of affect often argue.

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Our words, and our thoughts matter, for they shape our emotions. At the same time, our emotions are not strictly private, nor are they solely ours. Emotions exist in the world.2 Emotions are part of our landscape. Emotions are contagious and catchy. The question is not if we are feeling something—as Heidegger argues, we are always in an emotional state. What matters is what we are feeling and what we do with the emotions we feel. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle describes three ways a speaker can persuade an audience: with logic, with credibility, and with emotion.3 Emotion is one of the three pillars of all communication, teamwork, and leadership. There is no rhetoric without emotion. Yet Aristotle elevates emotion above strategy. For him, human being is emotional. In the rhetorical tradition, there is no overestimating the power of emotion. The Greek word for emotion, “πάθος” (pathos) is closely related to the verb “πάσχω,” to “experience” or “suffer.” Colloquially in classical Greek, pathos is “what befalls a person, often in the negative sense of an accident or misfortune.”4 However, one of the great philosophical errors, according to Heidegger, is to presume that humans are rational animals that, from time to time, suffer an emotion. We cannot, for Heidegger, engage the world from a purely rational point of view because humans are “always-already” emotional.5 Heidegger notes that Aristotle speaks of emotion using the word “διάθεση,” (disposition), from the related Greek verb meaning to dispose, to incline, and to arrange.6 Διάθεση is the root of the English word “diathesis,” which connotes a constitutional predisposition or tendency. By employing this word, Aristotle draws out a deeper meaning of pathos. Emotions do more than influence us, though they of course do that; emotions dispose us to the world and incline us to see reality in particular ways. Emotions are like a pair of funhouse glasses that we put on and that then determines what we see and how we see it—except that we can never take off these glasses, for they are permanent. The enduring insight of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is that our emotions shape our worldview. When we are resentful, we see everything as an offense or an injury, and we go in search of people to blame. When afraid, we fixate on danger, seeing it everywhere, around every corner. When depressed, everything looks cold and grey, even the best meals lack flavor, and our favorite pastimes bring no mirth. When grateful—well, we will discuss gratitude in the coming chapters. The point is that no

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one judges matters evenly, for each of us sees the world through the lens of our emotions. To talk emotion is to talk power. It is also to talk exclusion. The very same Aristotle who wrote the Rhetoric famously declared in his Nicomachean Ethics (1.13) that humans are characterized by a rational principle (λόγον ἔχον) that raises them above the level of plants and other animals. Medieval scholastics claimed that humans are the animal rationale.7 In this tradition, it is reason, and reason alone, that makes us properly human. The Enlightenment was premised on a stark antithesis between reason and emotion (in contrast to Aristotle, who saw logos and pathos as argumentative allies)—an antithesis that continues to play an important role in contemporary psychology.8 René Descartes posited a strict dichotomy between mind and body, and also between reason and emotion. Generally, outside of its dark alchemical, occult margins, and setting aside the powerful voices of Romanticism, the philosophers of the Enlightenment prized reason over emotion and, in fact, often defined reason in opposition to emotion. Reason was viewed as active, cold, and calculative, whereas emotion was a reactive, bodily, animal, mechanical, affective experience so powerful that it could completely overwhelm the mind, rendering even the smartest people passive before its great power. The privileging of reason has historically been associated with a fervent, at times almost evangelical, denigration of emotion. “Too emotional” has long been one of the chief justifications used by those in power to exclude individuals and, at times, whole classes of people, from the public sphere and render them politically mute. Our political system in the United States is founded on a deep fear of public emotion. The founders of the United States faced what I have elsewhere called “the dilemmas of American nationalism,” namely that they were attempting to uphold order against the very same populist, democratic violence that they helped to incite in order to win the Revolutionary War.9 The founders were obsessed with how to calm popular emotions that lead to violence and to cultivate in their place contrasting emotions that would promote order and stability. Early defenders of the Constitution proudly touted it as establishing the first government in human history that could successfully prevent rowdy, unpredictable, destabilizing emotions from gripping the public and roiling the masses into mob violence.10 Emotion, Alexander Hamilton claimed, was a “contagion” and a “cancer.”11 During the ratification debate of 1787−1788, James

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Madison scolded the anti-federalists by announcing that if Americans rejected the Constitution, “the passions, therefore, not the reason, of the public would sit in judgment. But it is the reason of the public alone that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”12 Ideally, Madison affirmed, Americans would be calm, cool, collected, and abide only “the mild voice of reason.”13 Yet people were far from perfect. And so Madison, one of the chief architects of the United States government, informed Americans that it was the job of government both to regulate and to control the passions of the people so that they would see—and also feel—the world as they were told. By controlling public emotions, Madison believed that American leaders could also control the violence of faction and tame the terrors of democracy. The Enlightenment gave voice to fears long associated with democracy, which, according to its critics, was akin to anarchy, for it encouraged citizens to irrationally follow their desires and emotions to the point of violence.14 As the United States became more democratic in the 1820s and 1830s, prominent pedagogues railed against passionate speech as they attempted to reeducate Americans in the ways of reason.15 “There is something so cool, manly and respectable in convincing, in addressing one’s-self to pure, clear reason or judgment,” Edward Tyrell Channing, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, proclaimed.16 Here, Channing followed Richard Whately’s popular Elements of Rhetoric (1828), which argued that while rhetors must sometimes employ emotion in their arguments, nevertheless emotion always should be kept under the control of reason lest the audience lose their minds.17 Of course, when Channing said “manly,” he meant it—for far too long women were excluded from American politics for being too emotional, as were many minority groups unable to live up to the standards of “decorous” speech delineated by power brokers like Channing.18 These groups were ostracized because those in power claimed they were unable to control their emotions. Even today, emotions continue to be a political battlefield. A grave mistrust of emotion underlines how many politicians and also many scholars conceptualize democracy and deliberation: we are told to give reasons, and to keep our feelings to ourselves.19 The attempt to purify democratic discussion and politics of emotion weakens citizens and denies one of the deepest, most human parts of ourselves. Ignore the emotions at your peril. Those in positions of power certainly do not. From cradle to grave, we live per fas et nefas—our

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emotional lives are carefully regulated. As youngsters we learn how to feel and how not to feel and how to appropriately express these feelings. Power operates on and through our emotions, and so it is vital that we, as citizens of the United States and human beings, attend to our emotional lives, for we cannot engage the world unemotionally. For those of us who are educators, we must do a better job of teaching our students to care for their emotional lives. Generally we treat our students like “brains on a stick”—but our students have bodies and feelings that they must attend to if they are to be capable participants in the world. Chris Uhl observes, “The separation of mind and body—that is, the denial of the feeling body—within schools and classrooms constricts learning and is stultifying to the human spirit.”20 To prepare our students to face the challenges of citizenship, we must rewrite the common script associated with American democracy; we must stop asking how to purge democracy of emotion, and instead begin asking how to cultivate emotions (like gratitude, compassion, reverence, and love) that are productive of democratic virtue. Kenneth Burke defined humans as “the symbol-using (symbolmaking, symbol-misusing) animal.”21 It is our capacity to communicate (and miscommunicate) that makes us human for Burke. How we feel shapes how we speak—and as the Bible says, death and life are in the power of the tongue. Heedless, selfish words stab like a sword, but the words of the wise are health, for they bring suffering to an end. Though our emotions shape our words, it is equally true that our words shape our emotions. This is rhetoric’s greatest power: it can change an audience’s emotional reality, and with it, their disposition toward the world. There is a debate in contemporary psychology concerning emotions between biological determinists, who argue that our emotional reality is biologically determined and who seek to tie emotions to activity in particular regions of the brain, and social constructivists, who agree that emotions are rooted in biology but who view emotions as social because the structure and function of the brain is influenced by language and culture.22 Clearly, social constructivism creates space for rhetoric in a way that biological determinism does not. Contemporary psychologists, especially those who study the relationship between mindfulness and well-being, recognize that it is even possible to change the biology of our brains. Neuropsychologists call this the principle of “neuroplasticity.”23 Humans are biological creatures, but that biology is not fixed at adulthood. It, like everything else, can be changed with focus, attention, and

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practice.24 Though psychologists generally do not use the word rhetoric, the art of rhetoric is foundational to therapeutic practices including Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): by reframing the narrative of what is happening in our lives, and learning to think and speak differently, it is possible to change how we feel, reducing stress, promoting resilience, and increasing overall well-being.25 CBT and MBSR could revitalize how rhetorical scholars understand “the narrative paradigm,” for these targeted narrative interventions demonstrate the power of rhetoric to reshape our emotions and hence our outlook on life.26 Words can alter our emotions, and for this reason I understand the serious critical, historical, and philosophical study of rhetoric as a foundational practice of the care of the self. When speaking of the care of the self, I am inspired by the work that philosopher Michel Foucault undertook at the end of his life.27 For much of his career, Foucault maintained that individuals are utterly insignificant. He asserted that modern forms of power function to promote the mass fabrication of individuals, and thus to study modernity is to study the myriad ways that humans are made into subjects of particular regimes of power and discourse. Foucault had no patience for humanism. He chided Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous mantra that “existence precedes essence”—the very words that, of course, became the slogan of French existentialism—as ridiculous and silly28; he dismissed the concept of a “soul” as a fiction and a fabrication of power29; and he gleefully announced the death of the concept of “man” in the closing pages of his book The Order of Things, stating that soon, the individual “would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”30 Toward the end of his life, however, Foucault made an unexpected detour from his research investigating modern practices of subjectification (assujettisement) to focus on classical practices of “the care of the self.”31 Foucault discovered that in ancient Greece and Hellenistic Rome it was believed that individuals did not inherently possess access to the truth. Instead, they had to prepare for the truth through spiritual practices including meditation and Socratic dialogue. The care of the self consisted of the exercises by which a person carried out the necessary work on him- or herself to be prepared to glimpse the truth.32 The Greeks and Romans believed that individuality is a living art, and that it is possible to change one’s perspective on the world, and hence one’s life, through diligent work and effort.

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In classical antiquity, the care of the self was not something that a person undertook on his own. The ancients, especially the Stoics, believed that most humans lived in a state of ignorance and aimlessness—they dubbed this state stultitia (the Latin root for our English word “stultification”).33 The care of the self was a social practice centering on the relationship between a student and a teacher (or philosopher, or sage, or master) that aimed to bring the student out of the state of stultitia. The teacher’s goal was to lend the student a hand (oportet educat), raising him or her out of aimlessness by teaching new practices.34 Contrary to our conceptions of modern pedagogy, the classical teacher was not preoccupied with transmitting knowledge. Rather, the teacher provided the student with what Epicurus called “παρασκευή” (paraskeuē), equipment or mental armor for use on the battlefield of life.35 Seneca translated the Greek word “paraskeuē” into Latin as “instructio,” which is the root of our English word “instruction.” During the classical period, “instruction” meant something quite different from what it means today—instruction represented the building up of a critical disposition toward the world and the outfitting of students with practices for managing their emotions. “The instructio is the individual’s armature for dealing with events rather than training for a definite professional goal.”36 Such “instruction” was invested primarily in educating students to care for their emotional lives, fostering emotions that were productive of happiness and cancelling out those that were not. For the Greek and Roman philosophers of antiquity, the care of the self was the path to “σωτηρία” (salvation).37 During what Foucault calls “the golden age of the culture of the self ” in the first two centuries CE, it was widely believed “that someone is saved, when he is suitably armed and equipped to be able to defend himself effectively if necessary. The person saved is the person in a state of alert, in a state of resistance and of mastery and sovereignty over the self, enabling him to repel every attack and assault.”38 This person was “saved” because he was no longer the passive product of discourse and cultural norms. Through spiritual practice he had become an active force capable of shaping his outlook and action. In the classical period, then, spiritual practice prepared individuals to weather the vicissitudes of life and to engage in the battles of political life. For the Platonists and the Stoics, the directive to care for oneself preceded the imperative to know oneself. In fact, one could not know oneself without first learning to care for oneself. A change in worldview

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was a prerequisite for self-knowledge, and it was through the techniques and practices of self-care (practices, we must remember, that were rhetorical through and through) that such a shift in perspective was achieved. In the age of Athenian democracy, the care of the self was explicitly political—it was an imperative for the young who hoped to one day rule others. Later, in the Hellenistic age, the imperative to care for oneself was generalized throughout life. It became essential to care for oneself at every moment of every day in every year, especially as one prepared for death. Philosophy, for Plato, meant learning how to die; thinking along the same lines, Seneca counseled, qui mori didicit, servire dedicicit, “he who has learned to die has unlearned slavery”—the person who has learned how to die without remorse and regret is free.39 Yet even in the imperial age of Rome the care of the self continued to be related to politics—after all, Seneca was a counselor to kings, and Marcus Aurelius was emperor. Christianity continues to speak the language of the care of the self, but it fundamentally alters the meaning of such care. The uniqueness of Christianity, Foucault argues, is that the relationship between the individual and the truth is mediated by the Text. Christianity requires faith in the revealed wisdom of the Word as recorded in the Bible, and, as a consequence, it places tremendous power in the hands of those priests and scholars sanctioned to read and interpret the Word. Christianity establishes a new, hierarchal order within the care of the self. According to Foucault, Christianity usurps many of the spiritual exercises of classical antiquity, transforming them into a “hermeneutics of the subject” that aims to lay the self bare before God (who is now a King, not a friend as he was for the Stoics). What Foucault calls “disciplinary power”—the form of power that seeks to mass produce individuals through normalization and that is sustained by surveillance and punishment—is built on the foundation of Christian “pastoral power,” the form of power that seeks to govern individuals through the confession of desire and sin.40 In the Christian tradition, the care of the self is a practice of hunting out the deep roots of sin within us, and then confessing our sins to a priest so that we might be absolved and get into heaven. Moreover, as I will note in chapter 3, Christianity introduces a new emotion into spirituality that has tended to dominate the care of the self ever since: guilt. The Christian care of the self is about managing the guilt associated with original sin and engendered by the inability to repay the profound existential debt owed to God for the gift of life.

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Foucault argues that the classical emphasis on spirituality was undermined during “the Cartesian moment” when Descartes and others initiated a paradigm shift by separating the care of the self from knowledge achieved by scientific inquiry.41 Foucault posits a decisive break between philosophy and spirituality with Descartes.42 “The modern age of the history of the truth begins when knowledge itself and knowledge alone gives access to the truth. That is to say, it is when the philosopher (or the scientist, or the seeker) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through his activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as subject.”43 For Foucault, Descartes is indicative of the schism between philosophy and spirituality that is characteristic of the modern era in which knowledge is equated with objectivity, logic, and method.44 Truth no longer requires the individual to change. After all, the scientific method attempts to remove the individual from the equation altogether by substituting a rigorous method for a person who has struggled to change him or herself. For Foucault, one tragedy of the modern world is that it has largely forgotten the care of the self. Writing in defense of the care of the self, but in opposition to what he calls “the California cult of the self ”—which calls on people to find their true selves or, simply, to be true to themselves, rather than to remake themselves through practice—Foucault repositions spirituality at the heart of politics.45 The norms and rationalities of power are implemented through individual practice, through the techniques of the self. This is also where power is resisted and remade. In the evening of his life, Foucault came to the conclusion that we have a substantial degree of freedom to shape our subjectivities by changing our practices. Moreover, Foucault found the basis for resistance to the totalizing force of disciplinary power in spiritual practice. We miss this resistance, he wrote, if we forget that “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.”46 Freedom is not something that an individual can pursue or achieve alone. To be free requires good laws and a government to uphold those laws—we are free only as citizens.47 We can only be free to the extent that our world creates the conditions for us to be free. Yet each of us has the capacity to practice freedom in the cracks and margins of possibility, and then, under the right circumstances, to work together with others to make the world more (or less) free. In this way, the care of the self is an ethical prerequisite for human

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freedom. If we take Foucault’s final lectures seriously, when theorizing democracy we must focus on both the crowd and the individual, on grassroots mobilization at the level of the mass and also on the individual who learns to reorient his worldview and who, by undertaking spiritual practice, develops a new relationship to himself. Some see Foucault’s work on the care of the self as fundamentally distinct from his prior scholarship.48 I see it as a continuation of his genealogy of power. The difference is this: at the end of his life Foucault learned to take the individual seriously, as the site where power (often taking the form of “truth” and “discourse”) is articulated and resisted. The “soul” might be a fiction, as he teased in Discipline and Punish, but it is a reflexive fiction constituted, at least in part, by an individual acting upon him- or herself in the context of the world.49 In Foucault’s final works there is a shift in tense—a shift that I have attempted to emulate in my own scholarship. Before his turn to the classics, Foucault’s works tended to be written in the passive tense. This is how the striking rhetorical effect of removing the active agent from the scene and hence rendering it passive is often achieved in Discipline and Punish. In Foucault’s earlier work, the subject was troped as an effect, a function, a product of discourse and power. The final books and lectures recover an active tense and an active subject. Before, humans were but traces of political power. After, humans play an active role in shaping our minds and our emotions by changing our practices. Inspired by Foucault, I have come to see rhetoric as a foundational practice of the care of the self that can help citizens to achieve greater control over our emotional lives and, consequently, prepare us for political life. The classical philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome often used the metaphor of sight to frame the care of the self: spiritual practice changes how we see the world. Significantly, Aristotle defines rhetoric in terms of vision, suggesting that rhetoric is a foundational practice of the care of the self.50 Aristotle offers the following definition of rhetoric: “Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion.”51 “To see” translates the Greek verb “θεωρέω” (theōreō), to look at, to contemplate, to consider, to grasp the meaning of. Our English word “theory” comes from the related Greek noun “θεωρία” (theōria). To study rhetoric is therefore to develop the capacity, the power, the ability to see the world in new ways—rhetoric is a foundational practice of the care of the self.

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Democracy and rhetoric emerged at the same moment in ancient Greece, because democracy is a government of words and speeches and communication and deliberation.52 Without rhetoric, democracy never gets going. Rhetoric can lead citizens to bad places. Plato was right to fear the demagogue.53 At the same time, rhetoric is the means by which citizens deliberate and make better judgments concerning common problems than they would make individually. There can be no democracy without rhetoric, and no rhetoric without emotion. Aristotle defined political deliberation as one of the three genres of rhetoric. For him, the study of rhetoric encompasses democratic deliberation. In the tradition of John Rawls, deliberation is generally defined as reason-giving discourse, while not all rhetoric assumes this deliberative form.54 This does not mean, however, that rhetoric and deliberation are opposed or that rhetoric is merely a pre-deliberative mode of engagement. Instead, democratic deliberation is a specific type of rhetorical practice.55 Via deliberation, democracy empowers citizens to make decisions over issues of common concern. For citizens to make good decisions, however, they must be able to see far into the future and into the distant past—and it is rhetoric that makes the past and the future real. Rhetoric is concerned with vision. The practice of rhetoric involves a kind of psychological “transport” that the ancient Greeks called phantasia: Michele Kennerly contends that “rhetoric’s work often consists of giving presence to the unseeable—something not yet or never capable of being seen—or to the unseen—something visible but ignored.”56 I would add that rhetoric’s work also often consists of giving presence to the unfelt. Whenever we deliberate, and whenever we judge, we see the world through the lens of our current emotional state. Consequently, there is tremendous power in the capacity to make people feel differently. Democracy is often a battle over conflicting emotions. Politics is the realm of persuasion. Competent democratic citizens see themselves as both persuadable and already persuaded. Training for democratic citizenship should always double back to the self via the study of rhetoric. Rhetoric involves intensive self-study, focusing in particular on how we have been disciplined to feel and know.57 Rhetoric is more than the study of persuasion. Rhetoric is concerned with bringing awareness to the awesome power of language and how that power can be used to change lives, including the rhetor’s. If we are going to be effective agents of change and proponents of social justice, we must notice how

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the words we use, and that are used by others, affect our emotions and hence our worldview. As I understand it, caring for the self means learning to regulate our emotions when we can through our rhetoric; and, when we cannot, learning to let our emotions wash over us without allowing them to dictate our words and control our behavior. Is this a futile endeavor? Can we control our emotions? At times it seems that emotions come and go as they please and there is little that any of us can do about it. I am sure that all of us have had the experience of an emotion hitting us out of nowhere and bringing us to our knees. We have all entered a room and immediately been struck by its mood. And there is no question that many people suffer from mood disorders that they cannot shake, no matter how hard they try. There are extreme moods—in a daring memoir detailing her struggle with bipolar disorder, the clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison calls them “black moods”—that may require additional attention or even medical intervention if a person who suffers them is to find balance and live a stable, fulfilling life.58 People who suffer from mood disorders should not be blamed for being unable to control emotions they cannot control. At the same time, I am also sure that most of us have also had the experience of shaking off undesirable emotions, perhaps anger, perhaps fear, when we find that they are causing us to suffer.59 Childhood is one long, persistent lesson concerning just how important it is to manage our emotional states. As we mature, we develop strategies for doing so or else we suffer.60 How do we govern our emotions? One way is to reframe the narrative of the events that gives rise to our emotions with our rhetoric. I believe that words matter. Even people with mood disorders benefit from therapeutic techniques that offer them at least some control over their emotions. To the extent that we can bring awareness to, and some control over, our emotions, we must. The rhetoric of emotion is concerned with cultivating this awareness and achieving this control. This is a good place to comment on the contemporary scholarship that attempts to distinguish affect from emotion, two words that I use as synonyms rather than antonyms. Aristotle described emotion (pathos) as a feeling of pain or pleasure that overcomes a person in response to a stimulus.61 Aristotle’s emotions are social, precisely because what people consider painful (such as an ego slight) and pleasurable (such as honor) will be influenced by our concepts and our cultural assumptions. Since the

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time of Aristotle, emotions have been understood to involve judgments; emotions involve thought. Even those emotions that hit us in the gut, or cause our heart to skip a beat, are based on our conceptual understanding of the world. Affect, in contrast, is said to be a pre-cognitive, strictly biological reaction to the world rooted deep in subcortical structures of the brain that trace back to the very beginnings of human evolution. Affect has nothing to do with thought, for it is deeper than thought. The contemporary scholarship on affect is inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (who himself was inspired by Spinoza’s recondite discussion of the “affections” in his Ethics).62 For Deleuze, affect is the capacity of a body to affect the world around it and to be affected by that world, and thus it is non-intentional.63 Affect scholars tend to be much closer to the biological determinists than the social constructivists in contemporary psychology. They see basic affects (such as fear, anger, disgust, joy, sadness, and surprise) as hardwired, automatic responses to the world rooted in our biology. Because affect is quicker than emotion and cognition, the implication is that we are not really in control of our lives, our biology is in control of us. Another implication is that we are not really in control of persuasion. Rhetoric hits us, and we are moved, dislocated, disrupted by deeply biological (and for psychoanalysists, subliminal) reactions to words and images.64 Dave Tell attests that if rhetorical scholars take the affect literature seriously, we will understand rhetoric as “mechanical.” He observes that “a mechanical rhetoric is thus very different from a symbolic rhetoric. It emphasizes the materiality of rhetoric and the embodied nature of persuasion.” This understanding of rhetoric is grounded in a biologically reductionist view of the brain in which humans react to the world with basic affects that are pre-cognitive and pre-symbolic.65 Rhetoric, here, is not about encoding and decoding symbols with cognition or reflection; it is more like touching a hot pan and reacting with a painful “ouch!”— which means that to persuade, rhetors must move the body, as a person who throws a stone at a person moves that person’s body through physical force. Indeed, Tell suggests that proponents of the mechanical view of rhetoric in the mid-twentieth century believed that “words . . . were like stones rather than signs; they ‘moved’ people by virtue of their impact rather than by their meaning (or by their correspondence). Much as an object might strike a person and leave an impression, so rhetoric was figured as a force that touched people in both senses of the word—it

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stirred their affections via physical contact.”66 In mechanical rhetoric, “the affections are not products of symbolic action; they are not the result of cognition, reflection, or association. Rather, the affections are the result of basic mechanics: of motion, force, impact, and dislocation.”67 Affect scholars are most interested in these “basic mechanics”—an interest that leads them to conceptualize rhetoric as a physical force that moves and dislocates audiences by its affective, precognitive impact on our bodies and brains. In many ways, talk of mechanical rhetoric is a throwback to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century understandings of rhetoric. During the Enlightenment, rhetoric was less about civic education, as it was for Aristotle and Isocrates in democratic Athens, for Cicero in Republican Rome, and for Vico during the Renaissance, and more about “the moving of the heart” [motum cordis]. Philosophers believed that there was an “affective rhetoric” [oratio affectuosa] that could trigger bodily responses that were outside of human control.68 Some feared affective rhetoric and the great power that rhetors gained by manipulating it. John Locke labeled orators “perfect cheats” and condemned the practice of rhetoric with nasty words that rival Plato’s in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) precisely because of rhetoric’s ability to stir the affections.69 Others believed that this affective rhetoric was greatly advantageous, if the speaker could somehow harness it. For example, the French logician Bernard Lamy forwarded a theory of affective rhetoric in The Art of Speaking (1675) that compared persuasion to war and the orator to the soldier. “An Orator is to imitate a Souldier fighting with his enemy,” he taught. “The Souldier is not satisfied with drawing his Sword, he strikes, and watches to take the first advantage that is given: He moves up and down to avoid the insults of his Enemy, and in a word assumes all the postures that Nature and practice have taught him for invasion or defense.”70 The ancient Greeks believed that there was a fundamental distinction between persuasion and violence (πείθω and βία) and thus between rhetoric and force.71 This distinction, which was always fraught, began to unravel during the Enlightenment. For Lamy, there was very little difference between words and weapons, rhetoric and violence—words forced people to act as the speaker desired, much as a stone or a sword would. Words, like weapons, were instruments for achieving the basic mechanics of moving, forcing, impacting, and dislocating the audience. The goal of rhetoric for

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Lamy was to “bend and incline [the audience] to what side he pleases” by using strong language to trigger certain affective, bodily responses in the audience. Lamy even went so far as to argue that words could bypass cognition altogether and “imprint strongly” on a subject’s mind, causing him or her to behave as the speaker desired.72 Thomas Hobbes echoed Lamy on this point. Rhetoric persuaded by creating “a commotion of the passions of the mind, such as hope, fear, anger, pity.”73 Rhetoric was a form of violence for Hobbes because it bypassed a person’s consent and forced him or her to act. He concluded that “opinions are delivered not by right reason, but by a certain violence of mind.”74 The affective rhetoric of Lamy, Hobbes, and others was shaped by the assumptions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy, in particular by faculty psychology, the dominant paradigm for the mind–body relationship in the 1700s. Faculty psychology modeled the relationship between the mind and the body on Newtonian mechanics, describing the human organism as a machine with levers and springs that could be pulled and pressed to achieve predictable results.75 The implications of Newtonian mechanics on rhetoric are clearest in the work of one of the leading proponents of eighteenth-century faculty psychology, Thomas Reid. Reid’s moral psychology classified human faculties in three categories: mechanical, animal, and rational. The mechanical faculties were involuntary and acted directly upon the will. The animal faculties were bodily in nature and included instinctive desires, physical appetites, and the emotions. Finally, reason, which found its home in the mind as opposed to the body—in the cogito, not the corpus—included conscience (what the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment often called the “moral sense”) and prudence, or what was often called (self-)interest. According to Reid, the human organism was divided into irrational or affective (mechanical/animal) and rational faculties: There is an irrational part, common to us with brute-animals, consisting of appetites, affections and passions, and there is a cool and rational part. The first, in many cases, gives a strong impulse, but without judgment, and without authority. The second is always accompanied with authority. All wisdom and virtue consist in following its dictates; all vice and folly in disobeying them. We may resist the impulses of appetite and passion, not only without regret, but with self-applause

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and triumph; but the calls of reason and duty can never be resisted, without remorse and self-condemnation.76 In Reid’s moral psychology, the animal faculties were fundamentally irrational, and it was the job of the rational faculties to resist and regulate these baser faculties. What made the animal faculties irrational was the fact that they gave a direct impulse to the will without the interruption of reason and conscience. Understanding the body to be a machine, Reid and other proponents of faculty psychology imagined that it was the job of reason to regulate the irrational, animal faculties. Reid repeatedly affirmed that “brutes” and “madmen” were incapable of regulating themselves, hence drawing what is a now a distasteful but what was then a common line between those who were “civilized”—i.e., capable of using their reason to regulate the passions so they did not operate directly upon the will—and those who were not.77 Yet even those blessed with reason—with “the power of self-government”—could be overwhelmed by an affective impulse, losing the “conflict between the dictates of reason, and the blind impulse of passion.”78 In such a situation, the animal faculties were (to use a favorite metaphor of faculty psychologists including Hobbes and David Hume) like a billiard ball ramming into another billiard ball, forcing the body to move without the reason having time to intercede and stop the (re-) action.79 In faculty psychology, “affect” signified a nonrational force welling up from deep inside the body and producing action that was almost always regrettable because it was irrational.80 Affect upended the mind’s discipline, acting directly on the will; affect was “blind,” “animal,” and “violent” in nature.81 Affect acted directly upon the will outside of the discipline of reason. For Reid, the Enlightenment meant learning how to resist the irresistible impulse of passion, or to counter such an impulse with reason. To be a fully realized human was to learn to exercise selfgovernment. One of the moral lessons of this particular culture of the self was for people to tame their irrational affective impulses. Though Reid cautioned his readers to be vigilant about their affections and to control them if possible, he nevertheless believed most affective appeals to be irresistible. For him, “appetite, affection, or passion, give an impulse to a certain action. In this impulse there is no judgment implied. It may be weak or strong we can even conceive it irresistible.”82

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There are times when rhetoric works as Lamy, Hobbes, Reid, and the faculty psychologists of the Enlightenment imagined—in such moments, words or symbols become weapons that move us before thought and before consent. If stones can be rhetoric, rhetoric can at times act like stones. Rhetoric moves and displaces us. At times rhetoric moves us without us being aware that we are being moved. Rhetoric can quite literally move us to tears or hatred and without us knowing why. This is rhetoric at its most subtle and dangerous and mechanistic, when it operates directly on the body through the affects.83 With its understanding of mechanistic rhetoric, the affect literature has produced some powerful cultural criticism.84 Not all scholars are so sanguine about distinguishing affect from emotion, however. Ruth Leys is critical of the affect literature for two reasons: first, she suggests that its foundational texts are based on a questionable reading of several experimental studies in psychology; and second, she claims (rightly in my view) that it unintentionally lends support to a biologically reductionist view of human motives that puts the type of critical work done by affect scholars in danger during a time in which the humanities are being shrunk in favor of STEM fields.85 Two additional quibbles I have with this work is that it fails to account for two foundational principles in contemporary psychology: first, the principle of neuroplasticity—that words and thoughts can remake the biology of our brain; and second, the principle of functional connectivity—that the brain works in a networked manner, meaning that the subcortical structures where the purported “Basic Emotions” of affect theory reside do not operate independently of the structures in the brain responsible for cognition.86 The brain cannot be chopped up into pieces, as many affect scholars attempt to do by locating the affects in the subcortical structures of the brain, for the brain is a network that is constantly evolving in response to our environment, our thoughts, and our words. Here I circle back to my earlier point: the world is disclosed to us through our emotions, and these emotions, in turn, are shaped by our thoughts and concepts, our words, and the situations in which we find ourselves. We might be moved affectively by a particular stimulus, but only if we are first prepared to experience that particular affect by our culture, our language, and our upbringing. In the contemporary debate over the rhetoric of affect and emotion, I take the side of contemporary psychologists who affirm that our emotional lives are socially constructed. Countering those psychologists

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who reduce emotion to biological changes in the brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett writes, “emotions have been essentialized as natural when in fact they are constructed. But this does not mean that emotions are illusions. And it certainly does not mean that emotions are not biological.”87 Emotions are based in biology, but the biological changes that scholars have labeled “affective” and “mechanistic” are meaningful only in reference to social categories and shared judgments about social reality—in short, emotions cannot be understood outside of our cultural context. For social constructivists, “an emotion is more than just a particular pattern of objective changes that reflect a diagnostic body state or a physical action—its reality derives from the way that perception works in a human mind, in conjunction with other human minds.” Barrett concludes, “a science of emotion should be focusing on the Xs (physical states and actions that occur in specific situations), the Ys (the emotion categories that exist in a particular culture), and the Cs (the contents and workings of the categories as situated conceptualizations that constitute emotions in a particular culture).”88 While cognitive psychologists and communication scientists are best equipped to study the Xs, rhetorical scholars are uniquely situated to describe and critique the Ys and Cs—for this is what we have been doing since the time of Aristotle, investigating how social reality makes certain emotions possible and then how these emotions influence an audience’s interactions with the world. To see the world rhetorically is to see it as a set of emotional possibilities that can be leveraged to move and persuade. Emotions are the givens that rhetors work with. However, to see the world rhetorically is to recognize that emotions are subject to negotiation and renegotiation. The givens are not immutable—they can be changed. Rhetoric can change how an emotion like gratitude is experienced, and with it the world. Sometimes emotions do operate like stones, in that they move bluntly. But even stones have symbolic meaning. We learn how to engage with stones, just as we learn how to feel. For social constructivists, affect scholars are wrong to believe that the basic emotions exist outside of social conditioning and before culture. The biology of the brain is foundational to emotion, but this biology exists in a context and is influenced by this context. Our biological responses to the social world are given meaning by that world—in this way they are learned. This does not mean that rhetoric never operates on a purely mechanical level. It means that our emotions, even the basic affects, are conditioned, and as such they can be unconditioned and reconditioned.

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Today, after two thousand years of education, we have been hardwired to experience gratitude as indebtedness. Hundreds of contemporary books and articles reinforce this definition of gratitude. In turn, the debt of gratitude is often trigged mechanistically by events in the world. We have learned to react to gifts in a certain way, just as many Americans have learned to fear people who look a certain way and that fear is trigged unconsciously when they see these people in the world.89 But must we always react this way? Surely, it is possible to undo these reactions and train ourselves to react differently—we can always rewire the brain. Learning to react differently to the world is an act of rhetorical invention and also the very essence of the care of the self, which I understand to be a process of retraining and reconditioning our emotional reactions to the world. We will always react, because to be human is to live a life of reaction. But to imagine the individual as a lived art is to learn to react differently, and more ethically, to the world.90 If we jettison the biological reductionism of affect theory, we are left with an incredible insight: that every one of us is part of an emotional landscape.91 Emotions circulate—they are catchy and contagious. I wake up cross, I find myself sad as I walk down the street behind someone who is crying, I see you laugh and it makes me happy, I walk into a room and immediately feel the tension. Such reactions are automatic but conditioned. We like to claim emotions as “ours,” as subjective experiences that exist in our heads, but emotions are a part of our world. The Stoics taught that emotions begin in an immediate, bodily response to a situation that only becomes an emotion if the person experiencing it ratifies it cognitively by saying, yes, this is how I feel. Anger and fear only become anger and fear with the mental consent of the one experiencing the anger and fear. In the Stoic tradition—a tradition that lives on in CBT—for an emotion to be an emotion, a person must consent to how he or she is feeling.92 Such consent is powerful, but I do not believe that such consent is necessary. We feel how we are feeling. But giving and refusing consent to how we feel is often possible, and to say otherwise (as some affect theorists do when they claim that our emotional lives are strictly biological) is to leave us completely at the mercy of how we find ourselves right now. Moreover, to be struck by the tension in a room implies that we are attuned to that tension—I once walked into a tense situation in India and completely missed the tension (only to learn about it later, post hoc) simply because I was not attuned to the cultural dynamics and because I didn’t speak the language.

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Our culture and our language prepare us to feel in certain ways. What matters is what we do with the emotions we feel. Do we affirm them? Contest them? Cultivate opposing feelings? Recognizing how deeply thought and feeling are interconnected, in the Yoga Sutras Patanjali offers the following advice: “Upon being harassed by negative thoughts, one should cultivate counteracting thoughts.”93 There are political stakes in the emotion/affect distinction for democratic politics. To me the argument that humans are incapable of changing how we feel is political folly, for it reduces us to passive products of our situation, rather than active participants in life. The belief that most citizens are morons unable to control their emotions has traditionally been a major premise of misodemia. The founders of the United States said as much in The Federalist. To reinvigorate contemporary democratic politics, we must reassert the ability of individuals to manage their emotions, and we must teach them how to do this. We must, in short, affirm the vital importance of rhetorical education to democratic politics. The care of the self involves noticing the emotional state we happen to find ourselves in right now and then addressing it. Rhetoric is the means by which we address our emotions and the emotions of those around us (who we hope to identify with and persuade). Of course, the words we use are not our own. The English language predates us; we speak the sentences of ages. Though the words are not really ours, at times it is necessary stand up and take responsibility for the words we speak. This is the foundation of rhetorical ethics. The same is true for our emotions. Our emotions do not strictly belong to us. We catch emotions that we are attuned to and primed for like a cold. Nevertheless, at times we must take responsibility for how we are feeling—not because others tell us to be more responsible—not because responsibility is demanded by authority—but because if we do not take responsibly we will perpetually suffer. This is the foundation of emotional ethics. If we refuse to take responsibility for how we feel, we are subject to the vicissitudes of the world.94 In a stunted state of stultitia, we are of little use to others, and we can do little good for them. Emotions feel private, but emotions are in fact social, political, and rhetorical. If we are to relearn the art of gratitude, then, we must attend to our situated emotional landscape—what Heidegger calls our thrownness.95 When we are born, we are thrown into a world that we did not create, alive with conversations we did not begin and built upon traditions we

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did not initiate. We speak a language that is not our own, a language that controls us as much as we control it. We live subject to norms and rules we did not fashion and that, often, we do not understand or even agree with. To be human is to be a creature of doxa, a word Aristotle used to represent the beliefs a particular culture assumes to be true. The word “δόξα” (doxa) is derived from the verb “δοκέω” (dokéō), which means to think, suppose, imagine, and expect. Doxa represents what is taken for granted in our society—hence our English word “paradox,” from the Greek “παράδοξος,” something that is contrary to expectation and common sense.96 Growing up we learn to measure our words, our thoughts, our beliefs, and even our self-worth, against the contingent, provisional truths of doxa. Foucault calls this process “veridiction.”97 The conditions of our thrownness dispose us to interact with others and with the world in certain ways. These conditions also dispose us to feel in certain ways.98 This is precisely why I will offer a genealogy of the debt of gratitude in the following chapters—by studying our rhetorical heritage, I believe it is possible to better understand the present in which we find ourselves, with all of its possibilities and limitations. Walt Whitman is right: “For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?”99 If we are unaware, we will be forever tripping over the past. Historia magistra vitae, it was said during the Middle Ages. Foucault did not believe that rhetoric was an art of the care of the self. In fact, central to Foucault’s project is the sharp line he draws between rhetoric and “παρρησία” (parrhesia), frank, fearless speech. Parrhesia is the means by which the teacher lends the student a hand, pulling him or her out of the state of stultitia—parrhesia is, in short, the language of the care of the self. Foucault’s parrhesia is a kind of mythic speech, for it purportedly exists outside of social convention, untethered from cultural norms, values, and the dominant rules of public speaking.100 Foucault defines rhetoric, on the other hand, as a learned art (a techne) interested in flattering or manipulating an audience by invoking commonplaces, doxa, and dominant cultural conventions.101 Foucault thus describes rhetoric much as Plato does in his Gorgias. For Foucault, rhetoric affirms, and does not challenge, social norms, making it antithetical to parrhesia, the care of the self, and philosophy. “I do not think that parrhesia should be classified or understood from the point of view of rhetoric,” he writes.102 In fact, the discourse of the care of the self “is above all a critique of the teachers of rhetoric.”103 Rhetoric is flattery, not philosophy.104 For Foucault,

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then, the ancient division “between philosophy and rhetoric begins to be marked out” in the ancient discourse on the care of the self.105 I’m not sure why Foucault believes that parrhesia can exist outside of social convention and is “fundamentally freed from the rules of rhetoric.”106 Any student of classical rhetoric would have understood that parrhesia is a genre to be learned, and is therefore rhetorical.107 Moreover, I’m not sure why Foucault holds such a grudge against rhetoric, or why he understands rhetoric so narrowly, as a synonym for belles lettres and thus as disciplinary training aimed at reinforcing cultural norms.108 Vital as it is to my own discipline’s history, the purported conflict between rhetoric and philosophy is an old story that I’ve grown tired of hearing. If we are going to rehabilitate democracy in the twenty-first century, philosophers and rhetorical scholars must work together, hand-in-hand, to defend the humanities and teach our students to care for themselves. So let us put the tired Plato-versus-the-Sophists motif to bed once and for all and move on together. Foucault was clearly mistaken when he stated that rhetoric had nothing to do with care of the self. I proceed from the assumption that rhetoric is a foundational democratic art. Indeed, the call to care for oneself—the parrhesiastic words of the teacher directed to the person in a state of stultitia—will be rhetorical, aimed at convincing the listless citizen to make a fundamental change in emotional outlook. Moreover, rhetoric is a foundational practice of the democratic care of the self—rhetoric is, as Kenneth Burke says, “equipment for living.” The ancients understood this well, ranking the study of rhetoric as a foundational “spiritual exercise.”109 From Plato’s Phaedrus to Isocrates’s Antidosis, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Vico’s The New Science, Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change, Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture, James Crosswhite’s Deep Rhetoric, Scott Stroud’s John Dewey and the Artful Life, Nathan Crick’s Democracy and Rhetoric, Gerard Hauser’s Prisoners of Conscience, Mari Lee Mifsud’s Rhetoric and the Gift, and Debra Hawhee’s Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, scholars have long described how the study and practice of rhetoric brings about a change in perspective that prepares individuals for democratic life. This is also my aim in The Art of Gratitude. By changing our rhetoric about gratitude we can also change how we experience gratitude. I hope, in the following chapters, to aid in this rhetorical conversion. I will argue in chapter 5 that gratefulness can revitalize contemporary democracy. To transcend the debt of gratitude, however, we must first

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grapple with the greatest danger to our democratic aspirations—namely, neoliberalism, which teaches us the debt of gratitude in order to affirm the tyranny of the market. There are some contemporary writers who suggest that Foucault’s later work on the care of the self champions neoliberalism. I acknowledge but firmly reject this argument. In fact, I cannot understand how any careful reader of Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, titled The Birth of Biopolitics, could hold this position.110 I fail to see why Foucault’s trenchant critique of French Marxism, and his interest in the individual’s capacity to resist political power, makes him a neoliberal.111 The inability to take the individual as a lived art seriously, and the denigration of any philosophy that does, is a great failure of contemporary critical and rhetorical theory. It is possible to take the individual seriously without being a neoliberal lackey. The art of gratitude as I outline it in this book stands firmly against both neoliberalism and the debt of gratitude. Before we can reclaim gratitude as a democratic emotion, however, we must first study how the contemporary gratitude literature, which focuses on positive psychology and individual well-being, has been enlisted in the service of neoliberalism (though as a popular genre of self-help literature it never uses this ugly, sesquipedalian word). Though it is not specifically an American innovation, neoliberalism has found a happy home in the United States due to its resonance with deep-seated American values and cultural assumptions.112 Since our founding days, Americans have celebrated autonomy and self-reliance as core values. But make no mistake, no one is an island. None of us, no matter how rich or how poor, does it alone. All of us are reliant on the support and goodness of others. Too many Americans view individualism in line with what John Dewey dubbed the “old liberalism.”113 For Dewey, the problem with old liberalism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke is that it imagines the individual incorrectly, as pre-social and ready-made. The social contract tradition is wrong when it says that individuals predate society. We become who we are through communication and engagement with others. Moreover, alone we are weak and feeble. It is only by joining with others in a community that we gain the capacity to effect change in the world. Human agency is interconnected. Heidegger argues in Being and Time that we “ek-sist,” emphasizing the ek, which is the ancient Greek prefix meaning “from” or “out of.” We ek-sist in a context, in a world, and it is from this world that we derive our powers. Yet in the United

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States, we are told to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” to “paddle your own canoe,” to “put your shoulder to the wheel.”114 A character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick explains the American ethos this way: “In case nobody has told you . . . this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else—where everybody learns to make his or her own way.”115 In America, we are supposed to live lives of the unconditional I-can-do-it-by-myself. We are told from a young age to go it alone. In America, individual agency means acting by ourselves to control the future with hard work and sheer force of will.116 This vision of agency is alluring but unrealistic. While old liberalism promises us strength, in reality it makes us weak, for it loads more weight onto our backs than we can bear by ourselves. How Americans are educated to imagine the individual will—as sovereign and infinitely powerful—makes us responsible for everything that happens to us and culpable for all that goes wrong in our lives. The American vision of agency as sovereign self-reliance had made the United States fertile ground for the rise of neoliberalism.117 This economic paradigm applies the logic of the market to every facet of our lives, even those that have nothing to do with economics (like friendship, love, and citizenship). Over the past forty years neoliberalism has even applied the logic of the market to our colleges and universities, with generally bleak results. Indeed, at the new corporatized, neoliberal university in which students are “customers” and the value of the “brand” trumps all else, instruction has been reduced to little more than professional training for the market—professors are encouraged to help students recoup their “investment” in education by providing them with usable, fungible content that will help them be fitter, happier, more productive, more docile employees.118 As a consequence of neoliberalism, Americans are no longer citizens, we are consumers, and life becomes about profit and gain. The triumph of market logic fractures communities and maximizes individual responsibility: we are told that because we are on our own, our successes and our failures are ours and ours alone.119 We have been “responsibilized,” that is, made responsible for circumstances and conditions that are often far beyond our control.120 As our lives have been turned into markets, old liberalism has come back with a vengeance in a new, extremely virulent form. We have adapted to neoliberalism by focusing on ourselves first, and others second, if at all. And so we find ourselves closed off to the communities that support us. The result is that we would-be heroes are left isolated, weak, alone.

