Gratitude, Now More Than Ever

Many Americans are bewildered by the anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and pro-Hamas attitudes many young people are espousing. Some points on this trendline are staggering. In the aftermath of Hamas’s barbaric October 7th terrorist attack against Israeli civilians, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 48 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old Americans sided with Hamas over Israel. A number of student groups penned or signed letters endorsing Hamas’s attack. Young people on campus and city streets across the country have chanted pro-terror slogans, including calls for the complete abolition of Israel and “intifada” to achieve that goal, evoking the two waves of terrorism that claimed thousands of Israeli civilians’ lives.

Anti-Westernism isn’t limited to downplaying or celebrating attacks in Israel. That much is evident in a horrifying trend that recently emerged on TikTok of young Americans announcing their support for Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Hopefully, it is an elaborate prank or shameless attention-seeking. The alternative—that anyone could embrace barbarism with such violent fervor—is almost too bewildering to comprehend.

Commentators have attempted to explain why American college students, the best and brightest of our youth, would so eagerly embrace the most evil causes. Explanations vary, from concluding that it is all an outgrowth of “intersectionality” and “privilege theory”—faddish left-wing ideologies that glorify victimhood and demonize perceived privilege—to speculation that it stems from some related postcolonial mentality that justifies any means of “resistance” by indigenous peoples, no matter how inhumane.

Some combination of those factors is surely to blame. It will take years of concerted efforts to excise these harmful ideas from our schools and culture and to discredit them among the generation of Americans for whom they represent the height of sophistication. But that alone does not offer an alternative disposition toward Western civilization. Rather, the key to disarming the growing threat of barbarism is gratitude. 

Inculcating a sense of gratitude for the blessings of Western civilization in general and America in particular is the best inoculation against the radical and anti-social views that have seduced young people. Stemming the current tide of anti-Western radicalism is crucial, but so is fixing the problems in moral formation that brought us to this point.

The logic of fighting barbarism with gratitude is simple in concept but challenging in execution. It is far more difficult to side with the vandals trying to upend society if one is trained to approach the world from a posture of historical perspective and gratitude for the everyday miracles we take for granted. But for far too long, Americans have tolerated or even applauded universities’ replacing classes on Western civilization with various hyphenated “studies” courses focused on the oppression suffered by various allegedly marginalized groups. Educators dismissed the foundational texts of our government, civilization, and culture as being written by “dead white men” whose ideas were a mere cover for oppressing others. At all levels of education, we have too readily accepted classes pushing texts that depict the history of the West as a sordid story that revolves, fundamentally, around exploitation.

Sources that shed light on history’s complexities and civilizational shortcomings may offer an important perspective to people who already appreciate the American project. Unfortunately, many of today’s students lack that foundation of understanding and appreciation, so they are susceptible to internalizing the un-nuanced view that American ideals are so tarnished as to be unworthy of admiration—if not a source of exploitation themselves.

In too many students’ minds, American history runs as follows: Europeans invaded, colonized, oppressed, and exploited less powerful and more peaceful civilizations. They established brutal regimes that thrived on creating arbitrary distinctions between people (based on race, gender, sexuality, and so on) to allow powerful groups (whites, men, heterosexuals) to oppress their powerless counterparts. This accounts for slavery, America’s original sin. Even after slavery was abolished, black Americans faced the evils of segregation and invidious discrimination. It explains why American women faced unjustifiable legal disadvantages and why other minority groups continue to face prejudices and mistreatment. Meanwhile, America embarked on imperialist foreign wars to plunder other countries and distract from misery on the home front.

There is truth in much of this narrative, but it paints a misleading picture that leaves students defenseless against malignant ideologies that preach violence and celebrate barbarity. If students suddenly discover that everything around them is part of a silent ongoing genocide, it’s easy to see why they would just as zealously embrace the cause of the downtrodden. Even if there was a time when educators and the culture at large overemphasized the positive aspects of American history and downplayed its failures, the pendulum swinging this far in the other direction does not serve young Americans any better. In some cases, it may do them significantly greater harm, by making them vulnerable to ideologies far more dangerous than even blind patriotism.

Correcting this trend does not require blind patriotism, of course. It merely takes a sense of historical perspective. So while we are not experts in pedagogy, we can offer the pillars of such a perspective, which ought to shape a curriculum of gratitude in the confines of the classroom and in the moral education of the family. 

Our most profound social problems—poverty, violence, exploitation, barbarism, terrorism—are not endemic to Western civilization in particular, but are part of the human condition. Despite our inevitable continuing faults and transgressions, ours is an overwhelmingly rich, safe, and fair society, unfathomably so by historical standards. Thus, before we despair about how much work is left for us to do, we must acknowledge that we owe a debt of gratitude to those who came before us for the freedoms, safety, and comforts that we enjoy today. 

It is not shallow or selfish to teach a young person to be grateful for the unearned wonders that he will inherit simply because he happened to be born in America in the twenty-first century. These material advancements did not occur by accident or through purely natural processes, and we should be grateful to everyone whose work drastically improved our lives. We should teach children to be grateful for Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, the Wright brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the many other Americans whose hard work helped pave the way for our modern lives. None of those men was perfect, but we should still recognize and be grateful for the way each improved our lives. We can critique those with blemished histories while simultaneously honoring them for the many benefits that they bequeathed to us. Gratitude is the posture that can help us see this clearly and rightly.

Perhaps more important than teaching future citizens how anomalous our era is in terms of prosperity is teaching them the American creed and the Western ideals that have improved lives around the world. Chief among these ideals is republicanism, or government of, by, and especially for the people. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist Paper, the American experiment sought to answer the question whether people were capable of self-government based on “reflection and choice,” or whether they would always be ruled by the “accident and force” of kings, tyrants, and emperors. That foundational idea, of government by the consent of the governed, along with our Constitution’s promises of a government of limited powers, free speech, the free exercise of religion, and the due process of law, changed the world for the better.

Americans would do well to recognize and tell the next generation of the hard work and sacrifice that went into winning, sustaining, and spreading those rights. Every attempted republic that predated America, and even some that followed it, collapsed into tyranny or anarchy. It may seem natural that we enjoy a broad array of freedoms, but America’s success hides the herculean effort that went into winning, preserving, and expanding those liberties. 

In America,  we have consistently moved toward understanding, appreciating, and internalizing our founding ideals, and we owe gratitude to all who played a role in that process. Americans have been remarkably altruistic in working to turn those ideals into reality for all, taking steps to abolish slavery, vanquish the injustices of the Jim Crow era, and grant women the right to vote. We’ve worked to ensure that equally qualified men and women receive equal pay for equal work. We’ve fought to abolish child labor and take down the slave-driving Soviet empire. We’ve worked to protect the rights of Catholics, Muslims, and Jews; fought to improve working conditions and give all people a chance of earning their success; helped disabled and mentally ill people participate in society; and created a safety net to help poor Americans fare better than many of their foreign counterparts.

These are just a few accomplishments. None of them simply happened on its own. History is not predetermined, and it is foolish to think that if those who achieved that progress had not done so, our national journey toward fulfilling the highest ideals known to mankind would have happened automatically. Students must be trained to view themselves not as building a just society from scratch, but as strengthening and improving the unfinished but formidable edifice their forefathers began. 

As we close out this year and approach the next, we should remember that gratitude is not an incidental or secondary civilizational value. It is the backbone of a free and decent civilization. Those who embrace barbarism love destruction and revolution because they have been trained to detest everything that came before them. But just as the heroic and imperfect Americans who came before us moved history through reflection and choice, we can write the American future by recommitting our educational institutions to gratitude.