Could gratitude be healing for democracy?

It’s been so fun to watch the spread of Garrett Bucks’ book The Right Kind of White and all the conversations it is inspiring since it launched last month. If you’re White and wondering how to take meaningful, local, and collective action on racial justice, The Barnraisers Project, which Bucks created, is a great start. So is his Substack The White Pages , of course. And his book is a gorgeous entry point to all of that. Read it (or don’t, no tests will be given!) and sign up for our live virtual book club on the topic. When you sign up, you’ll get the zoom link sent to you. April 19th 10:30am PST // 1:30pm EST. See you there!

You’ve likely heard this before: gratitude is not just good manners, it’s good for us. It “unshackles us from toxic emotions.” It reduces depression and anxiety. It even cuts down on the number of physical aches and pains one reports.

But in light of new research I’ve recently learned about, I’m wondering if gratitude might also have the power to push us in the direction of a healthier democracy. Here’s the deal: researchers Elizabeth Mancuso and her colleagues have found that feeling gratitude actually leads people to be more intellectually humble.

Intellectual humility, as I’ve written about before, is the ability to right size yourself in a given situation—to take up more space when you know a lot about a topic and less when you accurately self-assess that you have less to offer than others in the room—whether literal or proverbial, as in the case of social media. Intellectual humility is not a fixed trait—though some of us have greater tendencies towards it. It’s a muscle, a mindset, a way of moving through the world that has huge value—especially in this moment of such profound polarization, media disinformation, and damaging certainty.

So, if this is true—that feeling and expressing gratitude helps us move towards an openness to really listening to others and considering that we could be wrong about things, it seems we’re been doing civic conversation all wrong. When was the last time you heard someone express any gratitude for the parts of our democracy that are working well, or at least comparatively well compared to other countries? When was the last time that you heard someone express gratitude for the more proximate fruits of democracy functioning even marginally well, like public schools, libraries, transportation?

This is not to argue that we should be only focusing on the public systems or political freedoms that we do have, or pretending that their current state is satisfying to any of us. Gratitude can feel like such a hollow mandate. I get it. As poet Kaveh Ahkbar writes in his new novel, Martyr!, “It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.”

But gratitude shouldn’t be the province of young, scarless yoga instructors or vanity celebrity magazines. It is ours. All of ours. No matter how rain filled our life has been, I believe gratitude can and should be a birthright. And it may be easier for us to wrestle with our political differences, build real solutions for real communities, and reweave our civic fabric if we focus—at least as we are able and genuinely willing to—on what we are grateful for about our shared polity.

I feel like those of us who lean left are particularly likely to shun gratitude as romantic and soft. If we express gratitude, we worry, then we cede ground to the right, who is pretending that everything was better back in the Mad Men era. We don’t want to make America great again! America was never great in the first place! We show our love through incessant criticism.

But, actually, America is great in many, many ways. It is also deeply broken and hypocritical and in need of reform, and yes, dissent. Critique is a robust form of patriotism in my book, but so too is love and celebration and awe.

I think about this with public schools a lot. It’s de rigueur to talk shit about how dysfunctional our district and our public schools here in Oakland are. And trust me, I’ve got plenty of things I could share, myself, having survived many a teacher strike, the pandemic, and approximately one million meetings that devolve into an educational funding version of Sophie’s choice—do we hire more reading or math tutors because we can only afford one or the other? It makes me want to scream, and on occasion I have—in my car, alone, or with a neighbor who is equally outraged.

But you know what I can’t abide by? Spending so much time talking amongst ourselves and to others out in the community about how badly run our district is and/or our schools are such that we collectively lose confidence in this, the most sacred and democratic of all public projects—educating our children together. I also can’t abide by spending so much time talking about what is going wrong that we don’t acknowledge and build on what is going right; at our beautiful, imperfect school, that’s reading growth and teacher retention and the fabulous programs focused on affirming and supporting our Black students.

I’m reminded of GiveThx, a “digital program and research-validated curriculum that strengthens student wellbeing and social-emotional skills through gratitude.” Basically, from what I understand, GiveThx infuses a whole school community with gratitude, by explicitly teaching gratitude practices, but also by integrating an app that allows students to send digital thank you notes to one another and school staff. Educators also experience more ritualized and routine gratitude coming to them, as they should—what a huge, dynamic, hard job!

The kinds of notes students can send one another on GiveThx.

I’m also reminded of former superintendent Marlon Styles, who I profiled in this piece I wrote awhile back for The Christian Science Monitor, who did a brilliant thing to counter the trend of negativity in his own community; he invited a group of multi-sector, multi-racial leaders to be his designated “positive gossipers.” He promised to share the good, bad, and ugly with this once a quarter, if they promised to be voices out in the community sharing some of what was going right in our schools. It proved hugely successful in turning the cultures of the schools around, and also helped him lean on long-developing relationships when the culture wars landed on his doorstep.

What if we were “positive gossipers” for public institutions and infrastructure? What if we spent time each week thinking and talking about how grateful we are for what works in our communities, our states, and even our shared, ailing nation? What if we spent as much time pitching in as we do worrying, complaining, criticizing, and finger-pointing?

I can tell you that I’m outrageously grateful for the Rockridge Public Library where I have gone with my kids since they were tiny and Stella has picked out all the terrible Berenstain Bear books and Maya all the weird fact books, and we have never once had an accident even though it feels like we are always racing to the bathroom, and the librarians never make us feel back about returning our books overdue. I can tell you that being among a smattering of humanity and being able to gaze down out of the windows of BART as we slide in and out of West Oakland station is better than an amusement park ride to me. I can tell you that being a journalist in a country where I may be underpaid, but never jailed, for what I write is a comfort I don’t think often enough about.

Maya’s first library card on which she spelled her name backwards.

If we could turn out attention to what’s working, and maybe even express it, this research suggests that we might do a better job of acknowledging what it is we don’t actually know. And that just might be the first step towards a more accurate, more durable, more just America.

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What do you think? What’s a public institution you are grateful for, or a part of our democracy that you are still feeling optimistic about, even if just in a comparative light?