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Implored to be responsible for everything that happens in our lives, Americans have adapted to neoliberalism by becoming more selfish. The Baby Boomers were called the “Me Generation.” In 2013, Time magazine ran a cover calling Millennials “The Me Me Me Generation.”121 Academics deride young Americans as “excellent sheep”122 and “entitled little shit[s]”123 who are selfish and “morally inarticulate.”124 Without question, many of my fellow citizens have adopted a perspective that says it’s all me, the world is my selfie, I made this, I rise, and I fall, by my own effort, so get out of my way—but it’s not just young Americans who think and act like this; the me-first disease is much more widespread, because it is practically demanded by our economy. Besides, my students, and young Americans in general, face a world that is in many ways far scarier than it was for previous generations, and they are doing their best to play a game that often seems rigged against them. Into their twenties they emerge heavily indebted from colleges and universities and often, sadly, without much apparent hope that the world can be different. As educators, we must figure out how to counteract the rampant hopelessness and apathy amongst our college students. Overturning the debt of gratitude would certainly help. Unlike many progressive intellectuals, I have not given up hope for my students. I have found them to be pretty remarkable, when they are given the chance to speak up. It is easy to condemn people for being selfish and materialistic, but we must remember that such foibles occur within a social context.125 By applying the logic of the market to all domains, neoliberalism has tarnished the democratic concepts such as citizenship, community, and the common good. Building on the classical liberal dogma that individuals should be protected from government as much as possible, neoliberalism has eroded the ability of government to function in all areas of our lives except economic regulation (and then government functions only as a proxy for neoliberalism, extending its reach into new domains). To run government like a business is to abandon the purpose of government. We live in a time of waning sovereignty, for government, too, has been eviscerated by the profit logic of the market.126 Today, government has been so profoundly corrupted by the market logic that it is unable to do its most basic job—protecting the common good. And so, far-too-many Americans are left feeling like refugees in our own land. By weakening the social safety net and denying that there is a common good, neoliberalism has caught us between a rock and a hard place. We must be selfishly responsible for ourselves, and yet we face an

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uncertain world that is constantly outrunning our control. Mass layoffs, the collapse of the housing market, staggering medical costs, global warming, ends-less war, the erosion of the middle class, rampant racism, sexism, and homophobia, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and escalating levels of debt (including student debt), have made many Americans dependent upon the charity and generosity of others because wealthy benefactors, corporations, and nonprofits must step in to do the jobs that government should do, including protecting citizens from unnecessary dangers, providing health care, and defending citizens from natural disasters and then caring for them in the aftermath of catastrophe. Enter gratitude. Alarm over our selfishness, and general lack of empathy for the plight of others—what William James called a “certain blindness” that afflicts us all—drives contemporary interest in gratitude.127 Supposedly, gratitude will make us less selfish and more content. However, I worry that the contemporary gratitude literature encourages a kind of “cruel optimism,” in which we become attached to an emotion that continually disappoints and frustrates us.128 This is because, I will argue in the following chapters, the debt of gratitude is not meant to challenge neoliberalism but instead to teach us how to psychologically adjust to it. Cicero believed that gratitude could make a life in debt easier to bear. Under neoliberalism, the debt of gratitude is one way we are taught to manage the inevitable civic resentment generated by the failure of government to enforce the common good. Gratitude-as-indebtedness works as an opiate to soothe our discomfort and keep us quietly chugging along into an uncertain future. The rhetoric of the debt of gratitude has become one of the most effective techniques of power in the contemporary world. Indeed, the debt of gratitude works alongside the politics of resentment and a resurgent enemyship—which compensates us for our eroded civic power with participation in a militant, nationalistic, often racist ethnos shouted from the bully pulpit IN ALL CAPS!—to keep citizens from exercising their collective democratic might. Though such rhetorics might feel like rebellion, in fact screaming at each other in hatred and fear and resentment is one way that we as citizens uphold the status quo. Neoliberalism fundamentally alters our emotional landscape.129 Neoliberalism condemns negative emotions, instructing us that we simply do not have time to be sad or angry because we must always be busy, busy, busy, and it actively works to pathologize, and even criminalize, emotions

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such as depression that harm productivity and create dissonance in the workplace.130 Neoliberalism mandates that we remain optimistic131 and happy132 even in the face of the most difficult, impossible, soul-sapping situations. Feminist and queer scholars contend that because neoliberalism has so completely colonized the positive emotions, including happiness and love, we must reclaim the negative affects and “ugly feelings,” including envy, irritation, paranoia, melancholy, and depression that reside at the edges of neoliberalism and that have traditionally been marginalized in progressive politics.133 It was in this spirit that I wrote my previous book The Politics of Resentment, which was my humble attempt to reclaim resentment as an emotion that could reinvigorate democracy against the damage of neoliberalism. I celebrate many of the hard-won insights of the scholars of ugly feelings. My project in The Art of Gratitude provides a complement but also an alternative to the contemporary celebration of negative affect. My goal is to reclaim a positive emotion from the clutches of neoliberalism so that it can be used against it and in the service of democracy. Gratitude can be a powerful democratic emotion, if it is separated from the rhetoric of debt. If it is not, then gratitude is just another emotion that keeps us in check. We must learn to speak differently. By changing our rhetoric, we can also change how we feel and thus how we experience the world. But first we must map the ground on which we stand, the terra firma of the debt of gratitude.

2

From “Charis” to “Gratia” On the Political Origins of the Debt of Gratitude

Gratitude is not only the greatest of all virtues, but the mother of all the rest.1 —Cicero, Pro Plancio

One of the most popular contemporary books on gratitude is also something of an outlier: Janice Kaplan’s The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year of Living on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life (2015). Amidst the author’s descriptions of her conversations with celebrities and lush, lavish caviar dinners—there is no question that Kaplan, a former editor of Parade magazine, leads a charmed life—she breaks from conventional wisdom, and almost every other writer on the subject, when she distinguishes, in one quick paragraph, gratitude from obligation and indebtedness.2 Of course, she does not stop to discuss just how important, or idiosyncratic, this distinction is. Kaplan’s book does not go far enough. She remains squarely focused on the individual benefits of gratitude, and she has little to say about the social and political possibilities of gratefulness. Moreover, she says nothing about the long history of gratitude in the West. Nevertheless, by distinguishing obligation from gratitude, Kaplan’s The Gratitude Diaries makes an important contribution to the literature. In spite of what Kaplan says in The Gratitude Diaries, in everyday parlance, and in the majority of the contemporary works on the subject,

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“gratitude” is a synonym for obligation and debt. I am heartened by the fact that Kaplan distinguishes gratitude from debt—ultimately I will do the same. We cannot just speak the word and assume it is so, however. On the question of gratitude, we cannot beg the question. We cannot win the rhetorical campaign without fighting the battle. In support of those who attempt to disentangle gratitude from indebtedness, in the next three chapters I offer a genealogy of the long history that associates these two feelings like a key and its lock. People today turn to gratitude as an antidote to our shallow, materialistic, egoistic culture and all the needless forms of suffering it invites. We want to live happier, healthier, richer, and fuller lives whose worth is determined not by how much stuff we have or how big our house is. We want to reconnect to the people around us, we want to experience the beauty of the world, we want to enjoy life and move beyond debt. To do so, we must confront two millennia of philosophical instruction that gratitude means indebtedness. In the first chapter of her book, Kaplan quotes Cicero on gratitude: “The Roman philosopher Cicero famously said, Gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of all the others.”3 Near the close of her book, she quotes Aristotle: “Back in about 350 BCE, Aristotle pointed out that gratitude is felt toward him who gives, and in his famous treatise on ethics, he advised it was virtuous and noble to give to the right people, the right amounts, and at the right time, with all the other qualifications that accompany right giving.”4 It is no surprise that Kaplan quotes Cicero—almost everyone writing about gratitude offers some version of this quote, for it situates gratitude right at the heart of morality and ethics in the Western tradition.5 It is surprising that she quotes Aristotle, who in his Nicomachean Ethics advised virtuous people to avoid gratitude like the plague. Aristotle’s virtuous person valued personal autonomy above all else. This person refused to be dependent upon anyone else. Gratitude (in ancient Greek, “χάρις”) was a problem for Aristotle because he believed that to feel grateful to another was also to feel indebted to them. Cicero, too, recognized gratitude (in Latin, “gratia”) as a synonym for indebtedness and obligation. But rather than shun gratitude, Cicero attempted to capitalize upon it as a way of controlling others, especially the pesky masses of poor Romans who caused so much trouble for the rich Roman aristocrats running the show. Cicero saw what so many now see: grati-

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tude can put a person in debt like a bank. Like a bank, the person who wields gratitude is not a giver, but a lender who will have his return: a return with interest. This interest is his interest: not charity, but profit, control, and domination. In this tradition, the giver is not so much a benefactor as a malefactor. They say beware of Greeks bearing gifts, but it is not just our “enemies” we must beware. When Cicero speaks of gratitude, amicorum munera non munera. Cicero is important to my genealogy because he was the first to theorize gratitude as a form of political and social power. Today we are taught the debt of gratitude. This rhetoric is nothing new. In fact, it is as old as Western civilization itself. Cicero was its earliest theorist, and his ghost looms large over the contemporary gratitude literature. For the many contemporary writers who proudly quote Cicero, his words are not some distant echo from a forgotten past but are in fact a clarion call for better relations in the demanding now. Yet behind Cicero’s words, marshaled repeatedly and approvingly in the contemporary literature, are millennia of political conflict and anti-democratic sentiment. In fact, a hidden conflict over gratitude is at the very center of Western politics. Far from being a tenderhearted champion of unbounded human generosity, Cicero offered gratitude to the rich and powerful as a tool that they could use to neutralize democracy. Though he softened many of Cicero’s conclusions, Seneca ultimately intensified gratitude as an antidemocratic emotion. This Roman blueprint has proven useful repeatedly throughout Western history. Even today, gratitude is employed to manage the indebted, resentful masses. If we are to reclaim gratitude as a democratic emotion, we must first outline how it is turned against democracy.

Ciceronian Gratitude In one of the foundational works of modern sociology, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), Marcel Mauss positions the debt of gratitude at the heart of human community. In the archaic societies of both the East and the West, Mauss finds three basic social obligations—to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.6 In these ancient cultures, the line between people and things was not as clear as it is today.7 In fact, things were believed to be an extension of persons, and

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so people became bound through the exchange of things.8 Unfolding like a great public drama, the giving and receiving of gifts tied individuals, families, and communities—and thus society itself—together. The basic social dynamic was captured in two ancient mottos: the Latin do ut des and the Sanskrit dadami se, dehi me, which both read something like “I give to you so that you will give back to me.”9 In this world, gifts demanded a return, and as a consequence there were no free gifts—to give was to demand a return, and to receive a gift was to become indebted to the benefactor.10 Though giving and receiving were social obligations in the ancient world, becoming indebted to a benefactor nevertheless carried with it a terrible stigma. Mauss observes that in ancient Roman law the giver of a thing (res) gained a power over the receiver, who was said to be “reus,” the Latin genitive of “res”—the receiver is “possessed by the thing” and by his benefactor. Another meaning of reus in Latin is “guilty.” “The mere fact of having the thing puts the accipiens [the receiver] in the uncertain state of quasi-culpability (damnatus, nexus, aere obaeratus), of spiritual inferiority and moral inequality.”11 Deep in the ancient history of gratitude, it was commonly assumed that the receiver of beneficence was subject to public condemnation (damnatus) because he was morally guilty for putting himself in the position of needing assistance. He was also nexus, a category in Roman law that generally applied to formal contracts but which also was commonly used to enforce debts of gratitude. Nexus meant that if the receiver of a benefit was unable to repay his debt, he became the giver’s slave—a “free slave” who was free in relationship to all other Roman citizens but a slave to his benefactor.12 Americans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries understood what it meant to be nexus when they fell upon tough times and were thrown into debtors’ prisons or forced into debt slavery. Immigrants who came to the United States only to become free slaves in the form of indentured servants understood nexus. So, too, did emancipated slaves. All were subject to the damnatus of the community. Today, those who are on public support—those who Ronald Reagan famously and cruelty castigated as “welfare queens”—understand the condemnation associated with the debt of gratitude. Though they often work three or four jobs to get by, they are slammed as “freeloaders.” Decimated by neoliberalism, the twenty-first-century working class also understands what it means to be damnatus. Promised prosperity in return for hard work, and boy

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have they worked hard, they now hover above the poverty line, barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck, living in fear of an illness or an injury that would send them to the emergency room and right into insolvency. For much of Western history, gratitude has been an emotion associated with this triple demand to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. Gratitude has long been understood as the appropriate feeling to accompany the receipt of a gift. I like thank yous as much as the next guy. I grew up in Kansas, where “thank you, sir” and “thank you, ma’am” are obligatory expressions of basic social grace. Gratitude as a thank you for gifts received is certainly an important emotion for keeping the wheels of society turning.13 There is a catch, however. Mauss observes that, in many of the ancient societies he studied, gift-giving was supposed to be “both disinterested and obligatory.”14 But for the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was not disinterested—beneficence was self-interested, because the giver of a gift understood two things: first, that the gift had to be reciprocated; and second, that the very act of giving created powerful bond that could be leveraged to force the inferior, guilty party to behave as the giver desired. The trouble then—and it clearly remains a trouble today—is that gifts are often given with the express purpose of creating feelings of obligation and debt in the recipient. There are many who give solely to bring another person under their control. In such situations, gratitude becomes a demand the wealthy and powerful make upon the weak. The grateful thank you, so loving on the surface, in fact reveals a history of obligation, debt, and violence that has underlined the history of morality and governance in the West. This is especially clear in Cicero’s writings, which sound strikingly—at times shockingly—modern. Cicero was a prominent lawyer, philosopher, orator, and politician living during the last days of the Roman Republic. He was one of the fathers of Western humanism, and he helped to shape the vocabulary by which contemporary philosophers and political thinkers continue to imagine human potential. One of Cicero’s self-appointed tasks was to interpret Greek philosophy for Roman elites. This included extensive work translating Greek writings on emotion into the Latin of his day. Much of Cicero’s work on emotion was cribbed straight from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which was unquestionably the single most important treatment of the emotions in the ancient world.15 Cicero agreed with Aristotle about the power of emotions: we see the world through the lens of our feelings. Humans are affected beings. Cicero was a dutiful and devoted student

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of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Yet one emotion on which Cicero, and the Roman moral philosophers more generally, differed from Aristotle was gratitude: in ancient Greek “χάρις” (charis), in Latin “gratia.” The Greek word “charis” meant interpersonal gratitude and also the beautiful glow that accompanied the favor of the gods. In the Odyssey (8.19), Athena caused charis to be “poured over the head and shoulders” of Odysseus, making him beautiful to behold. Aristotle did not object to this charis—humans were rightly grateful for the favor of the gods. Instead, Aristotle rejected the debt of gratitude triggered by exchange, the other type of charis that was omnipresent in Homer’s poems.16 Virtuous people, he argued in his Nicomachean Ethics, did their best to avoid having to feel gratitude. Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to claim that there is no such thing as a free gift. To feel gratitude toward another was to acknowledge a state of indebtedness to that person, and debt in all its forms was incompatible with honor. It was possible for Odysseus to be honorable even in debt to a goddess, but there was no honor for the man who found himself indebted to another man. Aristotle’s great-souled man “is the sort of person who does favors but is ashamed to have them done for him, since the former belongs to one who is superior, but the latter to one who has someone superior to him.”17 He might give, because giving is one way to bring others into his debt. Yet he refuses to receive gifts because he values his independence, honor, and autonomy above all else. When he is unfortunate enough to receive a favor, the great-souled man returns it with an even bigger favor in order to put the original giver in his debt.18 Because gratitude involved obligation, Aristotle thought it more virtuous to deny gifts and shirk the debt of gratitude altogether. Cicero disagreed, for he sought to capitalize upon political power of gratitude. Cicero’s offered his most extensive treatment of gratitude in his book On Obligations (De Officiis, which sometimes is translated as On Duties), a book that has been called, by a leading contemporary philosopher, “perhaps the most influential book in the Western tradition of political philosophy.”19 More than any other work, this book has shaped Western views of gratitude. Though it was not written by a Christian, in 390 CE, St. Ambrose declared it legitimate for Christians to reference and utilize On Obligations and every other work by Cicero (and Seneca as well). In the coming centuries, On Obligations exercised a profound influence on Church Fathers including St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St.

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Thomas Aquinas. Following the invention of the printing press, it was the second book printed after the Gutenberg Bible.20 On Obligations was considered an important guide to morality by Petrarch, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Grotius, Pufendorf, John Locke, and Voltaire. American students during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries learned their Cicero by heart.21 Today, Americans learn Cicero through his many citations in, and his philosophical influence over, the contemporary gratitude literature.22 Cicero’s On Obligations was written during an acute legitimation crisis for the Roman Republic. Cicero composed On Obligations in late 44 BCE, only six months after the assassination of Julius Caesar and in the midst of a civil war between followers of Caesar and his republican opponents. Cicero himself would be assassinated just a year later, a casualty of the conflict over succession. As leading figures jockeyed for control and threats of violence filled the forum, Cicero worked the levers of power in the Senate and, imagining life after the civil war, composed his famous treatise on obligation, duty, and gratitude. He believed that gratitude was the perfect emotion for calming Romans down, for ensuring that the right politicians who were committed to the Roman constitution (like himself ) filled the power vacuum, and for putting the masses in their proper place.23 Gratitude, in Latin gratia, was a foundational political emotion in Roman society.24 When used as an adverb, gratis—originally gratiis (“with thanks”)—meant “for free,” so one might suspect that gratitude was freely offered in response to a gift or benefit. Yet, for Cicero, both the speech act of gratitude and the repayment of a gift, were obligatory. Anytime someone gave another Roman a gift or did them a favor, a return was required. To be labeled “ungrateful” was a powerful condemnation in Roman public address. If a person was ungrateful, gifts could be cancelled, and the ingrate could be severely punished—by society, and perhaps even by the gods.25 As Cicero understood it, the most foundational laws of justice necessitated the return of a gift. Here is where gratitude entered the equation. Gratitude was the emotion that made the obligation to return the original gift palpable to the debtor—gratitude made the status of damnatus, and the guilt associated with receiving a gift, bearable. Moreover, it was gratitude that allowed the nexus (the legal slave) to bear that terrible burden as long as it lasted. Gratitude, in short, kept the debtor from going mad. Moreover, gratitude was an emotional antidote to the

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resentment that naturally accompanied indebtedness. As Aristotle recognized, gratitude was a code word for indebtedness. It was this feeling of gratitude as indebtedness that Cicero valued and wished to cultivate in the masses. When Cicero claimed that gratitude was the mother to all the virtues [mater virtutum omnium], its offspring was not joy or contentment but indebtedness and obligation. Cicero was one of the world’s greatest champions of the debt of gratitude. In Roman hands, gratitude made gifts perfect shackles. “Do ut des,” “I give so that you may give back to me in return”— this was the basic motto of Roman life.26 Gratitude was the psychological state that bound two individuals together in a state of obligation and, in Roman society, patronage. When Cicero proclaimed gratitude the first of all virtues and the mother of all others, he was addressing gratitude’s centrality to Roman political life.27 Though contemporary scholars and writers and self-help gurus discuss gratitude primarily as a personal emotion, Cicero believed gratitude to be a political emotion—and not just any political emotion, but the most important political emotion. The purpose of gratitude was twofold: first, to bind the poor to the rich, the plebs to the Senate; and second, to defuse the resentment the poor masses felt toward the rich Roman nobles in times of want. In Cicero’s estimation, gratitude was necessary to manage the class divisions at the heart of Roman society and to preempt those leaders, called δημαγωγός in ancient Greece and populares in Rome, who would attempt to enflame the resentment of the poor for their own political ends. The historian Livy described Roman politics as “duas civitates ex una factas,” two cities having been made out of one, “each side with their own magistrates and laws.”28 The “two cities” Livy spoke of were the rich and the poor.29 The basic social distinction between citizens and the Senate or elders, between the people and the Roman elite, was institutionalized in Roman politics.30 Moreover, the battle between rich and poor was allegorized in a number of prominent Roman myths, including the fratricidal tragedy of Romulus and Remus, and displayed in the very logo (SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus) and language the Romans used to represent politics to themselves and the world.31 The battle simmered in the background of Roman life, and formed the backdrop to Cicero’s writings on politics, rhetoric, and law. The philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome accepted the clash between rich and poor as a basic social fact, and with it, they also

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accepted resentment (“φθόνος” [phthonos] in Greek, “invidia” in Latin) as a basic and inevitable democratic emotion.32 Though inevitable and perhaps inescapable, resentment was nevertheless widely recognized by the wealthy elite to be the most violent and unpredictable of all political emotions. Following the assassination of Julius Caesar, prominent populares politicians menaced Rome with their legions and appealed to the masses to drum up support for their political careers. For Cicero, gratitude was the one emotion that could counter the terrible power of popular resentment and cow the poor, who had numbers on their side, into obeying the commands of the wealthy Senators, who were powerful, but few in number and thus deeply vulnerable to popular violence. Cicero’s philosophy of gratitude must be understood in the context of his critique of democracy. Cicero’s philosophy has been called “a humane conservatism.”33 He respected the rights of citizens under the Roman constitution, but he believed that common people should stay in the background and leave the politics to great men like himself. Cicero believed that for Rome to prosper, power must be held by the aristocracy, and “no act of a popular assembly should be valid unless ordered by the Senate.”34 Like many conservatives throughout history, Cicero detested democracy, which he understood as government of the poor, the unqualified, and the worthless. On this point he was not alone, for Western philosophy was invented by critics of democracy.35 Cicero voiced the typical elite fear that tensions between rich and poor would explode, as they did from time to time, into violence as the masses acted out their resentment toward the nobles.36 Like Aristotle, Cicero viewed popular resentment to be the most dangerous political emotion. If there was to be political stability and social prosperity in Rome, he believed that elites had to crush popular resentment.37 For Cicero, the mark of a good rhetorician was his ability to calm democratic resentment—for it was by soothing popular resentment that elite speakers perpetuated the stability of a status quo that was in their favor.38 Cicero’s ideal society consisted of rich and powerful Romans devoted to the Republic leading a passive people to a calm and dignified peace.39 For Cicero, rhetoric was a potent tool for establishing elite rule and cultivating popular acquiescence to that rule. Today, we often think of rhetoric as the art by which people are riled up and moved to action. Cicero praised this side of rhetoric, but he also valued rhetoric’s ability to calm, soothe, and mollify an angry audience. Above all else, Cicero

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valued the power of rhetoric to promote quiet (in Latin, otium).40 In the hands of a skilled speaker, rhetoric was a great chiller of popular affect. Though it was imperative that the elite orator be competent in riling up an audience, one of his primary jobs was to bring them to rest. A good speaker was savvy in the art of revocare, calling back an audience from the precipice of resentful violence.41 “Nothing is so easy as to divert a crowd from pain and often from ill will by means of a timely and terse and wise and lively phrase,” he averred.42 Diverting a crowd from temporary eruptions of anger might be “easy,” but calming inveterate resentment was not. Cicero repeated time and time again that the greatest enemy to political stability was “invidia,” resentment. When confronting a resentful crowd, an elite orator had to draw on all of his resources and his full ingenuity, and even then the outcome of such a dangerous rhetorical situation was uncertain and could sour quickly. In ancient Rome, gratitude was a second front in the elite fight to contain democracy and prevent the demos from falling prey to demagoguery—a front that focused less on persuasion and more on pedagogy, less on action and more on attitude. Cicero recognized that a resentful crowd was unpredictable and rarely satisfied for long by bread and circuses. Political elites in the West have long known that it is better to educate a people to be compliant and acquiescent than to have to convince a rowdy and resentful crowd to stand down. This explains why Cicero founded his vision of moral education on gratitude. For him, gratitude taught the Roman poor how to respect to their aristocratic superiors by recognizing their indebtedness to them. To school the public in gratitude was to teach them to obey the orders, and heed the wishes, of their rich masters. In the hands of the Romans, gratitude became an art of governing. In On Obligations, Cicero described gratitude as a matter of justice.43 Justice demanded that every person be given his due, and this included, first and foremost, repaying a gift or a favor with a reciprocal gift or favor. The demand for repayment was iron clad and irrevocable. In matters of justice, “no obligation is more pressing than the return of a favor.”44 Note Cicero’s words here: there is no obligation, no rule, no commandment (not to be honest or respect life or refrain from beating up the rich Roman on the corner and stealing his stuff) more important than returning a favor or gift. The obligation to return a favor was the foundational moral obligation of civilization.

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Cicero was a master rhetorician. He used the Latin language to its optimal effect. In On Obligations, Cicero made perhaps the single most significant rhetorical choice in the history of Western gratitude. When speaking of gift giving and its obligations, Cicero utilized the rhetorical trope of “hendiadys,” the splitting of a single thing into two. In the simple exchange of gifts, Cicero twinned what was due upon return: the thanks, and the reciprocal gift. The giver gave one thing but was due two: first, a thank you; and second, the repayment of the original gift in some materially tangible form. Splitting gratitude from the material debt allowed for the creation of a relationship between these two obligations, such that for Cicero (and later for Seneca) gratitude was the psychological state that made being in debt palatable. In the Ciceronian tradition, gratitude is the political emotion that teaches us to be content with, and not resentful for, our debts. This is the testament of the debt of gratitude: let us be grateful in our debts. In On Obligations, Cicero spoke to how Romans should feel when they received a gift by instructing them in the proper philosophy of gratitude. For Cicero, gratitude was obligatory when someone received a favor or a gift. He wrote in On Invention (De Inventione), “gratitude has regard for remembering and returning obligations, honor, and acts of friendship” [gratiam, quae in memoria et remuneratione officiorum et honoris et amicitiarum observantiam teneat].45 Gratitude involved both the memory of a gift given (memoria) and an eye toward remuneration (remuneratio). At bottom, then, gratitude was an emotional accommodation to a life in debt. This is what made gratitude such a powerful political tool in the hands of Roman elites. The basic demand of justice was reciprocity. “There are two kinds of generosity,” Cicero explained. “The first bestows a kindness, and the second repays it. It is up to ourselves whether we bestow a favor or not, but the failure to repay one is not an option for a good man, so long as he can reciprocate without injustice to anyone.”46 The giving of gifts, and the grateful reciprocity of those gifts, formed a circle of obligation that held society together across its deep divisions of wealth and power. Gratitude kept the two cities that comprised Roman society at peace. Gratitude contained the democratic resentment of the citizenry. In the Roman patronage system, landlords were patrons to their tenants, and patricians to plebians. The rich brought the poor under their control, and the oldest families in Rome secured their continued

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hold over Roman politics, by their patronage. A patronage society like Rome in which do ut des, I give so that you will give back to me, was absolutely dependent upon gratitude. This is worth remembering today, as neoliberal capitalism loots the common good and pushes us ever closer to a new, postmodern patronage society. Cicero insisted that gratitude was the mother of all virtuous behavior because a patronage society positively demands gratitude if it is to function. If a Roman citizen was incapable of feeling gratitude, he was also incapable of recognizing his dependence upon wealthy benefactors. The person who felt gratitude toward his benefactors, however, recognized his debt, and this feeling blocked the development of resentment toward the nobles. Cicero was fond of repeating a rather puzzling maxim about gratitude. In his speech Pro Plancio, the very same speech in which he uttered his timeless words about gratitude that are repeatedly quoted by authors today, Cicero announced: And yet a financial debt is very different from a debt of gratitude. He who repays a financial debt loses what he has repaid, and he who owes remains in debt. But in a debt of gratitude, when he repays, he keeps, and when he keeps, in the same manner he repays. [Quamquam dissimilis est pecuniae debitio et gratiae. Nam qui pecuniam dissolvit, statim non habet id quod reddidit, qui autem debet, aes retinet alienum; gratiam autem, et qui refert, habet: et qui habet, in eo ipso, quod habet, refert.]47 He echoed these sentiments in On Obligations: Someone put it well when he said that the person who keeps his money has not repaid it, and he who has repaid it does not keep it; but the man who repays gratitude keeps it, and in keeping it has repaid it. [Commode autem, quicumque dixit, pecuniam qui habeat, non reddidisse, qui reddiderit, non habere, gratiam autem et, qui rettulerit, habere et, qui habeat, rettulisse.]48

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These quisquous sentences concern the receiver of a gift, who, Cicero insisted, was obligated by the very laws of justice to repay a benefit. The requisite reciprocity was both psychological and material. Roman society required that a person repay a material gift with a return gift, if he was able—this could be money, or time, or validation, or public support, and, of course, if we are talking support, then everyone was able. Roman gifts also demanded gratitude, and everyone was capable of gratitude. In repaying a gift, a person lost what they returned. But in repaying gratitude, a person kept the very same gratitude they gave away. Gratitude can be given and kept at the same time in one’s memory. The bonds of gratitude are not easily severed. Cicero believed that a grateful person would continue to repay the original charity time and time again with his esteem and deference. Though a debt of gratitude was different than a financial debt, it, too, was a good investment. The first philosopher of the debt of gratitude, Cicero insists that gratitude is part of an economy. Gratitude is something that one has and that one gives way. There can be a surplus, and a deficit, of gratitude. Likewise, gratitude can be demanded, and the demand for gratitude can put someone in debt. Of course, as soon as we start talking about debt we are talking about power. Cicero takes the principle that there is no free gift to a whole new level. Rather than view this as a problem, as Aristotle did, Cicero views the debt of gratitude as an opportunity for rich Romans to soothe the democratic resentment of the poor, hungry masses. For him, givers only give to enrich themselves. To give is to give something away; to give is to lose the thing given. Consequently, people only give to get a return, and justice mandates a return. Simple reciprocity, however, is not enough. The receiver of a donation is requited to puff up the giver’s ego by asserting, time and time again, their gratitude for the favor. The receiver has to put himself in the debt of the giver; to defer to his wishes; to bow before his riches; to kiss his ring; to do as he is told. This is the cruel logic of the debt of gratitude. It is cruel because, like the Romans, we continue to live in a world of scarcity and inequality in which money and resources and even the most basic human necessities such as food and water are not evenly distributed. It is cruel because humans need the support of their fellows, and also to eat. It is cruel because we all depend upon the common good for happiness and survival. It is cruel because where there is largesse there is also scarcity.

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The gods sent wheat not for the rich only. The origins of democratic resentment are found in questions such as: Is there not food? Is there not water? The debt of gratitude is cruel because it creates hierarchies that inflict violence upon those at the bottom. To transform friendship and good deeds into ways to own another person—to make food and water and shelter contingent upon an ability to repay—is not to affirm basic human sociality; it is to abuse the very nature of human community. Recognizing the reluctance of many wealthy Romans to give to those deemed unworthy or too poor to repay, Cicero acknowledged that elites should be careful in their giving.49 Beneficence might have been a virtue, but it was not indiscriminate or selfless. No one was required to give if it hurt their family’s wealth and social standing.50 The goal of gift giving was “increasing both our resources and our influence.”51 If executed properly, charity would prove “the greatest boon of wealth.”52 However, when calculating whether or not to give, Cicero counseled elite Romans not to consider the wealth of a recipient alone. “Kindnesses are better bestowed on men of integrity rather than on men well-endowed.”53 The man of integrity understood the need to express gratitude and the obligation to repay a gift. Fortunately, Cicero mused, this was one virtue—perhaps the only virtue—common to the poor as a class. Cicero was one of history’s great beraters of the poor. From behind his pathos of distance, Cicero lambasted the masses with words including improbus (shameless, morally unsound), perditus (degenerate, ruined), facinorosus (criminal, wicked), and faex (dregs), this last word being particularly derogatory, for “the word faeces, commonly used by Cicero and his contemporaries to label the lower classes, in addition to ‘dregs’ means sewage, garbage, and quite literally ‘shit.’ ”54 Echoing the sentiments of the Greek anti-democratic thinkers before him, Cicero lamented the moral turpitude of the poor and expressed his belief, shared by most of the Roman elite, that the role of common citizens in Roman politics should be minimized and carefully regulated.55 In On the Republic (De Re Publica), Cicero talked openly of his desire for aristocratic rule over the Roman imbeciles, which he asserted was the natural order of things: “Nature has provided not only that those men who are superior in virtue and in spirit should rule the weaker (inbecillioribus), but also that the weaker should be willing to obey the stronger.”56 Cicero once proposed extending suffrage to all Roman citizens, but with a catch: everyone’s votes would be reviewed by the “traditional leaders of the state” because

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“everyone knows that laws which provide secret ballots have deprived the aristocracy of all influence.”57 Fortunately, he explained in On the Laws (De Legibus), the Roman constitution was designed perfectly to achieve aristocratic rule and the demobilization of the masses, for “our law grants the appearance of liberty, preserves the influence of the aristocracy (auctoritas bonorum), and removes the causes of dispute between the classes.”58 Though Cicero castigated the poor time and time again, he acknowledged that they did have one virtue—because of their neediness, the poor were prone to gratitude. Scarcity and want were for Cicero vital to maintaining social peace between the rich and the poor, for the fact that the poor needed food and shelter and material support made them dependent upon the rich for their survival. Today we tend to think of poverty as a social problem to be rectified. The debt of gratitude encourages elites to think differently about poverty. For Cicero, the poverty of the poor had to be perpetuated, not ameliorated, if society was to be stable and tranquil. For those at the top of the social hierarchy, there are tremendous advantages to a war on the poor. This is another lesson from ancient Rome that contemporary proponents of neoliberalism understand all too well: poverty is not a problem but an advantage, for poverty creates the material conditions for the poor to become indebted to the rich. Cicero believed that gifts to the poor created a debt of gratitude that would ripen into a relationship of subordination as time passed. Moreover, gifts to the poor transformed how this class viewed rich Romans as a whole. No longer were the rich oppressors; now they were deep pockets and the source of bread.59 Whether or not poor Romans actually bought into this subordination and came to see the rich as benefactors, not oppressors, is of course a fair question. Did the poor feel truly grateful for this dependence, or was their gratitude more of a show, a savvy rhetorical performance? From Cicero’s perspective, the difference between appearance and reality mattered very little. If poor Romans were merely performing the rites of gratitude, rather than buying into them, the resulting stability was the same, and achieving stability in the face of a potential democratic revolution was one of the central goals of Cicero’s politics. Cicero was the first to develop a series of plays in a rhetorical playbook that has well served the rich and powerful for centuries and that continues to serve the proponents of neoliberalism today. Cicero’s philosophy of gratitude is driven by a profound insight: to give charity

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to the poor is to stunt their inclination toward resentment by making them indebted to their rich benefactors. In this way, charity serves the interests of social stability and public order—as does poverty. Giving gifts promotes popular acquiescence to elite rule and inaugurates a culture of gratitude that soothes political division. For those who are not soothed, for those who reject the debt of gratitude, Cicero reiterated that the duty to repay gifts would be upheld by social convention—and by the punishment of the gods. “The whole world detests one who forgets a kindness,” he surmised.60 These are punishing words. These words continue to punish us today.

Seneca’s Perpetual Debt Cicero’s On Duties was one of the two most influential Latin works on gratitude, matched only in enduring importance by Seneca’s On Benefits (De Beneficiis).61 Writing nearly a century after Cicero, Seneca worked to round off the sharp corners of Cicero’s brutal realpolitik. He attempted to change the calculus of how Romans, now living in a fully-fledged empire, viewed the giving and receiving of gifts. Distinguishing himself from Cicero, Seneca stressed, time and time again, that gratitude should never be used to gain power over another. Gratitude, for Seneca, was more precious. Gratitude was the emotion that encouraged people to recognize their common humanity and their rational preference for justice. Gratitude was nothing less than the bedrock of community life.62 While Seneca stood contrary to Cicero on many points, he did not set gratitude free from debt. In fact, by rejecting many of Cicero’s arguments, and softening his tone, Seneca made the debt of gratitude even more resolute. Seneca offered the now standard definition of gratitude as a feeling of indebtedness in response to a benefit (or gift or act of charity).63 Like Cicero, he had much to offer concerning the proper expression of gratitude. He told his readers what to say and how to say it in order to properly flatter a donor.64 Unlike Cicero, who focused almost exclusively on the mental state of a gift’s recipient, Seneca spent equal time discussing the mental state of the giver. It was the attitude of a donor that was critical for Seneca. “The ideal donor is someone who gave readily, who never requested repayment but was delighted when it came, and who—having genuinely forgotten what he gave in the first place—accepted the repay-

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ment as though he were himself the beneficiary.”65 Seneca differentiated the giving of benefits from “a shameful form of loan-sharking” (turpus feneratio).66 There was a difference between offering to help someone out and giving them a loan. Gifts were to be given freely, without hope of return.67 “Anyone who thinks about being repaid while he is giving deserves to be cheated.”68 Moreover, Seneca insisted that donors should not draw attention to the fact that they are givers, and, ideally, gifts should be given in private.69 “Someone who treats a gift as a debt to be accounted for undermines any sense of gratitude,” Seneca wrote, sharply rebuking Cicero and, apparently, flipping his philosophy on its head.70 Seneca painted a happy portrait of rich and poor Romans bound by gratitude living together in peaceful fellowship. Seneca defined gratitude as the foundational emotion of human community, and, in the closing pages of On Benefits, he urged wealthy Romans to give in order to cultivate a culture of gratitude: Let us give, even if many of our gifts are in vain. Let us nevertheless give to others; let us give to the very people on whose account we have already suffered loss. The collapse of a house does not deter anyone from building a new one, and when fire has destroyed our old household gods we lay new foundations when the ground is still warm; when a city is swallowed up, we often rebuild it on the same site. That is how stubbornly optimistic our character is. If we were not willing to try again when previous efforts have failed, then human endeavor would cease on land and sea.71 Like many contemporary authors, Seneca believed that gratitude was the life-blood of community life. He expressed a stubborn optimism that gift giving and receiving would draw out the best of people, transforming antisocial ingrates into meek and joyous Johns and Janes who recognized their “shared humanity” with both friends and enemies.72 Grateful people were able to see themselves as part of a community, and to recognize that they should be concerned with the public good, not just themselves.73 The Stoics were famous for their paradoxes and confounding sayings, which were designed, like Zen koans, to induce people to question doxa and how they were taught to view the world. Though Seneca agreed that the Stoic commonplace about gratitude—“that he who accepts a benefit

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willingly has thereby repaid it”—was a paradox, to him it was the “least puzzling” of all such paradoxes.74 For Seneca, moral virtue was found in the mind, in a person’s good intentions. To feel gratitude toward a benefactor was to return the benefit with good vibes. Had Seneca stopped there, he might have broken the Ciceronian debt of gratitude. But he did not stop there. He continued. Seneca spent the first two books of On Benefits discussing the proper mental state of a giver, yet the ghosts of resentment and ingratitude haunted him, just as they had haunted Cicero. When Seneca turned to a discussion of the ideal mental state of a receiver of a gift in the third book of On Benefits, he rooted out the deepest sources of ingratitude in the soul and tried to pull them out like weeds. He pronounced ingratitude destructive—“nothing so dissolves and disrupts the harmony of mankind as this vice”—yet also indestructible, for humans tended toward selfishness and few people were able to control their emotions as Stoicism demanded.75 Seneca marked ingratitude a disease of the heart. Ingratitude undermined the fragile bonds of social life. If left untreated, ingratitude was the first step down a slippery slope toward civil war. Gratitude, in contrast, was a centripetal force keeping society together. Though Seneca was clear that the giver of a gift could not demand gratitude, he did not say that gratitude was not an obligation for the receiver. Like Cicero, he pronounced gratitude an iron clad obligation. The crucial difference was that Seneca shifted the responsibility for managing the debt of gratitude from the giver to the recipient. Seneca did not escape Cicero’s economic rhetoric.76 He denounced shameful loan-sharking, yet he continued to speak of gratitude in the language of transaction and reciprocity and debt. He attested that gifts given create a deficit that cannot be repaid by good thoughts alone. It is this frustrating deficit—the debt of gratitude—that has haunted Westerners for centuries. Seneca was emphatic: a person might repay a gift with gratitude, but he nevertheless remained in debt. “Donors must be taught not to keep accounts, recipients must be taught that they owe even more than they have received,” Seneca announced.77 Cicero made it the responsibility of the giver to make sure a gift was repaid. Seneca let the giver off the hook. He instead shifted the responsibility for recognizing, remembering, and repaying a debt onto the gift’s recipient. This was Seneca’s great rhetorical innovation: transferring the onus for managing the debt of gratitude onto the receiver, making him responsible for his debts.

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For Seneca, the giver of a gift was free to live his life forgetting what he had given. He was free to live his life without the burden of memory. The receiver, on the contrary, had to obsess over the proper return. Moreover, the recipient had to learn to feel that he could never possibly do enough to repay a benefit given to him. Seneca argued that a truly grateful person could never be free from his debts. “Not being satisfied with one’s own expressions of gratitude, not even being able to hope to match the benefit one has received, this is the mark of a truly grateful mind.”78 The debt of gratitude, for Seneca, was perpetual and never-ending. Though the sound of Seneca’s philosophy is mellifluous, the touch of his words is cold. Seneca defined true gratitude as perpetual debt. Seneca offered the following council to Romans receiving gifts: “accept it with a kindly attitude; you have returned the favor. Not that you should think you have paid off the debt, but so that you may be indebted with a greater sense of confidence.”79 Like Cicero before him, Seneca believed that gratitude made indebtedness more palatable. Both Cicero and Seneca concluded that gratitude was a political emotion that bound poor Romans to the rich, and a personal emotion that eased the burden of being in debt. For Seneca, gratitude was a personal virtue that Romans practiced to achieve political ends. If “he who is unwilling to owe is ungrateful,” then the opposite was also true—he who was willing to owe was necessarily grateful.80 Gratitude made people more secure in their debts and more comfortable with what they owed others. Gratitude soothed the suffering of being poor, needy, and dependent. For Seneca, gratitude made the tremendous psychic weight of debt bearable. So he taught Romans to be grateful, because they were in debt. The Stoics were at the heart of the “golden age” of the care of the self that took place during the first two centuries CE.81 The Stoic practices of the care of the self were designed to promote tranquillitas, a positive internal calm in which people were left undisturbed by the agitations and fluctuations of the external world. Such practices also aimed at what Seneca called securitas, a type of mental armor that protected a person from the exterior world.82 Both “tranquility” and “security” contributed toward the achievement of the central goal of Stoicism, “απάθεια” (apatheia), which is the root of our English word “apathy”: freedom from negative emotions and attachments that throw people off their mental balance. Though committed to tranquility and security and apathy, the Stoics did not want people to be completely free from emotion. The spiritual

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exercises of Stoicism were designed to open people up to certain positive emotions, including gratitude. For the Stoics, learning to feel gratitude was a basic spiritual exercise of both public and private life. In a social world where being in debt was inevitable, gratitude provided the indebted with a feeling of tranquillitas, of being at peace in their sorry situation. On many points, Seneca’s philosophy seems progressive. Stoic philosophy celebrated the capacity for reason in all people, including the lowest classes and the slaves, who were excluded from Roman politics altogether. Yet neither Seneca, nor the Stoics more generally, worked to abolish the Roman system of slavery. Instead, Seneca taught a doctrine of internal freedom in which a slave was often said to be freer than his master—but only in his mind.83 In the case of Roman slavery, including the debt slavery of the nexus, Stoicism accommodated itself to an unjust political system by suggesting that it is what is in the mind that counts and external freedom really does not matter. Gratitude functioned similarly. In the Stoic tradition, gratitude enacted a political chilling effect. Though Seneca was much gentler than Cicero, he, too, upheld the debt of gratitude, teaching Romans to bear their burdens cheerfully and to rest easy in their debts to the wealthy and powerful. For the ancient Greeks, the goal of philosophy was to replace ignorance with knowledge. Think of Socrates’s noble work in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates spent his days running around Athens proving to anyone who would listen that they were ignorant of even the most simple and basic truths about life. Then Socrates and his interlocutors worked together to generate wisdom. For the Stoics, the trouble was not ignorance but human depravity.84 Cicero blamed society for teaching Romans bad habits: “no sooner are we born and received into the family than we are surrounded by all kinds of corrupting influences, and the most wrong headed beliefs, so that it seems almost as if we have drunk in error along with the milk of our wetnurses.”85 Seneca agreed that “learning virtue is unlearning vices” [virtutes discere vitia dediscere est].86 Yet Seneca thought the problem more severe than Cicero. For Seneca, there was an evil “in all of us” [intra nos est] directing us toward vices such as ingratitude.87 The problem was not culture but us; the problem was human sin. Ingratitude was not a bad habit. Ingratitude was an inner defect, and sin its manifestation. “Do you behave like an ingrate and claim that you are not indebted to anyone?” Seneca asked.88 The causes of ingratitude were three: greed (aviditas), resentment (invidia), and, worst of all, forgetting (obliviscor).89 In the

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Stoic tradition gratitude was a practice of scorekeeping, and it required remembering what was owed and to whom. Seneca’s final word on gratitude was this: The original giver should consider that he has had his benefit reciprocated, but the original recipient should be aware that he has not repaid it. The former should release him from his obligation, but the latter should bind himself. The former should say, ‘I have received,’ and the latter should say ‘I still owe.’90 In the closing paragraphs of On Benefits, Seneca again counseled mildness for the giver and the most severe psychic burden for the receiver. Of course, all debts must eventually be lifted, or else we are not talking about indebtedness but about slavery. If the grateful person must make “I still owe” his mantra, it raises the critical question of sabbatical. When is a gift repaid? When is gratitude enough? Only the divine knows, Seneca says.91 Even when a giver releases a person from their debt, the recipient should still bind himself to the giver with iron shackles. Gratitude is not just a debt, it is a debt without end, a perpetual debt, a debt that endures even after the original giver has released it and said, “enough.” Seneca’s philosophy of gratitude called on Romans to be content with their lot in life and their station, no matter how cruel that situation might be. It is only a short step—though not a step the Stoics took, and a step in fact they would have likely rejected—to a rhetoric that makes the poor feel guilty for the debts of gratitude they owe to wealthy benefactors. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Seneca’s On Benefits is that this treatise lays the cultural groundwork for gratitude to be yoked to guilt as kindred, backward-looking emotions of bondage. Of course, Seneca’s Stoicism had no room for guilt. Guilt was an emotion to be avoided. Yet his shifting of responsibility onto the receiver of a benefit represents a key moment in the transition from a shame culture to a guilt culture. In Seneca’s world, it was not public shaming, but instead the power of one’s conscience, that kept people in line. Guilt has long been an important political emotion in the West. Friedrich Nietzsche describes the central place of guilt in Western culture in his On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche argues that the conscience was born during Roman times when people were forced by their culture

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to keep track of their many debts so they could be properly repaid.92 Indeed, Nietzsche notes that the German word for debt, “Schuld,” also means guilt. The conscience is the affective experience of social guilt as experienced by the debtor. For Nietzsche, the moral rules we tend to associate with the conscience came later, and these rules—such as do not lie or steal—worked to protect the rights and privileges of the creditor in his relationship with the debtor. I suspect that it was actually the debt of gratitude that caused Romans to first experience the conscience, and that this conscience acted as a constant, guilty reminder of the debts that they owed and had yet to repay. When we hear our consciences speaking to us today, I would bet that we hear the same grateful words (though in a different language) that echoed in the poor heads of poor Romans, words reminding us to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” to repay one good turn with another, to remember what we owe and repay our benefactors as soon as possible. Since the days of ancient Rome, a basic move for controlling the democratic poor has been to encourage them to feel guilty for the debts they owe—and not only for the debts they owe, but for their very existence, as though life itself is a debt owed to God and State.93 To the extent that we feel guilty for being alive, we will be less likely to make demands on the powers that be for food, water, shelter, and other basic necessities. We will be less likely to talk and speak out and organize for change. We will quickly forget about questions of justice. Guilt shuts down the will to live. There is tremendous political power in the one-two punch of gratitude and guilt. If the poor masses can be made to feel guilty for amassing debts, and also guilty for being alive, then they will be less capable political actors. They will also be more vulnerable to the manipulation of charismatic speakers who provide them with momentary outlets for their sorrow.94 In the Western tradition, gratitude and guilt work together, side by side, to ensure political stability. Gratitude makes the pain of being in debt easier to bear, but this gratitude is often associated with guilt—in fact it takes on the texture and feel of guilt. To be indebted is to feel guilty for the debts that we have amassed. This experience of conscience becomes “bad conscience,” to use Nietzsche’s phrase, when the guilt we feel for outstanding debts (to others, to society, and, in certain religious traditions, to God for life) becomes the dominant mood through which we engage the world. There is a dangerous, life-destroying guilt that

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says that any problem I have is my fault, that I am what is wrong with the world, that I myself am my own worst enemy, that I must defeat myself if I am to be happy. Bad conscience says that I am a sinner, that I have an inner soul defect, and for this I am guilty. When we start to feel guilty for our lives and for demanding the things that we need to live, this is bad conscience. Anytime we feel guilt for simply being ourselves, this is bad conscience. Taken to its logical extreme, the debt of gratitude promotes a guilty gratitude that makes us suffer life rather than setting us free to live. The stakes of studying the history of gratitude should now be clear. We completely misunderstand the power of gratitude when we describe it solely as a personal emotion tied to psychological well-being. It is that, but also more. Gratitude is a political emotion whose experience, shaped by the Roman legacy of Cicero and Seneca, has a profound effect on how we live our lives. The genealogy offered in this chapter demonstrates that in the Western tradition gratitude means the debt of gratitude. So much suffering is caused today by the debt of gratitude, for this rhetoric is designed to turn us against ourselves. It is designed to hush us up. It is designed to perplex, to vex, to subordinate. To affirm life and to reclaim democracy, we must overcome the debt of gratitude.

