Paying Attention to Gratitude

Nov 28

In his book, The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford writes that “attention is the one thing that is most one’s own...we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us; what is actually present to our consciousness.” Attention is perhaps the most fundamental measure of value, for we attend to that which we value most. As such, attention is our most basic currency. We tacitly acknowledge this fact when we speak of paying attention.

Yet we have created a world where our attention is increasingly distracted, fragmented, and commodified. T.S. Eliot described us as “distracted from distraction by distraction.” That was in 1936. Since then we have only exacerbated the problem. Our devices magnetically draw our attention to themselves as if they were personal oracles containing the secret to happiness. In the process, our attention is harvested by marketers who employ complex algorithms to determine what will best hold our attention as we scroll endlessly with no clear idea of what, exactly, we are looking for. In this world of endless diversion, our attention flits and flickers, restlessly moving, never settling for long, constantly on the move, driven by impulse aided by algorithm.

In such a context, gratitude is the natural casualty, for gratitude requires attention directed and held. At its most basic, gratitude is paid via our attention. And when our attention skims over the surface of things, when our default mode is “surfing” or “scrolling” we assume a posture in which gratitude is not possible or even conceivable.

The problem goes even deeper, for our devices give us what we want. As such, they are the perfect narcissistic mirrors into which we gaze and find perfectly curated reflections of our most immediate and superficial desires. If gratitude depends on our attending to things beyond ourselves, narcissism and gratitude are mutually exclusive dispositions.

Of course, the problem is not simply the technologies around which our lives are increasingly oriented. Writing almost two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “the habit of inattention must be considered the primary vice of the democratic mind.” Tocqueville here is not referring to democracy as a form of government but rather as a social condition characterized by, above all else, equality. But equality does not remain neatly sequestered as an expression of the moral dignity of individuals. Once equality becomes the prevailing value of a society, the tendency is for all things to become increasingly indistinguishable. Aristocracies must, of course, be destroyed. Hierarchies must be flattened, but in the process unequals are reduced to equals, which is clearly a distortion of reality. Once all values are rendered equal, there remains nothing that will naturally hold our attention other than whatever our immediate appetites fixate upon. But appetite is a fickle guide, for appetites are constantly in flux; hence our restless inability to maintain sustained attention is, in large part, the consequence of the egalitarian principle applied to all reality and amplified by the narcissistic proclivities of our electronic devices.

All of this runs headlong into a serious moral challenge, for we all recognize that, at some fundamental level, gratitude is a moral duty that we owe and to neglect this duty, to live a life habitually characterized by ingratitude, falls short of an important ideal. To put it another way, we all intuitively recognize that ingratitude is a vice, a moral fault worthy of condemnation or at least scorn. If gratitude is only possible in the context of attention, and if we are increasingly an inattentive society, then we are clearly setting the conditions for a serious and sustained moral shortfall. Call it a gratitude deficit.

What, then, is to be done? The answer is both obvious and difficult: we must cultivate the habit of attention. There are, doubtless, many ways of going about this, but let me suggest two: we must recover the art of stillness and we must acquire the mental habits of the poet.

First, if we are in fact “distracted from distraction by distraction” we must change course. We must exchange distraction for concentration. We must learn once again to give the most important things the full currency of our undivided attention, and that can only happen when we still ourselves. Stillness stands at odds with a culture that values motion, activity, and progress. When we measure a person’s value by the busyness of his life, the packed calendar, and “demanding schedule” is it any wonder that stillness is seen as either a waste of time or a luxury that perpetually eludes us? Yet wise men throughout the ages have recognized that it is through stillness that we gain the perspective necessary to live well.

The Psalmist wrote, “Be still and know that I am God.” This pithy statement includes, in magnificently compact form, a distillation of key truths. Stillness is an imperative that is a precondition for knowing. And what is that knowledge? At the very least, it must begin at the heights of possible knowledge: God is. And once one in the stillness encounters the reality of God, all other things will necessarily fall into place, for when the hierarchy of knowing and being comes into focus, the world reveals itself as a cosmos, an ordered whole. An ordered whole is necessarily hierarchical, for order without hierarchy is meaningless and arbitrary. Only as conscious participants in this created order can we intelligibly attend to its various aspects, giving each its due and therefore paying attention in a way that properly acknowledges our various debts. Only by acknowledging our place in the cosmic order can we properly discharge the debts of gratitude that we continually accrue.

Second, we must learn to think like a poet. What I mean is this: poets specialize in particulars. Even when they are striving for universal truths, they do so by means of a deep penetration into particularity. The poet will not speak of a bird but of this finch; not a tree but that aspen. To think like a poet requires one to stop scurrying and scrolling long enough to truly see. When we see things as they truly are, we invariably recognize our relationship to them and to the world as a whole. We come to see ourselves not as passive observers but as active participants in a cosmos humming with mystery and beauty.

Consider, as an example, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his poem, “Pied Beauty,” he sings a hymn of praise to God who gives us ordinary things.

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Who other than a man who has mastered the art of stillness and attended well to this world could look at a blue sky full of white clouds and be reminded of the “couple-colour” of a Holstein? Who other than a man who has caught and studied a Brook Trout could describe the beauty of “rose-moles all in stipple”? These are the poetic lines of a man who has lovingly attended to the strange and wonderful particularities of the world. Such a man can recognize that, as Hopkins puts it in another poem, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

And herein we come naturally to the possibility, nay the necessity, of gratitude. When we still ourselves and, as a result, encounter the grandeur of this world through which we move, when we truly see the pied beauty of the common-place all around us, then we will come to see that the natural and proper response is gratitude. In that moment, which is inseparable from humility, we will come to recognize that all things are a gift, unbidden and gratuitous, which is another way of saying that all things come to us by grace.

This Thanksgiving, as we draw up chairs around tables laden with turkey, stuffing, and pie, may we attend well to the good things at hand. May we still ourselves and in the process delight in the presence of friends and family who are gifts beyond our deserving. And may we pause in this familiar and comforting glow to breath a prayer of thanksgiving to the One from whom all blessings flow.