3

“Gratitudo” On Christian Gratitude and Existential Debt

Centered on an ethic of do ut des, I give so that you may give, Roman society consisted of a complex tapestry of interpersonal debts. In the early days of Western culture, philosophers, including Cicero, hoped that gratitude would mitigate tensions between rich and poor by making life in debt easier to bear. Gratitude emerged into Western politics as an undemocratic emotion, for it was employed to accommodate people to inequality and cow the masses so that they might not rebel in resentment when their debts became too much to bear. However, even Seneca doubted that gratitude could ease the moral and psychological weight of a life in debt. “It is nevertheless extremely painful to be in debt to someone to whom you do not want to be.”1 This is the pain of the poor, forced to survive on charity. This is the pain of a people taught to be guilty, for whom life is a burden to bear rather than a chance to take. The human spirit is remarkable and can bear most burdens on stout shoulders. Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that two burdens have proven time and time again to be too much for most people: the burden of senseless, irrational, illogical suffering without design or meaning; and the burden of perpetual debt from which there is no release. There are limits, in other words, to the debt of gratitude. Past a certain point, gratitude can no longer soothe the pain of being in debt. Some debts are just too much. Some debts are just too heavy. When our debts become too

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much to bear, gratitude naturally gives way to resentment, and the debt of gratitude comes full circle. Originally designed to mitigate democratic resentment, the debt of gratitude breaks, like a dam, letting all sorts of negative emotions burst forth. In his reworking of Cicero’s coldhearted calculus, Seneca articulated a philosophy of gratitude that bound Romans in debt even more deeply, for this debt touched not just their minds but also their souls. At least Cicero believed that debts could be released. Seneca transformed the gift into psychic burden and moral shackle. Seneca’s On Benefits reveals the debt of gratitude to be one of the great causes of suffering in the West. We can only guess how it felt for poor and needy Romans to make “I still owe” their everyday mantra. We know it wasn’t easy, because the debt of gratitude set in motion one of the central dramas of Western politics as Romans struggled to be free from this emotion and its many burdens. In a number of recent works, Roberto Esposito argues that while Westerners have always valued community, community nevertheless exposes us to dangers—including what Aristotle’s great-souled man feared most, the debt of charis, gratitude—that we would rather be shielded from. At the very heart of Western politics there is therefore a tension between the desire for community (and its watchword “gratitude”) and the need for immunity from gratitude. Esposito observes that the Latin word for community, “communitas,” is a combination of the word for togetherness (“cum”) and the word “munus.” In Latin, munus can mean “onus” or “officum,” both of which connote a duty or an obligation; it can also mean “donum,” a gift, but a gift that one is duty-bound to reciprocate. This duty, as we have seen, is the debt of gratitude: “the gratitude that demands new donations.”2 At the heart of Western community is a circuit of mutual gift-giving that pulls humans into relationships with their fellow human beings. We tend to understand community not as a possession but as something that we enact through gifts and pledges and obligations and duties. Community “isn’t a having, but on the contrary, is a debt, a pledge, a gift that is to be given, and that will therefore establish a lack. The subjects of community are united by an ‘obligation,’ in the sense that we say ‘I owe you something.’ ”3 To be part of a community is to be exposed and vulnerable to gift-giving. For both Cicero and Seneca, it is the obligation created by such gifts that wins our assent to a shared, communal destiny. The trouble is that community life in the sense of Roman communitas is founded on debt, and debt can be psychologically damaging, especially

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when it takes on the form of guilt. The debts bringing us together are not petty debts that we can easily cast aside. As Seneca makes clear, the debt of gratitude is permanent, for it lives on in the bad conscience, as the one who benefits from a gift struggles with the burden of needing but not being able to repay his benefactor. In the end, Seneca’s concept of perpetual debt is self-defeating. In a state of perpetual debt, when life is flat and colored grey by debt, a grave feeling of pointlessness and impossibility causes us to suffer and stunts our ability to thrive. Enough, we cry! And we go in search of an exit. It is therefore only natural that the danger of community life gives birth to an opposite drive, immunity. To be part of a community is to be subject to the debt of gratitude. The person who is immune is not subject to this obligation.4 Immunity is the legal and emotional release from a debt of gratitude. Perhaps at first a privilege reserved for the wealthy and powerful only or for the most prominent soldiers at war (think Homer’s Achilles, pouting in his tent, refusing Agamemnon’s overtures), Esposito reveals a persistent drive in Western thought toward a general and all-encompassing immunity that will free everyone from debts of gratitude and the burdens of community life. We tire of suffering, so we seek release. Esposito contends that Western philosophy since the days of the ancient Romans has been obsessed with the project of immunity. Western history is driven by “the burden of still unpaid debts and of the desire to be relieved of them.”5 It is in this context that we can appreciate the great cultural achievement of Christianity, for this religion represents one of the most stunning attempts to articulate and put into practice a philosophy of immunity in Western history. In fact, Christianity is a wholesale rebellion against the system of Roman patronage and its grateful debtors.6 Christianity is based in a rhetoric of freedom from debt. According to many authors of contemporary works on gratitude, Christianity is the answer to the modern world’s “gratitude deficit” because it sets the world free and allows us to focus on what really matters. Whenever we encounter a rhetoric of “freedom,” we should be extra careful—for, as the popular expression says, “freedom isn’t free.” “Freedom” is a social construction. I do not mean that freedom is an illusion. I mean that our understanding of freedom, whatever it is, will be shaped by the time and the place into which we are thrown. Freedom is framed by doxa, and its meaning is constantly being negotiated and renegotiated by social actors. Freedom exists against a backdrop of possibility and impossibility, permissibility and impermissibility, what is sayable

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and what is not, what is legal and illegal. Freedom is not free of power, because freedom is a practice, and power is found in every cultural norm that governs the routines of everyday life.7 Moreover, freedom works on an affective level—some definitions strike us as more emotionally correct than others, while others just seem wrong in the gut.8 This is why Raymie McKerrow, in his seminal essay “Critical Rhetoric,” argues that scholars must focus their attention not only on “the rhetoric of domination” but also on “the rhetoric of freedom.”9 We must, of course, be attentive to moments of domination so that we can more effectively resist them. But we must also attune ourselves to the ways in which our freedom is structured by rhetorics of power. Early Christians understood that freedom was learned, and so they set out to teach their world a new definition of freedom, and a new philosophy of gratitude. Indeed, early Christians applied the Roman rhetorical theory of Cicero and Seneca, and their vision of gratia, to completely new ends. Cicero argued that there were three primary duties of the speaker, the offica oratoris: to educate (docere), to delight (delectere), and to persuade (permovere) the audience.10 Writing during the fourth and fifth centuries CE, St. Augustine, the first great rhetorical theorist of Christianity, confirmed that these remained the chief duties of the speaker.11 Like many other early Christians, Augustine was ambivalent about the pagan art of rhetoric. Deeply influenced by Cicero and Seneca, however, he believed that rhetoric could build the lasting foundation for a Christian community based on caritas, love and charity, rather than punishment, violence, or worldly debts.12 Both Cicero and Quintilian believed that only good men could become orators. The orator perfectus was “vir bonus dicendi peritus,” a good man skilled in speaking.13 Early Christians built upon this vision of rhetoric as moral training, transforming the Greek and Roman ideal of the speaker who embodies civic virtue into the ideal of the preacher teaching the world true Christian virtue. The word used in Matthew 13:10 for “preach” is “κηρύσσω” (kerusso), which also means “to proclaim.”14 As such, “the Christian address or sermon is a proclamation whose authority is based on Christian grace, a certain kind of ethical appeal that removes itself from demonstration or logic.”15 The Christian speaker is, in short, a herald of the Word. Writing for Christian preachers rather than wrangling politicians or flattering administrators, in On Christian Teaching Augustine placed the emphasis of rhetorical practice

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squarely on docere, education. Augustine observed, “the interpreter and teacher of the divine scriptures, the defender of the true faith and vanquisher of error, must communicate what is good and eradicate what is bad, and in this process of speaking must win over the antagonistic, rouse the apathetic, and make clear to those who are not conversant with the matter what they should expect.”16 The preacher is an educator first, and a pulpit persuader and crowd entertainer second, because the truth of the preacher’s words does not depend on doxa or the clashing of opinions in the public sphere. The preacher’s speech is True, with a capital “T,” for it expresses the Word of God. Moreover, every homily is a collaboration between preacher and God—the preacher must make full use of his rhetorical skills, which are essential to preparing disciples to hear the truth, and then trust that God will work though his words to educate the audience the true meaning of freedom and gratitude. According to Augustine, the divinely charged rhetoric of the Christian preacher seeks a revolution in the hearts and minds of people—it aims to change how they live their lives—it desires nothing less than a total rebuild of the individual from the ground up. Christian rhetoric is a form of “discipline” that seeks to indoctrinate acolytes into a new way of life. It does this not only by telling people “no,” do not do that, but also by telling them “yes,” do that, but do it in this particular way.17 This means that we will never understand the rhetorical power of Christianity if we focus our attention solely on “the negative.”18 Christianity teaches its disciples how to be free. The Christian public speaker indoctrinates the audience in a way of life grounded in the Truth and based on the Word. We must therefore ask of Christianity the same question we must ask of all religions and philosophies: How does Christianity encourage us to live our lives? How, in short, does it teach us to be free? Because we experience the world through our emotions, any critique of the rhetoric of freedom must focus squarely on the rhetoric of emotion. It is by educating the emotions, including love and hate and especially gratitude, that Christian rhetoric teaches its audience how to live freely. Though it has over time become the stuff of big money and big business, especially in the United States with its megachurches and silver-tonged evangelists, at its historical core Christianity is an ethic of the poor. The New Testament praises poverty as the path to God, and its authors repeatedly call on the rich and powerful to take care of the poor and needy, making sure that they have what they need to live. Take

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Proverbs 14:31: “Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him.” In the New Testament, Jesus tells his disciples, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). Jesus likewise bids them, “when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:13−14). This is Christianity at its most beautiful and dangerous and democratic: when it attacks the debt of gratitude and marshals the full rhetorical weight of its theology to release the poor from the grip of bondage. At its best, Christianity rebels against those who use their money to buy the world and put the masses in their debt, those who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 2:6). This passage from Amos is one of the most powerful in the Bible, and one of my favorites, for it condemns those who capitalize on want and poverty in order to turn a profit. Christianity defines freedom as freedom from worldly indebtedness. The New Testament describes a way of life with clear heroes and villains: blessed are the poor; damned are those who privatize the basic goods that humans need to survive, and then who sell them back at an engorged price these people cannot pay without entering into the sellers’ debt—these shameful loan-sharks are the worst sort of villains. Though it is true that we should love our enemies, the New Testament suggests that life-profiteers deserve the full-throated condemnation of all who believe in God. This is a powerful message and a truly radical, democratic definition of “freedom.” When the Bible speaks of “freedom,” it generally means the release from worldly debt, especially debt slavery (to which Amos undoubtedly refers here).19 The Christian Law of Jubilee, detailed in the Book of Leviticus, codified such freedom into law. Every seven years, all debts would be cancelled and slaves (including the poor souls who sold themselves and their children into slavery in order to repay their many crushing debts) freed from bondage.20 The Bible’s definition of “freedom” and its defense of the poor have inspired countless democratic rebels to fight in opposition to scroogery throughout the centuries. Christian freedom inspired the Levellers during the English Civil War, the Regulators of eighteenth-century colonial America, and many American martyrs during the Revolutionary War. The Christian rebellion against Roman debt is captured in the Lord’s Prayer of the Book of Matthew—“Give us this day our daily

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bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”21 Several different Christianities can be found in the different translations of this passage. The relevant Greek word here is “ὀφείλημα” (opheílēma), which, according to Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, means “that which is owed, a debt.”22 The Latin Vulgate translated “opheílēma” as “debita,” “debt.”23 I grew up more familiar with the Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer, which speaks of “trespasses” rather than “debts.” This translation comes from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549), which rendered the Latin Vulgate “debita” as “trespasses” rather than “debts” (perhaps in line with Matthew 6:14, which speaks of “trespasses” [παράπτωμα]).24 Calling on us to forgive “trespasses” waters down the original, radical meaning of this prayer, which is a call for the forgiveness of financial debts, the kind of debts that ruined people’s lives then and that continue to ruin lives today. Of course, it is even worse when Christians understand opheílēma not to mean “debts” at all, but instead to be a metaphor for “sins.” When Christians recite “forgive us our sins . . .” the Lord’s Prayer becomes a punitive attack on sinners, a way of blaming people who find themselves in debt, rather than a radical democratic call for a more just and equal social world. The Lord’s Prayer says: free us from debt slavery and gratitude-as-indebtedness. If we read it as “debts,” the Lord’s Prayer is a radical social critique that calls on everyone to have what they need to survive. We need bread—that is, we need resources, such as food and water and clean air—to live. And just as we need bread to live, so too must we be freed from our debts. Here, God is imagined as the agent of forgiveness. God forgives our debts to others, and we, acting on his model, forgive others in our debt.25 God breaks the bonds of Roman patronage. According to the New Testament, Christians recognize no social obligation and offer no gratitude but to God. Christians must practice “giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20), must “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6), and must always shun the ungrateful, who “for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened” (Rom. 1:21). To wage war against Roman patronage, early Christians, including Jesus and St. Paul, fundamentally altered the Western rhetoric of gratitude and ingratitude.26 Countering the Roman Stoics, Paul pronounced

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ingratitude the failure to recognize, acknowledge, and honor God. This meant that worldly debts, the type of debts that made the Roman world go round, were irrelevant to the true Christian. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” Paul advised (Rom. 13:8). Humans were needy creatures, and could as such accept the support of their fellows, but they should cast aside the debts that Cicero and Seneca believed so important—because ultimately all support came from God, and thanks was owed to Him and Him alone. Jesus, too, made the obligation to honor God and recognize his gift of life foundational. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus healed ten lepers, but only one returned to express his gratitude. “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?” Jesus asked, lamenting that the other nine failed “to praise God.” To the one who did return, Jesus spoke, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well” (17:17−19). It was not just this man’s faith, but his gratitude, that saved him. Understanding that highest duty of humans is to offer gratitude to God, in the New Testament Jesus called on Christians to give to everyone, including the poor, and even the undeserving. Gifts could be given indiscriminately because Christians included God in the calculus of grateful living. Giving, for Jesus, is not about winning power over another. Gifts are best given in secret, anonymously.27 This is so, Jesus testifies, because the rewards for generosity are won in heaven rather than on earth.28 In the end, on the last day, God will even everything out: the generous, rewarded, the wicked, punished.29 According to theologian Peter Leithart, the rhetoric of judgment day is Christianity’s greatest contribution to the history of gratitude. In his book Gratitude: An Intellectual History, a tome that passionately champions Christian gratitude as the only viable gratitude for the dangerous, skeptical, selfish world in which we live, Leithart writes: “There is a judgment to come, and at the judgment all the good deeds of the righteous will be rewarded, as all the deeds of the wicked will be punished. Be openhanded, be generous, Jesus can say: because the Father rewards at the last day.”30 The Roman logic of do ut des is shattered the minute the Christian God enters into the equation, for the types of interpersonal debt valued by Cicero and Seneca no longer matter. All that matters to the Christian is gratitude to God for life and to Jesus for salvation. For Leithart, Christianity breaks the bonds of gratitude-as-indebtedness, emancipating us from debt and setting us free to live lives in service to God and the church.

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Without question, both Jesus and Paul waged rhetorical war on a Roman society that organized itself along the lines of do ut des and that taught the debt of gratitude. The Christian war on worldly indebtedness continues to retain its appeal, even today. Many of the most popular contemporary writers on gratitude call for a revitalized Christian ethics in which the weight of worldly debts is lifted by God’s eternal grace.31 Christianity is indeed a dominant theme in the contemporary gratitude literature. In our disenchanted days—in these sacrilegious days of egoism and zombie capitalism—at a time when the public voices of the “new atheists” often seem as loud and forceful as the believers—many scholars are doubling down on Jesus’s message of redemption from debt. “With secularism,” Mark Mitchell writes in The Politics of Gratitude, “we come to neglect the debt of gratitude we owe to God. When we forget (or ignore) that we are contingent creatures, we inadvertently create an enormous metaphysical void.”32 Mitchell, like many of his peers, claims that we need a rebirth of Christian gratitude if we are to life happy, fulfilling lives. I am fully supportive of Christianity’s war on poverty. I cheer on my Christian brothers and sisters who work to ensure that their fellows have enough to eat and drink and a warm place to sleep. We could desperately use a time of Jubilee today. However, I do not believe that Christianity as it is presented in the contemporary gratitude literature escapes the debt of gratitude—and because it fails to escape this debt, it will be little help today as we attempt to defend democracy from neoliberalism and uphold the sanctity of the common good. Let me be completely clear: in this chapter I am not attaching Christianity. I am critiquing one particular interpretation of Christianity, one particular way of taming the radical democratic potential of the New Testament that is very common in the contemporary gratitude literature. I am critiquing those contemporary authors who invoke Jesus and St. Paul to intensify the debt of gratitude by making it a matter of heaven and hell, eternal salvation and perpetual punishment. The contemporary presentation of Christianity escalates the Roman rhetoric of the debt of gratitude by transforming life itself into a debt that must be paid. However, payment is due not now, but in the future, in the next life, at judgment day. Thus, the Christianity of the contemporary gratitude literature doubly affirms neoliberal rationality: first, by troping life as a debt (a debt that the State and the Corporation, acting in place of God, will attempt to

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collect); and second, by framing suffering in this life (suffering that is the consequence of neoliberal policy) as payment for a debt that will be collected after death. The contemporary gratitude literature makes the debt of gratitude existential while turning our attention from this life to the next life, and so it makes it that much more difficult to address injustice in this life. When speaking of existential debt, I except those who for centuries have gone against the grain and practiced a kind of “Christian yoga.”33 Here I speak about the Christian yogi-mystics who believe that the divine is immanent to the world, not separate from it.34 There is no existential debt in the philosophy of Meister Eckhart, who testifies, “if the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ it would be enough.”35 This prayer is said to no one in particular, because God is everywhere. Turn over a stone, and there you will find God. Cleave the wood, and the divine is there. “One should not accept or esteem God as being outside oneself, but as one’s own and as what is within one,” Eckhart preached. “Some simple people think that they will see God as if he were standing there and they here. It is not so. God and I, we are one.”36 The Christian mystics often talk like a church is unnecessary at all, and that Christianity needs no dogma or doctrine because all individuals are capable of knowing, and becoming one with, the divine on their own. It is not scripture that speaks to the mystics; it is individual experience. These prophets of the “perennial philosophy” recognize no existential debt because they refuse to believe there is a division between humans and the divine in the first place.37 Because there is no debt, there is no need for immunity from that debt. Because there is no debt, there is also no need to look to heaven for salvation, because salvation is possible on this earth, right now. When speaking of existential debt, I mean those Christian denominations that have historically been most hostile to the mystics, who branded the mystics as heretics and apostates and traitors: Catholics and Protestants.38 In these traditions, gratitude is offered to God in response to an existential debt that all people owe. For Christians, Robert Emmons argues in Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier, “gratitude sets up a relationship to the Divine, the source from which all good comes. It is a relationship that recognizes the gift of life from the Creator.”39 “The human condition,” Emmons continues, “is such that people desire to be close to their Creator and live forever with him. On

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the other hand, we know that our own present imperfections will not permit us access to God’s presence. This paradox is resolved through the gift of the Savior, Jesus Christ, the only sinless one, who paid for the sins of humanity by his death on the cross.”40 In this bestselling book, Emmons reminds us that for Christians, “there is nothing a person can do to merit salvation. It is completely and totally unmerited. This reminds us that true gratitude stems from the willingness to recognize what is unearned or undeserved. Grace is love freely shown to undeserving sinners.”41 For Christians, “true gratitude” is gratitude to God for the gift of life, and for the chance to live eternally in heaven even though we are all just undeserving sinners.42 In the Christian tradition the debt of “true gratitude” is owed to God. In the mid-1200s, medieval scholars invented a new Latin word to signify the gratitude owed to God, “gratitudo.”43 This neologism distinguished the emotion of human gratitude from the favor of divine grace, which is what the Latin “gratia” had come to mean in the scholastic tradition. Gratitudo is demanded, it was said, as payment for the existential debt all humans owe to God for life. In his Summa Theologica, written during the 1260s and 1270s, St. Thomas Aquinas drew a distinction between gratia, which is today often translated as “thankfulness,” and gratitudo, translated as “gratitude.” Gratia described both the grace of God toward sinners and the feeling of thankfulness in humans blessed by divine grace. The closely related neologism gratitudo marked the gratitude all Christians should feel toward their benefactors. Aquinas described gratitude toward God as the ultimate in a descending series of debts that all humans must pay: The nature of a debt to be paid must needs vary according to various causes giving rise to the debt, yet so that the greater always includes the lesser. Now the cause of debt is found primarily and chiefly in God, in that He is the first principle of all our goods: secondarily it is found in our father, because he is the proximate principle of our begetting and upbringing: thirdly it is found in the person that excels in dignity, from which general favors proceed; fourthly it is found in a benefactor, from whom we have received particular and private favors, on account of which we are under particular obligation to him.44

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The first and primary “debt of gratitude” [debitum gratitudinis] was owed to God for life. Secondary debts were owed to benefactors and friends. For Aquinas, “the repayment of favors belongs specifically to the virtue of gratitude” [recompensatio beneficiorum specialiter ad virtutem gratitudinis pertineat]. Much like Cicero and Seneca before him, Aquinas believed that gratitudo served a basic social function. Indeed, Aquinas suggested that “friendship is preserved by the repayment of favors” and “proportionate repayment belongs to commutative justice”—gratitudo is the emotion that holds Christian society together. Like Jesus and St. Paul before him, Aquinas described Christianity as an ethic of poverty—“whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance.”45 According to Aquinas, humans owed a series of material debts of gratitude to their benefactors on earth. Of course, these debts were nothing like the debt owed to God for life. All debts, however, had this in common: just as Seneca taught, the receiver of the benefit was obligated to repay more than he received. “Gratitude always inclines, as far as possible, to repay something more.”46 Aquinas quoted Seneca on this point, and he cited Seneca’s On Benefits repeatedly in his discussion of gratitude.47 Aquinas admitted that at times it was not possible for the recipient to repay more than given; in such cases, “the will to pay back” [recompensandi voluntas] had to be sufficient. For Aquinas, like Seneca before him, gifts created a relationship of subordination between benefactor and recipient, who was placed in the benefactor’s debt and given the burden of attempting to repay the debt. Gratitude for Aquinas thus represented three things: first, the recognition that a person was indebted to his benefactors for their charity; second, the acceptance of indebtedness as a marker of Christian virtue; and third, the willingness to attempt to repay the debt in whatever way he could. Gifts created a “moral debt” [debiti moralis] between individuals; the good Christian willingly accepted this debt and worked to even the scales through word, thought, and deed. Significantly, Aquinas reinterpreted Paul’s words in Romans 13:8, which announced that humans owe each other love, not debts of gratitude, into scriptural evidence for the unlimitedness and unboundedness of the debt of gratitude: The debt of gratitude flows from charity, which the more it is paid the more it is due, according to Romans 13.8, “Owe

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no man anything, but to love one another.” Wherefore it is not unreasonable if the debt of gratitude has no limit [Et ideo non est inconveniens si obligatio gratitudinis interminabilis sit].48 In short, the debt of gratitude could continue indefinitely. Like the debt owed to God for life, such worldly debts could be perpetual and everlasting. In Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, the word gratitudo represented the debt of gratitude owed to God for life and to earthly benefactors for their material support. Debts of gratitude required the receiver of the benefit to repay more than what was given, and debts could continue indefinitely. For Aquinas, gratitudo held society together. Aquinas’s gratitudo was, like the Roman gratia, a political emotion. In the three centuries after Aquinas, gratitudo was equated with justice (iusticia) and ingratitudo with the deadly sin of sloth (acedia).49 The debt owed to God was the most significant, for this debt was a question not only of social conduct but of salvation, but it was not the only debt that had to be repaid. Christianity, Aquinas suggested, taught the masses how to repay the debt all humans owed to God for life and to their benefactors for gifts given through practices of the care of the self, including piety, praise, worship, and sacrifice. Though Aquinas distinguished gratitudo from gratia, his rhetoric of gratitudo at times colored the meaning of gratia, and both keywords, closely associated with indebtedness to God, kings, and wealthy benefactors, were central to European thought about gratitude during the Middle Ages. English schoolboys learned to repeat the following phrases on “ingratitude” from the Liber Florenti: Non sis ingratus Domino si vis fore gratus . . . Dicitur ingratus benefactor male gratus Obliviscendo, non reddendo, ve nocendo . . . [Be not ungrateful to God if you wish to be graced . . . He is called “ingrate” who is improperly grateful to a benefactor, By forgetting or by not rendering in return or by harming . . .]50 Sayings like this cemented the link between gratitude to God, who gave us life, and gratitude to worldly benefactors, whose material gifts sustain

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life. There was no ingratitude so bad as ingratitude toward God, but worldly ingratitude also was recognized as a severe sin that undermined social bonds. While Christianity initially set out to undermine the debt of gratitude practiced in ancient Rome, by the Middle Ages Christianity had become the theological scaffolding for political and economic expressions of the debt of gratitude. During the European Middle Ages, the practice of do ut des became just as important as it was in ancient Rome. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that it was at this time that we first get the proverb “one good turn deserves another” [bounte autre requert, dit luy fraunseis].51 To the extent that politics is political theology, we can learn quite a bit about Western culture by studying the secularization of religious ideas. This is especially true when it comes to the Christian rhetoric of the existential debt of gratitude. Christianity emphasizes the debt of gratitude that humans owe to God for life and to Jesus for salvation. Jesus and St. Paul denied that humans owe any debts of gratitude to each other, only love. Though this rhetoric was originally directed against the Roman culture of interpersonal debt, a culture that oppressed the poor and exalted the wealthy and powerful, Christian gratitude has since become the bedrock of a very similar culture in which people are held in check by the debts they owe to their wealthy benefactors and to the state—in short, Christian gratitude has been adopted and adapted to promote obedience to secular, and worldly, political regimes. Beginning in the Middle Ages, politicians in the West built upon the Christian rhetoric of gratitudo to link religious debt to political debt, reminding citizens that just as they owed a debt to God for life and to Jesus for salvation from original sin, so too they owed a debt to the founders of the state and to those brave soldiers who died defending the homeland from its enemies. I call this rhetoric “the contract of blood,” and it was one of the most important rhetorical strategies used by the founders of the United States to promote obedience to the Constitution in the deeply divided, and incredibly violent, years that followed its ratification.52 Throughout the nineteenth century, prominent political leaders in the United States continued to insist that Americans owed a debt of gratitude to God for life and to the martyrs of the Revolutionary War for their safety, security, and prosperity. This rhetoric is still common today. Here is an example from the contemporary gratitude literature:

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In America, our national heritage has been powerfully shaped by the “covenant” we keep with those who have gone before, that national service and public duty are in fact a debt of gratitude we owe our forefathers and foremothers, who sacrificed their blood, tears, sweat, and toil to secure the liberties we enjoy.53 This rhetoric, echoed on patriotic holidays like the Fourth of July, dates back to Medieval Europe and the origins of the modern nation state. Remember that in Dante’s Inferno (composed during 1308−1321 in the brave new world of gratitudo) that those confined to the deepest level of Hell were two political traitors and one religious apostate: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.54 Though these three committed heinous acts of treachery, Dante concluded that their real crime was ingratitude. For this crime, they suffered the punishment of being eternally devoured by Satan, himself jailed in the heart of Hell for the ungrateful rebellion he waged against God. Gratitude was the mother of all virtues for Cicero; for Dante ingratitude was the mother of all vices—political, moral, and religious. That Dante equated these two acts of ingratitude, political and religious, is telling. It is not just treacherousness against God that matters. Political treachery is just as bad—a point that Shakespeare reiterated time and time again. Cicero’s On Obligations and Seneca’s On Benefits were reprinted often during Shakespeare’s day, for they provided a guide to moral conduct in a rapidly modernizing world.55 In Richard III (1592), Dorset defined ingratitude as the refusal to repay the debt created by charity: In common worldly things ’tis call’d ungrateful With dull unwillingness to repay a debt, Which with a bounteous hand was kindly lent (2.2.91−93). A common proverb during Shakespeare’s time held that, “as ingratitude is the most heinous offense against God, so it is the greatest fault in human actions” [ingratitudo (tam versus Deos immortales quam apud homines) peccatum maximum].56 In line with this view, Shakespeare’s characters condemned ingratitude with righteous fervor.

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In As You Like It, Amiens sings one of Shakespeare’s most popular songs about ingratitude, suggesting it worse than the cruel winter, a foul villain indeed: Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude. (2.7.174−79) Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, That dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot; Though thou the waters warp, Thy sting is not so sharp As friend remember’d not. (2.7.184−89) Here, ingratitude is defined as “benefits forgot” and a “friend remember’d not.” In politics “ingratitude is monstrous,” worse than the cruelest winter, and worthy of heaven’s fiercest punishment. One thing that makes us human is our ability to imagine the divine. We must remember, however, that the divine far transcends our words and the human capacity for imagination, as great as it is. Any picture of God is poetic, created by humans to serve human purposes.57 To study the Christian rhetoric of the debt of gratitude is to study power, exclusion, and hierarchy. Those authorized to speak and interpret the Word of God in the Christian tradition are invested with tremendous power. There is a dangerous tendency, in those denominations that take salvation out of the hands of the individual and instead imagine us as sheep who must be led to pasture by a shepherd, to invest too much power in the hands of any one person (or group of people). When considering the message of Jesus and St. Paul on gratitude, we can admire the beauty of their words, and I believe that we should, for they are at times radically democratic, but we must also inquire into the uses to which these words have been put in political history and the uses to which they are put in the contemporary gratitude literature. If rhetoric is concerned with discovering the available means of persuasion in a given case, as Aristotle

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argued in his Rhetoric, then we must ask: how does Christian gratitude look when considered as one of the available means of persuasion that political advocates have at their disposal for persuading their audiences and reconstituting the polis? Those who guard the path to salvation and eternal life assume the greatest power on earth. Political leaders understand this, and have modeled their politics on the Christian church accordingly. For the past two millennia, even in our disenchanted age, politics in the West has openly adopted the vocabulary and images and rituals of Christian theology for legitimacy.58 During the Middle Ages, gratitude to God and fealty to feudal lords became closely linked, as did treason and ingratitude, such that disobeying a lord was tantamount to disobeying the Lord.59 These clever feudal lords are just one player in a larger drama. In On Obligations, Cicero contended that whenever we make an oath—including the implicit oath pledged to a benefactor when taking a gift from him—it is not law or social custom but ultimately God that guarantees the sanctity of the oath. “So far as oaths are concerned, what we must grasp is not the fear they induce, but their impact, for swearing an oath is a scrupulous affirmation; you must keep the pledge which you have made solemnly as though God were witnessing it.”60 Working from Cicero’s text as well as the Old Testament, Giorgio Agamben hypothesizes that it is the inherent weakness of human oaths—the danger that humans can always go back on their words and refuse to repay their debts of gratitude—that gives rise to the Christian conception of God as Father and King, Lawgiver and bringer of Justice. It is this warlike, vengeful God who guarantees that the fragile bond between word and deed (and gift and gratitude) will not be broken by promising punishment for liars on judgment day. To God we foreswear lying, because to lie is to risk eternal damnation. The Christian God underwrites the truth of words, making it possible for people to live together in good faith.61 When God is positioned as the guarantor of truth, the vouchsafer of faith, and the collector of debt, it becomes all too easy for people on earth claiming to act on His behalf to bring the full weight of divine violence to bear in punishing those who renege on the debt of gratitude. If Western history has demonstrated anything, it is that people are at their most violent when claiming to act out the will of a vengeful God. Or when they govern in the name of God. Less than a century after Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes employed the Christian rhetoric of

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gratitude to defend the British monarchy from democratic rebels in Leviathan (1651). The Levellers of the English Civil War, who fought to abolish worldly debts of gratitude altogether and reclaim the earth as the common property of the masses, left quite a frightful impression on Hobbes. Like the classical Romans, who understood society to be duas civitates ex una factas, two political bodies battling for power in one society, philosophers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries assumed that society was at bottom divided between rich and poor, two factions battling for power. Unlike Machiavelli, who believed that this conflict was productive because it nurtured an active concern in the populace for protecting liberty, Hobbes saw no value in this clash, and he foreshadowed James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 by suggesting that the clash between rich and poor, between “the Aristocraticall, and Democraticall, factions,” must be managed and controlled by government.62 The factions of “Patricians, and Plebeians of old time in Rome, and of Aristocraticalls and Democraticalls of old time in Greece, are unjust, as being contrary to the peace and safety of the people, and a taking of the Sword out of the hand of the Sovereign,” he mused.63 Hobbes hoped to manage the conflict between rich and poor by cultivating certain desirable emotions in the populace, including gratitude, which he believed would lead to social peace.64 In Leviathan, Hobbes defended the British monarchy from the attacks of its democratic assailants by attempting to scare his readers with talk of the “state of nature,” in which homo homini lupus, man was a wolf to man, and life “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”65 According to Hobbes, the state of nature was what would happen if a strong government failed to check the conflict between rich and poor— and if people stopped paying their debts of gratitude. Hobbes agreed with Cicero: gratitude is the mother of all the virtues. But he took this a step further than Cicero. Hobbes’s Leviathan outlined a number of basic “laws of nature,” including the debt of gratitude, that were guaranteed by natural law and that all good governments had to respect. The state of nature was a state of war and conflict precisely because no one could guarantee that debts of gratitude would be repaid, and so, in the absence of a functioning economy of gratitude, law and civilization collapsed and humans fell on each other like wolves. Like Cicero and Seneca before him, Hobbes saw the giving and receiving of gifts and favors as foundational to civilization. He believed

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that the debt of gratitude was both natural and socially salubrious. He observed, To have received from one, to whom we think our selves equall, greater benefits than there is hope to Requite, disposeth to counterfeit love; but really secret hatred; and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor, that in declining the sight of his creditor, tacitely wishes him there, where he might never see him more. For benefits oblige; and obligation is thraldome; and unrequitable obligation, perpetuall thraldome; which is to ones equall, hatefull. But to have received benefits from one, whom we acknowledge for superiour, enclines to love; because the obligation is no new depression: and cheerful acceptation, (which men call Gratitude,) is such an honour done to the obliger, as is taken generally for retribution. Also to receive benefits, though from an equall, or inferiour, as long as there is hope for requitall, disposeth to love.66 Gratitude for Hobbes meant the cheerful acceptance of one’s status as a debtor. Whether or not indebtedness is cheerfully accepted, however, is dependent upon a number of factors. If an equal gives to someone and he cannot repay the gift, he will not be grateful—he will be resentful, and will rebel against his malefactor out of “secret hatred.” If, however, someone who is judged to be “superior” gives to that same person, he will not only tolerate his indebtedness, he will love it and readily accept the helotry it entails. This is because most people are already socially conditioned to feel indebtedness because of their neediness. Most people are primed, in short, for the debt of gratitude by their poverty. Hobbes testified that if the rich and powerful gave freely to the poor, and the poor freely accepted their indebtedness and the thralldom it generated, the debt of gratitude would promote social peace. Both Seneca and Aquinas argued that gifts had to be freely given by the benefactor in order to create a debt of gratitude.67 Hobbes dispensed with this criterion. “No man giveth, but with intention of Good to himselfe.”68 All givers were self-interested, and no one would give if they doubted they would profit by their gift and receive an equal, or greater, return. In times of ingratitude (like those allegorized in Hobbes’s state of nature), munificence ended, resulting in privation and war. For Hobbes,

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then, to achieve peace between rich and poor, the debt of gratitude had to be legally guaranteed. Seneca was emphatic that ingratitude should not be punishable by law.69 For him, gratitude was a social convention—the most important social convention, and in fact the foundation of all others, but still just a convention. Hobbes disagreed. He made gratitude subject to the law, and gave to his sovereign tremendous power to guarantee the repayment of debts. Hobbes’s leader, modeled after the Christian God as imagined during the Middle Ages, was a true sovereign in that he had absolute power over his subjects. The sovereign ensured that all debts were repaid. And he alone had the right to release his subjects from these debts. Hobbes transformed gratitude into a law of nature. Yet his sovereign, like God himself, could exercise the exceptional power to declare himself, or anyone else, immune from the debt of gratitude. The contemporary gratitude literature portrays Christianity as a religion of existential debt, a debt owed for God’s “indescribable gift” (2 Cor. 9:15), a debt that can never be repaid. Because this debt is unspeakable and insurmountable—a point that Jesus makes clear in his Parable of the Unforgiving Servant—humans must live their lives under the shadow of a debt that darkens life on earth.70 For Nietzsche, the existential debt at the heart of Christianity is quickly transformed into a feeling of total, all-encompassing guilt that is the “eternal punishment” the Christian must suffer because he was saved.71 Rather than a wholesale rebellion against Roman thought, in the New Testament Nietzsche finds the continuation, and in fact the intensification, of Roman guilt. Here again is a debt that can never be repaid, like Seneca’s. Unlike Seneca’s, this debt is total, for it involves eternal salvation and damnation. Though contemporary authors frame Christianity as the antidote to the Roman debt of gratitude, their interpretation of Christianity intensifies this debt, transforming gratitude into a cosmic game of sin and salvation for the highest stakes. Christianity shifts the focus of grateful living. Now, the end game of gratitude is not this world but the next. As I sat in childhood pews, and ate graham crackers at Sunday School, I quickly learned that Christian faith is concerned with what comes next. We place faith in a God who transcends this world so that we will be redeemed in the afterlife, when all debts will be paid and the crooked will be set straight. This life, the only life we know, is difficult, and full of pain, a “fiery ordeal” we must undergo to achieve our reward (1 Peter 4:12). Contemporary

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gratitude authors explain that Christian gratitude is not designed to mitigate human suffering, because Christianity reaches its fullest emotional force when we suffer. As Charles Shelton observes in The Gratitude Factor: Enhancing Your Life Through Grateful Living, Christians understand gratitude better than anyone else because they are attuned to “the cost of gratitude”: “Heartfelt gratitude, at some point, costs us. Its ultimate price is suffering. No doubt while we are experiencing gratitude we describe it in positive terms. But for Christians, the truth is that at times our gratitude will inevitably find its fullest expression only through the suffering we endure.”72 In the end, “our gratitude may cost us dearly and may involve enormous stress, great personal and physical sacrifice, or, as in Jesus’s case, our very lives.”73 Words like this have a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Christians embrace suffering, because it proves their devotion to God and their gratitude for His gift of life. Christian life is a grateful life, but Christian gratitude, required due to humanity’s existential debt, is deeply painful. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians counsels his audience to be “content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ.” Paul advises, “whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (12:10). Though life is full of pain and challenge, Christians endure, so they might find happiness tomorrow. Christian faith looks away, up or down, but away. “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light” (Col. 1:11−12). As portrayed in the contemporary literature, the goal of Christian gratitude is not to live a happier life or suffer less right now, but instead to win a share in the kingdom of light for all eternity. Though Nietzsche was often too hard on Christianity, on this point he seems correct: the Christian obsession with the afterlife at times tends toward a kind of “nihilism” that negates the value of life, with all its joys and difficulties, in the present moment, here and now, in this world.74 Not all practices of Christianity are otherworldly; I have Christian friends who are as fully engaged with life as anyone else I know, and who, while aware that judgment is coming, do not stop to miss a beat of the present moment. The Christianity common to the contemporary gratitude literature, however, encourages believers to spend their days in the shadow of an existential debt beyond repayment to win a place in heaven, and

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to embrace suffering because it proves the depth of our gratitude to God for life. In the meantime, we lose track of life right now. Rather than being full of life—gratefulness as “grate-fullness,” to use the words of one contemporary Christian mystic who is also a Zen master—when struggling to repay an existential debt of gratitude we become emptied by our effort.76 I question any tradition—be it religious or philosophical or spiritual or political—that demeans the value of life in this world, because this is the only life I know, and because this is one of the ways that neoliberalism governs us, by belittling life and making it expendable. As presented in the contemporary gratitude literature, the Christian project of achieving immunity from the debt of gratitude ultimately turns us away from this world, as we look to the spiritual realm to redeem the inequities of the material world. This tendency toward nihilism is perhaps the most severe problem with the Christian debt of gratitude. I get it. It is natural to look beyond this world toward something better when we find ourselves suffering in this world. On my worst days I find my thoughts constantly drifting away to a nice warm beach or a cold, wind-swept mountaintop. When it comes down to it, we are all escape artists. But is this really the best way to live? Why do we insist on suffering through suffering? Why do we accept this as the status quo? Why not work together to make this world better? Why not take aim at suffering and try to alleviate it in the present? I believe that the world can be better, and that we need not abandon the present for an uncertain future. About the Christian tradition, Robert C. Roberts writes in The Psychology of Gratitude: “the grateful person is content to be in the one-down position of owing an ongoing, unrepayable debt to another, a debt to which he or she gives expression not by paying it off, but by acknowledging it with tokens of gratitude.” “Christians are not slavish in such gratitude to their human benefactors, because of their view that all humans are equally dependent on God and positioned as recipients of His grace. They are, however, slavish (radically worshipful) toward God.”76 Though Christianity set out to overturn the debt of gratitude, in the end it, too, calls on us to bear this debt. In the hands of many contemporary writers, the Christian debt of gratitude is just as detrimental to democratic politics as the Roman. Indeed, Jesus’s refrain to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto

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God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21) is easily reinterpreted to encourage acquiescence to political power. This is a call to be indifferent to the implications of worldly debt in service of a more Godly debt. And today collection agents speak of paying off a financial debt as “debt servicing”! So the acquiescence is doubled; pay what you owe to Caesar, and to God; pay your taxes and pay your tithing. Enlisted in the service of worldly powers, the beautiful, dangerous, democratic message of Christian Jubilee is completely inverted. In the hands of kings and presidents, landlords and debt collectors, and contemporary gratitude authors, the Christian rhetoric of the debt of gratitude becomes a clarion call to bow down to authority or else. This Christian gratitudo is more like than unlike the Roman debt of gratitude. Sadly, in the contemporary gratitude literature, gratitude has become a conservative opiate enlisted in the service of the status quo, a carefully designed drug that keeps us quietly chugging along without protest, even though we feel great pain. The contemporary debt of gratitude is not a perversion of Western history. The debt of gratitude is its fulfillment.

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“Indebted” On the Contemporary Gratitude Literature

Aristotle argued that there are three basic genres of rhetoric—rhetoric about the past, present, and future. Rhetoric is at bottom concerned with time, and time, in turn, gains meaning through the rhetoric we use to describe it. Looking backward, rhetoric tends to be concerned with questions of guilt and innocence; Aristotle calls this judicial rhetoric. Looking at the present, rhetoric tends to be concerned with questions of praise and blame; Aristotle calls this epideictic rhetoric. Looking forward, rhetoric tends to be concerned with questions of expedience; Aristotle calls this deliberative rhetoric. Each genre has its own norms, and it was considered vital that students of rhetoric from classical Greece and Republican Rome to the American Republic of the nineteenth century understand these expectations. Americans who went to college before the Civil War learned to practice each of the genres with great skill. These genres continue to matter today. So many misunderstandings in social and political life result from genre confusion—you want to talk about the future, but I keep grumbling about the past. To understand the impact of time on rhetoric, and rhetoric on time, is to grasp a strategic lesson of tremendous power. So many arguments are won by the party most skilled in shifting the genre of rhetoric to that which is most advantageous for his or her side. Each of the three genres of rhetoric is important to democratic politics. Judicial rhetoric makes events that happened in the past seem real

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and relevant, and there are some events that should not be forgotten (at least right now). It is vital that citizens be able to accuse others—be they fellow citizens, politicians, or the social, political, and economic structures in which we exist—of injustice and to defend themselves against such accusations. To be a democratic citizen is to learn to point the finger of blame. It is also to learn that not all speech should be about pointing that finger. Sometimes we must forget the past so that we can exit its endless feedback loops and focus instead on the present.1 Epideictic rhetoric makes the present come alive. Epideictic rhetoric is the rhetoric of world-making—with praise and blame, with charges of virtue and vice, rhetors define the morals and values that underline social life and teach us how we should feel. This rhetoric can also be world-breaking. The hellfire and brimstone of the angry preacher and the quiet shaming words of the dignified war protestor are designed to trouble our daily routines and steer us toward another, better way of life. Americans are quite familiar with the angry epideictic of the American jeremiad, which is one of our oldest rhetorical genres. This rhetoric chastises us for our present sins and calls us back to founding values we have neglected.2 Though every form of politics makes use of forensic and ceremonial rhetoric, democracy is premised on the need for civic deliberation about issues of common concern. Deliberative rhetoric is a foundation of democracy. Indeed, one of the underlining philosophical ideals of democracy is that by forming communities and deliberating, citizens can make better decisions about how to confront the challenges of our shared world. John Dewey observes, For what is the faith in democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in the formation of public opinion, which is in the long run self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication?3 Deliberation is the bedrock of democracy because it is through conversation that citizens “uncover social needs and troubles” and recognize their many areas of “common interest.”4 For Dewey, then, “the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in the free gatherings of neighbors on the

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street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another.”5 These words might seem quaint in these dark days of manipulation and propaganda, but they express foundational beliefs on which modern democracy rests. Deliberation is not a substitution for civic action. We deliberate together in order to know how and when to act, mobilize, protest, and agitate for the common good. To abandon deliberation is to abandon democracy. No one sees the world as a god; no one has all the answers; each of us might be wrong. It is through democratic deliberation that we manage our inherent fallibility and tendency toward wrongheadedness. It is by talking with our fellow citizens that we expand our limited perspective on the world.6 Deliberation is one way that we care for ourselves as democratic citizens. For Aristotle, all rhetoric—no matter if it is focused on past, present, or future—is emotional. There can be no logos, no rationality, no human logic, and no deliberation that is unemotional. The dream of communication purged of emotion is just that, a dream, and a bad one. Humans experience the world through our emotions. In those rare moments when we break out of autopilot and find ourselves having an experience, it is generally because we notice how we are feeling at that moment. Emotions orient us toward the world and to time. Certain emotions lend themselves to an experience of the past, present, and future, and therefore to forensic, ceremonial, and deliberative rhetoric. We are afraid of what might happen in the future, and so fear leads us to deliberation. We resent things that happened to us in the past, and so resentment leads to forensic arguments about guilt and innocence. Happiness is an experience of contentment and joy in the present and often inspires ceremonial rhetoric. Nostalgia focuses on the past; melancholy, the present; hope, the future. Gratitude transcends these common generic boundaries. It is possible to feel gratitude toward the past, present, and future. The rhetorical adaptability of gratitude is what makes it such an important political emotion. To understand democracy, we must therefore investigate the rhetoric of gratitude. How we define and practice gratitude will alter our experience of the past, the present, and the future, and with it our rhetoric, our politics, our hopes and dreams, and our democracy. We live in a time of democratic eclipse. A 2014 Princeton study determined that the United States is no longer a democracy, ruled by

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its citizens, but an oligarchy or plutocracy, ruled by the super-rich.7 Democratic renewal rests on our ability to blame without falling into the politics of resentment, to develop new world-making rhetorics that inculcate emotions that strengthen democracy, and to deliberate about the future without dissolving into fear and anxiety and enemyship. If we are to create a more vibrant democracy invested in protecting the goods all citizens hold in common and ensuring that everyone has what they need to flourish, we must look to political emotions like gratitude. Here I can state more clearly my primary trouble with the contemporary gratitude literature. Though this literature is purportedly about the present, about making us happier and healthier and better citizens of the world, in fact, via the debt of gratitude, it is constantly shifting our attention to a guilty past and to an indebted future. As a genre, this literature often takes the form of forensic rhetoric, instructing us to look backward at our lives to tally up the debts we owe and to feel guilty for the debts we have not repaid. This literature also turns our attention to the future, not to encourage deliberation but to contemplate repayment. Looking backward and forward, the present gets lost. Today, we desperately need democratic deliberation about the future, about how to protect the common good and to nourish life—which, I will argue, we can only do by honestly reckoning with the present (hence, my argument for political mindfulness in the next chapter). My art of gratitude is about shifting back to the present and the future, away from the perpetual past. Before we can refashion the art of gratitude, however, we must take stock of where we are now and how we got to this place. Having described the three keywords of gratitude’s past, charis, gratia, and gratitudo, in this chapter I describe the keyword of gratitude’s present: indebted. “To be grateful means to allow oneself to be placed in the position of recipient—to feel indebted and aware of one’s dependence on others,” observes Robert Emmons, one of the founders of the positive psychology movement and “the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude.”8 In gratitude, “thanks are directed outward to the giver of gifts.”9 To be grateful “is to feel indebted.”10 Gratitude is “an acknowledgement of debt,” and ingratitude “the refusal to admit one’s debt to others.”11 Emmons calls on us to recognize our interrelatedness and dependence on others by focusing on the debts we owe. The human condition, he argues, is one of indebtedness. Gratitude is the recognition that we are indebted: to others, to wealthy benefactors, to the state, and to God.

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The personal benefits of practicing the debt of gratitude are, purportedly, plenty.12 Because body and mind are linked, the boons of practicing gratitude include feeling better. Gratitude reduces anxiety and stress and promotes health.13 Gratitude makes us happy—and who doesn’t want to be happy? After all, “the pursuit of happiness” is a national mantra. Gratitude benefits us as individuals, and it purportedly benefits the society in which we live. Indeed, the new prophets of gratitude tout this emotion’s ability to alleviate contemporary political and social ills by prompting us to recognize our relationships with, and dependence upon, others. Gratitude teaches us to stop thinking so much about ourselves and to start thinking about our fellow citizens. Americans are confronted today with a vast literature on gratitude. However, this literature is in general cursed by a lack of history. The blithe attitude of contemporary gratitude gurus toward the past leads to a general misunderstanding of how gratitude can function as a tool of power.14 These writers forget that gratitude is first and foremost a political emotion. Until now, no one has written a genealogy of gratitude as a tool of political power. In fact, most contemporary authors write about gratitude as though it has no history. It is as if gratitude is unconditioned and timeless. It is not. Gratitude has a long rhetorical history dating back to the foundations of Western democracy, as we have seen by studying the words for gratitude that have long receded into the background, including Aristotle’s charis, Cicero and Seneca’s gratia, and Aquinas’s gratitudo. Though ignored, this history completely circumscribes how contemporary authors talk about gratitude. Today, gratitude continues to mean the debt of gratitude. And were he alive, I am sure that Cicero would smile. When I accessed the Wikipedia entry on “Gratitude” in late 2016, I received the helpful information that “gratitude is not the same as indebtedness.”15 Here’s another example of why we should treat this site with skepticism, for this entry provides no history of gratitude in the West, nor does it acknowledge just how unnervingly Ciceronian the contemporary gratitude literature is. Nearly every book that discusses gratitude I’ve read from the last decade continues to associate gratitude closely with debt. The debt of gratitude is alive, as a brief survey of the contemporary gratitude literature demonstrates. Gratitude entails “duty, debt, or obligation. When we are recipients of another’s generosity, cultural pressures require that we respond in an appropriate and timely fashion.”16 “Gratitude is the label for a favorable response to a gift or a

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favor, while ingratitude labels an unfavorable response to a gift or favor.”17 “If someone does you a favor, you owe them something; you owe them a debt of gratitude.”18 “The grateful person looks with welcoming eyes for personal debts.”19 Gratitude is “an expression of thanks as an acknowledgement of the debt owed to others.” Humans are at our best when we recognize our indebtedness to others, and so, “May the celebration of our indebtedness live on!”20 To feel gratitude is to recognize that we are “indebted” to our benefactors, and that we must therefore must devote all of our mental energy to determining “what one owes when one has a debt of gratitude.”21 Everyday, we must ask ourselves: “What gratitude debt do you need to pay today?”22 The grateful obsession with constantly returning favors can be exhausting, as Seneca recognized. The gratitude literature therefore counsels us to be comfortable with our own personal weakness. “The grateful person is content to be in the one-down position of owing an ongoing, unrepayable debt to another, a debt which he or she gives expression not by paying it off, but by acknowledging it with tokens of gratitude.”23 Contemporary writers attribute the failure to recognize one’s debts of gratitude to a “lack of socialization” and a fundamental defect of human character.24 The debt of gratitude has become a core value of our culture. It has even become part of our legal system, as Hobbes hoped it might. In law, the “argument from gratitude” concerns what is owed in response to a favor.25 All of these contemporary writers define “gratitude” as a transaction of giving and receiving that creates a debt between people. For the Christian writers—and many, if not most, of the contemporary writers about gratitude do so from a Christian perspective—the primary debt we must acknowledge is to God. “When I realize that it is not God who is in my debt but I who am in His great debt, then doesn’t all become gift?”—a gift, mind you, that demands repayment, and a gift, let us not forget, that demands we shift our focus from this life to the next.26 As it did for Cicero, gratitude continues to mean the recognition that one is indebted, and to live gratefully means in large part learning to be comfortable living in the “one-down position” of being indebted. I have no problem with social niceties. It is good to recognize when others help us out. Even the debt of gratitude teaches us the important lesson that we are not islands. We are all dependent—upon other people, upon language, upon the earth. No one stands apart. There is no Being

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without a world. Contemporary writers leverage the human capacity for gratitude to underscore our sociality. The motivation driving much of the contemporary gratitude literature is to remind otherwise selfish, egotistical, and narcissistic folks that we are not at the center of the universe but are in fact part of a community. Gratitude reminds us of our dependence upon others. The main problem with the contemporary gratitude literature, however, is that we are reminded of our sociality through the rhetoric of debt. Freedom is a practice of the care of the self—a discipline of recognizing, and realizing, alternative possibilities for thinking and living and acting. The rhetoric of debt alters our vision of ourselves as historical actors. Debt locks us in to a vision of future action that will be dominated by reciprocal giving and the principle of do ut des. As such, it becomes difficult to imagine a future without debt (and hence without neoliberalism). Debt narrows the possibilities we can see and, consequently, our room to maneuver. The debt of gratitude keeps us looking backward with guilty eyes and forecasts a future in which we struggle to repay our debts. The contemporary gratitude literature transforms us into the bearers of guilt and debt. Without question, we are cursed today by the me-first disease. Unfortunately, selfishness is built right into our contemporary governing economic and political logic of neoliberalism, which ignores any concept of the common good and leaves us to fend for ourselves in the marketplace (and the whole world, according to neoliberalism, is a marketplace).27 The goal of contemporary neoliberalism is to extend the market logic to all aspects of our lives, even our private lives, which have traditionally been understood to be outside of the marketplace. Neoliberalism’s proponents legitimate its logic through a rhetoric of “social naturalism” that defines markets as natural phenomena—in spite of the fact that the purportedly “free market” is completely unnatural and dependent upon government regulation.28 Neoliberalism also legitimates itself, and conditions us to see our lives in terms of market fundamentalism, through the rhetoric of the debt of gratitude. For much of Western history, democratic citizenship has been framed in opposition to the market.29 Margaret Somers writes, “the precepts of citizenship emphasize what is true of all social concerns related to livelihood—namely, that protections against the risks of life in market society represent moral obligations we have to each other.”30 True to its roots in classical liberalism, neoliberalism encourages people to see their

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relationships with others in terms of contracts that are entered, and exited, with selfish motives. In fact, Thomas Hobbes taught that society is nothing more than “quid pro quo exchange”; for him there was no common good, and no need to speak of the shared fate of citizenship.31 For him, democracy was a bad word. The trouble is that the debt of gratitude accustoms us to think of our relations with others in terms of contracts. This is why Hobbes designated gratitude a law of nature. In the West, gratitude is a contractual emotion associated with the giving and receiving of gifts and favors. As Cicero said, there is nothing more important than returning a gift with another gift. The debt of gratitude makes it a fundamental human obligation to uphold the rules of market exchange. The debt of gratitude corrupts democracy by diverting our attention away from our basic moral obligation to work together to uphold the common good and protect ourselves from the tyranny of the market. The debt of gratitude teaches us to see human behavior in economic terms, transforming life into a ledger. If we buy into the debt of gratitude, life becomes an economic calculation and my interactions with you become one-up, one-down scores that I mark down in a book of payment and debt. Like any emotion, the debt of gratitude must be cultivated. We are what we practice. That is why Emmons calls gratitude a “discipline.” Understanding this, contemporary proponents of grateful living advise us to take time every day to write down the things for which we are grateful. Used to record a person’s daily experiences of grateful living, “gratitude journals” have become a whole new subgenre of American literature, with dozens upon dozens of such journals available for purchase. You can now record your gratitude in handy volumes including: Living Life as a Thank You: My Journal The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude Gratitude, A Daily Journal: Honor and Appreciate the Abundance in Your Life Buddha Doodles Gratitude Journal Grace of Gratitude Journal The 5-Minute Gratitude Journal Instant Happy Journal: 365 Days of Inspiration, Gratitude, and Joy Choose Gratitude: Blessings Journal

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The Gratitude Journal: A 21 Day Challenge to More Gratitude, Deeper Relationships, and Greater Joy Journey to the Stars: Gratitude and Vision Journal There are digital gratitude journals, such as the Greater Good Science Center’s Thnx4.org, and many helpful apps for recording your gratitude on a mobile device. For children, there is My First Gratitude Journal: A Write-in, Draw-in Gratitude Journal for Kids and What Makes Me, ME! My First Affirmation and Gratitude Journal. You can work through The Gratitude Power Workbook in order to Transform Fear into Courage, Anger into Forgiveness, Isolation into Belonging. If you are really committed, you can pick up 365 Days of Happiness and Gratitude: A Journal; or The Gratitude Habit: A 365 Day Journal and Workbook: A Tool for Creating Positive Feelings in Your Daily Life; or Daily Gifts: A Five Year Gratitude Journal. Fans of the best-selling The Secret—one of the great books of modern spiritual quackery in the win-friends-and-influence-people style that promises great wealth and power to all who read it—can purchase The Secret Gratitude Book to “show the universe how thankful you are for everything it has given—and lay the groundwork for even more gifts.”32 There is even a “Gratitude Now” list in each chapter of this particular journal, which to me sounds suspiciously like Frank Costanza’s “Serenity Now” mantra (with happier outcomes, one hopes!). Today, gratitude journals are tremendously popular. A quick online search reveals more than a hundred such journals I can use to capture my gratitude. In her best-selling memoir The Happiness Project, the popular blogger Gretchen Rubin recounts her experiences with keeping such a journal, and she finds that “instead of putting me in a grateful frame of mind, it made me annoyed.”33 Rubin finds these journals forced— though given their popularity, it is clear that many Americans disagree. Why might such a journal prove annoying? One might think that such journals would be a record of everything that is good about our lives, and often they are. But if gratitude means indebtedness, then such journals will also act as a running tally of the debts we owe to others. As such, they encourage us to look backward, weighing us down under burdened memories. Or they encourage us to look forward to better times and perhaps even to heaven. Too often they transform life into something to grin and bear, not embrace. Either way, we tend to lose track of the present, and it is annoying.

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The economic language of the debt of gratitude is quite common in these journals. In Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy, Christian radio host Nancy Leigh DeMoss recommends keeping a daily “gratitude account” whose sole purpose is to record and categorize all the debts of gratitude we owe to others. Much like keeping a bank statement or a checkbook registry, the purpose of the gratitude account is to manage our many gratitude debts. Such accounts teach us a basic lesson of neoliberalism: that all social interactions and relationships can and should be judged economically, with numbers on the page. “I want to encourage you to think of gratitude as being a debt you owe, the same way you’re called upon to pay your monthly bills.”34 “What gratitude debt do you need to pay today?” she asks.35 We all have our individual debts, but everyone owes a debt to God—and we must pay the interest on this debt for this “indescribable gift,” she reminds us, because the debt itself is too great for repayment (2 Cor. 9:15). The end goal of such accounting is to win a place in heaven, despite our unworthiness as sinners and the guilt that we all share as human beings. This is some good old-fashioned American thinking—we might dub it “the Ben Franklin principle,” after Franklin’s relentless accounting of everything, including his debts, in his Autobiography. The Ben Franklin principle is concerned with tallying up everything in order to begin the long hard task of getting back into the black. This is the Protestant Ethic, designed to prove to ourselves and to others that we are the elect saved by God.36 Americans have always viewed happiness and its pursuit through the lens of the Protestant Ethic. In the gratitude literature, this ethic has gone completely haywire. When keeping a gratitude account, “gratitude” becomes an economic calculation and a cost-benefit analysis. Such an account teaches us to judge the value of others by the contribution they make to us and the cost of this contribution to them. Emmons writes: Gratitude requires that a giver give not only a gift but also a gift dear to himself—a ‘pearl of great price,’ as it were . . . The degree to which we feel gratitude always hinges on this internal, secret assessment of cost: It is intrinsic to the emotion, and perfectly logical, that we don’t feel all that grateful for gifts that we receive that cost little or nothing to the giver.37

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These gratitude accounts would be better called social reciprocity debt reports, for that is their goal—to make sure that we are model reciprocators who acknowledge every kindness and favor by transforming our acts into a number on a chart that can be repaid with an action that takes the form of another number on a chart. In this case, counting your blessings means counting your debts. The contemporary gratitude literature teaches us to measure and count gratitude, as though life itself is an economy. Of course, according to Adam Smith, one of the philosophical fathers of capitalism, a basic lesson of economics is that sad people can be made to feel better about their lives by comparing them to others who are “worse” off. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith taught capitalists to manage the inevitable sadness and depression produced by capitalism with a rhetoric of sorry comparisons.38 Told to be grateful for what we have, because at least we are better off than them, gratitude saps our democratic energy in the service of the status quo. Smith himself paired “gratitude” and “resentment” together as the two most important emotions for maintaining social order—if a people were grateful, he claimed, they would be orderly. Smith was sneaky—he confined “gratitude” to the private realm of moral sentiments, which was, he suggested, not a place of politics. Yet it is in the realm of moral sentiments that the real political work, the rhetorical work, happens, for this is the realm where attitudes are shaped.39 According to Emmons, whose bestselling Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier (2007) is without question the most popular and influential contemporary book on the subject, “the more I study gratitude, the more I have come to believe that an authentic, deeply held sense of gratefulness toward life may require some degree of contrast or deprivation.”40 Sometimes this contrast crisis comes from our own life, as we remember lean times and feel thanks for what we have now. I have no problem with this. In fact, remembering our struggles and how we surmounted them is a basic spiritual exercise for entering into gratefulness. Sometimes this contrast comes through antithesis, as we compare ourselves favorably or unfavorably to others. With this I do have a problem. Emmons describes how he and his team of researchers at the University of California−Davis, conducted an experiment that deliberately invoked a gratitude contrast by creating a “comparison condition” that

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called participants to compare their lives either positively or negatively with the lives of others. “One group was asked to finish the sentence ‘I wish I was ___.’ ” The other was asked to complete the sentence ‘I’m glad I’m not ___.’ ”41 Not surprisingly, the group that was asked to pine for another destiny was less content than the group that was asked to judge themselves superior to another. Of course, if we can feel grateful for our life only by comparing it to another’s and judging ours superior, then we will never be content, because our gratitude will be forever dependent upon an ever-shifting social terrain of sorry comparisons. Sure, there will always be a poor beggar or a starving child who has it worse than us. But tying our gratitude to such poverty makes our joy dependent upon their misfortune, and in such a situation it is all too easy to find ourselves rooting for the suffering of others because when they suffer it makes our lives seem better by comparison. We are not really content if our contentment is contingent upon judging and putting down, and we are certainly not grateful if we feel pleasure in another person’s pain because it proves how fortunate we are. So let us call these sorry comparisons what they are—such “gratitude” verges on smugness. From Cicero’s time to the present day, it is remarkable how easily the debt of gratitude has been enlisted in the service of particular political causes, especially those that seek to manage, tame, and if possible destroy democracy. Standing well within the Western tradition of the debt of gratitude, the contemporary gratitude literature continues to pronounce chilling political lessons. To take just one example, in Thanks!, Emmons lashes out at the Iraqi National Soccer Team for its “blatant ingratitude” at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. The Iraqi team finished a surprising fourth that summer. They were able to do so well, Emmons argues, because they “did not have to face the former Olympic Committee head Uday Hussein,” who was killed during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “It was the brutal Uday, who, according to human rights groups, was responsible for the torture of hundreds of athletes and at least fifty deaths.” Freed from this madman, the soccer team played its heart out, only to come up just short of a bronze medal. This showing was a triumphant success. Yet in one area the team apparently failed. “Now competing without the fear of torture—or worse—the Iraqi team stunned commentators with their apparent ingratitude. Not only were they not grateful for the liberation from the former Iraqi regime, but they did not mince words in expressing their disapproval as well.” One of

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the Iraqi players even went so far as to claim that God would condemn President George W. Bush for his war crimes, including the deaths of scores of innocent Iraqi civilians—and this player suggested that if he was not playing soccer, he would be fighting alongside insurgents against the American occupation.42 Emmons writes that “regardless of one’s political stance toward the war in Iraq, the ingratitude of the Iraqi soccer team was difficult to digest.”43 Part of the trouble was situational—it was the Olympics, after all, which he suggests should be governed by the ideal of “sportmanship,” not protest. Part of the trouble was philosophical. “Why is ingratitude such a moral failure? The principle of reciprocity, upon which human societies are based, states that one has an obligation to help others who have helped us, while at the same time not harming others who have helped us. Directing ingratitude toward our benefactor is a way of inflicting harm upon that person.”44 Here, the Iraqi soccer team is said to have harmed their “benefactors” with their ingratitude, a difficult claim to swallow given the unspeakable physical and mental harms that Iraqis experienced during the war. The root of the trouble, however, was that “the slap in the face by the Iraqi soccer players toward the U.S. government” exemplified the most dangerous type of ingratitude possible in our contemporary world—political ingratitude.45 There are few stages bigger than the Olympics, and many of the most effective symbolic protests in the history of the world have happened there. The Iraqi team spoke out to draw the world’s attention to civilian causalities, which one study estimated to be north of 100,000 at that point in the war, and to deny that Iraqis owed Americans anything.46 For Emmons, the proper response of the Iraqi soccer team was not to protest, but to express their debt of gratitude for the sacrifices of the American military, and, I guess, to ignore the destruction occurring in their country. Emmons includes his discussion of the Iraqi Olympians in a chapter titled “The Unnatural Crime: Ingratitude,” a chapter that describes ingratitude as “a profound moral failure” and (paraphrasing David Hume) “a horrible and unnatural crime.” Summarizing his beliefs, Emmons writes that ingratitude—including, presumably, the Iraqi soccer players’ ingratitude—“is clearly the mark of a vice, whether in a single instance or as a long-term defect of character.”47 “Whereas gratitude is appropriate, even mandatory, being ungrateful is a sign or symptom of lack of socialization, whether the inability to appreciate what others

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have done for you, or, worse, the grudging resentment of one’s own vulnerability and the refusal to admit one’s debt to others.”48 We should remember that these soccer players were Muslim. Indeed, Emmons’s talk of “defect of character” and “lack of socialization” veers dangerously close to the rhetoric of Orientalism that has long justified Western aggression in the Middle East by denouncing Muslims as savage, backward, and ungrateful.49 In a popular, bestselling book about gratitude that promises to bring Americans personal happiness and joy, these political messages seem to me to be especially dangerous. In Emmons’s book, gratitude, defined as a positive emotion and a personal virtue, is quickly and subtly transformed into a political weapon for silencing dissent and rewriting American war-making as charity. These comments about the ungrateful Iraqi soccer players read like something straight from President George W. Bush’s mouth. Indeed, our forty-third president frequently complained about an ungrateful world that did not show Americans proper thanks for its leadership. “I don’t think America gets enough credit for trying to improve people’s lives,” he groused in 2007.50 After Saddam Hussein was removed from office, President Bush demanded that the new leader of the Iraqi government had to be “someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.”51 Of course, Iyad Allawi, the first American-backed prime minister, did go out of his way to thank President Bush and the American people, repeatedly. But it was not enough. Well into his second term in office, in January 2007, with the popularity of the war in Iraq tanking as the American occupation ground on, and with the president defending a 21,000 troop increase to the country, he commented on CBS’s 60 Minutes: “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude.” “I mean . . . we’ve endured great sacrifices to help them,” and yet the American people are left to “wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”52 The president, here, demanded gratitude, suggesting that because America acted from the best of intentions, there should be no dissent from its wars, and no criticism of them, either. The cost of “ends-less war”—I along with William Saas call it ends-less not just because contemporary warfare is ongoing and seemingly perpetual but also because unlike most of the wars of the twentieth century, there are no stated, concrete ends or goals of the so-called “war on terror” that might signify victory—both human and monetary, defy

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calculation.53 Traditional war rhetoric aims at gaining the support of the citizenry for war through emotional appeals to anger, outrage, and fear. The new war rhetoric does not care whether citizens support the war or not. In fact, it would prefer that citizens ignore the war altogether and just get on with their lives. The new war rhetoric aims at promoting acquiescence, not assent. So when you think about it, couching war in the language of “gratitude” is a brilliant strategic move. Almost everyone who has ever written about gratitude in the West says that it follows a law of “reciprocity,” in which gifts are given and those gifts in turn demand a grateful response.54 Here, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is labeled a “gift” to the people of Iraqi, and because gifts mandate a response, the Iraqis were obligated to express their gratitude, not their criticism. Apparently in this case the desired outcome of gratitude is kowtowing, not critique. The debt of gratitude is a perfect rhetoric for denouncing all critique as the ungrateful whining of ungrateful people. Of course, we now know that the war in Iraq was not a “gift,” it was an act of aggression that violated international law, with the result of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians and thousands of dead American soldiers (not the mention those soldiers who came home with PTSD and other physical and psychological afflictions caused by the trauma of battle). In terms of its stated goals, of promoting stability and security, the war was a failure. The cost of the war will saddle Americans with a monetary debt that can likely never be repaid, and this is to say nothing of the grave human costs of war. Too many lives were lost or ruined, on both sides of the conflict. To all of this, Americans, and Iraqis, and the world, are called to acquiesce.55 In the hands of the powerful, “gratitude” quickly becomes an effective rhetorical weapon for promoting obedience. Mandatory gratitude silences the legitimate outrage of those hurt and wounded and killed by American justice in Iraq. And it is hinted that gratitude should work similarly on the home front. Emmons summarizes psychological research that suggests that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks brought out the best of Americans, prompting them to be more grateful. He approvingly quotes President Bush’s words on the tragedy’s first anniversary calling for love of country and “gratitude for life and to the Giver of life”56—even though these words were contained in a violent, bellicose speech that invoked the memory of September 11, 2001, and even the authority of God himself, to justify a global, open-ended, ends-less war

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that in the coming years would tarnish America’s international reputation, bankrupt its economy (costing between $4 and $6 trillion57), and destroy the lives of countless soldiers and civilians at home and abroad. The war in Iraq, especially, is a black eye on Uncle Sam. We should not be openly celebrating it or quietly condoning it but actively determining how to prevent such a disaster in the future. We owe no gratitude to the war profiteers who manufactured this war. Today, gratitude is made political through the rhetoric of enemy58 ship. Enemyship is a rhetoric that forecasts future dangers in order to encourage us to experience the present though the lens of fear. The rhetoric of enemyship remakes our political world by calling on citizens to be united in opposition to our national enemies. As President Bush said just days after the attacks of September 11, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”59 Enemyship demands civic unity in the face of danger, and though this political unity is never quite achieved, the demand for oneness (such as in our national motto e pluribus unum) provides elites with a powerful rhetoric for denouncing dissent as unAmerican. It is not difficult to see how enemyship can capitalize upon the debt of gratitude to silence critics. Do you remember why Socrates refused to flee Athens after being sentenced to death, even when fleeing would have been so easy, even when his followers repeatedly asked him to abscond and would have helped him to do so? Socrates did not bolt, he explained, because he owed a debt of gratitude to Athens for his life, just as he owed a similar debt of gratitude to his parents.60 The polis, here, is imagined as a parent whose children (the citizens) owe it such a debt of gratitude that they must sacrifice their lives for it if commanded to do so.61 It is but a small step from Socrates’s resigned acceptance of his fate to a willing, enthusiastic sacrifice for the state: in Horace’s words, “it is sweet and right to die for one’s country!” [dulce et decorum est pro patria mori].62 This has been called “the Old Lie,” but it is a lie we readily believe, even today.63 We are perhaps more familiar with the words Nathan Hale supposedly uttered before his execution during the Revolutionary War—“My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country”—but the sentiments expressed by Horace are familiar enough to Americans. Horace’s militaristic poem urged Romans to develop their fighting abilities so that, strong and united, they would deter their enemies. Horace’s words are inscribed over the Memorial Amphitheater

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at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC, for all visitors to the shrine to see. I have no problem with service. But when we serve, we must always ask, who are we serving, and to what ends? We should never serve blindly. Our gratitude is at its most powerful and praiseworthy when it serves the commonweal, not the private interests of the rich and powerful. I much prefer the cheeky and, to my mind, rather profound reworking of Horace’s words that became a popular toast during the nineteenth century: “It is sweet and right to die for one’s country, but much sweeter to live for one’s country, and sweetest to drink to one’s country. So, let us drink to our country’s health!” [dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, sed dulcius pro patria vivere, ed dulcissimum pro patria bibere. Ergo, bibamus pro salute patriae].64 This irreverent salute flips the debt of gratitude on its head: our focus should be on life, not death, and on freedom, not debt. It is better to live than to die, and better yet to live well with purpose. There are many ways to serve one’s country and one’s fellows. Service is not limited to participation in war and death and killing. We can serve our country by caring for others, by teaching, by farming, by calling out injustice when we see it, by doing whatever we can to make life richer and fuller for the whole, by reducing suffering. We must combat the debt of gratitude when it serves to foster enemyship. Yet enemyship is not our only problem. There are, in fact, two dominant forms of rhetoric in the United States that are routinely used to manufacture consent, to render citizens acquiescent and weak, and to justify forms of political and economic organization harmful to the public—enemyship and the politics of resentment. I did not speak much about gratitude in my book The Politics of Resentment. I mistakenly believed that Seneca was correct and that, at bottom, gratitude and resentment are opposites, a view that is affirmed by contemporary psychologists including Emmons, who suggests that gratitude and resentment are canceled out by the principle of “emotional incompatibility.”65 I should have seen, as Adam Smith saw in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, that resentment and gratitude can and often do work together as techniques of governmentality and social control. For Smith resentment and gratitude were the two most important emotions for promoting social stability. Gratitude would ensure that people were comfortable living in debt and goad them to repay what they owed. Resentment, in turn, would restrain the ungrateful—for to act ungratefully was to risk facing the resentment of the

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community and the swift hand of its justice. For Smith, it is the debt of gratitude that brings and holds us together, just as it was for Cicero, Seneca, Aquinas, and Hobbes. Today, gratitude and resentment continue to go hand in hand, though differently than Smith imagined. For much of Western history, resentment was believed to be the most dangerous and volatile political emotion. Whenever the masses were resentful, elite speakers sought to calm them down or at the very least to displace resentment into a different political emotion that could be more easily controlled (such as fear). During the twentieth century, however, American politicians began to realize that resentment could be a valuable political emotion, and they sought to amplify, rather than to alleviate, popular resentment.66 Why? Because resentful people are easily manipulated. This is a problem for democratic politics, because resentment is often a perfectly justifiable political emotion. When we stand face to face with a crushing debt that can never be repaid, and when we are told to meet this debt with gratitude, not rage, it is only natural for us to feel resentment, both toward the debt and to those who have brought this debt upon us. Resentment is a natural, logical, understandable response to the debt of gratitude. This resentment might feel like power—and that is the one of the reasons resentment is so intoxicating, as it feels both holy and mighty—but ultimately it leaves us vulnerable to the emotional pyrotechnics of the skilled speaker. A politics born out of resentment, no matter how well-intentioned or righteous it might seem to participants, is easily manipulated by a society’s governing elites and media pundits. The politics of resentment is a style of leadership that directs civic resentment away from its legitimate sources—including a neoliberal economy that has undermined the common good, transformed people into things to be bought and sold and discarded, and designated the earth as just another commodity to be bought and sold—toward scapegoats within the demos. In this way, the politics of resentment fractures Americans, ensuring that they cannot come together as a united people to make demands on the powers that be for a better future.67 In the end, both enemyship and the politics of resentment are rhetorics of division and antagonism. Both employ emotions such as gratitude to split the world into rival camps, into friends and enemies, victims and victimizers, and in such an affectively charged, black-or-white situation, it becomes impossible to talk openly with others and difficult even to think.

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The debt of gratitude represents a colossal failure of empathy and the hardening of the human heart. The contemporary gratitude literature teaches us to live in debt, and to feel good that our debts are not as severe as another’s. Building on a long history with Cicero and Seneca at its beginning, many contemporary writers continue to speak of gratitude as though it means indebtedness. Yet debt is possible, philosophically and rhetorically, only when we start with separation, between people, between rich and poor, between humans and the divine. To counteract the debt of gratitude, we must remember that we are all in this together. Seneca believed the debt of gratitude to be the foundation of human community. There could be no community, and no human cooperation, without the debt of gratitude. Rituals of gift-giving and debt-bearing have long been at the heart of how we in the West have pictured communities. Cicero said that all morals ultimately derive from the debt of gratitude. In the early twentieth century, following the unraveling of Europe after WWI, Marcel Mauss pronounced the debt of gratitude to be at the center of human communities in his monumental work The Gift. Before the war, fellow sociologist Georg Simmel described gratitude as “the moral memory of mankind.”68 Without the debt of gratitude, Simmel concluded, “society (at least as we know it) would break apart.”69 I hope that Cicero and Seneca and Mauss and Simmel, reaching the same conclusion nearly two millennia apart, are mistaken. In times of crisis, the debt of gratitude might bring us together, but it cannot create a community of shared purpose. The debt of gratitude might seem like a rhetoric promoting identification and consubstantiality, but ultimately it is a rhetoric of disconnection and division. It fractures humankind by instituting a hierarchy of those who give and those who receive; or, in the parlance of today’s politics of resentment, the Makers and the Takers. In the end, the debt of gratitude proves an ally to the politics of resentment. In fact, political actors easily harness the debt of gratitude as another brutal rhetoric in this divisive, violent thunderdome of contemporary politics. Today, the debt of gratitude is turned against the common good and democracy. The debt of gratitude fuels our anger even as its acts as a palliative for living a life of debt. It riles us up, then it cools us down. It is against the debt of gratitude that a truly democratic politics of gratitude must be staged. The debt of gratitude has been confusing and confounding and diminishing us since the days of ancient Rome. This form of gratitude

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continues to hover over us like a storm cloud, blackening out the sky, making us feel guilty for the debts we owe and for life itself. The debt of gratitude makes us acquiescent and politically weak. Even when it doesn’t make us weak, it makes us easy prey for enemyship and politics of resentment.70 Gratitude is a foundational democratic political emotion. If we are going to reinvigorate our democracy today, we must reassess the art of gratitude. I hope that this book is a step toward that goal. When it comes to gratitude, Cicero cannot be our guide, as both his “good man speaking well” [vir bonus dicendi peritus] and the gratitudinous debtor are wrapped up in a patronage relationship designed both to engender dependence and to promote obedience through guilt. On this point Rome has spoken, but the case is far from concluded. Today, we must steadfastly reject the Latin gratia as our model if we hope to be free. Fortunately, on this matter Rome is not the last word.

5

“Santosha” On the Yoga of Gratitude

“Know Yourself ” (γνῶθι σεαυτόν). These words were emblazoned above the entryway to the Oracle at Delphi for all pilgrims to see. This was advice and warning: if a person did not know himself or herself, the pilgrim would not receive good counsel from the Oracle, and might, in fact, be led dangerously astray. The Greeks understood that we cannot live the good life, nor can we be capable political actors, if we do not know ourselves—and the only way we can know ourselves is by learning to take care of ourselves.1 The twin imperatives of self-knowledge and self-care are at the very foundation of Western civilization.2 They are also at the heart of yoga philosophy. Yoga is a practice of knowing who we are in order to change who we will become. I believe that the individual is a lived art. It is not quite that existence precedes essence, as the existentialists said. When we are born, we are thrown into a world that is ready-made and at the ready to tell us how to act and who to be. Each of us is the product of norms and practices and assumptions and habits that define our existence and limit who we can be. But that is not the end of the story; it is the beginning. If we become aware of ourselves as the products of history and doxa and commonsense, if we recognize ourselves as the inheritors of the debt of gratitude, if we learn to care for ourselves, we will find that within this bounded world there is tremendous freedom and creativity. Through

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focused, disciplined practice, we can change ourselves by changing how we feel and thus how we see, and interact with, the world. A human life is lived in reaction. The world presents situations to us, and we react, generally as we have been taught to react. Many spiritual traditions, including American pragmatism, attempt to break our bad habits so that we might have less destructive and more humane reactions to the world. Scott Stroud labels pragmatism’s spirituality “orientational meliorism.”3 Pragmatism attempts to change our orientation toward the world so that we create opportunities for communication and cooperation with our fellow citizens. The pragmatist emphasis on orientation is deeply rhetorical. Indeed, rhetorical scholars have long taught that the civic health of a democracy is dependent upon how citizens approach the world and each other.4 Writing in the 1930s, Kenneth Burke announced that a fundamental change in perspective was necessary “to forestall (if it can be forestalled!) the most idiotic tragedy conceivable: the willfully ultimate poisoning of this lovely planet, in conformity with a mistaken heroics of war.”5 Burke’s message rings no less true in the early twenty-first century. If humans are going to continue to live together on this planet, we need to recalibrate how we see the planet and each other. Because our orientation toward the world is emotional through and through, we must also learn to feel differently, for how we feel makes democracy more or less possible. The art of gratitude I defend in this book takes orientational meliorism seriously, but I strive to take it a step further. We are not spectators or bystanders to nature but co-creators of a world in flux. The placebo effect is real. Is it a particle or a wave?—It matters who is looking. The answer depends upon the question, and the questioner. How we live our lives invites the world to respond in particular ways. Our orientation or perspective changes the world by making some possibilities live and others die. When we feel gratitude as indebtedness, the world is different than when we feel gratefulness. My point is that the present moment is not a given. Inspired by yoga philosophy, my thesis is more radical: by altering our experiences of the present, we change the present itself and the opportunities it affords us. By practicing the art of gratitude, we will see the world differently, and the world itself will be different for us. That, in a nutshell, is how I understand the practice of yoga: We study who we are right now, so that we can bring about conscious change in who we will become. Yoga challenges us to take a long hard look at ourselves and how we are living.

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Most of us have learned to be grateful by practicing the debt of gratitude; indebtedness is commonsense, and it is our curse. Once we are conscious of how indebtedness makes us suffer and limits our room to maneuver, we can practice the yogic discipline of santosha, which is designed to complicate and challenge our current habits of gratitude so we can feel differently. Santosha paves the way for an experience of gratefulness—an emotion that is, I believe, unavailable to most people because they have been trained in the debt of gratitude. Once we experience gratefulness, the world is no longer the same. Gratefulness, I conclude, paves the way for true democracy, the type of democracy that my favorite writer, Walt Whitman, champions. In Democratic Vistas (1871), Whitman argues that democracy exists to articulate “the central divine idea of All.” Though the idea of the All is ancient, “it is for Democracy to elaborate it, and look to build upon and expand from it, with uncompromising reliance.” It is gratefulness that leads to this democracy of the All.”6

Yoga Contra Neoliberalism When I discuss the benefits of yoga with my students and fellow academics, I often receive eye-rolls and suspicious glances. So let me address this question straightaway: Why yoga? The fact that yoga philosophy provides a keyword for gratitude, santosha, that has escaped the attention of the contemporary gratitude literature should be sufficient reason to devote this chapter to yoga. But my interest in yoga is motivated by more than a desire to be comprehensive. The world will never change for the better if we wallow in despair and disappointment. We need to hope—and I believe that yoga gives us reason to hope that a change is going to come. Moreover, I believe that yoga helps us to understand what a “better” world might look like. The yoga I describe in this chapter—specifically the yoga of santosha, a keyword of gratitude that I nominate to replace “indebtedness” and all its precursors in our contemporary political rhetoric—troubles and challenges the debt of gratitude, offering democratic citizens a powerful rhetoric for critiquing neoliberalism. I recognize that this will sound strange, given that many of you have probably been to a yoga studio or a fitness center and experienced what is taught there. It is true: most current yoga does not escape neoliberalism. In fact, most contemporary yogis are perfect little neoliberal

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people: well meaning, but politically acquiescent, focused as they are on building their “brand.” Look in the pages of any popular yoga magazine, and you immediately see a multitude of beautiful yoga entrepreneurs selling themselves and their spirituality as a product to be consumed by the tranquility-seeking masses. The contemporary practice of yoga is a great example of how neoliberalism transforms everything into a commodity, even spirituality.7 Contemporary yoga sometimes pays lip service to its deep philosophical roots in Indian philosophy and religion, but the yoga most Americans practice today is divorced from its radical philosophical and ethical content. Yoga philosophy has been sanitized so that it is more easily bought and sold without disturbing the status quo. In this chapter, I aim to present yoga philosophy in a different light, as the basis of an art of gratitude that disrupts contemporary habits and forwards a radical challenge to the very premises of neoliberalism. Today, yoga’s demonstrable calming and concentrating effects have thrilled many and frightened some, tied up as yoga seems to be with religion and faith and gods and strange words that most Americans do not understand.8 Yoga alarms many progressive academics committed to social justice for other reasons. According to its icy critics, the explosion of interest in yoga over the past thirty years is a consequence of the rise and triumph of neoliberalism. Yoga’s opponents tend to see it in one of two ways: either yoga is a distraction from systemic ills—we tone our minds and bodies instead of fighting for social justice—or it is quite literally an extension of the neoliberalism that makes us all responsible for our own happiness and sadness and success and failure. In The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, William Davies speaks of mindfulness and yoga as “mental management,” implying that yoga is just another type of social control developed by our neoliberal overlords.9 For many of its critics, yoga is just the newest opiate of the masses with great glutes. I recognize these critiques, but I see in yoga, just as I see in gratitude, the potential for something more radical, something that can challenge the totalizing logic of neoliberalism from the inside out and reinvigorate our politics by overturning the debt of gratitude. Like anything good, yoga is easily commodified. Far too many yogis proudly prance about in expensive pants made by a company, Lululemon, which once printed a quote on its shopping bags (“Who is John Galt?”) from Ayn Rand, the twentieth-century’s unabashed queen

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of egoism and a great despiser of the human race. I can think of no one who better represents the opposite of what yoga should be about than Ayn Rand, and yet her words about conquering mediocrity and destroying democracy are sold to yogis on shiny bags they then proudly show off to their peers. This company in fact derives its motto from Rand’s contemptible novel Atlas Shrugged, one of the most extreme defenses of selfishness, and the virtues of stepping on your neighbor to get ahead, ever written.10 We know who John Galt is. He is the neoliberal citizen; he is us. Neoliberalism tames democracy by transforming citizens into ambitious egoists who are concerned only about their own happiness and who, consequently, are unwilling to look beyond themselves toward the common good. In line with Davies’s The Happiness Industry, many of my progressive friends see yoga as a functional distraction from systemic problems, and they mock people for toning their abs when they could be manning a picket line. While I acknowledge my friends’ critiques of yoga, and while I agree that these critiques are valid for much but certainly not all of the yoga that is practiced in the United States today, I look at things differently. I believe we will be better able to care for others, and more effective agents of social change, if we first learn to care for ourselves. When true to its rich philosophical roots, yoga prepares us to care for ourselves in the context of the whole, on which we depend and to which we are bound. Yoga, in short, teaches us how to care for ourselves as members of a democratic community and a common world. Too many contemporary yogis practice a yoga of retreat. Though we do not run off to the forest or the mountains as the sages of the Vedas did, we do withdraw onto our mats into our beautiful studios. But yoga is not only a philosophy or a practice of retirement. In the practice of santosha, yoga teaches a rhetoric of gratitude that is not beholden to the Ciceronian paradigm of debt, a rhetoric that prepares us to see the world anew and to work with others toward the common good. As I understand it, yoga prepares us to see the common good and then to work to make the world a better place for all. While the yoga that most Americans practice is philosophically quite shallow, I do not see yoga’s tremendous popularity as a problem at all. If yogis are able to practice the art of gratitude, I see yoga as an opportunity for a new social movement based in a gratitude that transcends narrow egoism and directs our attention instead to the well-being of us all and to the precariousness of

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what we hold in common. Practicing santosha, we sit on our mats ready warriors for the democratic common good.

“Atha”: Yoga as Mindfulness Yoga is first and foremost a practice of mindfulness, and mindfulness begins when we notice our present orientation toward the world.11 The first word in the great classical textbook of yoga, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, likely written during the second century CE, is “atha,” now; yoga draws our attention to how we are living right now, in the present moment.12 Yoga begins when we ask the question, “where do I find myself?” right now.13 Mindfulness has become popular today precisely because it is concerned with drawing attention to our practices of engagement with the world.14 Mindfulness involves two practices: shamatha (stopping, calming, resting) and vipashyana (looking deeply at things).15 Patanjali argues that yoga involves two similar practices: nirodha (restraining the mind) and samapatti (the attainment of a deeper vision of reality).16 And what are we recognizing as we stop and look deeply? We are recognizing our vasana, our “habit energies,” how we have been trained to see and act in the world.17 Vasana is how doxa and culture act through us as individuals. Humans are our habits. Habit is “the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent,” William James wrote.18 Most of us spend our days on automatic pilot. But make no mistake: we are always practicing something—the question is what and toward what ends. Do our practices and our habits expand our vision and capacity for action, or narrow it? To me, the concept of vasana resonates strongly with what Michel Foucault calls “disciplinary power,” the type of power that works by training and conditioning us to behave in politically desirable ways, to meet the world each morning in this way, not that way.19 Vasana is one of the most helpful yogic concepts, for we all have habits that cause us to suffer. On some level, we probably know what these habits are, and we can recognize them as habits. It takes courage and practice to meet them with a smile and a little compassion, rather than with guilt and mortification. It takes even more courage to admit that these habits cause us suffering and therefore to commit to changing them. Mindfulness is about recognizing our habits as they emerge and stepping back from them so that we might develop a new perspective on

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how we are living in the present moment.20 Thich Nhat Hanh explains: “Mindfulness is the energy that can help us stop. We investigate the kinds of nutriments we now ingest and decide which ones to continue to eat and which to resist. We sit and look together with our friends, with our family, and as a community.”21 What the Buddhists call “Right View” is about nourishing only those seeds that bring goodness into the world.22 In the end, we become what we practice. To ek-sist is to exist in the context of the habits we have developed over the course of our lifetimes. Every one of us has a way of being, a style of living, initiated by our culture, shaped by our practices, and colored by our emotions. Our thoughts and feelings ride on the road of habit. We cannot change ourselves if we are unskilled in observing how our minds work. Mindfulness is the practice of focusing complete attention on how we are experiencing each moment. Seneca instructed his readers, “fight against yourself!” [pugna tecum ipse!].23 Mindfulness teaches the opposite. Nhat Hanh notes that “the Sanskrit word for mindfulness, smriti, means ‘remember.’ Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment.”24 The Chinese character for mindfulness (nian, ⾝) is a combination of two characters: jin (Ṳ), meaning “now,” and xin (⽫), meaning “mind” or “heart”—mindfulness is the practice of observing the mind and heart in the now, rather than the guilty past or the anxious future, where so many of us live our days.25 Through the practice of mindfulness—or heartfulness—we can observe how we work as individuals without passing judgment on ourselves (as the debt of gratitude demands we do). It is not about fighting ourselves, but learning to observe ourselves and our natural tendencies (our vasana, habit energies). We must learn to notice our own tendencies before we can change them. Jon Kabat-Zinn points out that “in life there are actually no problems, only situations that require a response.”26 Every life has its storms. Mindfulness involves learning to look at a situation for what it is—not for what we want it to be—and then responding appropriately. By practicing mindfulness, we can become unstuck from our bad habits. Mindfulness involves letting go of the past and refusing to let projections of the future predetermine how we will behave. Kabat-Zinn is worth quoting at length here, for he offers an answer to critics who see mindfulness (and yoga) as a depoliticizing, selfish practice that encourages us to focus only on ourselves and consequently to acquiesce to the status quo:

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So the challenge of each and every moment is, can we approach things in such a way that we act appropriately in each situation, moment by moment by moment, whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, even as the thinking mind wants to and does automatically turn it into a problem, even misperceiving it at the same time, and the small “I” gets into the act and turns it into a dilemma or an elaborate melodrama? The story of me and my problem and how it is going, or not going.27 Mindfulness is a necessary starting place if we hope to change our world. To practice mindfulness is not to withdraw from society. Mindfulness is in fact the starting line of the necessary spiritual journey we must undertake to be effective participants in democratic social change. By learning to live more mindfully, we can then act more deliberately, as more than spokespeople for the status quo.

Yoga Is More Than Moving Bodies There is no doubt that yoga today is huge. Yoga is a $27 billion dollar industry with over thirty-two million practitioners in the United States.28 The words “downward dog” and “namaste” have entered our everyday vocabulary. “Om” symbols are everywhere, printed on t-shirts, tattooed on bodies. Though yoga has become very popular, most Americans have a very limited sense of what it means to practice yoga because they tend to equate yoga exclusively with the practice of asana, physical postures. There is nothing wrong with toning our bodies. That trite expression, the body is a temple, is no less true because it is trite. It is much easier to be happy, and a capable agent of democratic change, in a healthy body. Yet asana is just one aspect of yoga. In fact, the elaborate physical practice of complicated, body-bending postures that most of us practice in America is a relatively recent invention of about a century ago.29 In the Yoga-Sutras, Patanjali explains that yoga is the practice of citta vrtti nirodhah, “the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.”30 Yoga begins from the principle that most of us have very little control over our minds. We suffer constantly and terribly from angry and fearful thoughts and emotions that color our perception and vision. By learning

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to focus the mind, yogis are able to overcome the sense of division that drives so many people to despair and violence. Yoga is emphatically not about deadening or “killing” (to use Swami Vivekananda’s unfortunate word) the mind—this interpretation of “nirodha” (the Sanskrit word for “silencing” or “stilling” our thoughts) makes no sense, both because a dead mind would leave the yogi unable to function in the world, and also because it is only through the workings of the mind that the yogi can advance along the path of yoga.31 The Bhagavad Gita teaches that “the mind is unsteady and difficult to restrain; but by practice . . . it is restrained.”32 For Patanjali, yoga far transcends flashy poses and bendy bodies. There are, in fact, eight limbs of yoga: yama (moral proscriptions); niyama (moral prescriptions); asana (physical posture); pranayama (breath-control); pratyahara (sense-withdrawal); dharana (concentration); dhyana (meditation); and samadhi (absorption into the infinite).33 While we in the West tend to focus our attention on asana, yoga is much broader and all encompassing. B. K. S. Iyengar likens the eight limbs described by Patanjali to a “tree of yoga.”34 The roots of the tree are the yamas and the niyamas, concepts that have been variously translated into English as “restraints,”35 “abstentions,”36 “moral injunctions,”37 “attitudes” and “behaviors.”38 The yamas are suggestions for what we should not do, and the niyamas of what we should do, if we hope to reach our fullest potential for the good.39 These limbs comprise the ethics of yoga. Yoga begins as a reconsideration of how we act and how we speak. Yoga then proceeds though a number of practices that are aimed at bringing balance to the body, ease to the breath, and focus to the mind (asana, pranayama, pratyahara). Yoga ends with meditation and absorption. Samadhi is said to bring “the peace which passeth understanding.”40 Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the yogic experience of samadhi in the most famous image from his first book, Nature (1836): “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”41 Spiritual practices like yoga are designed to shake up our perspective on the world, so that we might awaken from the sleep of doxa and habit and see things differently. Most of us believe what we are told to believe, feel how we are told to feel, and do what we are told to do. Yoga aims to enlarge our vision so that we might think, feel, and act

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differently. Yoga is a practice of self-study in which we take ourselves and our habits as the object of inquiry. In yoga, we aim to develop a wiser, healthier relationship to ourselves, especially our thoughts and emotions. To practice yoga is to notice aspects of ourselves that we tend to ignore—including how we feel—and then bring some control over what is automatic. Yoga is concerned with our minds, which are generally set on cruise control. There is a Zen story in which one friend sees another friend rushing by on horseback. The first friend asks the second, “Where are you going?” The friend yells back, “I don’t know—you’ll have to ask the horse!” Most of us are like this, though it is our minds that send us galloping and stampeding through life.42 For the next minute, sit quietly and try not to think of a monkey. I bet you can’t. That’s how little control most of us have over thoughts. Our minds are made to think and feel. William James coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” to capture the fact that the mind is like a river that is always running, whether we realize it or not—and if we are not careful, like a river with its rapids and swirling eddies and drowning vortexes, it will carry us away. Our minds have a way of sweeping us into narrative thought, such that we see the world like a great drama in which we play the hero and someone else the villain. So often we get lost in our minds, and also in our hearts. The stream of consciousness includes our emotions, for thought and feeling are intimately related. In fact, yoga philosophy teaches that our minds are, like all forms of matter, made up of three fluctuating emotional realities called the “gunas”—tamas, which is manifested as laziness and clingingness; rajas, which is manifested as desire and striving; and sattva, which is manifested as happiness and tranquility.43 In opposition to Western, Cartesian traditions that affirm a strict separation between mind and body, between thought and matter, yoga teaches that our thoughts are emotional on an ontological level. We quite literally feel our thoughts. Yoga aims at an unwavering, deeply focused mind because when our minds are out of control, so too will our feelings be (and vice versa). The Yogacara (Mind-Only) Buddhists say that thoughts and feelings are seeds (bija), and our minds are like a storehouse that contains all the seeds (sarvabijaka). Yoga philosophers speak similarly of vasana, deep impressions left on the mind by our experiences.44 All of our emotions exist as potentials in the storehouse of our consciousness, waiting to be

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triggered by our thoughts and experiences.45 These emotions, in turn, shape the world that we experience. The world does not look the same to someone who is fearful, or angry, or grateful, and so that world is not the same because the possibilities for action—our breathing room, our room to maneuver—are not the same. Humans are capable of thinking many things and feeling many ways. When we have a thought, and it causes us to feel a certain way, as thoughts always do, this leaves an impression on the mind. This mark is like a seed that will sprout into a great tree if we continually focus our attention on it. Yoga involves asking, what seeds, what vasana, are we are sowing in ourselves? To practice yoga is to observe how we think, and then to bring thought—which yogis compare to a rampaging, runaway, out-of-control horse—under more conscious control. The Bhagavad Gita says that “a lamp in a windless place does not flicker.”46 Yoga is the practice of making the mind like this lamp, steady and unwavering in its constant sure focus—and, as a consequence, clear and certain in its emotions.47 The philosophers of India’s three ancient religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, all identify desire as the primary cause of human suffering. The Bhagavad Gita flags desire as the source of “bondage.”48 The goal of yoga is moksha, liberation from bondage (the Buddhists call liberation nirvana; for the Jains it is kaivalya). The rub, of course, is that desire is the primary motivation for human action. We act because we desire something or someone or some state of being. We act to achieve. Understanding this, many yoga philosophers have suggested that to achieve liberation it is necessary to live a life of sannyasa, the ascetic renunciation of this world. Krishna pronounces sannyasa a perfectly valid yogic path, but it is not the only path to liberation, nor is it, he suggests, the best for most people—who, by their situation in life, are required to act. The primary question for Krishna is therefore: How can we act without being driven primarily by desire? The answer is “disinterested action” or “actionless-action”49 (naiskarmya-karma)—acting without being attached to the “fruits”—that is, the results—of action. Krishna tells Arjuna: Your right is to action alone; Never to its fruits at any time. Never should the fruits of action be your motive; Never let there be attachment to inaction in you.

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Fixed in yoga, perform actions, Having abandoned attachment, Arjuna, And having become indifferent to success or failure. It is said that evenness of mind is yoga.50 The Bhagavad Gita encourages its audience to become a person firm in wisdom (sthitaprajna).51 This is a tall order. Arjuna quickly realizes that it will take tremendous discipline to achieve the “evenness of mind” that Krishna speaks of. And so he asks Krishna, how do I become a sthitaprajna, one who is firm in wisdom? Krishna responds: Arjuna must practice yoga. The practice of yoga extends to all areas of our lives, including gratitude. In the Bhagavad Gita, one mark of human goodness is “dana,” charity.52 Krishna singles out charity as an opportunity to practice action without desire because, he argues, you can tell a lot about a person by how they give and if they demand a return for their graciousness. To practice yoga successfully, Krishna concludes, Arjuna must fundamentally reconsider gratitude. Book Sixteen of the Bhagavad Gita outlines the yogic practice of virtue ethics. To describe how the good person acts, the Gita explores a metaphorical conflict between two human potentials that are said to be constantly at war in us all: the potential for goodness (daiva), which is fearless, humble, and seeks to promote the common good for all, and the potential for heedlessness (asura), which is angry, fearful, selfish, and driven by the assumption that life has no purpose other than material gratification.53 These categories become a guidebook through which Krishna teaches Arjuna how to care for himself. Some commentators on the Bhagavad Gita translate the word “asura” into English using terms long associated with Christianity, including “evil,” “demonic,” “wicked,” or “ungodly.” In using “heedless,” I follow one of my favorite poets, Norman Fischer, who in his translation of the Christian Psalms speaks not of “wickedness” or “evil” but of “heedlessness”—Psalm 1:6 thus becomes “What you see is always lovely and remembered, But the way of heedlessness is oblivion.”54 The accomplished yogi, according to the Bhagavad Gita, sees the divine in all people and all things.55 In the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita and Advaita Vedanta, the battle is against avidya, ignorance of the true interconnectedness of all beings. People act heedlessly in line with avidya when they deny this divinity, when they neglect human interconnectedness, and when they ignore the common good of the whole. Rendering asura as “heedless” does not posit an innate,

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fixed character trait (such as “evil”) but instead calls attention to how a person is living their life in the present moment. People are evil, but they live heedlessly, and heedlessness can be corrected (whereas in the Christian tradition those who are evil or demonic can only be punished). According to the Bhagavad Gita, there is a battle between conflicting potentials in us all. Both the daiva and the asura practice gratitude. But there is crucial difference. The asura is driven by the destructive desire for domination over others. The asura uses his tremendous wealth to throw parties, put on festivals, and stage rituals—not for the good of the community, not to help people realize their potential for goodness, but to increase his fame and renown.56 The asura gives, but it is not charity. The asura gives to control, to demand, to enslave, to own.57 The asura views gratitude as an instrument of power. The asura is an expert practitioner of the debt of gratitude. He gives to bind, shackle, and enslave. He can practice this false charity because for centuries we have been taught to view gratitude as a synonym for indebtedness. In contrast, the daiva looks at his life in the context of the whole, and understands that the quality of one life cannot be detached from the quality of all lives. The daiva recognizes his full and complete dependence upon the common good, and he gives without hope of return. There is an old Cherokee legend—a legend, coincidently, that one of my teachers in India shared to exemplify the true nature of yoga—in which a young grandson asks his grandfather about the meaning of life. The old man tells his grandson that there is a battle raging in all of us between two wolves. One wolf is evil: angry, fearful, untrusting, untruthful, violent, esurient, self-pitying. The other wolf is good: happy, kind, truthful, peaceful, generous, trustworthy, serene. “Which wolf will win,” the grandson asks? “Whichever one you feed,” the grandfather replies. The asura is us, just as much as the daiva. Every individual is the site of a war between any number of emotions and drives and histories. The Bhagavad Gita boils this complex, messy psychology down to a conflict between the asura and the daiva in order to prepare us for spiritual change and worldly action. According to Krishna, we all have the capacity to act like the daiva when it comes to gratitude. If we are to be liberated from the bondage of desire, we must learn to cultivate gratitude without obligation or debt. The asura practices false charity, for his motivation is mastery over others. Giving to enslave, he too becomes a slave to the gift-giving economy. In the process he promotes suffering, both for himself and

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for those entangled in his web of reciprocity. In his lectures on the Bhagavad Gita, Swami Vivekananda suggests that most people act like the asura, giving to get a return: “No sooner do we give money to some charity than we want to see our names blazoned in the paper. Misery must come as the result of such desires.”58 Vivekananda turned to the Bhagavad Gita in the 1890s to encourage Americans, habituated to acquisition and desirous of fame, to reconsider gratitude. He pleads with his audience to practice giving a truly free gift, as the daiva does. “Do you ask anything from your children in return for what you have given them? . . . In whatever you do for a particular person, a city, or a state, assume the same attitude towards it as you have towards your children—expect nothing in return.”59 Rejecting the asura’s imposition of a debt of gratitude, Krishna explains to Arjuna that humans should give to others and work on their behalf, but without hope of return, and not to enrich themselves materially by their giving. To combat avidya and achieve moksha, Krishna implores Arjuna to practice the art of giving a free gift, of offering assistance to another with no strings attached.60 This might well be impossible—as Jacques Derrida argues, we are constantly haunted by the debt of gratitude, by the gift that demands a return—but only by struggling against this impossibility and working to give freely can we be free of bondage. In the tradition of the debt of gratitude, all gifts are self-interested and demand a return. If we experience the world through the lens of indebtedness, this is true: there is no such thing as a free gift. There are other ways to experience the world, however.61 Giving a gift freely, without obsessing about the fruits of such a gift, requires great firmness of mind, and great emotional stability, that is the result of a sophisticated yoga practice—and this leads us back to the niyamas, especially santosha, the practice of gratitude. But it requires more than this, too. Ultimately, yoga teaches us that it is easier to practice the gift-giving virtue, to give freely and without hope of return, when we give from a place of abundance—when our hearts are full and our most basic needs are met. When these needs are not met, yoga teaches us to stand up and fight for what we need. We do this as a community, as a demos, as a democracy. As we will see, yogic gratitude does not mean acquiescence or complacency in the face of privation and scarcity. Some desires are unnecessary, and they should be cast aside; but other desires are elemental and must be satisfied or else our bodies, our minds, and our souls suffer.

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To practice santosha is to be moved by thankfulness for life, and then immediately to recognize just how dependent our lives are on the world and those around us. The practice of santosha changes how we view the world, revealing a very different understanding of “the good” than what we are taught by neoliberalism—for santosha leads us to a vision of the good as a common good shared by all. In this way, the true spirit of yoga runs counter to neoliberalism, which pays no attention to what citizens need because it refuses to recognize any basic needs higher than the market. The yogic practice of santosha has the potential to reinvigorate our moribund democracy by showing us as democratic citizens what we should be fighting for. Yoga can reorient our emotions, and with them, our democracy and our world.

Santosha and The Ethics of Yoga Yoga philosophers have long expressed the same concern about gratitude that Aristotle voiced in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle saw gratitude (in ancient Greek, “χάρις”) as a synonym for obligation. He advised the great-souled man to never receive a gift or favor, precisely because such a kindness would put him in another person’s debt. Himself an astute student of both ancient Greek and Indian philosophy, Emerson echoed Aristotle’s chagrin in his essay “Gifts.” “It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver.”62 One of the five yamas is aparigraha, often translated as “non-covetousness” but which can also mean something like “self-reliance.” Vivekananda explains in Raja Yoga: Not receiving any present from anybody, even when one is suffering terribly, is what is called Aparigraha. The idea is, when a man receives a gift from another, his heart becomes impure, he becomes low, he loses his independence, he becomes bound and attached.63 One cannot achieve moksha, liberation, when in another person’s debt— yoga is the practice of mental self-reliance, because ultimately only we can liberate ourselves that bondage that exists in our minds. Walt Whitman gave voice to the yogic path when he wrote,

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Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.64 Yoga teaches self-reliance because no one can achieve moksha for us. We must do it ourselves. Yoga teaches self-reliance, but it is not egotistical, if by egotistical we mean neglectful of others and the world.65 As presented in the Bhagavad Gita, yoga aims at a new and enlarged perspective on the world in which all beings are interconnected in their shared divinity—me and you, us and them, friend and foe. Krishna observes in the Bhagavad Gita: He who is disciplined by yoga sees The Atman present in all beings, And all beings present in the Atman. He sees the same Atman at all times.66 Yogis practice seeing divinity, the Atman, in every person, friend or enemy. This yogic vision of innate divinity is said to be samadarsanah, “seen equally,” and sarvatra, “at all times, everywhere, in all cases.” The yoga of the Bhagavad Gita strives toward a resolute vision of common divinity. The Bhagavad Gita called this divinity “Atman”; Emerson called it “Over-Soul”; Whitman called it true “Democracy.” Whatever word we choose, it is a recognition of the common good out of which we spring and from which we derive all our power and agency. Yogic traditions within Hinduism are diverse and often contradictory. The Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are often lumped together in contemporary treatments of yoga. However, these two works present very different soteriologies—the Gita presents union with the whole, represented by Krishna, as the highest goal of yoga, while Patanjali says, in line with Samkhya metaphysics, that the ultimate goal of yoga is kaivalya, aloneness.67 While doing my best not to collapse one yogic system into the other, my goal in this chapter is to read Patanjali’s yogic ethics alongside the virtue ethics of the Bhagavad Gita as spiritual exercises leading us toward a new and enriched understanding of the democratic common good. The ethics of santosha, as presented in the Yoga Sutras, can bring about a change in perspective that furthers the ultimate philosophical goal of the Bhagavad Gita, namely to see, and feel, the world from the perspective of the whole; to recognize, and act, in line with the

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yogic insight that Atman, the individual soul, is equivalent to Brahman, universal divinity. Emerson believed that if we devote ourselves to the All (which he called “Over-Soul”), we will experience “the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side.”68 To practice yoga is to become invested in the common good, because, ultimately, we are all one. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the five disciplines of yama, which advise us how not to act, and the five disciplines of niyama, which advise us how to act, encourage us to consider how we are living our lives in this particular moment (atha). To practice these disciplines is to hold up a mirror to our lives. The yogic practice of gratitude is called “ô˴àȞó” (santosha), and in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, santosha is one of ethical disciplines mandatory for the yogi. In the Western tradition, gratitude is understood primarily as a transaction between individuals. Aparigraha is about learning how to avoid getting entangled in interpersonal debt relations. However, yogis also recognize that such self-reliance unfolds against a background of physical dependence. Yoga involves recognizing that we live in bodies, and that our bodies depend upon the earth, and upon others, for their well-being. We are dependent, but this does not make us debtors. At its heart, yoga philosophy also involves a fundamental reconsideration of gratitude. In his discussion of santosha, Patanjali challenges us to consider the consequences of how we conceptualize gratitude on our ability to live and to thrive in a world of dependence. Santosha is a practice of critical self-study concerning the meaning of gratitude. If gratitude is fundamental to human being—and on this point thinkers East and West seem to agree—then how we define gratitude will have real-life ramifications on how we live our lives. Santosha invites us to consider these pragmatic consequences. In yoga, gratitude is more than an emotion. Gratitude is a provocation to ponder our passions and hence our worldview. Santosha begins as a practice of questioning what warrants gratitude. As one commentator on santosha observes, “to avoid injury from thorns, one only has to wear one pair of shoes—one doesn’t need to cover the entire earth with leather!”69 Today, we are encouraged to buy, and buy, and buy, as though stuff will fill the pain in our hearts, the pain of alienation and disconnection, of fear and resentment. Such consumption furthers our debts, our feelings of guilt, and ultimately our resentment, making us easy prey for mountebanks and other predators who provide easy answers

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to our problems. We are told that to be happy we must cover the earth with leather, when really all we need is a simple, sturdy pair of shoes. And why do we need shoes? Because they prevent our feet from being hurt while we walk around. And just as we need shoes, there are other necessities for those of us who choose life over death—and ultimately yoga is a philosophy for those who choose life. Santosha is a provocation to reconsider our relationship to the necessities on which life depends. We do not live in spite of others but because of others. The living depend upon the living and the non-living. Yoga philosophy encourages us to consider how we treat the world that sustains life. Should we feel indebted to those who give us water and food? Or should such necessities be requirements shared by all, equally, without debt? The Bhagavad Gita teaches that we are aimless creatures of doxa, or what yoga philosophers call “maya,” the veil of illusion that masks the ontological reality that all creatures are united in their shared divinity.70 Emerson equated maya with fate—it is our fate to be blinded to the true nature of human interconnectedness. Maya, he concluded, was a frustrating adversary, “stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo.”71 The Titans deposed their father, Uranus, the god of the sky; the golden-worded god of prophecy Apollo could literally interpret the mysteries of nature—but these mighty mythic figures were no match for maya. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind, until she became as last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god. The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.72 Emerson derived a profoundly pessimistic lesson from yoga philosophy: “All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.”73 As I understand it, yoga suggests otherwise. By learning to care for ourselves, it is possible to change our perspective on the world so that we can see doxa and maya for what they are—illusions that prescribe and proscribe how we should act but that can never fully determine who we should be. We are stronger than the ropes that tether us to the ground.

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The yogic path is one of questions whose answers change our perspective on the world, waking us up from the sleep of illusion and habit. Yoga prompts us to think about things we might not otherwise consider. Santosha involves a rigorous questioning of ourselves and our habits of living, including our practices of gratitude. The discipline of santosha requires asking, For what should we be grateful, really? We should be grateful for a good study pair of shoes because they allow us to walk without pain. Similarly, yoga teaches that we should be grateful for the world of the living and non-living that supports us and makes it possible to live. Of course, we might disagree on what support is necessary. Some yogis have, quite famously, subsisted on very little. This disagreement is precisely the point of santosha. We begin with self-study, and then compare notes and discuss our conclusions with others. Santosha is the practice of returning to what is really important—what is really necessary—so as to cut through the fog of desire and advertising and meet the question of our existence head on, without denial or displacement. Translation is a challenge, period. But translating Sanskrit represents a particular challenge. There are a number of problems with how the key terms of yoga philosophy have traditionally been translated into English. It seems shortsighted to me to translate “santosha” in English as “contentment.” While the word santosha is indeed generally translated as “contentment,” I prefer to translate it as “gratitude,” for while contentment implies passivity, gratitude is active.74 Translating “santosha” as “contentment” is one way that contemporary writers can accommodate yoga to neoliberalism and yogis to injustice. Santosha emphatically does not mean being content with what we have. Most of us have things we do not need, and need things we do not have. If santosha is a synonym for acquiescence to the status quo then it would be of little value. Instead, santosha is a consideration of what is necessary and what is not if we value life. Santosha is the first step in a radical reformulation of gratitude. The practice of santosha invites us to reject the language of debt, and, consequently, to reject the meaning of words such as Aristotle’s charis and Cicero’s gratia and Aquinas’s gratitudo. Yogic gratitude is not a feeling of indebtedness to another person, to divinity, or to the State. Instead, yogic gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness for the support we receive in order to live. There is a world of difference between indebtedness and thankfulness; to be thankful is to recognize that we are not alone, and that, in fact, we can only exist as individuals within a common world. Indebtedness is

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a rhetoric of hierarchy and power. Thankfulness is a democratic rhetoric that evens things out. To be thankful is to recognize that as a living, breathing human being I am in this thing called life alongside others and that I can only live with their support. Santosha draws our attention to the support on which our lives depend. It is also a provocation for us to recognize when this support is not present, to notice when we do not have what is necessary to live, when we and others are being sabotaged (most often by the peddlers of debt). Santosha means learning to feel gratitude for what matters, and the relinquishment of what does not. Santosha is concerned not just with what is, but with what is necessary and thus what is good. At times, the discipline of santosha means recognizing that we do not have all that we need to thrive and grow, and preparing to fight for those basic necessities. At other times, santosha means recognizing that the situation we find ourselves in is unhealthy and life-defeating, and thus gratitude is the first step toward changing that situation. Santosha is a necessary practice because it will illuminate what is worth fighting for. By moving beyond the debt of gratitude, we quickly learn what we need, and what we don’t. Santosha does more than simply change our orientation toward the world, though it does do that. Santosha changes the world itself by opening an emotional experience that is otherwise off-limits in this neoliberal world of indebtedness. By practicing santosha, gratefulness or gratitude-as-thanksgiving becomes possible. And once we experience this emotion and begin to see the world through its lens, democracy becomes possible.

Gratefulness: Gratitude-As-Thanksgiving The contemporary gratitude literature is full of stories of tragedies and crises that lead people to become more grateful for life. Heart attacks, cancer diagnoses (and non-diagnoses), car accidents, and even the tragedies of September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina are cited as examples of such crises that shake us from our slumber and return our focus to the power of the present moment. One writer makes recognizing the tragedies that have befallen us in our lives, and remembering how we overcame them, a basic spiritual exercise of gratitude.75 This practice hearkens back to the famous Stoic premeditatio malorum, in which people are called

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to meditate upon the worst things that might happen to them in order to realize that, while it would be better if these things did not happen, nevertheless the soul has sufficient securitas to weather these storms without its moral worth being affected. Of course, to shock us out of our daily routines, true tragedy cannot be forced or imagined but must be experienced—this is one of the limits of phantasia, the human capacity to conjure up images with words.76 We can talk about tragedy all we want, but it must shake us or those closest to us to the very core for it to change our lives. Unfortunately, the insights opened by such tragedy are often quickly lost, as we fall back on our old ways. Old habits die hard, they say. We all see the world through a particular perspective or lens. How we feel determines our orientation toward the world. Though we might try, some ways of looking are simply not available to us. Some perspectives are temperamentally blocked, banished for the time by our way of being in the world. In near-miss moments when we escape tragedy, a new way of viewing the world tends to be opened up, a new way of seeing becomes possible that was not available to us before. In such moments, we realize that life matters to us and that it should not be squandered. Though we might have pondered the most basic questions on a starry night (what is the meaning of life? why am I here? what am I doing with this opportunity?), all of a sudden after tragedy these questions become real and pressing. All of a sudden we become aware of our ourselves as living beings co-creating a life on this earth. All of a sudden we begin to think existentially. In such moments, a kind of gratitude becomes available to us that is not about debt—this is gratitude for life, for the chance to live. In those moments when we escape tragedy and cheat death, we recognize that, as the Buddha taught, achieving a human life is very rare and that life is to be treasured, not wasted. In such moments, we experience a gratitude that is much deeper than the feeling we feel when someone gives us a gift or does us a favor, than the gratitude that Cicero or Seneca or Hobbes spoke of, much deeper, too, than the feeling of indebtedness contemporary positive psychologists associate with gratitude. Tragedy opens an existential gratitude to us that I label gratefulness—but it is not just tragedy, perhaps not even primarily tragedy, that can bring us into this emotional state. There are other ways for those of us who have not nearly had our lives cut prematurely short. Beginning with the practice of santosha, the discipline of yoga is one such way.

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Though they reach different conclusions about the goal of life, neither the Bhagavad Gita, nor Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, is a nihilistic philosophy.77 Yoga is concerned, first and foremost, with enriching life in this moment, in this place. Yoga is a spiritual discipline designed to empower us to live better, more capable lives, not to deny life. The practice of santosha is a call for an affirmative, life-enhancing gratitude. To distinguish it from the debt of gratitude, I will call it gratefulness. The art of gratitude is the practice of gratefulness, not indebtedness. When I speak of gratefulness, I of course speak of nothing new. Gratefulness is an elemental human experience testified to in the spiritual literature of both East and West. Meister Eckhart seemed to speak to gratefulness when he said that “thank you” was the most basic, and most meaningful, prayer we can utter.78 Buddhists often invoke an experience that sounds to me like gratefulness, though they also recognize four debts of gratitude in their daily practice.79 Moreover, gratefulness has long been a cherished theme in American thought. Though Emerson often derided gratitude as a wicked synonym for indebtedness, he also praised the emotion I am calling gratefulness as the ethical foundation of social justice.80 Henry David Thoreau likewise believed gratefulness to be a compass that would return Americans’ focus to the true north of what really mattered in the “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century.”81 “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” lusting after unnecessary things, Thoreau wrote in Walden (1854).82 He told Americans to make do, and be thankful. “I am grateful for what I am & have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite—only a sense of existence.”83 In Leaves of Grass (1855), America’s poet, Walt Whitman, echoed these sentiments, joining Emerson and Thoreau in calling for a substantial change in how his fellow citizens emotionally engaged the world. Americans were “demented with the mania of owning things,” blinded to the joys and sufferings of their fellow citizens by a seemingly insatiable desire for stuff.84 Whitman reminded Americans that life itself was good, and so long as they were alive, they ought to be happy. At a time of rising consumerism and a dog-eat-dog, me-first mentality, these authors taught a joyous, grateful embrace of the gift of life. Gratefulness for life would encourage Americans to be more considerate of their fellow human beings, and to focus on what really mattered: “happiness not in another place, but this place . . . not for another hour, but this

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hour.”85 In the tradition of the Transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, who were all, we should remember, astute students of Indian philosophy, I argue that gratefulness is the emotional experience of being moved by thanksgiving for life. It is a strange quirk of the human condition that the living tend to take life for granted. We often say that youth is wasted on the young. We might also say that for most people life is wasted on the living. Perhaps this is adaptive. If we were overcome with the gravity of life in every moment, we might not get anything done. Or would we? I bet we would quickly learn to get the right things done. Today, most of us meet life with a blasé shrug of the shoulders and a quick, nonchalant “whatever.” Day to day we live in a state of casual whateverness. We are not in the habit of stopping—because who can afford to stop? We hurry and rush around, as though “we are determined to be starved before we are hungry”86—to recognize that the very fact that we are here, standing on the earth in this moment, is a mystery beyond all others, a riddle beyond the wit and wisdom of even the most clever sphinx, a puzzle that the most brilliant philosophers and most thoughtful theologians have struggled to solve for millennia. It is ultimately indifference toward life, and our casual willingness to underestimate the worth of our own lives and the lives of our fellows, that makes Americans perfect prey for neoliberalism and the politicians who claim, under the logic of exception, that life is expendable.87 Even those who are in the most vulnerable positions in society feel gratitude for life. In fact, it is this gratitude for life, this recognition that this chance, this moment, this life matters, that drives such people to fight for social justice. The slogan is “Black Lives Matter,” after all—life matters. Those who transform this democratic battle cry into “All Lives Matter” get something right—all life does matter—but they forget that Black Americans are often excluded from the definition of “all,” as are other minorities, immigrants, and many women. We need a more expansive definition of “all,” one where all means all. We can all learn something about democracy from those who practice gratitude for life and speak out when their brothers and sisters are killed or starved by privation. The Declaration of Independence defines life as an inalienable right. Even Thomas Hobbes, the great defender of monarchy and enemyship, recognized the sanctity of life. Today, however, there is no inalienable right to life under neoliberal rule, because, in the end, we are all anonymous market actors,

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not citizens with rights or human beings worthy of the highest dignity. Gratefulness is a political emotion because it has the potential to break the spell of casual whateverness and frustrate the neoliberal rhetoric that denies that life matters. In gratefulness, all of a sudden we are struck by the existential fact that we are alive, and that whatever might be wrong with our lives at the current moment, no matter how badly we might be mistreated, nevertheless life itself is good. Gratefulness is the deepest feeling of thankfulness for life. And how can we experience gratefulness, outside of unexpected calamity? Each of us has the power to dance between emotions, to bring ourselves out of one emotional state and into another, through mindfulness and mediation. There are two ways to think of meditation.88 One type of meditation is about experiencing life fully through complete absorption in a particular activity—this is meditation as “flow,” and it is found in art, music, writing, walking, sports, and so on.89 In this type of meditation, subject and object merge; we do not judge, we experience. The second type of meditation is more instrumental. This meditation is a disciplined, conscious practice of focusing on a particular object completely and unwaveringly—in yoga we call this dharana, concentration, and dhyana, one-pointed focus. This meditation is contemplative and directive. The practitioner consciously chooses the object of focus in order to cultivate a specific disposition toward the world. With great focus and tremendous discipline in the practice of meditation, it is possible to bring some control over our minds and our emotions. In yoga, after practicing either type of meditation, we step back and notice what we learned about how our minds work. Taking this knowledge forward, we advance in our yoga practice. Yoga is more rhetorical than practitioners realize. The second type of yogic meditation involves directing our focus through the use of words and images (affirmations, mantras) in order to conjure up certain feelings, as opposed to others. Yoga does not mean emptying the mind. Yoga means bringing mental and emotional distractions under conscious control. Learning to concentrate (dharana) and to focus the mind on one thing (dhyana) is a big step forward toward the yogic practice of meditation. The practice of santosha is the preparatory work one must undertake to engage in a gratitude meditation. Santosha is necessary because it provides a cognitive framework for the experience of gratefulness. If we have not undertaken the type of self-study involved in santosha, our meditation

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will be aimless and wandering, or worse, we will focus on our many debts of gratitude, as we are taught to do by the contemporary self-help literature with its gratitude accounts. We must focus, instead, on the fact that we are alive and that life is good, and then what support us as we live and breathe and laugh and fall and cry. To practice yoga is to study how our minds work. Once we learn to observe ourselves at work, we can begin to bring our thought under conscious control, and with it how we feel. I find that one way to access gratefulness is to focus on specific people, places, activities, things in my life for which I am grateful. The key, here, is not to focus on debt. A gratitude meditation must not be the type of meditation Cicero, or Seneca, or Aquinas wanted, or the type that most contemporary positive psychologists seem to want. Focusing on debt and obligation will render the experience of gratefulness off limits, for a life in debt is a life that cries out for immunity and escape, not a warm embrace. Directing my attention to the people, places, activities, and things for which I are grateful, I then step back to contemplate what it is about these that causes me to feel gratitude. I find that I am grateful for the support that is provided to me, support that is necessary for me to live. So often we feel alone and adrift. Indeed, many emotions make us feel as though we do not belong in the world, and these emotions, like guilt and self-resentment, can easily turn us against life. Gratefulness in contrast encourages us to embrace life and the situation in which we find ourselves right now. Focusing on support helps me to feel at home in the world, and to recognize that I am not alone. I then take this meditation a step further and practice feeling gratitude for my body and my breath, for my sight and my hearing, for my heart that beats and feels. Again I contemplate why I am grateful for such things—and I realize it is because I am grateful for life, for the opportunity to learn and laugh and fall and heal and connect and struggle and grow. This meditation opens me to the experience of gratefulness by making my gratitude existential. Looking at the world with grateful eyes, I am then able to return to the things for which I am grateful with a new appreciation for life and a new understanding of the common good. By shaking us out of a slumbering state of casual whateverness, gratefulness prompts us to ask the most basic questions about how we are living right now and the future we are projecting for ourselves, including: Am I living the life that I want to lead? Am I making the

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most out of my time on earth? Am I squandering this gift, the greatest gift I will ever be given, the first gift, the gift that makes all other gifts possible? Gratefulness leads to contemplation and soul-searching. And here the practice of santosha proves useful: as we experience thankfulness for life, we must ask ourselves: what is necessary to live, and to live well? Anger, fear, and resentment make it seem like I am capable of living alone, in a world without others, apart from and against society, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Gratefulness reveals a very different world, one that is interconnected. By directing our focus to that which supports our ability to live, gratefulness makes it clear that we “cannot live without a world.”90 Gratefulness makes “our condition of universal dependence,” to use Emerson’s words, clear—and in this way it is the most democratic of all the emotions.91 Gratefulness leads us to focus on the people, places, and things in our lives on which we depend. Rather than walling ourselves off from the world or retreating into the wilderness, gratefulness encourages us to reach out our hands to others, to embrace them for the support they offer us, not as a gift to be repaid, but as a contribution to the common project of life. Emotions are disclosive; we experience the world through our emotions. Gratefulness cuts through the fog of desire and advertising and resentment and debt. To be human is to be dependent upon the world. Looking through grateful eyes, we notice what is good, that is, what supports our ability to live and thrive and develop and flourish. In short, gratefulness discloses the good. And what is good? More stuff? A bigger house? A fancy car? An expensive suit? Having more friends than anyone else on Facebook? Popularity? Influence? A sexy body? These are the superficial answers of the advertiser. These “goods” do not free us, they bind us to a vicious cycle of consumption and debt. These goods tether us to neoliberalism. In the end, gratefulness reveals the good to be more basic. Each of us is made of the earth, of sun, clouds, plants, and so on. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that “what we call non-living makes what we call living beings possible. If we destroy the non-living, we also destroy the living.”92 What is good to the grateful, then, is that which supports life. This includes clean water to drink. Healthy food to eat. Fresh air to breathe. Shelter from the storm. Shade from the warm sun. Protection from the bone-rattling winds of winter. Freedom to move about. Medicine. A comfortable place to rest. But the grateful do not just want to live; the gratitude mediation reveals to us that we want to live well, and flourish. And so our grati-

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tude extends to that which supports our ability to live well. Meaningful work. Good teachers. Good conversation. Access to the wisdom of our ancestors. Community. Friendship. Family. Recognition. Dignity. The insurance provided by “higher rights.”93 A say in governing the world in which we live. Co-travelers along the path of life to walk side-by-side and step-by-step with, for alone the path is hard and steep. Beauty. And thus from the basic biological goods of life gratefulness quickly reveals the psychological, sociological, and spiritual goods. One of the greatest tragedies of our resentful times, these hard days of neoliberalism, in which we worship at the altar of selfishness even though all of us know it to be a false god, is that we have lost the concept of the commonweal. We have become accustomed to thinking of ourselves as isolated individuals, immune to the needs and wants of others, invulnerable to the world. To fix our contemporary political and social troubles, we need to recover a sense of shared fate.94 The yoga of gratitude reveals our deep connection to, and universal dependence upon, other people and the earth, the living and the non-living, allowing us to see ourselves as deeply interconnected with others. Gratefulness therefore challenges the commonsense assumption that we are all alone and that agency is solo. This emotion allows us to see ourselves as participants in the creation, and defense, of a common good that we all share and upon which we all depend. Gratefulness shows us that a good life for each of us can only emerge from the world that we share with others. Gratefulness reorients our attention toward the common good. When we write about life and existence, I find it helpful to follow Heidegger and insist that we “ek-sist,” emphasizing the ek, the ancient Greek prefix meaning “from” or “out of.” We ek-sist in relationships and in a community, and it is from such an interpersonal matrix that we derive our powers. The yoga philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita teaches that we ek-sist in the Cosmos, as an emanation of Being, which has gone by many names in many tongues—Brahman, the Tao, the One, the All, OM, God, Krishna, YHWH, Over-Soul. Yoga philosophy begins from this fact—ek-sistence is built right into the yogic rhetoric of divinity. In the early nineteenth century, the brilliant Indian philosopher, linguist, and reformer Raja Rammohan Roy inadvertently started a doctrinal controversy when he translated the four Gospels from the original Greek into Bengali for the first time.95 The King James translation of John 1:3 reads “All things were made by him” [πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο],

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but the Greek preposition “δια” (dia), “by,” can also mean “through.” In line with yogic philosophy, Roy translated this passage as “All things were made through him,” contradicting the official Church doctrine of creation by God’s command and suggesting, instead, that the world was an emanation of the divine force and all creatures were of God.96 In yogic philosophy, the divine is not separate from creation; the world is divine, as are we, and all things. For yogis, the universe is animated by divinity—and where is this God to be found? Turn over a stone, and there you will find it; cleave the wood, and it is there. In the yoga philosophy of the Bhavagad Gita and Advaita Vedanta, divinity is another word for the All, for the totality of Being, for the world in which we find ourselves and that empowers us to live.97 When we imagine ourselves as separate from the All, as neoliberalism encourages us to do, we become weak and feeble. To see ourselves as part of the whole or the All (what yoga philosophers call “tat ekam,” that which is) is to see our agency as enabled by a broader ecosystem of support. It is from the All that we derive our powers of action. “This open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality,” Emerson observed.98 “Let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is enlarged.”99 Gratefulness discloses our ek-sistence to us. To see our ourselves as ek-sisting is to call attention to the fact that we derive all of our powers from the support of the world around us. Gratefulness reorients our understanding of the good. The crucial thing about the good revealed by gratefulness, in turn, is that it is common. Philosophers and political theorists have long maintained that the debt of gratitude is useful as social glue. In book VIII of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes three types of friendship: ethical friendship, in which the participants have achieved all of the virtues and exist as equals; pleasure friendship, in which people come together simply because they enjoy each other; and utility friendship, in which people do not feel love or goodwill or any happy affect, really, but are bonded by mutual profit. Utility friends offer help and gifts to their friends precisely so they can get help and gifts back. Utility friends speak the language of debt and gratitude. This is the type of friendship, Aristotle maintains, typical of citizenship.100 Quite famously, in his bestselling, barnstorming Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam attributes the fraying of American democracy to the decline of “social capital,” which is how he describes the trust

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between citizens generated by utility friendship.101 Central to his idea of social capital is reciprocity: our society is healthy to the extent that we abide by the norms inherent to the debt of gratitude. The healthiest democratic society, he concludes, is composed of citizens who can delay their gratification and hold off asking for a return on their original gift until some later date, trusting, as it were, that all debts eventually will be repaid. Putnam’s theory of social capital is premised on a profound blindness. When speaking so passionately about reciprocity and debt, Putnam completely ignores the power dynamics inherent to relationships built on debt.102 Moreover, Putnam has nothing to say about the death-grip of neoliberal economic thought over our lives. The debt of gratitude habituates us to seeing life through an economic lens of do ut des, tit for tat, one good turn deserves another, I’ll be there for you because you’re there for me, too. This rhetoric implores us to say “very much obliged, my friend,” and “thank you, I owe you one.” It encourages us to see society as a series of contracts. This means that nothing is above the market or above renegotiation, as the common goods of citizenship must be. The debt of gratitude does have this in its favor: it leads us to recognize our dependence upon others. It does not, however, promote a sense of interconnectedness. The contemporary rhetorics of debt that loosely bind us together are a sad way to promote a sense of what is common, for they emphasize what is lacking. In the absence of the common good, we turn to the debt of gratitude. The trouble is that the sense of we’re-all-in-this-together of the debt of gratitude is little more than the fragile camaraderie of shared indebtedness.103 The persistent danger of the debt of gratitude is that it will degrade social relationships to the point that we need someone to blame for our suffering. The debt of gratitude leaves us vulnerable to the easy answers provided by purveyors of the most violent forms of rhetoric in contemporary society, including enemyship and the politics of resentment. In contrast to the debt of gratitude, gratefulness promotes a feeling of interconnectedness based on shared, common goods that are necessary for life but too large for me to protect individually—and so they must be protected by us all, because they are common. Democracy is community life.104 Democracy begins when citizens come together into communities to manage our shared ek-sistence because none of us can do it alone. Gratefulness represents the possibility for a revitalized

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democracy by revealing to us that we value life and by illuminating the common goods on which that life depends. Gratefulness prepares us for democracy, precisely because it does not entail acquiescence. We often find ourselves in situations that are completely unjust. There are many evils that must be addressed, confronted, defeated. Here I think of Krishna’s commandment to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: “Resort to yoga! Stand up, Arjuna.”105 Democracy means standing up and fighting for the support we need together. The art of gratitude is not some otherworldly, troglodytic ethic for would-be hermits hoping to escape the human race. The art of gratitude is deeply invested in fighting for social justice. We cannot be effective participants in the struggle for social justice, however, if we do not first learn to care for ourselves by disentangling gratitude from indebtedness and opening ourselves to the experience of gratefulness. Some emotions are currently off-limits due to our present habits. We need to change our habits so that these emotions become real, live possibilities. If we are able to open ourselves to gratefulness, we will find that this emotion discloses what really matters. Gratefulness reveals the good, orienting us toward what is important. Through the lens of gratefulness, we see the good and know what is worth fighting for. In this way, gratefulness prepares us for democracy.

Conclusion

The Politics of a Sunset From Gratefulness to the Common Good

In her recent book When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Unexpected Places, Even the Church, Lillian Daniel, the senior minister of the First Congregational Church of Glen Ellyn, United Church of Christ, in Chicago, Illinois, throws some serious shade on gratitude. Daniel’s work went viral after she published an acerbic screed on the Huffington Post in 2011 ripping into that new set of religious dissidents who identify as “Spiritual But Not Religious” (SBNR) titled “Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.”1 In 2014, a full 7 percent of Americans identified as “SBNR,” a group larger than atheists, and substantially larger than Muslims, Jews, and Episcopalians in the United States.2 These Americans, who have also been called “the new metaphysicals,” do not fit neatly into the pew. They have little interest in hearing a preacher’s words. However, they do desire a deeper spiritual connection to the people around them, and to the world, and to nature.3 In this they are just the most recent expression of a deeply American impulse toward “religious liberalism” based on principles including “spiritual liberty, mystical experience, meditative interiority, universal brotherhood, and sympathetic appreciation of all religions.”4 Daniel has a message for the SBNRs: you are boring, and bad for humanity.5 Spirituality is boring, Daniel says, because it is easy. The SBNRs have neglected all of the hard work that is incumbent upon being a Christian.

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These misguided souls mistakenly believe that God is immanent to this world, and can be found only nature, not in scripture or a preacher’s words—which explains their allure for sunsets and all things beautiful.6 Indeed, she brings up sunsets a couple of times to demonstrate just how silly these SBNRs are. “How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories, and throughout our deep tradition.”7 When Daniel says “geniuses,” she of course means the opposite. Americans have long sought a religion based on direct, individual experience of the divine.8 “Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?” Emerson queried in Nature, in words that capture a spiritual impulse that remains at the heart of the SBNR movement today.9 Yet for Daniel, the SBNRs are softheaded hedonists interested only in themselves. For her, the SBNR talk of the primacy of individual experience shirks the hardheaded commitment to social justice typical of Christianity. “Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating.”10 The SBNRs say they have no religion, but in fact they do—Daniel accuses them of practicing a “religion” of “gratitude.”11 As I have shown in this book, Americans are indeed confronted with a booming gratitude industry, and those of us hoping to live more grateful lives have plenty of guidance. Daniel has no love for this gratitude, and she has done more than most thinkers today to give gratitude a bad name. Gratitude, she attests, is a code word for complacency and pride. She mocks Americans who feel gratitude for life, because she views this gratitude to be nothing more than the misplaced pride of affluent people who have more than their neighbors. “The punch line from the religion of gratitude: ‘We’re so lucky that we live here instead of there.’ Really? That’s it?”12 The sarcastic, mocking, ironic tone of her words in When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough is not incidental to her broadside. This is in fact an age-old playbook: if you are in the position of defending a well-established tradition, do all that you can to belittle and discredit and mock those who oppose you. If gratitude is little more than a first-world problem, then I agree that gratitude is indeed a problem. Gratitude is toxic when it is based

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on a comparison condition in which we, whoever we are, judge ourselves superior to them, whoever they are. The art of gratitude as I’ve outlined it has no place for sorry comparisons. Yet Daniel would have little patience for the art of gratitude as I understand it. Indeed, the most severe problem with the new literature on gratitude for her is that it has forgotten Jesus—though my own survey of that literature shows that Jesus (or at the very least, Jesus as contemporary authors understand him, not Jesus the destroyer of debt but Jesus the prophet of existential indebtedness) remains the guy with the biggest gratitude bullhorn. “There are some things that we simply cannot do for ourselves,” Daniel explains, and so we must follow Jesus to salvation and world peace: “thousands of years later, we’re still trying to be the body of Christ; utterly human and realistic enough to know that we need a savior who is divine.”13 A belief system founded on “gratitude” but not “God” is for her worth nothing. If there is a contemporary insurgency against gratitude, Daniel must be thanked for throwing the first word bomb, for she has done much to besmirch gratitude in the popular press. An article in the New York Times discussing the SBNR movement closes with the following question about spirituality: “Is it theologically engaged or just focused on ‘nature’ and ‘gratitude,’ as Ms. Daniel worries?”14 These are the two choices put forward by the paper of record: either spirituality has theological sophistication, or it is “just,” that is, merely, gratitude. If gratitude is to be a positive force for social change in our contemporary world, Daniel declares that it will be Christian gratitude, gratitude that recognizes our individual and collective existential debt to God for life and to Jesus for salvation. She is a big proponent of existential debt; for her, morality begins by recognizing our debt to God for life. For Daniel, and for many of the authors of the contemporary gratitude literature, life is a debt. I disagree. I believe that we will be more capable democratic citizens and advocates for social change if we stop speaking as though life is a debt. I do not deny the meaningfulness of Christianity to believers. I do not deny that there is a God. I am not that person Whitman once characterized as “frivolous sullen moping angry affected disheartened atheistical.”15 I believe that life is more than a libidinal accident. I believe that humans are fit for higher purposes than sensory and material gratification. I believe in the marvelous and the Over-Soul, in Atman and Democracy; I try to live my life with awe. The Bhagavad Gita denounces

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those who are “anishvaram,” “godless,” because they tend to be egotists who cannot see beyond themselves to the whole in which we ek-sist.16 Of course, not all atheists are immoral, any more than all Christians are moral. The divine, however, serves an important rhetorical purpose, a purpose I often worry critical theorists have forgotten. In one of his more mystical moments, Plato’s Socrates speaks of seeing the divine in topos hyperouranios, the place above the heavens, the home of the gods.17 In the dialogue Theaetetus, Socrates speaks of the need to escape the material world and “become like god, so far as that is possible [de homoiosis theo kata to dunaton]” (176b). Humans are rotten with perfection, and the rhetoric of God is one way of defining the ends to which we adapt the means of life. The rhetoric of God is inspirational and aspirational. Calling on Athenians to adapt themselves to the highest, Plato’s Socrates frequently turned his readers’ attention to the vertical dimensions of human praxis—to become like the divine was the motivation for the care of the self. Yoga operates similarly. In yoga, the rhetoric of divinity is a rhetorical pathway to the All. Inspired by the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, yogis believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all beings. The yogic vision of divinity helps us to see life as ek-sistence, not mere existence. I think that Christians would find the yogi a welcome and staunch ally in social reform, so long as we meet on the common ground of gratefulness and not the divided, frustrated battlefield of indebtedness. Religion teaches us how to see the world. It is heuristic. Raised in the land of pragmatism, when I study religion I cannot help but focus on its consequences for how we see and feel the world. I take seriously Whitman’s words in Leaves of Grass: We consider the bibles and religions divine . . . I do not say they are not divine, I say they have all grown out of you and may grow out of you still, It is not they who give the life . . . it is you who give the life; Leaves are not more shed from the trees or trees from the earth than they are shed out of you.18 Whitman’s meters represent one of the most astute commentaries on religion ever penned. The divine exists outside and beyond humans, but

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we need the divine, we need to feel connection and a higher purpose, and so we invent words for God—which means that religion grows from us, from our needs and desires and weaknesses and anxieties, and as such it should be judged based on the possibilities it opens up for us in this life. Leaves do not fall because of us, but we give meaning to the leaves that fall, and so the leaves fall because of us. We must take great care with the words we invent to describe the highest. Sometimes the holiest words tarnish their object. So it is with talk of debt. Life is not a debt, life is an opportunity.19 I weary of the persistent talk of existential debt in the contemporary gratitude literature. As I observed in chapter 3, Christianity is at its most powerful and beautiful when it wages war on worldly debt. The gratitude literature promises us freedom. Yet the gratitude literature, and also Daniel’s call for a Christian gratitude, seems to be another way that we are kept in debt today. The problem is that the debt of gratitude is written right into our language at the level of grammar. In English, “gratitude” is not a word that stands on its own. As we use the word today, gratitude is generally felt in response to a gift, and it is directed to a giver. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the English word “gratitude” is most immediately derived from the Latin “gratitudo.” When the Medieval scholastics invented this word around 1270, they cemented the link between gratitude and obligation/debt, for gratitudo referenced the debts humans owed to each other, and especially the debt they owed to God for life, in contrast to God’s eternal grace (which is what the Latin gratia had come to mean in the Middle Ages).20 Our rhetorical heritage, from Aristotle’s charis to Cicero and Seneca’s gratia to Aquinas’s gratitudo, makes it abundantly clear: to overcome the debt of gratitude, we need a fundamental change in our language and our rhetoric. For much of Western history gratitude has been understood as the feeling of indebtedness that accompanies the receipt of a gift or favor. This is gratitude as charis, gratia, and gratitudo. This is the debt of gratitude, and this gratitude-as-indebtedness is trapped by the economic logic of exchange. After two thousand years, it is unfortunate but we have learned the lessons of Cicero’s rhetoric all too well: we give to bind, and in turn we are bound by the gifts we receive. Though Western history works to compel us to see gratitude this way, we need not—there are other traditions, if only we have the imagination, the creativity, and the courage to acknowledge and act upon them. To speak of gratitude in

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terms of debt is to sell this emotion short. The debt of gratitude might bind us together in rituals of indebtedness (this is its virtue, according to many psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists), but it slams shut the door of alternative futures by habituating us to see our fellows as givers and receivers of debt. The debt of gratitude fundamentally alters our rhetorical practices, for it demands that we look backward to recount the debts we owe and forward to ponder how best to repay those debts. In the meantime we lose track of the present moment, which is the moment in which the difficult work of yoga and the care of the self occurs. Indebtedness changes how we see the world. It leads to rhetorics of recrimination, mortification, and guilt, and it alters how we deliberate—deliberation becomes about repayment, not about questions of what is most expedient and more just under the circumstances. In place of the debt of gratitude, in this book I have outlined a very different art of gratitude based on the overwhelming emotional experience of thankfulness for life. I call this existential gratitude gratefulness. Gratefulness discloses a world that is open to new, more democratic ways living and acting and working together that can liberate us from the wreckage of neoliberalism. While I certainly could have written a book solely in praise of gratefulness, I remain convinced that we must understand gratitude in its fullest sense, as lock and key, as an emotion that binds us and that can set us free. If we are to understand the power of gratefulness, we must first develop the ability to sniff out those moments in which gratitude becomes a tool of oppression in the day-today interpersonal rituals of our lives. To change ourselves, we must first contemplate where we are. We must understand our situatedness, our thrownness, our place in doxa and maya and an ancient language that pulls and goads us to feel indebted. I provided a road map for studying gratitude as a technique of governmentality in the first chapters of The Art of Gratitude—here is the lock. In chapter 5, I described the flipside of gratitude, as an emotion that reveals the good and prepares us for democracy—here is the key. Gratefulness is a better way of affirming our interconnectedness than the ancient Roman motto do ut des, I give so that you give back to me, which has cast such a long shadow over Western politics. Gratefulness reorients us so that we can challenge the most common neoliberal techniques of governance in our contemporary world: enemyship and the politics of resentment. Gratefulness counters Thomas Hobbes’s insistence

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that “gratitude” compels us to be obedient to the King’s rules.21 Gratefulness transcends the daily rituals of bondage Adam Smith imagined to be at the heart of modern life.22 Gratefulness moves us beyond debt altogether, those that can be repaid, and those that cannot. By practicing the yoga of gratitude, in particular the niyama of santosha, we can prepare ourselves to experience a type of gratitude that is not premised on indebtedness but instead on appreciation. The point of this gratitude is not to make us okay with life as it is, but instead to wake us up to the fact that we care about our lives, showing us how to change our lives for the better by revealing our ek-sistence and reorienting our focus toward the common good. The reframing of gratitude as thanksgiving for life is a difference that makes a difference. By practicing the art of gratitude, a new way of seeing, and consequently a new life, becomes available to us. I argued in chapter 5 that the Sanskrit word “santosha,” one of foundational ethical practices required of the yogi in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, could act as a new keyword for a twenty-first-century democratic art of gratitude. Surprisingly, as boring as Daniel finds the new SBNR crowd, as cruelly as she mocks them, she also believes that yoga can be a useful practice of the care of the self for contemporary Americans. Of course, she can’t help but poke fun at some of the strange things that yoga teachers say about chakras and nadis and ujjayi breathing.23 She also expresses the typical worry that yoga is depoliticizing. “When did sitting still get equated with spiritual depth?” she rightly asks, “as if heaven will be full of people meditating in the lotus position.”24 No one is getting into heaven because they can sit still, but of course yogis are not sitting in meditation to get into heaven. Yogis are sitting in meditation to practice awareness of heaven on earth. I agree with Daniel when she says that if yoga is only about sitting quietly, then it has nothing to offer Americans in these selfish, neoliberal days. Yet if this sitting is one side of the coin, the contemplative yin to the active yang of social reform, then yoga is crucial, for it provides us with a set of disciplines for helping us to see ourselves as part of the whole. Daniel validates the importance of learning to sit still in quiet contemplation as a useful counterpoint to the constant activity of the Christian reformer who is always busy, busy, busy. Daniel reads yoga alongside the story of Mary and Martha in the Gospel of Luke (10:38−42). When Jesus and his disciplines roll through town, these two sisters open their house to him. Mary sits at Jesus’s feet,

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drinking in his wisdom, while Martha is busy cleaning up the place and preparing dinner. Martha is upset by Mary’s breaking of social convention, for “women weren’t supposed to sit at the feet of gurus. Women were supposed to be serving the food.”25 When Martha turns to Jesus, all huff and puff, he instructs her to relax: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.” Mary, he says, “hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her”—not taken away by her culture, or by the men and the women in her life.26 The path of quiet listening is open to all. Both Mary and Martha are necessary for human goodness, Daniel surmises. “Mary and Martha are two halves of the human spirit, two parts that complement each other. Do you ever feel it? Mary and Martha, wrestling within you?”27 It is vital that humans set the table for divinity—we have work to do on this earth. But we miss this work when we are too busy to sit still and just listen. Yoga has great value, then, even for Christians, in that it can teach them how to sit still and observe how we are living, thinking, and feeling. Yoga reveals our habits. Yoga teaches us to focus the mind and bring some control over our emotions. Yoga is one way to integrate these two sides of our personality, the listener and the doer. “Do we have to choose? Or can we embrace both? Rich and full. Still and strong. Martha. Mary. Amen. Namaste.”28 Namaste, indeed. We are accustomed to bonding based on mutual dislike. Most human communities are based on enemyship. Such rhetoric is powerful, but it splits people right down the middle and encourages us to ignore the goods we share in common—you are either with or against me, the purveyor of enemyship says, in a voice that I imagine sounds like John Wayne’s rough-hewn chaparral drawl, one hand resting on the trigger even while he uses the other to shake your hand. If we look at the world through divided eyes, we cannot see ourselves as part of the All. Habituated to uniting in opposition to shared enemies, I worry that we have begun to think that this is the only way people can come together—following the summer alien-invasion blockbuster, we might call this the Independence Day-fallacy, for it takes the threat of extinction to finally bring humans together. Of course this is not the only way. The yoga of santosha points the way toward a community based not on opposition but on unity, on all those goods that we share in common and our duty to protect them. Can the art of gratitude be political? In discussions about gratitude with friends and in public presentations, I often get this question. I tend to reframe it and ask, what is the politics of a sunset? Daniel mocks the

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SBNR’s for their refrain that they feel closest to God in nature. I fail to understand why people should be mocked when they are moved by a beautiful tableau in the sky. I, too, have glimpsed the divine in such magnificent displays. If a sunset prepares us to experience gratefulness, then God bless the sunset! A beautiful sunset is a gratitude meditation in the sky. Experiences like this can open us to gratefulness. Moreover, gratitude for a sunset reveals the ultimate common good that we all share: the earth on which we stand. To be is to be in the world, and there is no being without a world. When we look upon our world, and see the great evils that must be confronted—racism, sexism, homophobia, climate change, ends-less, never-ending war, the decline of democracy and the rise of oligarchy, resurgent fascism and the toxic, disgusting rhetoric of white nationalism—it is only natural that we feel sad, afraid, alienated, resentful. Yet neither sadness nor fear nor alienation nor resentment will solve our problems. These emotions can inspire us to act, alone and in concert and often with fortitude, but each limits our perspective and our political prospects. A sad, afraid, alienated, resentful democracy cannot confront, let alone defeat, our great enemy, neoliberalism, which imagines humans solely as market actors and judges all facets of our lives, even those that have nothing to do with money, by the logic of the market. The defenders of neoliberalism have become skilled at playing on our anger, our fear, and our resentment to uphold and extend the logic of the market into where we work, live, play, and rest. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly given its long association with debt, contemporary neoliberalism has successfully captured the rhetoric of gratitude to justify its ascendency. Neoliberalism turns us all into debtors, and then uses the affective, emotional force of that debt to compel us to walk in a straight line. Neoliberalism has little respect for individual lives. Though corporations are “too big to fail,” citizens are “too small to protect.”29 Neoliberalism denies the very concept of an inalienable right—not life, not liberty, not the pursuit of happiness. Markets crash, corporations and states fail, people die, and the living are left to toil for survival. Neoliberalism attempts to undercut any ground we might have for fighting social injustice, precisely because all is fair in the free market, a place where the value of individual lives is irrelevant and everyone is homo sacer. What can be done? Wendy Brown is clearly right when she argues that we must work to reclaim a sense of political being (humans as

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homo politicus) that is capable of standing up to neoliberalism and the market logic (which imagines humans solely as homo oeconomicus). She is right, too, when she points to the crucial role that liberal arts education will play in fostering such critical thought.30 Finally, she is right when she argues that it is political beings banding together democratically as “the people” that will ultimately defeat neoliberalism. The progressive, anti-austerity parties of Europe, including Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, point one way forward. Even as I cheer on the successes of these populist movements, I feel a knot deep down in my belly, for any democracy or populism that loses track of the individual gives me pause.31 Two centuries of populism in the United States demonstrate that most Americans are inspired to jump into reform movements by emotions—anger, fear, resentment—that leave them deeply vulnerable to manipulation and burn-out. Our souls might be the color of the sky, and our intentions good, the most humane, positively divine intentions you can imagine, but this matters little. The emotions that accompany our good intentions and inspire our cerulean souls make us easy prey for the demagogues and confidence men and silver-tongued wordsmiths who make a living manipulating “tender consciences” and Pollyannaish good intentions.32 If we do not learn to care for ourselves, our emotions will overwhelm us. They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This might well be because those intentions spring from destructive, self-defeating emotional states. Bad feelings of one sort or another are common to American life in this new century. Life lived in a state of casual whateverness lacks luster and the world is flat and gray. Having been trained to look at the world as one big market, we debtors will likely find gratefulness off limits. With discipline and practice, however, we can prepare ourselves for gratefulness. And make no mistake, gratefulness is not passive. Gratefulness is not the same as acquiescence. Because it reveals the good to us, gratefulness is the appropriate emotion for democratic engagement. Gratefulness opposes both enemyship and the politics of resentment, and it offers a persuasive alternative to contemporary defeatist rhetorics, especially on the left, that claim that individual agency is irrelevant in the face of overwhelming structural violence. We see the world more clearly through the lens of gratefulness. This emotion is not so easily coopted by neoliberal rhetoric, for it focuses our attention on the very goods that neoliberalism most threatens. Gratefulness opens up new possibilities of

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becoming, new potentials, new vitality. Through grateful eyes we come to know what is worth fighting for, and what is not. At the most basic level, politics is concerned with how we should act and live and communicate together. Democracy, from the classical Greek word demokratia, a compound of demos, the citizens of the polis, and kratos, power, sovereignty, rule, means the power of the people to rule. And to what end do we rule? Whitman grasped the essence of democracy in Leaves of Grass: I speak the password primeval . . . I give the sign of democracy; By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.33 At bottom, democracy is concerned with ensuring that all citizens have what they need to live. Democracy is a philosophy, and a practice, of equality. Democracy is driven by the belief that no one should have to go without because no life is intrinsically more valuable than any other. More radically, democracy is invested in ensuring that everyone, and not just the rich or well connected, has access to the good life. The word “democracy” is a noun that we must understand as a verb. Democracy begins when citizens recognize the need to come together to collectively manage the world in which we live and to guarantee the ability of everyone to prosper.34 Democracy is the collective power of the community to take back a share of control over its destiny and to use its full might to ensure that everyone has enough. Democracy is the power of the community. I have argued in this book that we cannot consider democracy at the community level alone, however. We must also consider the individual practices of the care of the self, because spirituality prepares us for politics. I see the art of gratitude as more than a palliative, as more than a conservative opiate that keeps us quietly chugging along. Gratefulness prepares us for democracy by disclosing the good to us. If we see the world through grateful eyes, a different type of citizenship is available to us than if we see things through eyes of resentment. Resentment can be a powerful spur to political action; nothing seems to get people as riled up as resentment. Yet resentment prompts us to see the world as divided into victims and oppressors. Gratefulness encourages us to focus on what we share, and to begin with what is common. At a most basic level, what we share is the sunset.

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The central philosophical question, according to William James, is this: is life worth living? If life is not worth living, no philosophy, and no religion, will save us. We have already lost. I would venture that this is also the central political question. James believed that two things are necessary to make life feel significant: a deeply held ideal and the struggle to turn that ideal into reality. “The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing—the marriage, namely, of some habitual ideal, however, special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—And whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.”35 The trouble for most of us is not the struggle—we have pluck and grit to spare—but the more basic step of figuring out what to fight for. What are the core values for which we stand? An ideal is intellectual, but it must also strike the heart as though it wells up from deep inside. From whence do such ideals come? Our ideals are shaped by our emotions and how we see the world. Looking at the world through grateful eyes, we quickly realize that meaningful work needs to be done, and what the struggle must be. Our struggle is soulful, but it is not otherworldly—in fact it is very much of this earth, it is a struggle to ensure that we do not destroy the planet that gives us life, it is a struggle for the earth. The struggle of our time is to ensure that the earth remains a place on which we can continue to live and flourish and develop and ek-sist. There are of course many other struggles, but without the earth—which for me means the basic conditions of life, the ground on which we stand, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat—these struggles are irrelevant. Neoliberalism has transformed the earth into just another commodity to be exploited. “Drill, baby, drill!” neoliberals say. They deny that water is a human right. They deny that clean air is a human right. They deny that safe, nourishing, healthy food is a human right. Paradoxically, and as ridiculous as it sounds, sometimes they deny that life is a human right. We must do all that we can to reclaim the earth as a common good that stands above any market. Gratefulness makes it clear: life cannot happen if we destroy the place where life happens. This common home is one good that is truly common. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger contends that “Man is the shepherd of Being.”36 According to Heidegger, the problem with Western humanism is that it has vastly underestimated the dignity

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of humans, but I worry that Heidegger exalts the humanitas of humanity too highly when he anoints us the supreme protectors of Being. We exist to “guard the truth of Being,” he writes.37 Heidegger’s sentiments have deep roots in religious thought. That said, I think we praise ourselves too highly when we say that Being needs us and that the Brahman is dependent upon us. Better to leave the Tao alone. There is a potential for great arrogance when we position ourselves as the outcome of cosmic evolution and the protectors of the truth of the Logos. I would wager instead that we are the protectors of the place where Being makes a home—this world, this earth, our home. We are not shepherds but farmers, and just as all good farmers recognize their dependence upon the dirt, rain, sun, wind, bees, beasts of burden, and the spade, so too we must recognize that if we are to live we defend the earth on which we stand—for we are of this earth. Earth is our footing. Gratefulness draws us out of ourselves rather than retreating, as the sages of the Upanishads retreated into the forest to practice their tapas and burn away desire.38 The Bhagavad Gita describes two paths of yoga, a path of withdrawal (sannyasa), and a path of action (karma). Karma yoga teaches us that we do not stand apart from other people, from our community, from the world and the All. Karma yoga is based on the recognition that just as we come from the All, we have duties to the All. We cannot be solely concerned with ourselves because we are of this world. The earth disclosed to us through gratefulness is one that needs us because we are capable of both doing great good for it and inflicting great harm upon it. In this new age that anthropologists dub “the Anthropocene,” humans are fundamentally altering the planet on which we stand. We must recognize that how we are living “changes everything.”39 This earth on which we make our home is under assault from all corners. Yet gratefulness reveals to us that we cannot live without a home. Neoliberalism might encourage us to destroy our home in order to make way for a bigger, better home, but the earth? Our relentless quest for more, and more, and more, and our zombie ethic in which we feast, and feast, and feast, is quite literally killing the home where life happens. All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players, but the play will end abruptly if we burn down the stage. I am not here to articulate a new environmental ethic, as there are people much better equipped to do that than I am. I am particularly drawn

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to the work of the “deep ecology” movement, which at times premises its activism on the connection between Atman, individual soul, and Brahman, universal divinity.40 My goal here is reorientation. Neoliberalism teaches us to see everything we experience in terms of the market, even ourselves, and even the ground on which we stand. Yet some goods stand above the market, for they are sacred, as they are essential for life. Gratefulness reveals a different set of norms than neoliberalism. Gratefulness discloses the value we place on life, and on the world where life happens. It is this we must band together to protect. Today we need a new democracy of the earth. Gratefulness reveals the good, and demonstrates that this good is held in common by us all. Gratefulness allows us to speak about the world differently, in terms of the commonweal. Life is just what is. Life just is. Life is. Life—as the Bhagavad Gita teaches, as a part of the All we are dependent upon the All for our capacity to act. We develop our capacities, we learn to care for ourselves, so that when the opportune moment comes along to help someone in need and to contribute to making the human predicament a little easier for those around us and perhaps beyond, we are ready. We must be ready when the stars align. Today we often throw around the phrase “carpe diem” like it is as easy as apple pie to seize the day. It is not. Carpere takes extensive preparation and discipline and practice to be ready to capitalize on those timely moments when the stars align. In rhetorical studies we speak of “kairos,” seizing an opportune moment. To understand how to seize a moment requires tremendous skill that can only be developed over time, with great discipline. If we are to change the world in which we find ourselves, we must learn how to see those rare opportunities when a word or a deed can make a difference, when a simple word can change the world, when a grateful deed can change everything. In such moments, when we make the most of those talents we have been given and the resources our context provides us, true creativity is possible. Gratefulness prepares us to seize the present. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”41 I would slightly revise this aphorism to say that there is only an affected seeing, only an affected knowing, because we know the world through our emotions. Either way, the first principle of

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wisdom is to recognize that human vision is limited, fallible. We do not see the world as gods. Our view of the world is a perspective, not the perspective, and so we must be humble in our knowledge. Such humility is, in fact, the first step in the practice of freedom. To be free it is first necessary to recognize that our current perspective does not exhaust all meaningful ways of being in the world. Once we realize this, we are able to see that we have room to maneuver, and thus that change is possible. We are who we are, but we need not be. The ultimate trouble with the debt of gratitude is that it takes away our room to maneuver by projecting our future for us. The spiritual traditions of the East and the West teach that it is possible for us as individuals, through hard work and dialogue with others, to change how we see and experience the world—but only, as Nietzsche writes, if we “want to see differently,” which requires “no small discipline.”42 The ancients called the discipline of learning to see differently the care of the self, and Nietzsche (like many nineteenth-century philosophers and thinkers in both Europe and the United States, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman) placed his hope for social reform in a renewed focus on the care of the self. Through practice, Nietzsche believed that humans could change how they see the world. Slowly, gradually, not like a lightning bolt but more like water over a stone, it would then be possible to resist and rework the dominant emotions of the age. Nietzsche hoped that people could move on from a tired and hostile ressentiment to an open and affirming joy for life that would lead us past our current state and on to something better. Though we can only feel the world perspectivally, when we labor to feel life differently, through the lens of gratefulness, new worlds are opened to us. We gain new room to maneuver. Seeing with grateful eyes, we will be able to live more harmoniously with others and with the earth. We will be better prepared to work together with others to ensure that the world is a home for us all. We will be ready for democracy.43 To feel differently, we must talk differently. We must abandon the rhetoric of debt, we must jettison the economic talk, we must cease defining other people and the earth as resources to be exploited for personal gain, we must stop speaking about gratitude as a transaction, we must rewrite the script that people are the givers and receivers of debt. Life is too precious to be wasted on counting debts. Life is not a ledger or a checkbook registry. Life is not a gratitude account. Life is an opportunity

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to be seized, a moment to be lived, a word to be spoken, a connection to be made. Life is a chance, not a debt. If we redefine gratitude as thanksgiving, and we learn to focus our mindful attention on that which supports our ability to live, then we can see beyond ourselves toward a common good that we all share. The virtue of gratefulness is that it reveals the good to be a common good. In this way, gratefulness provides us with a new foundation for democratic politics, the politics of collective agency, the politics of the common good, the politics of a sunset.

Notes

Introduction 1. For two summary statements on the contemporary importance of gratitude, see Arthur C. Brooks, “Choose to Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier,” New York Times, November 21, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/ opinion/sunday/choose-to-be-grateful-it-will-make-you-happier.html, and Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Selfish Side of Gratitude,” New York Times, December 31, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/sunday/the-selfish-side-ofgratitude.html?_r=1. 2. “Gratitude is not just the key. It’s a magic key—all you need to do is to use it, and the world is suddenly transformed into a beautiful wonderland, in which you are invited to play”—M. J. Ryan, Attitudes of Gratitude: How to Give and Receive Joy Every Day of Your Life, 10th Anniversary Edition (1999; San Francisco, CA: Red Wheel, 2009), 27. Gratitude has become a “God-term” of contemporary American public address, a “rhetorical absolute.” On God-terms, see Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953; Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1985), 211−32, and Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 25−27. The power of God-terms comes from the automatic connotations they generate. 3. I explore how the American motto e pluribus unum gave way to the reality of a politics of resentment based in e unibus duo in Jeremy Engels, The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). 4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (1651; New York: Penguin, 1985), 186. 5. Here, see Amy Morin, “7 Scientifically Proven Benefits of Gratitude That Will Motivate You to Give Thanks Year-Round,” Forbes, November 23, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/amymorin/2014/11/23/7-scientifically-proven-bene-

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162 / Notes to Introduction fits-of-gratitude-that-will-motivate-you-to-give-thanks-year-round/#8164f8e6800a. To me the fact that business magazines like Forbes are touting the health benefits of gratitude is no coincidence. For a summary of these benefits, see Janice Kaplan, The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year of Living on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life (New York: Dutton, 2015). 6. Robert A. Emmons, Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 29. 7. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, eds., The Psychology of Gratitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), viii. 8. See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012), and Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing By Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan (2013; South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015). On the rituals of indebtedness at the very heart of community life, see Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (1998; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 9. Emmons, Thanks!, 126−27. 10. Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009), 216−17. 11. Though the checkbook registry example might seem extreme, we should not dismiss it because this is precisely the type of metaphor that one of the preeminent schools of contemporary ethical thought, Kantian deontology, uses to describe our ethical obligations to one another. In the deontological paradigm, humans are “moral bookkeepers” who are ethical to the extent that they are able to settle their accounts and repay their many, often conflicting, debts. On the Kantian debt of gratitude, see Claudia Card, “Gratitude and Obligation,” American Philosophical Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1988), 115−16, 117−18. 12. On neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), and Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). In her book, Somers uses the term “fundamentalist capitalism” rather than “neoliberalism.” 13. Maurizio Lazzarato, who coined the phrase “the debt economy,” captures our situation with the following words: “While everyone awaits the signs of economic growth, something else looms on the horizon. The primacy of rent; massive inequalities between employees and their employers; monstrous discrepancies in property ownership between the richest and the poorest (900 to 1 in France); social classes stuck perpetuating the same conditions; the end of social mobility, which was already dismal (especially in the United States, where the American dream is now no more than a dream)—all this looks less like capitalism than a variation on the Ancien Régime.” Lazzarato, Governing By Debt, 9−10. 14. Rhetorical power happens at the moment of the constitution of identity, as Maurice Charland argues. I believe that indebtedness, through the contemporary

Notes to Introduction / 163 rhetoric of gratitude, interpellates us into neoliberal power relations while also making us more comfortable with such relations. For his helpful re-reading of Kenneth Burke’s “identification” in terms of Louis Althusser’s “interpellation,” see Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987), 133−50. 15. Ehrenreich, “The Selfish Side of Gratitude.” 16. Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2007), 4. 17. Martin Heidegger observes, “We are better off since we possess the Aristotelian Rhetoric rather than a philosophy of language. In the Rhetoric, we have something before us that deals with speaking as a basic mode of the being of the being-with-one-another of human beings themselves, so that an understanding of this legein also offers the being-constitution of being-withone-another in new aspects”—Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 80. 18. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1356a, in Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 2nd edition, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38. 19. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1378b, in On Rhetoric, trans. Kennedy, 116−17. 20. On neoliberalism’s capitalization of and on neuroscience, see William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (London: Verso, 2015). 21. David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 31−32. 22. For an example of this evolutionary perspective, see Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 23. Here, see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (1998; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy, ed. Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 24. David Zarefsky, “Two Faces of Democratic Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices, edited by Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 115−37. For a brilliant analysis of how democratic deliberation might proceed through a reading of our collective history, see Kirt H. Wilson, “Debating the Great Emancipator: Abraham Lincoln and our Public Memory,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13 (2010), 455−79. 25. Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). 26. Engels, The Politics of Resentment.

164 / Notes to Introduction 27. Philip Watkins attributes the connection between gratitude and indebtedness to Marcel Mauss’s seminal study The Gift (1925), a connection I consider in chapter 1—Philip Watkins, Gratitude and the Good Life: Toward a Psychology of Appreciation (New York: Springer, 2014), 31−32. 28. In his translation, Alan Sheridan renders this passage as “simply because I am interested in the past,” which somewhat obscures the meaning of Foucault’s words—see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. (1975; New York: Vintage, 1995), 31. 29. Stuart Elden offers this helpful translation of this passage in “Beyond Discipline and Punish: Is It Time for a New Translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir?” Progressive Genealogies, January 22, 2014, http://progressivegeographies. com/2014/01/22/beyond-discipline-and-punish-is-it-time-for-a-new-translation-offoucaults-surveiller-et-punir/. As he points out, Sheridan translates the French as “writing a history of the past in terms of the present” (31), which “obscures the way that terminology and vocabulary, supposedly a remnant of his earlier ‘archeological’ work, remains a crucial concern in his later, ‘genealogical,’ writings.” As a rhetorical scholar, I, of course, remain interested in how Foucault reads language and vocabulary as a driver of social change. 30. Kendall Phillips points out that discursive formations “are riddled with incoherence and contingency.” It is because discursive formations always contain the possibility of their own antitheses or counter-discourses that rhetorical invention is possible from within a Foucauldian analytic framework. See Kendall R. Phillips, “Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Thought, and Freedom in Foucault,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002), 333. 31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31. 32. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Duties of Justice, Duties of Material: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000), 178. 33. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 110. 34. Philosophers make a distinction between “targeted” or “prepositional” gratitude (which is gratitude given to someone for something) and “propositional” gratitude (which is gratitude for some state of affairs). Though I will not work with these two categories in my book, because the rhetoric of debt can color both prepositional and propositional gratitude, I would generally favor propositional gratitude as a democratic corrective to neoliberalism—if we are grateful for life, we must also be grateful for the conditions that enable us to live, which means being grateful for an environment but not necessarily to anyone for providing that environment (or providing life itself ). Being able to transcend targeted gratitude and take the perspective of propositional gratitude is vital to the art of gratitude—especially because propositional gratitude tends to involve humil-

Notes to Introduction / 165 ity. Here, see Sean McAleer, “Propositional Gratitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2012), 55−66. 35. This is true, too, about rhetoric itself, which is premised on a “distributed sense of capacity” and “vulnerability”—see Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy, “Thinking Ecologically about Rhetoric’s Ontology: Capacity, Vulnerability, and Resilience,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 1 (2017), 1−25. 36. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), 84. 37. For one of the clearest and most provocative accounts of Whitman’s vision of democracy as an art of mobilizing for the common good, see John Marsh, In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), esp. 179−224. 38. My understanding of democracy as a practice of collective resistance is shaped by the work of a number of contemporary European philosophers, especially Jacques Ranciere and Roberto Esposito. I also admit an affinity for Jean-Luc Nancy’s attempt to re-think the concepts of “fraternity” and “community” outside of their exclusionary, violent rhetorical heritage (as “family” or “kinship”)—see especially Being Singular Plural (1996; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Though in works including Rogues and The Politics of Friendship Jacques Derrida suggests that this attempt to rework fraternity so that it is properly open to difference is impossible, it is nevertheless important to struggle with the contradictions of community if we are to build a democratic community in the mold of “the All.” 39. I adopt the felicitous phrase “hyperbole of hostility” from Mari Lee Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015), 124. 40. In America, as youngsters we quickly learn that individual agency means acting by ourselves to control the future with hard work and sheer force of will—see Elisabeth R. Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 41. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005), 2. 42. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 3. 43. Laurie E. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2015), 57. Gries proposes calling the distributed sense of rhetorical agency outlined in her book, and that I fully support, “rhetorical actancy” (73). 44. Carolyn Gregoire, “How Yoga Became a $27 Billion Industry—And Reinvented American Spirituality,” Huffington Post, January 23, 2015, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/how-the-yoga-industry-los_n_4441767. html. For a description of how yoga’s transformation into a consumer industry,

166 / Notes to Chapter 1 see Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2005), and Andrea R. Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For the number of Americans practicing yoga, see “2016 Yoga in America Study Conducted by Yoga Journal & Yoga Alliance,” January 13, 2016, https://www. yogaalliance.org/2016YogaInAmericaStudy. 45. When speaking of the philosophical roots of yoga, it must be acknowledged that yoga has a number of ontologies and soteriologies—at least two need to be identified here. The Bhagavad Gita presents union with Krishna as the ultimate goal of yoga (here, yoga indeed does mean “yoking” from the root “yug” or “marriage,” as it was often translated in the nineteenth century); in line with Samkhya metaphysics, the Yoga Sutras presents kaivalya (“aloneness”) as the ultimate goal of yoga (yoga here means not “yoking” but disentangling the purusha from the prakriti). On the Gita, see Richard H. Davis, The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); on the Yoga Sutras, see David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). For more general treatments on the ends of yoga, see Georg Feuerstein, The Philosophy of Classical Yoga (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1996), and Ian Whicher, The Integrity of the Yoga Darśana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). 46. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939), in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 226, 227. 47. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, OH: Swallow University Press, 1954), 148. 48. For a discussion of the role that “democratic faith” played in John Dewey’s vision of democracy, see Jeremy Engels, “Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War,” in Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Culture, edited by Gregory Clark and Brian Jackson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), 87−105. 49. Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 50. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (2011; Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 24.

Chapter 1 1. Oftentimes, we believe an argument to be true for no other reason than it feels right in our hearts and our guts—our beliefs rest on the “affectively

Notes to Chapter 1 / 167 legitimated fact.” See Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact,” in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 54. 2. Writing in the tradition of Aristotle and Heidegger, Daniel Gross observes that “emotions are the contours of a dynamic social field manifest in what’s imagined and forgotten, what’s praised and blamed, what’s sanctioned and silenced.” Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15. 3. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1356a, in Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 2nd edition, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38. 4. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 4. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (1927; Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 126. 6. Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 83. 7. For a brilliant counter-history that contests the distinction between humans and animals in rhetorical theory, see Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 8. Here, see Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy (1961; New York: Routledge, 2006), and Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Sara Ahmed explores the politics of affective exclusion in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004; New York: Routledge, 2013). For a contemporary iteration of the Enlightenment antithesis between reason and emotion, see Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco, 2016). 9. Engels, Enemyship. 10. I track this history of skepticism concerning emotion in Essay I of Engels, The Politics of Resentment, and Jeremy Engels, “The Trouble with ‘Public Bodies’: On the Anti-Democratic Rhetoric of The Federalist,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 3 (2015), 505−38. The paradox, of course, is that the founders just a decade before recognized the centrality of emotion—what was then often called “sentiment”—to the revolutionary effort—see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), and Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 11. James Madison, Federalist No. 49, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, intro. and notes by Robert A. Ferguson (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006), 283. 12. Alexander Hamilton uses the “contagion” metaphor in Federalist No. 28 (p. 149), Federalist No. 16 (p. 91), Federalist No. 61 (p. 340), and Federalist No. 73 (p. 407). 13. James Madison, Federalist No. 42, 236.

168 / Notes to Chapter 1 14. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Cocoran (2005, London: Verso, 2014). 15. See Kimberly Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in American Politics (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999), 87−117. I investigate one critical moment in this attempt to get rowdy Americans to embrace the language of cold Enlightenment reason in Jeremy Engels, “Uncivil Speech: Invective and the Rhetorics of Democracy in the Early Republic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 3 (2009), 311−34. 16. Edward Tyrrell Channing, Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College, ed. Dorothy I. Anderson and Waldo W. Braden (1856; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 36. Channing exercised tremendous influence on both the public culture and the rhetorical theory of Antebellum America; he taught rhetoric at Harvard for 31 years, from 1819 to 1850, and his students included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips, James Russell Lowell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Charles Eliot Norton, Edward Everett Hale, and countless other prominent preachers, statesmen, and businessmen who preached the gospel of rugged individualism and self-reliance widely. Dorothy Broaddus thus writes that Channing “is a significant figure in the history of American rhetoric primarily because of his famous students, and his Lectures Read to the Seniors at Harvard College are important because they indicate what he said to the young men who became major contributors to the New England Renaissance”—Dorothy C. Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 10. 17. Richard Whately, The Elements of Rhetoric (1828; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 176−80, a claim that is also evident from his continued use of “reasoning” to describe the practice of rhetoric, which for him is the art of inventing and arranging arguments. 18. On nineteenth-century debates about emotion, reason, and public speech, see Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: W. Morrow, 1990). For a provocative treatment of how debates about emotion and gender played out in the twentieth century, see Janell Johnson, American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 19. I could cite any number of articles here, but I will flag one popular article concerning how to argue with people who fundamentally disagree with you—Michael Shermer, “How To Convince Someone When Facts Fail: Why Worldview Threats Undermine Evidence,” Scientific American, January 1, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-factsfail/. Rule number one: “keep emotions out of the exchange.” 20. Christopher Uhl with Dana L. Stuchul, Teaching as if Life Matters: The Promise of a New Education Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 17−18.

Notes to Chapter 1 / 169 21. Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 16. 22. On this debate in contemporary psychology, see Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Emotions are Real,” Emotion 12, no. 3 (2012), 413−29, and C. Daryl Cameron, Kristen A. Lindquist, and Kurt Gray, “A Constructivist Review of Morality and Emotions: No Evidence for Specific Links Between Moral Content and Discrete Emotions,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, January 2015, 1−24. 23. Richard J. Davidson with Sharon Begley, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live—and How You Can Change Them (2012; New York: Plume, 2013), 161−75. 24. For example, see The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation, ed. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard J. Davidson, with Zara Houshmand (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2011). 25. A very helpful overview of contemporary perspectives on the relation between words, thoughts, emotions, and our brains, see the January 8, 2015 episode of the NPR Podcast “Invisibila,” called “The Secret History of Thoughts,” available online at http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia. On CBT, see Jeffrey E. Young, Arthur D. Weinberger, and Aaron T. Beck, “Cognitive Therapy for Depression,” in Clinical Handbook of Psychological Disorders: A Step-By-Step Treatment Manual, 3rd edition, ed. David H. Barlow (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001), 264−308, and Donald Robertson, The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy (London: Karnac Books, 2010). On Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, see Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (1990; New York: Bantam Books, 2013), and Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression, 2nd edition (New York: The Guilford Press, 2013). 26. On the narrative paradigm, see Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51, no. 1 (1984), 1−24, and Walter R. Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm: An Elaboration,” Communication Monographs 52, no. 4 (1985), 347−67. 27. This work was undertaken after a “general reshuffle” of his research project—see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (1986; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 80. 28. Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006), 19−45. 29. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 28−30. 30. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966; New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 387. 31. Foucault explained his detour to the classics in the following terms: “As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of

170 / Notes to Chapter 1 some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself ”—Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume Two of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (1985; New York: Random House, 1990), 8. The key source for Foucault’s genealogy of the care of the self is Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981−1982, ed. Frédéric Gross, trans. Graham Burchell (2001; New York: Picador, 2005); the most helpful treatments of Foucault’s turn to the classics that I have found are Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), and Robert Nichols, The World of Freedom: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 32. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 15. 33. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 130−31. 34. The relevant Stoic pedagogical principle here is oportet educat. About this Foucault notes: “Forgive a tiny bit of grammar: educat, of course, is an imperative. So it is not educare but educere: offering a hand, extricating from, leading out of. You see then that this not at all a work of instruction or education in the traditional sense of the term, of the transmission of theoretical knowledge or of know-how. But it is actually a certain action carried out on the individual to whom one offers a hand and whom one extricates from the condition, status, and mode of life and being in which he exists . . . It is a sort of operation focused on the mode of being of the subject himself and not just the transmission of knowledge capable of taking the place of or replacing ignorance” (Hermeneutics of the Subject, 134). 35. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 240−41. 36. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 94. 37. Indeed, the Greek verb sōzein (to save) and the substantive sōtēria (salvation) meant saving something (a city, or a person) from a threatening danger. 38. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 30, 183−84. 39. Seneca, Letter 26.8; on Plato and preparing to die, see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 93−101. For Seneca, the lesson was this: consummare vitam ante mortem, complete your life before you are dead!—Seneca, Letter 32. 40. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 364. 41. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 14. 42. The Cartesian moment is not authored by Descartes. Foucault reiterates that he does not believe in individual authorship but instead in larger discursive shifts. Instead, Descartes is emblematic of this shift. On Foucault’s reading

Notes to Chapter 1 / 171 of Descartes—who he sees as a key figure in the genesis of biopolitics—see McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis, 222−41. 43. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 17. 44. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 189−90. 45. For Foucault’s hostility toward the “California cult of the self,” see Paras, Foucault 2.0, 132, 141. I think one of the troubles with Jeffrey Nealon’s critique of the paradigm of the care of the self (which he hopes to disregard in favor of a Marxist critical praxis that ignores the individual altogether) is that he mistakes the California cult of the self for the only manifestation of the care of the self. Nealon is certainly right to note that the “find your true self ” trope has been enlisted as a neoliberal technique of governance, but I remain unconvinced that this is the only possible practice of such care. See Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)—and note that Nealon does not cite the Hermeneutics lectures. Three works that attempt to explore the consequences of Foucault’s radical rethinking of subjectivity and practice are: Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (2009; Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013); and Nichols, The World of Freedom. 46. This is a foundational principle of the civic republican tradition. See Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 47. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 252. 48. A strong case is made for a radical break in Foucault’s work between early and late in Paras, Foucault 2.0. 49. On the “soul” as a site of power, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 28−30. 50. Here, see Debra Hawhee, “Looking Into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (2011), 139−65. 51. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2:“estō dē hē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston tou theōrēsai to endekhomenon pithanon.” 52. On the origins of rhetoric and rhetorical theory in ancient Greece, see George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3−29, and Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). On the simultaneous emergence of rhetoric and democracy in ancient Greece, see Takis Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); Takis Poulakos and David Depew, eds., Isocrates and Civic Education (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009);

172 / Notes to Chapter 1 and Ekaterina V. Haskins, Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009). For a helpful study of rhetoric and power in ancient Greece, see Nathan Crick, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014). 53. On Plato’s critique of rhetoric, democracy, and demagoguery, see Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1996). 54. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and “The Idea of Public Reason,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 93–141. For other works stressing reason-giving, see also Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 52–127; James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 23–70; and Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy, 67–91. For helpful critiques of this paradigm, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990), 56−80, and Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). 55. Here, see J. Michael Hogan, “Rhetorical Pedagogy and Democratic Citizenship: Reviving the Traditions of Civic Engagement and Public Deliberation,” in Rhetoric and Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices, eds. Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 75–97; and Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004), 189–211. 56. Michele Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010), 269. 57. The study of rhetoric works to illuminate our “trained incapacities” and “occupational psychoses”—see Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 58. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995; New York: Vintage, 1996), 14. 59. The ability to bring some control over our emotions is at the heart of the classical Western literature on the care of the self—see especially William V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 60. As Martin Heidegger writes, each individual “can, should, and must master its mood.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 128. 61. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 31−32. The cognitive aspect of emotions—that they are based on shared judgments or “cognitive appraisals” about the social world—is central to the work of Martha Nussbaum—see

Notes to Chapter 1 / 173 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Nussbaum, Political Emotions. 62. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (1970; San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 48−51, 122−30, and Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (1990; New York: Zone Books, 1992), esp. 235−54. 63. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (1991; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 163−99. For one of the most forceful statements on the distinction between affect and emotion, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); see also Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 2004), Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), and Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader. 64. On the psychoanalytic understanding of rhetoric, see Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004), 1−23, and Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012). 65. Dave Tell, “The Rise and Fall of a Mechanical Rhetoric, or What Grain Elevators Teach Us About Postmodernism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (2014), 168. 66. Tell, “The Rise and Fall of a Mechanical Rhetoric,” 168. 67. Tell, “The Rise and Fall of a Mechanical Rhetoric,” 168. 68. Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (1990; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 158, 159. 69. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (1690; New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 2: 146. 70. Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking (1676), reprinted in The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John Harwood (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 374. 71. See Megan Foley, “Peitho and Bia: The Force of Language,” Symploke 20, no. 1–2 (2012), 173–81. 72. Lamy, The Art of Speaking, 361, 247. 73. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law (1640), quoted in Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 166. 74. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), in Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998), 231. 75. Morton White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 102.

174 / Notes to Chapter 1 76. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1788), 76. 77. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 2, 68. 78. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 68, 84. 79. David Hume wrote about the mind as machine using one of Newton’s favorite metaphors: “the impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second.” For Hume and Hobbes before him, passion was a direct spur to action—and, Hobbes wrote, “when a Body is once in motion, it moveth (unless something else hinder it) eternally.” David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1758), 318; Hobbes, Leviathan, 88. 80. “Passion often gives a violent impulse to the will, and makes a man do what he knows he shall repent as long as he lives,” Reid concluded darkly. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 181. 81. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 113, 176, 181. 82. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 68. 83. In addition to Tell’s essay on mechanistic rhetoric, there have been several recent essays that exemplify just how powerful the rhetorical criticism of affect can be—Lauren Berlant, “Opulism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2011), 235−42; Bryan J. McCann, “Affect, Black Rage, and False Alternatives in the Hip-Hop Nation,” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 13, no. 5 (2013), 408−18; Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015), 2−17; Caitlin Bruce, “The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2015), 42−62; Bryan J. McCann, “ ‘Chrysler Pulled the Trigger’: The Affective Politics of Insanity and Black Rage at the Trial of James Johnson, Jr.,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2016), 131−55; Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010), 1−25; and Anne Teresa Demo, “Hacking Agency: Apps, Autism, and Neurodiversity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017), 277−300. 84. I’d celebrate here, especially, Anker, Orgies of Feeling. 85. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011), 434−72. 86. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain; Kristen A. Lindquist et.al., “The Brain Basis of Emotion: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Behavioral Brain Science 35, no. 3 (2012), 121−43; C. Daniel Salzman and Stefano Fusi, “Emotion, Cognition, and Mental State Representation in Amygdala and Prefrontal Cortex,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 33 (2010), 173−202; Richard J. Davidson, Daren C. Jackson, and Ned H. Kalin, “Emotion, Plasticity, Context, and Regulation: Perspectives from Affective Neuroscience,” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 6 (2000), 890−909. 87. Barrett, “Emotions are Real,” 424.

Notes to Chapter 1 / 175 88. Barrett, “Emotions are Real,” 424. 89. I think, here, of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). There is a certain kind of life lived in reaction that celebrates violence and war. Indeed, Robin argues that conservatives secretly love and work to foment violence and war because it reifies and supports their worldview of the masses who must be governed by violence. This deep pathology in the liberal imagination must be corrected as we move forward, and I believe that gratitude can serve as a groundwork for doing so. 90. For a helpful review of social constructivism and a discussion of how our emotions influence our moral judgments, see Cameron, Lindquist, and Gray, “A Constructivist Review of Morality and Emotions.” 91. Or following Hawhee we might call it a “sensorium”—see “Rhetoric’s Sensorium.” For a description of rhetoric as a means by which we attune ourselves to the world, see Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). 92. In the Stoic tradition, emotions were thought to be cognitive. This vision of the emotions still has purchase: Stoicism represents the philosophical foundation of what today is called Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. In Stoicism, emotions are the products of rational calculation; people feel in line with what they believe to be true and desirable. These calculations are often incorrect, leading to bad feelings that disrupt a person’s mental equilibrium and cause them pain. The Stoics hoped to teach Romans how to feel correctly, so that they were open to the desirable, pacific emotions and steeled against the rollercoaster of emotional ups-and-downs that rocked the lives of most people. On the Stoic conception of emotion, see Ludwig Edelstein, The Meaning of Stoicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics, 2nd edition (1975; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 59−67; and A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2nd edition (1974; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 175−78; on the Stoic roots of CBT, see Donald Robertson, The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy (London: Karnac Books, 2010). 93. Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 255 (2.33). 94. On stultitia, see Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 131. 95. Heidegger, Being and Time, 127−28. 96. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (1972; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 164−69. 97. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell (2004; New York: Picador, 2008), 27−50.

176 / Notes to Chapter 1 98. According to Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, our emotions (the pathe) are how we find ourselves in a moment. “Insofar as the pathe are not merely an annex of psychical processes, but are rather the ground out of which speaking arises, and which what is expressed grows back into, the pathe, for their part, are the basic possibilities in which being-there itself is primarily oriented toward itself, finds itself.” Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 176. 99. Walt Whitman, “Passage to India,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 531. 100. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 406. 101. For attempts to think of a type of rhetoric that is prior to, and that exists beyond, techne, see Pat J. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), and Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift. 102. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982−1983, ed. Frédéric Gross, trans. Graham Burchell (2008; New York: Palgrave, 2010), 54. 103. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 96. 104. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 135−36. 105. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 304. 106. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 386. 107. Arthur E. Walzer, “Parrēsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2013), 1−21. 108. See Foucault’s definition of “discipline” (which perfectly captures how the art of belles lettres was taught in both Europe and the U.S.) in Discipline and Punish, 137−38. Foucault himself described rhetoric as a technique of the care of the self in his earliest lectures on the subject, a view that he later rejected—see Michel Foucault, About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self, Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 109. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 21, 127. 110. This argument is advanced in Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013; London: Verso, 2014). 111. The argument that Foucault’s rejection of French Marxism signifies a turn toward neoliberalism is advanced in Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent (2014; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016). 112. For a helpful provisional history of neoliberalism, see Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics. 113. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (1935), in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925−1953, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 30. 114. For the classic account of the Protestant Ethic, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904–05;

Notes to Chapter 1 / 177 Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1998), and “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 302–22; also very helpful on the classical liberal vision of the individual is C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1955). 115. Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick (1976), in Novels 1876−1985, ed. Sidney Offit, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2014), 65. 116. We have been taught to define individual freedom “as self-reliance, as unconstrained agency, and as unbound subjectivity,” and to imagine the individual as “a sovereign subject, one who obeys no other authority but one’s own, who can determine the future and control the vagaries of contingency through sheer strength of will”—Anker, Orgies of Feeling, 9. I explore sovereign reason as a foundational American practice of the care of the self in Jeremy Engels, “Disciplining Jefferson: The Man within the Breast and the Rhetorical Norms of Producing Order,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 3 (2006), 411−36. 117. On neoliberalism, see Brown, Undoing the Demos, and Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship. Neoliberalism has gained public legitimacy largely through what Bradford Vivian calls “neoliberal epideictic,” the ritual praise of neoliberal ideals in public ceremonies by prominent public officials—see Bradford Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2002,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 1 (2006), 1−26. For an exploration of the rhetorical dynamics of neoliberalism, see Joshua S. Hanan, Indradeep Ghosh, and Kaleb W. Brooks, “Banking on the Present: The Ontological Rhetoric of Neo-Classical Economics and Its Relation to the 2008 Financial Crisis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (2014), 139−62. 118. See Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The FortyYear Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Helpful studies of neoliberalism in higher education include Luke Winslow, “Rich, Blessed, and Tenured: A Homological Exploration of Grant Writing, Prosperity Theology, and Neoliberalism,” Western Journal of Communication 79, no. 3 (2015), 257−83, and Diane Marie Keeling, “Of Turning and Tropes,” Review of Communication 16, no. 4 (2016), 317−33. For a review of contemporary literature on the neoliberal challenge to higher education, and how communication and rhetoric scholars might respond to this challenge, see Christina R. Foust and Daniel J. Lair, “The Political, Cultural, and Economic Assault on Higher Education,” Review of Communication 12, no. 2 (2012), 159−74. 119. For a Nietzschean description of “the will” as a means by which we are held accountable, see Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

178 / Notes to Chapter 1 120. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 133. On the 2008 neoliberal housing crisis, see Megan Foley, “From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market Crisis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012), 386−410. 121. Time, May 9, 2013. 122. William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014; New York: The Free Press, 2015). 123. Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 223. 124. David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015), 15. 125. For a wonderful example of how scholars should tie selfishness to a larger social context that demands and enables such behavior, see Sara Ahmed, “Against Students,” The New Inquiry, June 29, 2015, http://thenewinquiry.com/ essays/against-students/ 126. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 127. William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Writings 1878−1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1992), 841−60. 128. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 129. See Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, and Anker, Orgies of Feeling. 130. Davies, The Happiness Industry. On neoliberalism’s impact on how we understand and discuss depression, and how we might recover a more productive, affirming rhetoric of depression, see Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 131. Here, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), and Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 132. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); for a counter-view, see Dan Harris, 10% Happier: How I Tamed The Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). 133. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Cvetkovich, Depression; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). I agree with Cvetkovich, who writes that “especially important have been models for the depathologization of negative feelings such as shame, failure, melancholy, and depression, and the resulting rethinking of categories such as utopia, hope, and happiness as entwined with and even enhanced by forms of negative feeling” (Depression, 5).

Notes to Chapter 2 / 179

Chapter 2 1. “Etenim, iudices, cum omnibus virtutibus me affectum esse cupio, tum nihil est, quod malim quam me et gratum esse et videri. Haec est enim una virtus non solum maxima, sed etiam mater virtutum omnium reliquarum.” Cicero, Pro Plancio, in Orations: Pro Archia. Post Redium in Senatu. Post Reditum ad Quirites. De Domo Sua. De Haruspicum Responsis. Pro Placio, Loeb Classical Library Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 512 (section 80). 2. She interviews Yale psychologist Yarrow Dunham, who observes: “Obligation is a debt that you have to pay back. Gratitude is that feeling when something good happens and you are happy with the world.” Kaplan, The Gratitude Diaries, 66. For other attempts to distinguish gratitude from obligation and indebtedness, see Watkins, Gratitude and the Good Life, 31−37, and Sara B. Algoe, Jonathan Haidt, and Shelly L. Gable, “Beyond Reciprocity: Gratitude and Relationships in Everyday Life,” Emotion 8, no. 3 (2008), 425−29. 3. Kaplan, The Gratitude Diaries, 12. Kaplan presents a translation that Cicero’s “mater” as “parent,” when it would be more accurate to translate it as “mother.” 4. Kaplan, The Gratitude Diaries, 263. 5. Cicero’s words are invoked in multiple contemporary books on gratitude. For a sample, see Emmons and McCullough, The Psychology of Gratitude, 8, 123, 136; Emmons, Thanks!, 15; Nina Lesowitz and Mary Beth Sammons, Living Life as a Thank You: The Transformative Power of Daily Gratitude (San Francisco, CA: Viva Editions, 2009), xxv; Angeles Arrien, Living in Gratitude: Mastering the Art of Giving Thanks Every Day (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2011), 5; Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works! A 21 Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity (San Francisco: Jossey-Boss, 2013), v; and Kaplan, The Gratitude Diaries, 12. Cicero is also quoted in Jack Canfield and D. D. Watkins, Gratitude A Daily Journal: Honor and Appreciate the Abundance in Your Life (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2007), on the pages for Sept. 22−28. 6. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Society (1925), trans. W. D. Halls (1950; New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 39. 7. On the development of the legal distinction between a person and a thing, see Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015). 8. “To make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself; hence, the thing given is not inactive”—Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift, 140. 9. Mauss, The Gift, 6, 17. 10. Jacques Derrida develops the argument that there can be no free gift in Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1991; Chicago: University

180 / Notes to Chapter 2 of Chicago Press, 1992). “For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt . . . If he recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition sufficiently to annual the gift” (13). The gift, the free gift, is impossible. For a helpful reading of Derrida on the gift, see John D. Capstone, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 160−229. 11. Mauss, The Gift, 52. 12. Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (2013; New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 140−41. 13. Of course, the key text on this point is Mauss, The Gift. 14. Mauss, The Gift, 33. 15. If the history of emotion in the West was a play, its elder playwright would be Aristotle. On the centrality of Aristotle’s Rhetoric to classical visions of emotion, see Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks. 16. On “the gift” in Homer’s poetry, see Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift. 17. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), 69 (1124b11–12). 18. “And he is apt to do a favor of greater worth in return, since in that way the one who did the first favor will be left owing something to him, and will be the one who gained the benefit.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 69 (1124b12). 19. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Duties of Justice, Duties of Material: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000), 178. 20. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds., The Classical Tradition, Harvard Press Reference Library Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 142. 21. See Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric; on the turn away from education in the classics during the late nineteenth century, see Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence. 22. Cicero’s On Obligations has also made a resurgence in the popular press as an antidote to Trumpism: see Danielle Allen, “Cicero Used to be Boring. With Trump Around He’s Breathtaking,” Washington Post, January 4, 2017, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cicero-used-to-be-boring-with-trump-aroundhes-breathtaking/2017/01/04/02043c1e-d2a3-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story. html?utm_term=.71b8078b90b7/ 23. On the events following Julius Caesar’s assassination when Cicero composed On Obligations, see Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York: Random House, 2003), 272−319.

Notes to Chapter 2 / 181 24. The English word “gratitude” is closely related to the Latin “gratia,” which is cognate with two Sanskrit words meaning “praise,” “gurtih” and “gurtah.” Unlike early Sanskrit, Latin distinguished “praise” (laus) from “gratitude” (gratia), thereby marking off gratitude as an important emotion in its own right, an emotion that would become foundational to Roman politics. Margaret Visser, The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 168. 25. On gratitude and ingratitude as inventional resources, see Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift; on the cancelling of gifts to ungrateful receivers, see Mauss, The Gift, 51; on the punishment of the ungrateful by God and the gods, see Georges Davy, La Foi Juree: Etude Sociologique du Problem du Contrat: La Formation du Lein Contractuel (Paris: Librarie Felix Alcan, 1922). 26. Peter J. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 5. 27. Here, see Cicero, De Inventione, 2.65−66: “ac naturae quidem ius esse, quod nobis non opinio, sed quaedam innata vis adferat, ut religionem, pietatem, gratiam, vindicationem, observantiam, veritatem.” Latin text available online at the Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perse us%3Atext%3A2008.01.0683%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D65 28. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 2.44.9–10. 29. M. I. Finley observes that while there were a range of terms and euphemisms and puns in Greek and Latin for describing the people as divided into clashing classes, “the fact remains, however, that more often than not ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ render the sense better than a literal translation.” M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2. 30. The conflict between rich and poor was institutionalized in Roman politics with the office of the Tribune of the Plebs—an office that represented Roman plebs in opposition to the wealthy, elite senate, and magistrates. Moreover, the Senate and the people, via the tribunus plebis, were said to manifest different and often antithetical forms of power—the Senate auctoritas patrum, the people potestas and imperium. The Senate could have citizens killed; the Tribune of the Plebs could shield citizens from death. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (2003; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 74–75, 85–86. 31. The Romulus and Remus myth is explored as an expression of the social conflict between plebs and patres and the conflict of the orders in T. P. Wiseman, Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This distinction between the few and the many was written right into the Roman emblem SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus, The Senate and the Roman People. This emblem, much like our USA, was emblazoned on the standard of the Roman legions and appeared on coins, on monuments, and at the end of official documents and pronouncements. Though a logo of unity, Senator was

182 / Notes to Chapter 2 an office and populus was not, and thus the emblem SPQR captured the basic opposition between ruler and ruled at the heart of Roman politics—see George Boas, Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 43–45. 32. On the centrality of the distinction between the few and the many in Athenian democracy, see Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). I argue for translating phthonos and invidia as resentment in Engels, The Politics of Resentment, 25−69. 33. Everitt, Cicero, 184. 34. Cicero, De Re Publica, in De Re Publica and De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes, Loeb Classical Library Edition (1928; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 167 (2.32.56). 35. Here, see Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 36. Engels, The Politics of Resentment, 25−69. 37. Engels, The Politics of Resentment, 36. 38. Engels, The Politics of Resentment, 38−39. 39. In his words, “cum dignatate otium,” tranquility (otium) joined with worthy standing—in other words, social peace lead by the best men. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Speech on Behalf of Publius Sestius, trans. Robert A. Kaster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 32. 40. Like Cicero, Aristotle claimed that the opposite of anger, praotes, “calmness” or “satisfaction,” was a useful emotion for a speaker to be able to cultivate in a crowd, especially when that speaker was an elite politician facing down an angry and resentful mob. Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 77−90. 41. Cicero, De Oratore, 2.82.337, Latin text from the Perseus Digital Library available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3At ext%3A1999.02.0120%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D337 42. Cicero, De Oratore, 2.83.340, my translation from the Latin text of the Perseus Digital Library available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex t?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0120%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D340 43. Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (2000; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9 (1.20). I take the quote concerning the influence of Cicero’s De Officiis from Nussbaum, “Duties of Justice, Duties of Material.” 44. Cicero, On Obligations, 18 (1.47−48). This passage (and a similar statement by Seneca that gratitude is a first payment on “debt”) are invoked as foundational to contemporary practices of gratitude—in fact are invoked as preface to a 21-day course in becoming more grateful—in Emmons, Gratitude Works!, vi. Here again we see the debt of gratitude rearing its ugly head in the contemporary world.

Notes to Chapter 2 / 183 45. See Cicero, De Inventione, 2:66, my translation from the Latin text from the Perseus Digital Library available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0683%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D66. This passage is repeated almost verbatim at 2.161. 46. Cicero, On Obligations, 18 (1.48). 47. This is my translation. The Loeb edition translates this passage differently: “And yet a pecuniary obligation is a very different thing from a moral obligation. He who discharges a debt in money, ceases forthwith to possess that which he has paid; while he who remains a debtor keeps what does not belong to him. But in a moral debt, when I pay I keep, and when I keep, I pay by the very act of keeping.” Cicero, Pro Plancio, 496−97 (sections 68−69). 48. Cicero, On Obligations, 78 (2.69). 49. As such, it was logical for elite Romans to only consider bestowing favors only upon other Romans who are sufficiently wealthy to repay those favors materially. “The fact is that our preference usually inclines more to the man from whom there is the likelihood of a readier and swifter return.” Cicero, On Obligations, 78 (2.69). 50. Cicero, On Obligations, 76 (2.64). 51. Cicero, On Obligations, 77 (2.65). 52. Cicero, On Obligations, 76 (2.64). 53. Cicero, On Obligations, 79 (2.72). 54. Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97. Here I allude to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy. For Nietzsche, the first moral philosophy, the morality of good and bad, was born out of the kings’ attitude that he labels the “pathos of distance.” These kings had arrogated to themselves the mighty rhetorical power of definition—and they defined a moral universe. “It was ‘the good’ themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Walter Kauffman and R. J. Hollingdale (1967; New York: Vintage, 1989), 25–26. The pathos of distance displayed by Nietzsche’s kings was an attitude of war and domination, as it was for Cicero. The kings asserted their will to do as they pleased and coin the values they desired. This is especially apparent in the phrase “das Pathos der Distanz,” “the Pathos of Distance,” the feeling of intrinsic superiority that drives Nietzsche’s nobles to create values of “good and bad.” Indeed, the German Distanz connotes a sense of interpersonal conflict—this is not the distance of impartial spectators but the space separating armies. When Nietzsche speaks of the “Pathos der Vornehmheit und Distanz,” “the Pathos of Nobility and Distance,” Nietzsche’s

184 / Notes to Chapter 2 nobles are those who have “seized the right” (“das Recht . . . genommen”), presumably through battle, to assert their will on the social world. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 26. Thanks to Ira Allen for his help with unpacking Nietzsche’s German. 55. For a helpful discussion of Roman visions of the conflict between the few and the many, see Henrik Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 56. Cicero, De Re Publica, 79 (1.51). 57. Cicero, De Legibus, 3.15.33, 34. 58. Cicero, De Legibus, in De Re Publica and De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes, Loeb Classical Library Edition (1928; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 505 (3.39). 59. “The needy person believes that any service offered is a tribute to his person and not to his status, and accordingly he is eager to show gratitude not only to the person who has merited it, but also to those from whom he anticipates future help, for he is in need of many things.” Cicero, On Obligations, 78 (2.70). 60. Cicero, On Obligations, 76 (2.63). 61. For a discussion of Seneca’s influence on the Western conception of gratitude, see Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History, 48−55. 62. “De beneficiis dicendum est et ordinanda res, quae maxime humanam societatem alligat”—“Our job is to discuss benefits and to organize the topic which more than any other binds together human society”—Seneca, On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 22 (1.4.2). 63. Seneca defines a benefit as “a well-intentioned action that confers joy and in so doing derives joy, inclined towards and willingly prepared for doing what it does.” Seneca, On Benefits, 24 (1.6.1). 64. “Once we have decided to accept, we should do so with a cheerful acknowledgment of our pleasure . . . We should make evident our gratitude by unrestrained expressions of emotion, and we should express our feelings everywhere, not just in the presence of the donor. Receiving a benefit with gratitude is the first installment of its repayment.” Seneca, On Benefits, 48−49 (2.21.1). 65. Seneca, On Benefits, 44 (2.17.7). 66. Seneca, On Benefits, 20 (1.2.3). 67. Seneca, On Benefits, 86 (4.3.3). 68. Seneca, On Benefits, 18 (1.1.9). 69. This aspect of Seneca’s philosophy is emphasized in Thomas R. Blanton, “The Benefactor’s Account-book: The Rhetoric of Gift Reciprocation According to Seneca and Paul,” New Testament Studies 50, no. 3 (2013), 396−414. 70. Seneca, On Benefits, 42 (2.15.2). 71. Seneca, On Benefits, 189−90 (7.31.5).

Notes to Chapter 2 / 185 72. Seneca, On Benefits, 182 (7.19.8). 73. Seneca, On Benefits, 179 (7.16.3). 74. Seneca, On Benefits, 54 (2.31.1). 75. Seneca, On Benefits, 97 (4.18.1). 76. Nevertheless, true generosity “also possesses an element of advantage”— Seneca, On Benefits, 98 (4.20.1). Even when I am grateful, “there remains the issue of getting some use out of me, and the kind of advantage derivable from someone who is grateful. But this is not the remaining portion of an as yet incomplete obligation; it is a bonus on top of a completed obligation”—Seneca, On Benefits, 55 (2.33.1). 77. Seneca, On Benefits, 22 (1.4.3). 78. Seneca, On Benefits, 50 (2.25.1). 79. Seneca, On Benefits, 58 (2.35.5). Italics added. 80. Seneca, On Benefits, 112 (4.40.5). 81. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 30. 82. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 50. 83. Seneca, On Benefits, 71 (3.20.1). 84. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 129. 85. Cicero, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4, trans. Margaret Graver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3−4 (3.1.2). 86. Seneca, Letter 50, in Seneca, Epistles 1−65, Loeb Classical Library Edition, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 334. 87. Here again Seneca’s Letter 50: “non est extrinsecus malum nostrum; intra nos est, in visceribus ipsis sedet, et ideo difficulter ad sanitatem pervenimus, quia nos aegrotare nescimus.” Seneca, Epistles 1−65, 332. 88. Seneca, On Benefits, 88 (4.6.3). 89. Seneca, On Benefits, 50−51, 59 (2.26−28; 3.1.3−5). Note that while Griffin and Inwood translate invidia as envy, I draw on the Greek roots of this word (phthonos) to translate it as resentment. Seneca writes: “Someone who denies that he received a benefit that he in fact did receive is ungrateful. Someone who presents not to have received it is ungrateful. Someone who fails to repay it is ungrateful. But most ungrateful of all is the person who forgets that he received it.” 90. Seneca, On Benefits, 179 (7.16.1). 91. Seneca, On Benefits, 62, 63 (3.6.2; 3.8.1). 92. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 63. Heidegger offers a very different take on guilt in Being and Time—in fact, after his reconstruction and rearticulation of “guilt,” in the end this emotion bears very little resemblance to typical Western conceptions of guilt. For Heidegger, when we hear the “call of conscience” originating from the They-self, we are shaken from our everyday

186 / Notes to Chapter 3 routines into an existential awareness of ourselves as beings who ask questions about the nature of Being. This awareness, in turn, is “guilty,” in the sense of an existential responsibility we bear for existence and for the choices we make and project forward. Closely associated with Heidegger’s concept of resoluteness (entschlossenheit), guilt here means something like responsibility—see Daniel O. Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 46−47, 184−86. 93. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 81−82. 94. Following Nietzsche, Kenneth Burke positions guilt at the heart of human symbolic experience; his description of “the victimage ritual” outlines how we name scapegoats (or scapegoats are named for us by charismatic speakers) to assuage our guilt—for a discussion of Burke and Nietzsche on victimage, see Jeremy Engels, “The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Resentful Times,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010), 303−25.

Chapter 3 1. Seneca, On Benefits, 45 (2.18.3). 2. Esposito, Communitas, 5. John Durham Peters also points to these Latin roots, and their connection to another related word, “communication,” in John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 7−8. 3. Esposito, Communitas, 6. 4. Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (2002; Malden, MA: Polity, 2011). Esposito notes, “immunity in political-juridical language alludes to a temporary or definitive exception on the part of the subject with regard to concrete obligations or responsibilities that under normal circumstances would bind one to others”—Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (2004; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 45. 5. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 90. 6. Here, see Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History, 57−96. Note that Leithart does not use the language of “immunity.” 7. This, I take it, is one of the central points of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. 8. This is a point made by Philip Pettit in his work on neo-republican visions of “freedom”—that the neo-republican definition of freedom as nondomination strikes us as more “innately true” than the liberal or neoliberal visions of freedom. See Philip Pettit, Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (New York: Norton, 2014).

Notes to Chapter 3 / 187 9. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric.” 10. Cicero, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, 1.3, available online at http:// www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0543 11. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 77. 12. Conley argues that “Augustine’s rhetoric is not simply the means by which the Truth can be conveyed to a congregation most effectively, but a rhetoric whose fundamental spirit is that of caritas (“charity”) and whose ends, beyond teaching, delighting, and moving, are summed up in communitas” (Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 77). 13. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 37, 39. 14. George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition, 2nd edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 145−46. 15. Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric, 8. 16. Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 103 (4.4.6). 17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–228. 18. For an argument that “the negative” is central to Christian rhetoric, see Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion. I believe the issue with Burke’s theory is that he sees order and disorder as diametrically opposed, and that acts of disorder lead to guilt needing redemption. Guilt, however, can easily be incorporated into a symbolic order as a governing emotion that produces order. Moreover, Burke fails to see how easily order can expand to include and incorporate its opposite, disorder. 19. Graeber, Debt, 82. 20. Leviticus 25, 27; for further discussion of the “Jubilee,” see also Jeremiah 34. 21. Matthew 6:11−12. 22. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Founded Upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1889), 580. 23. Matthew 6:9: “et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris”—Novum Testamentum Latine, ed. D. Eberhard Nestle (Stuttgart: Privilegierte Wurttenbergische Bibelanstalt, 1906), 13. 24. The Book of Common Prayer, Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 247. For a helpful survey of the wide-reading influence of this text, see The Oxford Guide to The Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, ed. Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 25. God is portrayed as an agent of forgiveness in the admittedly difficult Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:21−35), in which the servant,

188 / Notes to Chapter 3 who is forgiven his unimaginable debt, then attempts to collect a minuscule debt from a fellow—and is punished for his ingratitude. 26. “Paul is quite strict: to live as a Christian is to live without debts, including especially without debts of gratitude. Christian givers impose no debts; Christian recipients acknowledge not debts, except to love.” Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History, 7. 27. See Matthew 6:3−4: “But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth; That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” See also Luke 6:30−35, where Jesus counsels against the type of calculated, reciprocal gift giving and hospitality common to Roman society. 28. Matthew 6:20: “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” 29. For Jesus’s eschatology, see Matthew 25; for Paul’s, see Romans 2. 30. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History, 69. 31. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History; Lillian Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church (New York: Jericho Books, 2013); Charles M. Shelton, The Gratitude Factor: Enhancing Your Life through Grateful Living (Mahwah, NJ: Hidden Spring, 2010); DeMoss, Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy. 32. Mark T. Mitchell, The Politics of Gratitude: Scale, Place and Community in a Global Age (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2012), 42. 33. Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Gramercy Books, 1993), 221. Armstrong’s chapter “The God of the Mystics” (pp. 209−56) is particularly helpful on Christian mysticism, and also on the mystical strains of Judaism and Islam. 34. I have found the following collection helpful: Light on Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, 2nd edition, ed. Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman (Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001). 35. Quoted in Emmons, Thanks!, 90. Emmons uses this quote as an epigraph to a chapter titled “Thanks Be To God,” though, of course, Eckhart’s thanks is not the same as how most Christians offer thanks to God. 36. Eckhart, Sermon Six, in Light on Light, 161. 37. Aldous Huxley notes that in the perennial philosophy, all is one, not two—and in fact the word “two” is generally pejorative in context—see The Perennial Philosophy (1944; New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 10−11. 38. Armstrong, A History of God, 256. 39. Emmons, Thanks!, 94. 40. Emmons, Thanks!, 98−99. 41. Emmons, Thanks!, 99.

Notes to Chapter 3 / 189 42. In Thanks!, it is clear that Emmons has tremendous respect for the Christian practice of gratitude—he speaks about how Christianity reminds us of the nature of “true gratitude” (99). Many, if not most, contemporary writers on gratitude seem to believe that the Christian practice of gratitude is the highest form—it is this practice that will save us today, Peter Leithart argues in Gratitude: An Intellectual History. “Only the infinite Christian circle is capable of preserving the political, scientific, economic, and social advances of modernity, while restoring a personal and human world. Modernity’s gains can be preserved only within the Christian circle, the bits and pieces of which gave rise to modernity in the first place” (15). Emmons is not so emphatic—in fact, elsewhere he argues that gratitude does not require religion—“none of this have I framed in a religious context or using religious/spiritual language,” he is quoted as saying in Emma Green, “Gratitude Without God,” The Atlantic, November 26, 2014, http:// www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-phenomenology-of-gratitude/ 383174/ 43. Visser, The Gift of Thanks, 179. 44. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 106, Article 1, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/SS/SS106. html#SSQ106OUTP1 45. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 106, Article 1. 46. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 66, Article 7, available online at http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/SS/SS066. html#SSQ66OUTP1 47. Aquinas quoted Seneca here without attribution, though he cited him repeatedly in this question—“Gratiae recompensatio semper tendit ut, pro suo posse, aliquid maius retribuat.” Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 66, Article 6. 48. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 66, Article 6. 49. Andrew Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to ‘Kyndenesse,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 3 (1994), 369. 50. Quoted in Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic,” 370. 51. Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic,” 370. 52. Engels, Enemyship, 157−205. Maurizio Viroli ascribes to the civic republican argument that we all owe a debt of gratitude to country in For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 9. 53. Ellen Vaughn, Radical Gratitude: Discovering Joy Through Everyday Thankfulness (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 46. Mitchell alludes to the

190 / Notes to Chapter 3 “debt of gratitude” we owe to our ancestors in The Politics of Gratitude, 27−28, and discusses how this gratitude is translated to the state on pp. 28−29. 54. About Brutus, Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, 3.2: Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him! This was the most unkindest cut of all; For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms, Quite vanquished him: then burst his mighty heart . . . 55. Leithart, Gratitude, 112−13. 56. R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 439. 57. This is I take it one of the central points of Armstrong’s A History of God. 58. On political theology, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (2007; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 59. Catherine Dunn, The Concept of Ingratitude in Renaissance English Moral Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1946). 60. Cicero, On Obligations, 120 (3.104). 61. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (2008; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 62. Hobbes, Leviathan, 368. 63. Hobbes, Leviathan, 287. 64. Hobbes, Leviathan, 216. I explore how Hobbes leveraged another emotion, fear, to promote peace and order in Engels, Enemyship, 207−22. 65. Hobbes, Leviathan, 186. 66. Hobbes, Leviathan, 162−63. 67. Aquinas, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 106, Articles 3 and 5. 68. Hobbes, Leviathan, 209. 69. Seneca, On Obligations, 62 (3.6.1−2). 70. This remarkable parable is found in Matthew 21−35. 71. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 91. 72. Shelton, The Gratitude Factor, 151. I think it’s worth noting that this book is not on the fringes of the gratitude literature, but right in its philosophical center. Indeed, Robert Emmons writes the blurb that appears on this book, noting, “Charles Shelton’s book provides a wise and compassionate analysis of

Notes to Chapter 4 / 191 what has been often referred to as the ‘greatest of the virtues.’ Read it and savor it over and over again. You will be deeply fulfilled and overwhelmingly grateful.” 73. Shelton, The Gratitude Factor, 151−52. Interestingly, Shelton redefines the meaning of “immunity.” In the glossary printed at the end of his book, he defines “Immunity of gratitude” as “the protection the gratitude surplus (see above) provides as we live everyday life.” 74. Nietzsche denounces nihilism in many of his works; for his discussion of how Christian nihilism equates to “hostility against life,” see The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (1954; New York: Penguin, 1976), 574. 75. I adopt the term “grate-fullness” from the Christian mystic Brother Steindl-Ross, Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness (New York: Paulist Press, 1984). 76. Robert C. Roberts, “The Blessings of Gratitude: A Conceptual Analysis,” in Emmons and McCullough, The Psychology of Gratitude, 76.

Chapter 4 1. On the political importance of forgetting, see Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 2. On the American jeremiad, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 3. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 227. For a helpful study of John Dewey’s vision of communication and deliberation, see Nathan Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010). 4. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 34, 206. 5. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 227. 6. Here, see Zarefsky, “Two Faces of Democratic Rhetoric.” 7. On the study, see Brendan James, “Princeton Study: U.S. No Longer an Actual Democracy,” Talking Points Memo, April 18, 2014, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy; “Study: US is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy,” BBC News, April 17, 2014, http://www.bbc. com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746; and John Cassidy, “Is America an Oligarchy?” The New Yorker, April 18, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/ john-cassidy/is-america-an-oligarchy 8. Emmons, Thanks!, 29. I take this quote about Professor Emmons from the website of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California− Berkeley: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/author/Robert_Emmons

192 / Notes to Chapter 4 9. Emmons, Thanks!, 4. Gratitude is central to the new science of “positive psychology”—see Robert A. Emmons and Charles M. Shelton, “Gratitude and the Science of Positive Psychology,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, ed. C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 459−71. 10. Emmons, Thanks!, 29. 11. Emmons and McCullough, “Forward,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, vii. 12. “Our groundbreaking research has shown that grateful people experience higher levels of positive emotions such as joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism, and that the practice of gratitude as a discipline protects a person from the destructive impulses of envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness.” Emmons, Thanks!, 11. 13. This research is discussed at length in Kaplan, The Gratitude Diaries, 173−230. 14. At best we get a few pages on this theme: see Emmons, Thanks!, 135−36 (on “inappropriate gift giving,” a discussion that devolves into a consideration in its second and final paragraph about “the hazardous ritual of classroom holiday gift giving”), and Shelton, The Gratitude Factor, 128−36. 15. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude, accessed December 16, 2016. 16. Shelton, The Gratitude Factor, 80. On this same theme, Gratitude: A Journal (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2009), quotes Ruth Benedict: “A man’s indebtedness . . . is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.” 17. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History, 4. 18. Shelly Kagan, Death (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 347. 19. Robert C. Roberts, “The Blessings of Gratitude: A Conceptual Analysis,” in Emmons and Mczcullough, eds., The Psychology of Gratitude, 76. 20. Kerry Howells, Gratitude in Education: A Radical View (Boston: Sense Publishers, 2012), 31. 21. Terrance McConnell, Gratitude (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 4, 6. This is a recurring theme. Daniel Lyons argues, “What kind of debt can the debtor owe and yet the creditor be expected to disclaim? The debt of gratitude. If A does B a favour, B is wrong not to thank A, not to show gratitude by returning a favour”—Daniel Lyons, “The Odd Debt of Gratitude,” Analysis 29, no. 3 (1969), 92. See also A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 172−88. 22. DeMoss, Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy, 217. No surprise that the recommended biblical verses are Phil. 1:3−11, where St. Paul speaks of God’s “bonds,” i.e., his chains. 23. Roberts, “The Blessings of Gratitude,” 76. 24. “Often, being ungrateful can be a symptom of mistrust, suspicious of another’s motives, or lack of socialization. It can also be a way to protect a

Notes to Chapter 4 / 193 fragile self-esteem or a diminished and delusional sense of being unworthy in order to elicit generosity from others—without considering that gratitude is a debt to be repaid. What states of ingratitude get triggered for you, and under what circumstances?” Angeles Arrien, Living in Gratitude: A Journey That Will Change Your Life (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2011), 82. 25. Jeffrey Brand, Philosophy of Law: Introducing Jurisprudence (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 95−96. 26. Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 94. 27. Brown, Undoing the Demos. 28. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 75−76. 29. Wendy Brown has developed this argument in Walled States, and Undoing the Demos. 30. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 45. 31. Outside of mutual enemyship, that is. 32. Rhonda Byrne, The Secret Gratitude Book (New York: Atria Books, 2007). The promise of future gifts comes from the book’s description on Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/158270208X/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_6?ie=UTF 8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER. The Secret is cited approvingly in one of the most popular of the many gratitude self-help books on the market: see Nina Lesowitz and Mary Beth Sammons, Living Life as a Thank You: The Transformative Power of Daily Gratitude (San Francisco, CA: Viva Editions, 2009), xxii. 33. Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project (New York: Harper, 2009), 205. 34. DeMoss, Choosing Gratitude, 216. Emmons speaks of developing “accountability partners” who help us to remember to repay our debts in Thanks!, 200−01. 35. DeMoss, Choosing Gratitude, 217. 36. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904−1905; Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1998). 37. Emmons, Thanks!, 126−27. 38. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (1776; New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 13. 39. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (1759; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 68−79. On Smith’s theory of gratitude, see Eun Kyung Min, “Adam Smith and the Debt of Gratitude,” Studies of English Languages & Cultures 4 (1996), 47−75. 40. Emmons, Thanks!, 165. 41. Emmons, Thanks!, 136. Comparison, especially negative comparison, is described as one of the “occasions” for gratitude in Shelton, The Gratitude Factor, 94−95. 42. Emmons, Thanks!, 142, 143. 43. Emmons, Thanks!, 143.

194 / Notes to Chapter 4 44. Emmons, Thanks!, 144. 45. Emmons, Thanks!, 146. 46. In 2004, The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest peer-reviewed medical journals, published a study lead by Les Roberts, an epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins University. Utilizing cluster sampling methodology, Roberts and his team of Iraqi researchers estimated that around 100,000 Iraqis had died during the time period from March 2003 to September 2004. The estimate of 100,000 Iraqis dead since the beginning of the war was an astonishingly high number, close to ten times higher than any other estimate at the time. “This American Life, What’s in a Number?,” October 25, 2005, http://www.thisamericanlife. org/radio-archives/episode/300/whats-in-a-number. On the rhetoric of counting during wartime, see Frank J. Stec, “Bringing Attention to the Human Costs of War: Grievability, Deliberation, and Anti-War Numbers,” Southern Journal of Communication 81, no. 5 (2016), 271−88. 47. Emmons, Thanks!, 146. 48. Emmons, Thanks!, 146. 49. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; New York: Vintage, 1994). To get a sense of how deep negative images of Muslims are in America, see Fuad Sha’ban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: The Root of Orientalism in America (Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1991); and Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776−1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 50. Fred Kaplan, “Why is Bush so Obsessed with Ungrateful Foreigners?” Slate Magazine, March 13, 2007, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ war_stories/2007/03/a_debt_of_gratitude.html 51. Kaplan, “Why is Bush so Obsessed.” 52. Kaplan, “Why is Bush so Obsessed.” For more colorful commentary on Bush’s words, see Clara Jeffery, “Bush Says Iraqis Not Grateful Enough,” Mother Jones, January 15, 2007, http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2007/01/ bush-says-iraqis-not-grateful-enough 53. Here, see Jeremy Engels and William Saas, “On Acquiescence and Ends-Less War: An Inquiry Into the New War Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013), 225−32. 54. Emmons, Thanks!, 4−6, 135. 55. See Engels and Saas, “On Acquiescence and Ends-Less War.” 56. Emmons, Thanks!, 173; President George W. Bush, “September 11 Anniversary Address,” New York, September 11, 2002, http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/09.11.02.html 57. This is the 2013 projection by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government for the war costs, including, especially, the costs of health care for returning veterans—see Peter Foster, “Costs to US of Iraq and Afghan wars could hit $6 trillion,” The Telegraph, March 29, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Notes to Chapter 5 / 195 news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9961877/Cost-to-US-of-Iraq-and-Afghan-warscould-hit-6-trillion.html 58. See Engels, Enemyship. 59. President George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” September 20, 2001, http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/09.20.01.html 60. Plato, Crito, 50d−51d. About the city, Socrates observes: “You must either persuade it or obey its orders, and endure in silence whatever it instructs you to endure, whether blows or bonds, and if it leads you into war to be wounded or killed, you must obey . . . one must obey the commands of one’s city and country, or persuade it as to the nature of justice.” Plato, Crito, in Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), 53. 61. On the link between gratitude and political obligation, see A. D. M. Walker, “Political Obligation and the Argument from Gratitude,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 17, no. 3 (1988), 191−211. 62. Horace, Odes, 3.2.13, in Odes and Epodes, trans. Niall Rudd, Lobe Classical Library Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 144. 63. Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002). 64. Martin M. Winkler, Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 202. 65. Seneca, On Benefits, 50−51 (note that Griffin and Inwood translate “invidia” at 2.28.1 as “envy,” yet it can and this case I believe it should be translated as “resentment”). This point is echoed in Emmons, Thanks!, 10−11, 25. Emmons calls this the principle of “emotional incompatibility”—that opposed emotions, such as resentment and gratitude, cannot exist simultaneously, and in fact are opposed (74). 66. I tell this story in Engels, The Politics of Resentment. 67. See Engels, The Politics of Resentment. 68. Georg Simmel, “Faithfulness and Gratitude,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 388. 69. Simmel, “Faithfulness and Gratitude,” 389. 70. See Engels, The Politics of Resentment.

Chapter 5 1. See Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, esp. Lecture 1. 2. See Christopher Moore, Socrates and Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 3. Scott R. Stroud, John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 136−67.

196 / Notes to Chapter 5 4. On rhetorical education during the nineteenth century, see William M. Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). For descriptions of the symbiotic relationship between rhetorical studies and pragmatism, in addition to Stroud’s John Dewey and the Artful Life and the essays in Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, see Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric; Paul Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013); and Robert Danisch, Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). 5. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd edition (1937; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Introduction (n.p.). 6. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871), in Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 985. Whitman was, like Emerson, influenced by Indian philosophy, including the Bhagavad Gita—see T. R. Rajasekharaiah, The Roots of Whitman’s Grass (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970).” 7. Here, see Carrette and King, Selling Spirituality. 8. For a discussion of the physical effects of a consistent yoga practice, see William J. Broad, The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). 9. Davies, The Happiness Industry, 32. 10. Alexis, “Who is John Galt?” Lululemon.com, November 2, 2011, http://lululemon.com/community/blog/who-is-john-galt/ [accessed April 6, 2015]. Around this time, founder Dennis “Chip” Wilson had “Who is John Galt?” printed on the sides of Lululemon shopping bags. A blog post by “Alexis” on the Lululemon page explains that Wilson “first read this book [Atlas Shrugged] when he was eighteen years old working away from home. Only later, looking back, did he realize the impact the book’s ideology had on his quest to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness (it is not coincidental that this is Lululemon’s company vision).” This blog attributes the following quote to Wilson: “Our bags are visual reminders for ourselves to live a life we love and conquer the epidemic of mediocrity. We all have a John Galt inside of us, cheering us on.  How are we going to live lives we love?” 11. Here, see Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment, And Your Life (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2012), Thich Nhat Hanh, The Mindfulness Survival Kit: Five Essential Practices (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2014), and Matthieu Ricard, The Art of Meditation (2008; London: Atlantic Books, 2010). 12. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 10 (1.2). 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays: Second Series (1844), in Emerson: Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America),

Notes to Chapter 5 / 197 471. From this point forward, all citations of Emerson’s published works refer to this collection. 14. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 23. 15. Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 24. 16. The comparison of the Buddhist shamatha/vipashyana and the yogic nirodha/samapatti is one of the central contributions of Stuart Ray Sarbacker, Samadhi: The Numinous and Cessative in Indo-Tibetan Yoga (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 17. Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 25. 18. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, 1983), 125. 19. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 20. “With mindfulness we have the capacity to recognize the habit energy every time it manifests. ‘Hello, my habit energy, I know you are there!’ If we just smile to it, it will lose much of its strength”—Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 25. 21. Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 38. 22. Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 52. 23. Seneca, De Ira, 3.13.1, Latin text edited by John W. Basore, http:// www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0014%3Ab ook%3D3%3Achapter%3D13%3Asection%3D1 24. Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 64. 25. Thanks to my dear friend Ariel Xu for helping me with these translations. 26. Kabat-Zinn, Coming To Our Senses, 462. 27. Kabat-Zinn, Coming To Our Senses, 463. 28. Carolyn Gregoire, “How Yoga Became a $27 Billion Industry—And Reinvented American Spirituality,” Huffington Post, January 23, 2015, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/how-the-yoga-industry-los_n_4441767. html; Jain, Selling Yoga, is the best source available on the contemporary commodification of yoga. For the number of Americans practicing yoga, see “2016 Yoga in America Study Conducted by Yoga Journal & Yoga Alliance,” January 13, 2016, https://www.yogaalliance.org/2016YogaInAmericaStudy 29. Here, see especially the brilliant work by Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 30. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 10 (1.2). 31. My understanding of nirodha as an application of the mind rather than a killing of the mind follows Whicher, The Integrity of the Yoga Darśana, 154−72 (Vivekananda quoted on p. 161). 32. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Winthrop Sargeant, ed. Christopher Key Chapple, 25th Anniversary Edition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 306 (6.35).

198 / Notes to Chapter 5 33. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 241−42 (2.29). 34. B. K. S. Iyengar, The Tree of Yoga, ed. Daniel Rivers-Moore (1988; Boston: Shambhala Press, 2002), 7−8. 35. Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga-Sutra of Patañjali: A New Translation and Commentary (1979; Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1989), 79. 36. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 242−43. 37. B. K. S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali (1993; Uttar Pradesh, India: HarperCollins, 2011), 134. 38. T. K. V. Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995), 98. 39. “The attitude we have toward things and people outside ourselves is called yama in yoga, and how we relate to ourselves inwardly is called niyama”— Desikachar, Heart of Yoga, 97. 40. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922; New York: Liveright, 2013), 84. 41. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), in Essays & Lectures, 10. 42. The chariot metaphor is significant in the philosophical literature of east and west. In his Phaedrus (246a−254e), Plato imagined the human soul in terms of a charioteer (who represents reason) driving a chariot pulled by two horses, one good (which represents the rational part of the soul) and one bad (which represents our irrational impulses). The Katha Upanishad (1.3.3−9) also uses the chariot metaphor to describe the relationship between the body, the mind, and the soul (purusha). 43. For a discussion of the gunas as “feelings,” see Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1922), 1: 241−45. Books 14, 17, and 18 of the Bhagavad Gita work through the many manifestations of the gunas in our daily lives. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 17−18 also points to this tradition of interpreting the gunas as “feelings.” 44. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 446−47 (4.24). 45. Nhat Hanh, The Mindfulness Survival Kit, 153. 46. “yatha dipo nivatastho nengate”—The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 290 (6.19). 47. Here, the Bhagavad Gita speaks of yoga as “yatacittasya,” a state of controlled, steady thought (6.19). When the mind is at rest, “uparamate,” it becomes possible to see clearly (6.20). The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 290, 291. 48. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 124 (2.39). 49. Whicher, The Integrity of the Yoga Darśana, 22. 50. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 132−3 (2.47−48). 51. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 139 (2.54). 52. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 610 (16.1). 53. In reading the Bhagavad Gita as a conflict between daiva and asura, I am following Swami Dayananda Saraswati’s nine-volume Bhagavad Gita: Home Study

Notes to Chapter 5 / 199 Course (Chennai, India: Arsha Vidya Research and Publication Trust, 2011). My friends helped me trek these nine big volumes back from India, and this “course” has profoundly influenced my interpretation of the Gita. Thanks to the teachers at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram for recommending Saraswati’s work. 54. Norman Fischer, Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms (New York: Penguin Compass, 2002), 3. 55. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 300 (6.29). 56. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 624 (16.15). 57. “Spiritual wealth is considered to be for freedom, the wealth of an asura, for bondage.” Saraswati, Bhagavad Gita Home Study Course, 8: 180 (16.5). 58. Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga, in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 8 vols. (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1989), 1: 105. 59. Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga, 59. 60. The idea of a “free” gift is memorably deconstructed in Derrida, Given Time, I. 61. The practice of giving freely is central to Buddhism: see Thich Nhat Hanh, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion (1992; Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2010). A truly free gift is also an idea that Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra—the “gift-giving virtue” is to become so full of joy and love that it positively overflows, that it cannot be contained, that it must be shared with others in the theatrum mundi. This over-fullness can be spiritual and psychological; it must also be material, meaning that we have enough, so that what we give does not physically hurt us. 62. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Gifts,” Essays: Second Series (1844), in Essays & Lectures, 536. “The expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person . . . It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap,” Emerson concluded (537). 63. Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, in Complete Works, 1: 190. 64. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 82. 65. This is a yoga in the tradition of what Leigh Eric Schmidt calls “religious liberalism” and the “Spiritual Left,” “in which the primacy of individual experience is joined to a whole web of spiritual practices and social commitments”—Leigh Eric Smith, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality From Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005), 286. 66. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 300 (6.29)—yogayuktatma sarvatra samadarsanah, “The yoga-disciplined self at all times seeing the same.” 67. On the Bhagavad Gita, see Davis, The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography; on the Yoga Sutras, see White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography. 68. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Essays: First Series (1841), in Essays & Lectures, 398.

200 / Notes to Chapter 5 69. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 253. 70. Feuerstein, Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga, 185. 71. Emerson, The Conduct of Life (1860), in Essays & Lectures, 1117. 72. Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 952. 73. Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1117. 74. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 271−72 (2.42). 75. Emmons, Thanks!, 165, 191−92. 76. Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away.” 77. In his reading of the Bhagavad Gita, Hegel denied that yoga was an active practice at all because he claimed that Indian philosophy precluded the development of free individuality. Instead, India was a land of fatalism and blind obedience; yoga was a quietistic nihilism, “an intuition of nothing” [das Anschauen des Nichts], a flight from the world into nothingness. On Hegel’s reading of the Gita, see Dorothy M. Figueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 72−80. Hegel was the source of what Figueira calls “the moral dilemma of fatalism” common to nineteenth-century orientalist readings of India (74). 78. Quoted in Emmons, Thanks!, 90. Emmons uses this quote as an epigraph for a chapter titled “Thanks Be To God,” though, of course, Eckhart’s thanks is not the same as how most Christians offer thanks to God. 79. Here, see Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, with an introduction by Thich Nhat Hanh (1969; New York: Random House, 1996). On the four debts of gratitude recognized by the Buddhists, see Emmons, Thanks!, 101−02, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991), 446−51. 80. “A good man is contented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour, than the world of his hour”—Emerson, “Spiritual Laws,” Essays: First Series (1841), in Essays & Lectures, 321. For a helpful reading of Emerson’s work that defends him against charges of political quietism and acquiescence, see David M. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Emerson’s position on debt and gratitude is complex; in his essay “Compensation,” he seems to defend, or at the very least acknowledge, the debt of gratitude (295), whereas in “Fate” and “Power” he offers a forceful critique of this debt. 81. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (1854; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 320. 82. Thoreau, Walden, 7. 83. Henry David Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, December 6, 1856, in Henry David Thoreau, Letters To A Spiritual Seeker, ed. Bradley P. Dean (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), 142.

Notes to Chapter 5 / 201 84. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 58. 85. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 98. 86. Thoreau, Walden, 90. 87. On the state of exception, see Agamben, State of Exception, and Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 88. Kabat-Zinn, Coming To Our Senses, 64−68. 89. Here, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990; New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). This is generally the sense of meditation that is espoused by contemporary writers inspired by the American pragmatists, especially John Dewey’s theory of art as experience—see Crispin Sartwell, The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), and Stroud, John Dewey and the Artful Life. 90. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” Essays: First Series (1841), in Essays & Lectures, 254. 91. Emerson, “Gifts,” 536. 92. Nhat Hanh, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion, 47. 93. I take this phrase from Emerson, “Politics,” Essays: Second Series (1844), in Essays & Lectures, 569. 94. The need to recover a sense of shared fate is stressed in Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship. 95. John 1:3: “πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν ὃ γέγονεν”: “All things were made by/through him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” 96. J. P. Rayapati, Early American Interest in Vedanta: Pre-Emersonian Interest in Vedic Literature and Vedantic Philosophy (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1973), 77−78. 97. The yogic vision of the All receives its most dramatic treatment in Book 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, in which Arjuna has an experience of nirvikalpa samadhi, in which all material forms collapse into the divine or “the All”—Easwaran describes Patanjali’s nirvikalpa samadhi in The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Eknath Easwaran (1985; Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2007), 192. 98. Emerson, “New England Reformers,” Essays: Second Series (1844), in Emerson: Essays & Lectures, 607. 99. Emerson, “New England Reformers,” 608. 100. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), 154−55 (8.9.1−6). Danielle S. Allen develops Aristotle’s utility friendship into a basic democratic practice in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 119−39.

202 / Notes to Conclusion 101. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 102. Pierre Bourdieu speaks to the power relations involved in social capital in “Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241−58. 103. Utility friendship is said to be an alternative to war, for at least the relationships of reciprocity typical of such friendship are based on consent. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 126−27. 104. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 148. 105. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 242 (4.42).

Conclusion 1. Lillian Daniel, “Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me,” Huffington Post, September 13, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lillian-daniel/ spiritual-but-not-religio_b_959216.html 2. Mark Oppenheimer, “Examining the Growth of the ‘Spiritual but Not Religious,’ ” New York Times, July 18, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/ us/examining-the-growth-of-the-spiritual-but-not-religious.html 3. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 4. Schmidt, Restless Souls, 9. 5. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 127. 6. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 127. 7. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 128. 8. This tradition is explored in Schmidt, Restless Souls, and Bender, The New Metaphysicals. 9. Emerson, Nature, 7. 10. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 128. 11. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 8. 12. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 8. 13. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 14. 14. Oppenheimer, “Examining the Growth of the ‘Spiritual But Not Religious.’ ” 15. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 78. 16. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Sargeant, 617 (16.8). 17. Plato, Phaedrus, 247c. 18. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 93.

Notes to Conclusion / 203 19. As Emerson writes in “Compensation,” “the soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is.” Emerson, “Compensation,” in Essays: First Series (1841), in Essays & Lectures, 299. 20. Here, Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic.” 21. Each of Hobbes’s laws of nature are in the service of peace (the first law). For Hobbes, the third law of nature is justice, and the fourth is gratitude—Hobbes, Leviathan, 202. Though Seneca was emphatic that ingratitude should not be punishable by law, Hobbes disagreed—see Seneca, On Obligations, 62 (3.6.1−2). 22. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 68−79. 23. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 33−34. 24. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 30. 25. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 32. 26. Here (Luke 10:42) Jesus speaks of “one thing that is needful,” referring to Psalm 27:4, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.” 27. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 36. 28. Daniel, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough, 37. 29. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 72. 30. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 184−85. 31. These movements follow Laclau, and his theory of populism erases the individual in the collective experience of empty signifiers—see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). For a discussion of Laclau’s influence on the contemporary European populist movements, see Dan Hancox, “Why Ernesto Laclau is the Intellectual Figurehead for Syriza and Podemos,” The Guardian, February 9, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/ feb/09/ernesto-laclau-intellectual-figurehead-syriza-podemos 32. Emerson, “New England Reformers,” 593. 33. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 50. 34. On democracy as a collective attempt to manage and govern the world in which we live, see Dewey, The Public and Its Problems. I explore democracy as a force invested in guaranteeing the ability of everyone, and not just the rich, to prosper in Engels, The Politics of Resentment. 35. William James, “What Makes A Life Significant,” in William James, Writings 1878−1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1992), 878. 36. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings: Key Selections from Being and Time to The Task of Thinking, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 234. For a helpful reading of this famous

204 / Notes to Conclusion essay, see Roberto Esposito, “Politics and Human Nature,” trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 3 (2011), 77−84. 37. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 234. 38. See Roberto Calasso, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, trans. Tim Parks (1998; New York: Vintage, 1999). 39. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 40. I’d like to thank my friend Ted Toadvine for pointing me to the work of Arne Naess and the deep ecology movement—see Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. and ed. David Rothenberg (1976; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. George Sessions (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1995). 41. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 119. 42. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 119. 43. I agree wholeheartedly with Gerard Hauser and Chantal BenoitBarne, who argue that “the point of democracy is not to maximize satisfaction of individual preferences but to maximize the common good. Over and against self-interest it has an abiding concern with justice”—see Gerard Hauser and Chantal Benoit-Barne, “Reflections on Rhetoric, Deliberative Democracy, Civil Society, and Trust,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 2 (2002), 263.

Index

accountability partners, 193n34 acquiescence, 5, 56 Christianity and, 92–93 debt of gratitude and, 9, 92–93, 114 giving gifts and, 62 vs. gratefulness, 144, 154 mindfulness and, 121 rhetoric and, 8, 55, 109, 111 santosha and, 133 yoga and, 117–18, 121 vs. yogic gratitude, 128 action, Krishna on, 125–26 Advaita Vedanta, 18, 126, 142 affect biological determinism, biological reductionism, and, 31, 32, 35–37 as conditioned, 36 culture and, 35, 36 definition and nature of, 31, 34 vs. emotion, 30–31, 35, 173n63 democratic politics and, 38 faculty psychology and, 34 Gilles Deleuze and, 31 as hardwired, 31

negative affects, 36 reclaiming, 45 neurobiology of, 31, 35 Nietzsche on, 158 as precognitive and presymbolic, 31 rhetoric and, 31–32, 35, 56 social constructivism and, 35–36 affect literature, criticisms of the, 35 affective experience, 21, 68 affective (mechanical/animal) faculties, 33–34 affective impulses, 34 affective rhetoric, 32, 33 agency American vision of, 42 as collective/interconnected, 41–42, 141, 160 defined, 14–15 enabled by a broader ecosystem of support, 142 gratefulness and, 141, 154, 160 human, 41–42 individual, 14, 42, 141, 154, 165n40

205

206 / Index

agency (continued) individual freedom and, 177n116 nature of, 14, 15, 41, 42, 165n40 recognition of the common good and, 130 rhetorical, 14–15 All, the, 18, 117, 165n38 and action, 142, 158 Bhagavad Gita and, 141, 142, 158, 201n97 democracy and, 117 Emerson on, 131 gratefulness and, 18, 117 separation from, 142, 152 terminology and related terms, 18, 131, 141, 142 yoga philosophy and the yogic vision of, 141, 142, 148, 157, 201n97 Allawi, Iyad, 108 Amos, 76 anger. See resentment animal faculties, 33 Anker, Elisabeth R., 165n40, 177n116 Anthropocene, 157 anti-democratic emotion, gratitude as an, 49 anti-democratic sentiment, 49, 60. See also democracy: Cicero and aparigraha, 129, 131 apathy, 65–66 Aquinas, Thomas, 139 Christianity, God, and, 81–83 Cicero and, 52–53

on debt of gratitude, 81–83, 89, 112 on gifts and giving, 89 on gratia, 81, 83 on gratitudo, 81–83, 99, 133, 149 on poverty and the poor, 82 Seneca and, 82, 89, 189n47 Summa Theologica, 81–83 argument. See rhetoric “argument from gratitude,” 100 Aristotle, 39 autonomy and, 48 Cicero and, 11, 48, 51–52, 55, 59, 182n40 on emotion(s), 7, 19, 20, 30–31, 36, 51, 55, 180n15, 182n40 on friendship, 142 on gifts, 52 on gratitude (charis), 11, 48, 52, 54, 59, 72, 99, 129, 133 on great-souled man, 52, 72, 129 on indebtedness, 48, 52, 54, 59, 72, 180n15 Janice Kaplan on, 48 on means/modes of persuasion, 6, 20 Nicomachean Ethics, 21, 48, 129, 142, 180n15 on political deliberation, 29 on reason and rationality, 21 on resentment, 55, 182n40 on rhetoric, 6, 28, 29, 32, 86–87, 95, 97, 182n40. See also Rhetoric Arrien, Angeles, 192n24

Index / 207

asanas (physical postures), 122, 123 asura (heedlessness) Bhagavad Gita and, 126–28, 198n53 daiva and, 126–28, 198n53 gratitude and, 127, 128 meanings and translations of the term, 126–27 nature of, 126, 127 atha, 120, 131 Athenian democracy, 26, 32, 182n32 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 118–19, 196n10 Atman, 130 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 52, 74–75, 187n12 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 36 being-with-one-another, 163n17 “Ben Franklin principle,” 104 Benedict, Ruth, 192n16 benefit. See also under Seneca defined, 184n63 Benoit-Barne, Chantal, 204n43 Bhagavad Gita and the All, 141, 142, 158, 201n97 asura and, 126–28 charity and, 126–28 gratitude and, 126, 127 Hegel and, 200n77 Krishna and, 125–28, 130, 144, 166n45. See also Krishna on life, 158 on the mind, 123, 126

on moral conflict, 126–27, 198n53 philosophical goal of, 130–31 on universal divinity, 130–32, 141, 147–48. See also All virtue ethics of, 126–27, 130 on wisdom, 126 yoga and, 125, 130, 136, 141, 144, 148, 157, 166n45, 198n47, 200n77 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and, 123, 130–31, 136, 166n45 Bible, 141–42. See also Christianity; Jesus freedom and the, 76 on poverty and the poor, 75–76 biology. See affect; neuroplasticity black moods, 30 blame, 96 “blame the other side,” 9 blood, contract of, 84 body and mind. See mind and body Broaddus, Dorothy C., 168n16 Brown, Wendy, 153–54 Burke, Kenneth, 23, 40, 116, 186n94, 187n18 Bush, George W., 107–10 Caesar, Julius, 92–93, 190n54 assassination, 53, 55 “California cult of the self,” 27, 171n45 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 14 care of the self. See self-care/care of the self Cartesian moment, 27, 170n42

208 / Index

Channing, Edward Tyrell, 22, 168n16 charis (gratitude), 52, 72, 98, 99, 133, 149 charity. See also under poor Aquinas on, 82 asura and, 126–28 Augustine and, 74, 187n12 Bhagavad Gita and, 126–28 Cicero on, 59–62 Charland, Maurice, 162n14 children, gratitude journals for, 103 Christian gratitude, 73–87, 90–93 existential debt and, 26, 80, 81, 84, 90–92, 147 Christian rhetoric of gratitude employed by Hobbes, 87–88 Christian yoga, 80 Christianity, 73–82 acquiescence and, 92–93 as an ethic of poverty, 75, 82 Aquinas and, 81–83 care of the self and, 26 Cicero and, 74, 78 cultural achievements of, 73 democracy and, 76, 77, 79, 86, 92, 93 equality and, 77, 92 Foucault on, 26 freedom and, 74, 75 gratitude literature and, 79–80, 90–92, 149 gratitudo and, 81–84, 93, 149 neoliberalism and, 79–80, 92 Nietzsche on, 90, 91, 191n74 nihilism and, 91, 92, 191n74 rhetoric and, 74–75

Robert Emmons and, 80–81, 189n42 Seneca and, 52, 62, 74, 78 St. Paul and, 82, 188n26 truth and, 26, 75, 87 Cicero, 7, 11, 71, 114 Aristotle and, 11, 48, 51–52, 55, 59, 182n40 on calmness and satisfaction, 55–56, 182n40 characterizations of, 51, 59, 60 on charity, 59–62 Christianity and, 74, 78 contemporary gratitude literature and, 99, 179n5 on debt of gratitude, 44, 48–49, 54, 56–59, 62–66, 72, 78, 100, 102, 106, 112, 113, 119, 149, 182n44, 183n47 democracy and, 49, 55, 59 on duties of speakers, 74 economics, finance, and, 59 on emotion(s), 7, 51–52, 54, 55, 57, 65, 69 on financial debt, 57, 59 on generosity, 57 gifts and, 53, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 72, 87, 102, 149 God and, 62, 78, 87 on gratia, 11, 74, 99, 133, 149 on gratitude, 11, 48, 49, 52–58, 64 on gratitude as mother of all virtues, 47, 48, 54, 58, 85, 88 Hobbes and, 88 humane conservatism, 55

Index / 209

on justice, 56, 57, 59 on needy persons, 184n59 neoliberalism and, 58, 61 overview, 51, 53, 59 pathos of distance and, 183n54 politics and, 49, 54, 55, 60, 61 Pro Plancio (speech), 47, 58, 179n1, 183n47 resentment and, 55, 56, 59, 61–62, 64 rhetoric and, 11, 32, 54–57, 64, 74, 149 and the rich and poor, 48, 49, 54–56, 59–62, 65, 71 Romans and, 48, 53–61, 65, 66, 69, 74 Seneca compared with, 52, 57, 64–66, 69, 72, 78, 82, 85, 88, 99, 112, 113, 135, 139, 149, 182n44 Seneca contrasted with, 49, 62–64, 66, 72, 89 writings of, 51, 53, 54 On Duties, 62 On Obligations, 52–53, 56–58, 85, 87, 183n49 On the Republic, 60 citizens. See also democratic citizens made into consumers, 4, 42 neoliberalism and, 153 citizenship democracy and, 29, 43, 96–98, 101, 155 friendship and, 142–43 neoliberalism and, 42, 43. See also neoliberalism: and dehumanization

utility friendship and, 142 “cocktail party problem,” 6 cognitive appraisals, 172n61 cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), 24, 37, 175n92 common good democracy and the, 9, 14, 17, 113 democratic, 9, 43, 120, 130 neoliberalism and the, 8, 9, 43, 44, 79, 101, 112 commonweal, 111, 141, 158 communication and humanity, 23 community. See also under selfishness concept of, 165n38 democracy and, 17, 43, 96, 119, 128, 143, 155, 165n38 neoliberalism and, 43 Seneca on, 63, 113 comparison condition (social comparison), 105–6 complacency, gratitude as code word for, 146 condemnation. See damnatus Conley, Thomas M., 187n12 conscience, 68 Nietzsche on, 67–68 conservatism, humane, 55. See also Cicero Constitution, U.S., 21–22 contentment. See santosha “contract of blood,” 84 “Critical Rhetoric” (McKerrow), 74 curiosity, 170n31 Cvetkovich, Ann, 178n133

210 / Index

daiva, 126, 127 asura and, 126–28, 198n53 Bhagavad Gita and, 127, 128, 198n53 gratitude and, 127, 128 damnatus, 50, 53 Daniel, Lillian, 145–47, 149, 151–53 Dante, 85 Davies, William, 118, 119 debt, 68, 72–73, 92–93. See also indebtedness Americans feeling comfortable living lives in, 4 financial, 4, 57–59, 77, 93 forgiveness of, 77, 188n25 separation and, 113 “debt economy,” 18, 162n13 neoliberalism as, 4 debt of gratitude, 3, 9, 37, 49, 149–50. See also guilt: debt and; indebtedness; specific topics acquiescence and, 9, 92–93, 114 Cicero as first philosopher of the, 59 Cicero on, 44, 48–49, 54, 56–59, 62–66, 72, 78, 100, 102, 106, 112, 113, 119, 149, 182n44, 183n47 democracy and, 17, 18, 45, 69, 72, 76, 79, 92, 102, 106, 113, 147 Jesus on, 76, 79, 84 owed to God for life, 68, 81–84, 114, 147, 149 and politics, 17 debt servicing, 93

debtor, cheerful acceptance of one’s status as a, 89 dehumanization. See under neoliberalism Deleuze, Gilles, 31 deliberation, 14 democracy and, 14, 22, 96–97 deliberative rhetoric, 95–97 democracy, 9, 116. See also under common good; Enemyship: Democracy and CounterRevolution in the Early Republic and the All, 117 in ancient Greece, 26, 32, 171n52, 182n32 bedrock of, 96 Bhagavad Gita and, 130 British monarchy and, 88 and care of the self, 26, 40, 155 Christianity and, 76, 77, 79, 86, 92, 93 Cicero and, 49, 55, 59–61 citizenship and, 29, 96–98, 101, 155 community and, 17, 43, 96, 119, 128, 143, 155, 165n38 conservative opposition to, 55. See also Cicero debt of gratitude and, 17, 18, 45, 69, 72, 76, 79, 92, 102, 106, 113, 147 decline of, 142, 153 defending, 16–17 deliberation and, 14, 22, 96–97 Dewey on, 16–17, 96–97, 166n48, 203n34

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emotions and, 11, 17, 22, 23, 29, 38, 72, 98, 112, 114, 129, 153 equality and, 17, 77, 155 essence of, 155 etymology of the word, 155 as force invested in guaranteeing everyone’s ability to prosper, 203n34 Foucault and, 28 freedom and, 17, 76 future of, 18 and the good, 154, 155. See also under common good gratefulness and, 14, 15, 18, 117, 140, 143–44, 150, 154, 155, 158–60 gratitude and, 9, 18, 49, 55–57, 97–99, 105, 113, 114 Hobbes and, 88, 102 and the individual, 14, 28, 154 nature of, 17, 29, 143, 144, 155, 165nn37–38, 203n34 neoliberalism and, 8, 17, 18, 41, 43, 45, 79, 119, 150, 153, 154, 164n34 philosophers and, 165n38 practicing, 14 propositional gratitude and, 164n34 purpose, 203n34, 204n43 reclaiming and rehabilitating, 40, 69 resentment and, 8, 14, 45, 72, 98, 112, 153 rhetoric and, 29, 38, 40, 45, 55, 95–99, 171n52. See also democratic deliberation

Rome and, 49, 55–57, 59 santosha and, 120, 129 spirituality, religion, and, 77, 122, 147 true, 17, 113, 117, 130. See also Whitman: on democracy in United States, 21, 22, 97–98 Western philosophy and, 55 Whitman on, 13, 14, 117, 130, 155, 165n36 yoga and, 119, 122, 128–30 democratic (social) change, 122, 147 democratic citizens, 147 blame and, 96 debt of gratitude and, 117, 147 deliberation and, 97. See also democratic deliberation neoliberalism and, 117 persuasion and, 29 rhetoric and, 117 santosha and, 117, 129 democratic citizenship and the market, 101 neoliberalism and, 43 rhetoric and, 29 democratic common good, 9, 43, 120, 130 democratic culture, 5, 7 democratic deliberation, 8, 29, 97, 98, 163n24 democratic emotion gratitude as a, 41, 45, 49 resentment as a, 8, 55 democratic faith, 17, 166n48 democratic poor, 68 democratic resentment. See resentment: democratic

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democratic rhetoric, 134 two faces of, 7 democratic vistas, 13 Democratic Vistas (Whitman), 117 DeMoss, Nancy Leigh, 104 depression. See also mood disorders neoliberalism and, 178n30 Derrida, Jacques, 128, 165n38, 179n10, 199n60 Descartes, Rene, 21, 27, 170n42 desire as cause of suffering, 125 practicing action without, 126 Dewey, John on democracy, 16–17, 96–97, 166n48, 203n34 on old liberalism, 41 on personal character, 16–17 dharana (concentration), 123, 138 dhyana (meditation/one-point focus), 123, 138 divinity. See also All; God Bhagavad Gita on universal, 130–32, 141, 147–48 vision of common, 130 doxa, 39, 115 awakening from the sleep of, 123 freedom and, 73 inducing people to question, 63 maya and, 132, 150 nature of, 39, 132 vasana and, 120 yoga and, 123, 132 Dunham, Yarrow, 179n2 Eckhart, Meister, 80, 136

egoism, 79, 119 egotism, 1, 48, 101, 123, 130, 148 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 4–5, 9 elites, American, 8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, x, 136, 142, 146, 200n80 on the All/Over-Soul, 130–32 on “condition of universal dependence,” ix, 140 on debt of gratitude, 129, 136, 199n62, 200n80 “Gifts,” ix, 129, 199n62 Indian philosophy and, 132, 137, 196n6 on maya, 132 Nature, 123, 146 samadhi and, 123 Emmons, Robert A., 3, 4, 98, 102, 104, 190n72 Christianity and, 80–81, 189n42 on developing “accountability partners,” 193n34 on emotional incompatibility, 111, 195n65 on inappropriate gift giving, 192n14 on indebtedness, 3, 98 on ingratitude, 106–8 on Iraqi Olympians, 106, 107 on 9/11 terrorist attacks, 109 political messages, 108 research, 5, 105–6 on resentment and gratitude, 111 Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You

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Happier, 3, 80–81, 105, 106, 108, 189n42, 192n12 emotional incompatibility, 111, 195n65 emotional landscape, 20, 37, 38, 44. See also political landscape emotion(s), 6–7. See also affect; political emotion Aristotle on, 7, 19, 20, 30–31, 36, 51, 55, 180n15, 182n40 cognitive aspect of, 172n61, 175n92. See also reason as contagion, 21 defined, 30 democracy and, 11, 17, 22, 23, 29, 38, 72, 98, 112, 114, 129, 153 history of skepticism regarding, 167n10 nature of, 20, 21, 30–31, 36, 124–25, 167n2, 175n92 neoliberalism and, 4, 44–45, 153, 154 as polyvalent, 12 reason and, 19, 21, 22, 34 rhetoric and, 6–7, 12, 36, 97 rhetoric of, 19–45. See also pathos shaping one’s worldview, 20 social constructivism and, 35–36 Stoics and, 65–66 terminology, 20, 167n10 yoga and, 124–25 empathy debt of gratitude as representing a failure of, 113 lack of, 44

ends-less war, 108–10 enemyship, 9 and civic and political unity, 8, 110 fear, danger, and, 8, 110 vs. gratefulness, 150, 154 gratitude made political through, 110 Hobbes and, 137 indebtedness and, 44, 110, 111, 114, 143 nature of, 8, 110, 112 9/11 terrorist attacks and, 110 rhetoric of, 152 as rhetoric of division and antagonism, 112 Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (Engels), 7–8 Enlightenment, 10, 21, 22, 32–35 environmentalism, the earth, and neoliberalism, 156–58 epideictic rhetoric, 95, 96 equality Christianity and, 77, 92 debt of gratitude and, 89, 92 democracy and, 17, 77, 155 friendship and, 142 Esposito, Roberto, 72, 186n4 ethical foundation of social justice, gratefulness as, 136 ethical friendship, 142 ethics, 15, 104. See also morality ancient Rome and, 71. See also morality: Cicero and Christian, 74, 75, 79, 82 emotional, 38

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ethics (continued) Kantian deontology and, 162n11 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 21, 48, 129, 142, 180n15 rhetorical, 38 virtue, 126–27, 130 yogic, 16, 118, 123, 129–34. See also santosha ethos, 6. See also persuasion exchange, 49, 50, 52, 57, 102, 149 “existence precedes essence,” 24, 115 existential debt, 80. See also life: debt owed to God for Christianity and, 26, 80, 81, 84, 90–92, 147 in contemporary gratitude literature, 80, 149 Jesus and, 147 existential gratitude, 135, 139, 150. See also gratefulness existential responsibility and existential guilt, 90, 186n92. See also life: debt owed to God for existentialism, 24, 115. See also Heidegger, Martin faculties, 33 categories of human, 33–34 faculty psychology, 33–35 fatalism, 200n77 fear, 190n64 enemyship and, 8, 110 as a political emotion, 8, 9 Federalist, The, 38 Federalist No. 10, 88

Finley, M. I., 181n29 Fischer, Norman, 126 forgetting and ingratitude, 66 forgiveness, 77 God as agent of, 77, 187n25 Foucault, Michel, 27, 169n31, 170n34 on “California cult of the self,” 27, 171n45 on care of the self, 24, 170n31, 176n108 on Christianity, 26 Descartes and, 27, 170n42 on disciplinary power, 26, 27, 120 on discipline, 176n108 genealogical method for reading the past, 10 history and, 10, 164n28 humanism and, 24 on individuality and the individual, 24–26, 28, 41, 170n42 Marxism and, 41, 176n111 neoliberalism and, 41, 176n111 on parrhesia, 39, 40 on rhetoric, 28, 39–40, 176n108 on spirituality and philosophy, 27 on truth, 24, 26–28 on veridiction, 39 writings of, 28 The Birth of Biopolitics, 41 Discipline and Punish, 10, 176n108 Founding Fathers of the United States, 21–22

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Franklin, Benjamin, 104 fraternity, concept of, 165n38 free gift, 199n61 art of giving a, 128 no such thing as a, ix, 50, 52, 59, 128, 179n10, 199n60 “free slaves” (giver’s slaves), 50 freedom, 73–74. See also agency care of the self and, 27–28, 101 Christianity and, 74, 75 definitions, 76, 177n116, 186n8 democracy and, 17, 76 neo-republican visions of, 186n8 rhetoric of, 73, 74 Seneca’s doctrine of internal, 66 as a social construction, 73–74 “freeloaders,” 50 friendship citizenship and, 142–43 types of, 142 functional connectivity, principle of, 35 generosity, 185n76 two types of, 57 Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Society, The (Mauss), 49–51, 113, 164n27 gift giving, 62, 89, 126, 128, 199n61. See also specific topics inappropriate, 192n14 gift-giving virtue, 128, 199n61 gifts. See also free gift Cicero and, 53, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 72, 87, 102, 149

laws of justice necessitating the return of, 53 Seneca on, 63–65, 67, 72, 73, 82, 88, 89 “Gifts” (Emerson), ix, 129, 199n62 giving to get a return, 128 and receiving, 50 God. See also All as agent of forgiveness, 77, 187n25 debt of gratitude to, 82 forgiveness and, 187n25 governing in the name of, 87–88 gratitude to. See under life rhetoric of, 148 gratefulness, 135, 136, 150. See also existential gratitude; specific topics discloses the good, 140 gratitude-as-thanksgiving, 134–44 nature of, 15, 82, 113, 136, 138–44, 150–51, 154, 157, 158 gratia (thankfulness), 114 ancient Rome and, 48, 52, 53, 57, 74 Aquinas and, 81, 83, 189n47 Cicero on, 48, 52, 57, 58, 74 vs. gratitudo, 81, 83 vs. “praise” (laus), 181n24 Seneca and, 74, 99, 149, 189n47 terminology and related terms, 81, 83, 98, 133, 149, 181n24

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gratitude, 1. See also specific topics art of, 9, 98, 116, 118, 155 need to reassess the, 114 as political, 152 as the practice of gratefulness (not indebtedness), 136, 150 practicing the, 116, 151 propositional gratitude and the, 164n34 relearning the, 5, 18, 38 social comparison and the, 147 and social justice, 144 yoga and the, 119, 151 definitions, 2, 37, 62, 65, 100 as a discipline, 102 etymology of the word, 149, 181n24 as foundational political emotion in Rome, 53 genealogy of how Westerners have conceptualized, 10 meanings of, 2, 48, 89, 146, 149–50 as mother of all virtues, 47, 48, 54, 58, 85, 88 nature of, 99–100, 102, 108, 113, 131 paradox at the heart of, ix as a political emotion that bound poor Romans to the rich, 65 “religion” of, 146 terminology and keywords, 1–18, 48–50, 98, 149, 181n24 types of, 164n34 uses of the word, 2, 149

Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Leithart), 78 gratitude account, 104–5 gratitude-as-indebtedness. See debt of gratitude Gratitude Diaries, The (Kaplan), 47–48, 179nn2–3 Gratitude Factor, The (Shelton), 91, 190–91nn72–73 gratitude industry, 146 gratitude journals, 3, 102–4 gratitude literature, 3, 41, 134, 149 Christianity and, 79–80, 90–92, 149 Cicero and, 49, 53, 99 debt and indebtedness in, 2–4, 10, 18, 79, 84–86, 90–92, 99–101, 113, 147, 149 lessons from, 2, 3, 18, 100, 101, 105 political, 106 motivations driving, 101 neoliberalism and, 3–4, 41, 80 problems with and criticisms of, 2–5, 10, 44, 93, 98 Protestant Ethic and, 104 purposes, 4 yoga philosophy and, 117 gratitudo Aquinas on, 81–83, 133, 149 Christianity and, 81–84, 93, 149 etymology of the word, 81 vs. gratia, 81, 83 gratitude and, 149 nature of, 81–83, 149 origin of the term, 81

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political debt and, 84 terminology, 81, 83, 133, 149 great-souled man, Aristotle on the, 52, 72, 129 Greater Good Science Center, 5 Greece, democracy in ancient, 26, 32, 171n52, 182n32 greed and ingratitude, 66 Gries, Laurie E., 15 Gross, Daniel M., 167n2 guilt, 68, 69, 104, 131, 187n18 Christianity and, 26, 90 debt and, 50, 53, 67–69, 71–73, 98, 101, 114, 150 existential, 90, 186n92 felt by the poor for their debts, 67, 68 gratitude and, 68 gratitude literature and, 101 harmful effects, 67–69, 139 Heidegger on, 185n92 judicial rhetoric and, 95 Kenneth Burke on, 186n94 meanings of, 186n92 Nietzsche and, 67–68, 90, 186n94 as a political emotion, 67–68 promoting obedience through, 114 resentment and, 97 Seneca on, 67 shame and, 67 gunas, 124 Hale, Nathan, 110–11 Hamilton, Alexander, 21 Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business

Sold Us Well-Being, The (Davies), 118, 119 Happiness Project, The (Rubin), 103 Hauser, Gerard, 204n43 health benefits of gratitude, 2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 200n77 Heidegger, Martin Being and Time, 41, 185n92 on ek-sisting/ek-sistence, 41, 141 on emotions, 19, 20, 38, 176n98 on guilt, 185n92 on humanism and humanity, 156–57 religion and, 157 resoluteness, 186n92 on Rhetoric (Aristotle), 11, 19, 163n17, 176n98 Hobbes, Thomas, 41, 102, 137 on cheerful acceptance of one’s status as a debtor, 89 Christian rhetoric of gratitude employed by, 87–88 Cicero and, 88 on debt of gratitude, 88–90, 100, 112 enemyship and, 137 faculty psychology and, 33–35 on gifts, 88, 89 gratefulness and, 150–51 on gratitude, 88, 90 and the law, 88, 100, 150–51, 203n21 laws of nature, 88, 90, 102, 203n21

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Hobbes, Thomas (continued) on leaders, 90 leveraging fear to promote peace, 190n64 Leviathan, 88, 203n21 on passion and action, 174n79 on relations between the rich and poor, 88–90 Seneca and, 88–90, 203n21 on the state of nature, 2 Homer, 52 Horace, 110 humanism, 156–57 humanity, 23 Hume, David, 174n79 Hussein, Uday, 106 immunity of gratitude, 191n73 indebtedness, 2, 10–11. See also debt; debt of gratitude; specific topics Aristotle on, 48, 52, 54, 59, 72, 180n15 enemyship and, 44, 110, 111, 114, 143 vs. gratitude, 99 normalizing, 4 individuality and the individual, 15 Inferno (Dante), 85 ingratitude, 106–8 causes of, 66 defined, 85 political and religious, 85, 107 Seneca on, 64, 66, 90, 185n89, 203n21 Shakespeare and, 85–86 instructio, 25 Iraq War, 107, 194n46

Iraqi National Soccer Team, 106 Iraqi Olympians, 106–7 Isocrates, 32, 40 James, William, 13, 44, 120, 124, 156 Jesus, 81, 147 on debt of gratitude, 76, 79, 84 existential indebtedness and, 90, 147 on giving and generosity, 78, 188n27 on God, 78, 203n26 gratitude and, 77, 78, 86, 91 at the home of Martha and Mary, 151–52 on the poor, needy, and undeserving, 76, 78, 82 on redemption from debt, 79 “Render unto Caesar,” 68, 92–93 salvation from, 78, 84, 147 John Templeton Foundation, 5 journals, gratitude, 3, 102–4 judicial rhetoric, 95–96 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 190n54 justice, 53. See also social justice Cicero on, 56, 57, 59 reciprocity and, 57, 59 Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 121–22 Kantian deontology, 162n11 Kaplan, Janice, 47–48, 179nn2–3 Kennerly, Michele, 29 know-how, transmission of, 170n34 Krishna Bhagavad Gita and, 125–28, 130, 144, 166n45 debt of gratitude and, 128 desire and, 125–27

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on gifts and giving, 126, 128 on gratitude, 126, 127 union with, 130, 166n45 yoga and, 125–26, 130, 144, 166n45 Laclau, Ernesto, 203n31 Lamy, Bernard, 32–33 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 162n13 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 12–13, 136–37, 148, 155 Leithart, Peter J., 78, 186n6, 188n26, 189n42 Leviathan (Hobbes), 88, 203n21 Leys, Ruth, 35 liberalism “old,” 41, 42 religious, 145, 199n65 liberation. See freedom; moksha life, 159–60 debt owed to God for, 68, 81–84, 114, 147, 149 gratitude/thankfulness for, 78, 92, 109, 129, 134–40, 146, 150. See also santosha value of, 156, 159–60 Livy (Titus Livius), 54 loan-sharking, 63, 64 Locke, John, 32, 41, 53 logos, 6, 21, 97. See also persuasion; reason Lord’s Prayer, 76–77 Lyons, Daniel, 192n21 Madison, James, 21–22, 88 manipulation of emotion, 7 market logic, 42, 43 neoliberalism and, 4, 42, 43, 101, 153, 154

Mauss, Marcel, 49–51, 113 maya, 132 definition and nature of, 132 doxa and, 132, 150 McKerrow, Raymie, 74 me-first mentality, 43, 101, 136. See also selfishness “Me Generation,” 43 mechanical faculties, 33 meditation santosha and, 138–39 ways of thinking of, 138 Millennials, 43 mind and body dichotomy/separation between, 21, 23, 124 as linked, 99 mindfulness, 122 benefits of, 122, 197n20 emotions and, 138 Kabat-Zinn and, 121 nature of, 120–22 practices in, 120 as remembering, 121 and social change, 122 yoga and, 118 yoga as, 120–22 mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), 24 Mitchell, Mark T., 79, 189n53 moksha (liberation), 125, 128–30 money. See also debt: financial; poverty; rich and the poor Christianity and, 76 mood disorders, 30. See also depression moral conflict, Bhagavad Gita on, 126–27, 198n53 moral debt, 82. See also debt

220 / Index

moral failure, ingratitude as a, 107 moral memory of mankind, gratitude as the, 113 moral philosophy, first, 183n54 moral psychology of Reid, 33–34 moral sentiments, 105. See also Smith, Adam moral training, rhetoric as, 74 morality, 123, 183n47. See also ethics Cicero and, 48, 51–53, 56, 60, 85, 113 citizenship and, 101 debt of gratitude and, 18, 71, 72, 102, 113 faculty psychology and, 33 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 67–68, 183n54 ingratitude and, 85 religion and, 147, 148 Seneca and, 64, 71, 72, 85 motivating people, ways of, 6 Nealon, Jeffrey T., 171n45 neoliberal epideictic, 177n117 neoliberal rhetoric, 137–38, 154. See also neoliberalism neoliberal rule, 4, 137–38 neoliberalism, 42, 142, 153, 162n12 adaptation to, 42 and Americans as consumers rather than citizens, 4, 42, 43, 112 ancient Rome and, 58, 61 Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and, 119 Christianity and, 79–80, 92

Cicero and, 58, 61 and citizens as commodities, 156 civic resentment and, 8, 9, 44, 45, 112, 141, 150, 153 and the common good, 8, 9, 43, 44, 79, 101, 112 criticism of, 3–4, 8, 9 debt and, 101, 104, 117, 118, 153 and dehumanization, 4, 42, 43, 119, 129, 137–38 democracy and, 8, 17, 18, 41, 43, 45, 79, 119, 150, 153, 154, 164n34 depression and, 178n30 emotions and, 4, 44–45, 153, 154 environmentalism, the earth, and, 156–58 Foucault and, 41, 176n111 government and, 43, 44 gratefulness and, 138, 140, 150, 154, 156–58 gratitude literature and, 3–4, 41, 80 higher education and, 177n118 indebtedness and, 4, 40–41, 44, 79, 134 market logic and, 4, 42, 43, 101, 153, 154 optimism, happiness, and, 45 overview and nature of, 3–4 politics of resentment and, 8, 45, 112, 150 poverty and, 61 propositional gratitude as a democratic corrective to, 164n34

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public legitimacy, 177n117 santosha and, 129, 133, 134 selfishness and, 42–43, 101–2, 141, 151 value of life, right to life, and, 137–38, 153, 156 Wendy Brown and, 153–54 and the working class, 50 yoga and, 117–20, 133, 142, 151 neuroplasticity, 23–24, 35 Newtonian mechanics, 33 Nhat Hanh, Thích, 5, 121, 140, 197n20 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 21, 48, 129, 142, 180n15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71 on Christianity, 90, 91, 191n74 on debt, 68, 71, 90 On the Genealogy of Morals, 67–68, 183n54 on gifts and giving, 199n61 on guilt and conscience, 67–68, 90, 186n94 Kenneth Burke and, 186n94 on nihilism, 91, 191n74 on pathos of distance, 183n54 on perception and perspectives, 158 on ressentiment, 159 Romans and, 67–68, 90 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 199n61 on victimage, 186n94 nihilism Christianity and, 91, 92, 191n74 Nietzsche on, 91, 191n74 9/11 terrorist attacks, 109, 110, 134

nirodha, 120, 123, 197n31 niyama, 123, 128, 131, 151 Nussbaum, Martha C., 17–18, 172n61 obedience, promoting, 84, 109, 114 debt as, 4 gratitude as, 84, 109, 114, 151 through guilt, 114 Objectivism. See Rand, Ayn Odyssey (Homer), 52 On Benefits (Seneca), 62–64, 67, 72, 82, 85. See also Seneca On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 67–68, 183n54 optimism, 63 “cruel,” 44 neoliberalism and, 45 Whitman to be the paragon of American, 13 orators, 74 orientational meliorism, 116 original sin, 26, 84 Over-Soul, 130 parrhesia, 39, 40 Patanjali. See Yoga Sutras of Patanjali pathos, 20, 30. See also emotion(s) Aristotle on, 6, 20, 21, 30 definition and nature of, 20, 30 Heidegger on, 176n98 pathos of distance, 60, 183n54 patronage in ancient Rome, 57–58. See also Rome Paul the Apostle, Saint, 91 Christianity and, 82, 188n26

222 / Index

Paul the Apostle, Saint (continued) on debts of gratitude, 78, 79, 82–84, 188n26 on gratitude, 77, 86 on ingratitude, 77–78 Jesus Christ and, 77, 79, 82, 84, 91 persuasion, means/modes of, 6, 20, 21. See also logos ; pathos Peters, John Durham, 186n2 Pettit, Philip, 186n8 Phillips, Kendall, 164n30 philosophy rhetoric and, 39–40 schism between spirituality and, 27 Plato, 26, 29 on rhetoric, 29, 32, 39, 40 on the soul, 198n42 pleasure friendship, 142 political benefits of gratitude, 2 political deliberation, 29. See also democratic deliberation political emotion, 9, 112. See also emotion(s) Cicero on, 54, 55, 57, 65, 69 fear as a, 8, 9 gratefulness as a, 138 gratitude as a, 17, 53, 54, 57, 65, 69, 83, 97, 98, 112, 114 guilt as a, 67–68 resentment as a, 8, 9, 55, 112 Political Emotions (Nussbaum), 17–18 political ingratitude, 85, 107 political landscape, 8, 9 political origins of the debt of gratitude, 47–69

politics. See also specific topics as the realm of persuasion, 29 politics of resentment, 155 “blame the other side” as the mantra of the, 9 contemporary, 8, 113, 150 democracy and the, 8, 14, 45, 98 destructive effects, 9, 112 gratefulness and the, 14, 154 indebtedness and the, 44, 113–14, 143 as leadership style, 8–9, 112 neoliberalism and the, 8, 45, 112, 150. See also neoliberalism: civic resentment and politicians who practice the, 8–9 as rhetoric of division and antagonism, 112 Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy, The (Engels), 8, 45, 111, 167n10, 182n32 poor. See also rich and the poor in ancient Rome, 61, 65, 67, 68, 72 and the Bible, 75–76 charity and giving to the, 5, 60–62, 71, 75–76, 78, 89 Christianity and, 75–76, 78, 82 debt of gratitude and, 60, 61 gratitude and, 61, 65 guilt for their debts, 67, 68 Jesus on the, 76, 78, 82 populism, 154, 203n31 positive psychology, 41, 135, 139, 192n9. See also Emmons, Robert A.

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poverty. See also Hobbes: on relations between the rich and poor among working class, 50–51 attitudes toward and ways of viewing, 5, 61 and the Bible, 75–76 Christianity as an ethic of, 75, 82 Christianity’s war on, 79 debt of gratitude and, 61, 82, 89 gratitude and, 106 positive aspects of, 61, 62, 75, 76 pragmatism, 116 pranayama (breath control), 123 prepositional gratitude, 164n34 presentist fallacy, 10 pride, gratitude as code word for, 146 propaganda, 7 propositional gratitude, 164n34 Putnam, Robert, 142–43 rajas, 124 Rand, Ayn, 118–19 Atlas Shrugged, 118, 119, 196n10 rational faculties, 33–34. See also reason reason, 22, 33, 34. See also logos and care of the self, 177n116 emotion/affect/passion and, 19, 21, 22, 34 Enlightenment and, 21, 34 faculty psychology and, 34 and government, 22

and humanity, 19, 21 nature of, 21, 33 Stoic philosophy and, 66 reciprocal gifts, 56, 57, 59 reciprocating gratitude and, 51 obligation of, 49 reciprocity, 57, 59, 128. See also specific topics justice and, 57, 59 law of, 109 principle of, 107 social capital and, 143 Reid, Thomas, 33–34, 174n80 religion, 147–49, 189n42. See also specific topics “religion” of “gratitude,” 146. See also “Spiritual But Not Religious” religious liberalism, 145, 199n65 “Render unto Caesar” (Jesus), 68, 92–93 resentment, 155. See also politics of resentment Aristotle on, 55 Cicero and, 55, 61–62, 64 democracy and, 45, 72, 112, 153 democratic, 7, 8, 55, 57, 59, 60, 72 as a democratic emotion, 8, 55 gratitude and, 111–12 and ingratitude, 66 neoliberalism and civic, 8, 9, 44, 45, 112, 141, 150, 153 as a political emotion, 8, 9, 55, 112 terminology, 185n89

224 / Index

resoluteness, 186n92 rhetoric, 166n1. See also specific topics acquiescence and, 8, 55, 109, 111 affect and, 31–32, 35, 56 Aristotle on, 6, 28, 29, 32, 86–87, 95, 97, 182n40 care of the self and, 24, 26, 28–30, 37–40, 176n108 Christianity and, 74–75 Cicero and, 11, 32, 54–57, 64, 74, 149 definitions, 6, 28 democracy and, 29, 38, 40, 45, 55, 95–99, 171n52. See also democratic deliberation of emotion, 19–45. See also pathos emotion and, 6–7, 12, 36, 97 Foucault on, 28, 39–40, 176n108 of freedom, 73, 74 genres of, 95–97 mechanical/mechanistic, 31–33, 36, 174n83 and motivating people, 7 nature of, 6–7, 29, 31, 39, 40, 74, 168n17 neoliberal, 137–38, 154. See also neoliberalism symbolic, 31 uses of, 6 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 20, 21, 51–52, 86–87, 180n15 central lesson of, 19 Heidegger on, 11, 19, 163n17, 176n98

rhetorical actancy, 165n43 rhetorical agency defined, 14–15 distributed sense of, 165n43 rhetorical knowledge, transmission of, 170n34 rhetorical scholars, 7 rich and the poor, the, 57, 61, 63, 181n29. See also poor achieving peace between, 89, 90 in ancient Rome, 48, 54–61, 63, 67, 68, 84, 88, 181n30 Cicero and, 48, 49, 54–56, 59–62, 65, 71 conflict between, 54–55, 88, 181n30 debt of gratitude and, 61–62, 89, 90 gap between, 44 gratitude as a political emotion that binds together, 54, 55, 65 gratitude as mitigating tensions between, 71 Hobbes on relations between, 88–90 resentment between, 54, 59, 61–62 separation between, 54, 113 Richard III (Shakespeare), 85 Roberts, Les, 194n46 Roberts, Robert C., 92 Robin, Corey, 175n89 Roman law, 50, 54 Rome, ancient Cicero and, 48, 53–61, 65, 66, 69, 74

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democracy and, 49, 55–57, 59 Nietzsche and, 67–68, 90 the rich and the poor in, 48, 54–61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 72, 84, 88, 181n30 Seneca and, 65–67, 69, 72, 74 slavery and, 50, 66 Romulus and Remus myth, 181n31 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19 Rubin, Gretchen, 103 Ryan, M. J., 161n2 Saas, William, 108–9 salvation from Jesus, 78, 84, 147 samadhi (absorption into the infinite), 123, 201n97 sannyasa, 125, 157 santosha ethics of, 130, 131 practice of, 117, 120, 128, 129, 140, 151 gratitude and the, 131 and meditation, 138–39 nature of the, 129, 136 provides cognitive framework for the experience of gratefulness, 138 purposes and functions of the, 117, 129 and views of the good, 129 yoga and the, 119, 131, 135 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and, 130, 131, 136 sattva, 124 Secret, The (Byrne), 103 Secret Gratitude Book, The (Byrne), 103

security, 65 self, culture of the, 25, 34 self-care/care of the self, 83, 171n45 in antiquity, 24–26, 28, 148 Christianity and, 26 democracy and, 26, 40, 155 discourse of, 39 divinity and, 83, 148 emotional control and, 172n59 ethics and, 27–28, 34 Foucault on, 24–28, 39–41, 170n31, 171n45, 176n108 freedom and, 27–28, 101 meaning and nature of, 30, 38 Nietzsche and, 159 parrhesia as the language of the, 39 politics and, 26, 29, 155 power and, 27 reason and, 177n116 rhetoric and, 24, 26, 28–30, 37–40, 176n108 self-knowledge and, 26, 115 Stoics and the “golden age” of, 65 Western civilization and, 115 yoga and, 148, 150, 151 self-centered American culture, 1, 146 self-knowledge, 26, 115 selfishness, 23, 43–44, 64, 101. See also me-first mentality Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and, 119 community, society, and, 15, 43–44, 101, 178n125 gratitude and, 44, 78, 101

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selfishness (continued) neoliberalism and, 43, 101–2, 119, 141, 151 Seneca and, 64 yoga and, 121, 151 Seneca, 26, 184n64, 185n76 Aquinas and, 82, 89, 189n47 on attitude of the donor, 62 Augustine and, 74 on benefit(s), 63–64, 184nn62– 63, 185n76. See also On Benefits Christianity and, 52, 62, 74, 78 Cicero compared with, 52, 57, 64–66, 69, 72, 78, 82, 85, 88, 99, 112, 113, 135, 139, 149, 182n44 Cicero contrasted with, 49, 62–64, 66, 72, 89 on community, 63, 113 on debt of gratitude, 57, 62–67, 71–73, 82, 89, 90, 112, 113 doctrine of internal freedom, 66 on dying, 26 on gifts, 63–65, 67, 72, 73, 82, 88, 89 God and, 78 gratia and, 74, 99, 149, 189n47 on gratitude, 62, 63, 65, 67 on gratitude as a social convention, 90 on gratitude as an antidemocratic emotion, 49 guilt, conscience, and, 67 vs. Hobbes, 90, 203n21

Hobbes and, 88 influence on Western conception of gratitude, 184n61 on ingratitude, 64, 66, 90, 185n89, 203n21 on intention, 64 language and terminology, 25 and the law, 90, 203n21 mindfulness and, 121 on moral virtue, 64 On Benefits, 62–64, 67, 72, 82, 85 on perpetual debt, 62–69, 73 politics and, 65, 69 on resentment and gratitude, 111 and the Romans, 65–67, 69, 72, 74 on securitas, 65 shame and, 67 on shameful loan-sharking, 63, 64 slavery and, 66 Stoicism and, 67 Stoics and, 63, 66 on use of gratitude to gain power over another, 62 on virtue and vice, 66 sensorium, 175n91 separation and debt, 113 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 109, 110, 134 Shakespeare, William, 85–86 Shelton, Charles, 91, 190–91nn72–73 Sheridan, Alan, 164nn28–29 Simmel, Georg, 113

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sin, 13, 26, 66, 77, 81, 83, 84, 90 Slapstick (Vonnegut), 42 slavery, 26, 127 and the Bible, 76, 77 debt, 50, 66, 76, 77 Romans and, 50, 66 Seneca and, 66, 67 slaves freedom and, 50, 66 Stoics and, 66 Smith, Adam, 105, 111, 112, 151 social capital decline of, 142–43 Robert Putnam’s theory of, 142–43 social class. See rich and the poor social comparison, 105–6 social constructivism, 35–36 rhetoric and, 23 social constructivists on emotion and affect, 23, 31, 36 social justice art of gratitude and, 144 gratefulness as ethical foundation of, 136 social naturalism, rhetoric of, 101 social reciprocity debt reports, 105 Socrates, 66, 110, 148, 195n60 Somers, Margaret, 101 “Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 13 soul, 24, 131. See also greatsouled man chariot metaphor and, 198n42 Emerson on, 203n19 Foucault on, 28, 171n49

“Spiritual But Not Religious” (SBNR), 145–47, 151–53 Spiritual Left, 199n65 sportsmanship, 107 Stoicism, 63–66 stream of consciousness, 124 Stroud, Scott, 116 stultitia, 25, 38–40 suffering, desire as primary cause of, 125 symbols, 23 tamas, 124 targeted gratitude, 164n34 Tell, Dave, 31 Templeton Foundation, 5 terror, war on, 108–9 thankfulness. See gratia Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Emmons), 3, 80–81, 105, 106, 108, 189n42, 192n12. See also Emmons, Robert A. Thoreau, Henry David, 136 thrownness, 38–39 totalitarianism, 17 tragedies, 134–35 tranquility, 65 Tribune of the Plebs, 181n30 truth, 24 Christianity, God, and, 26, 75, 87 Descartes and, 27 Foucault and, 24, 26–28 and the individual, 24, 26, 27 rhetoric and, 6 Uhl, Chris, 23

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ungratefulness. See ingratitude United States, Founding Fathers of the, 21–22 utility friendship, 142, 202n103 vasana (habit energies), 120, 121, 124, 125 veridiction, 39 victimage, 186n94 virtue ethics, 126–27, 130 Vivekananda, Swami, 128 Vivian, Bradford, 177n117 Vonnegut, Kurt, 42 war, ends-less, 108–10 “war on terror,” 108–9 war rhetoric, traditional vs. new, 108–9 “welfare queens,” 53 Whitman, Walt, 12–13, 117, 136–37, 147 debt of gratitude and, 12–13 on democracy, 13, 14, 117, 130, 155, 165n36 on gratitude and gratefulness, 12–14, 136–37 Leaves of Grass, 12–13, 136–37, 148, 155 on past and present, 39 on privation, 13 on religion, 148 and the yogic path, 129–30 whole, the. See All will, 33, 34, 174n80, 177n119 Wilson, Dennis “Chip,” 196n10 wisdom, 126 words, importance of, 30 working class, 50–51

yamas (moral prescriptions), 123, 129, 131, 198n39 yoga, 16 acquiescence and, 117–18, 121, 128 Bhagavad Gita on, 125, 130, 136, 141, 144, 148, 157, 166n45, 198n47, 200n77 Christian, 80 democracy and, 119, 122, 128–30 goals of, 123–25, 130, 166n45 Hegel on, 200n77 is more than moving bodies, 122–29 Krishna and, 125–26, 130, 144, 166n45 meanings of the term, 138, 166n45 as mindfulness, 120–22 nature of, 118, 123–25, 138, 139, 166n45, 198n47, 200n77 neoliberalism and, 117–20, 133, 142, 151 ontologies and soteriologies, 166n45 philosophical roots, 166n45 popularity, 16 of retreat, 119 of santosha, 152 santosha and the ethics of, 129–34 two paths of, 157 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 136, 198n43 Bhagavad Gita and, 123, 130–31, 136, 166n45

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on eight limbs of yoga, 123 and the five disciplines of yama, 131 on goal of yoga, 130, 166n45 on practices in yoga, 120, 122 santosha and, 130–31, 136 on thoughts, 38

yogic ethics, 130 yogic gratitude, 128, 133. See also yoga yogic paths, 123, 125, 133, 157 Zarefsky, David, 7