Shooing Away Shamelessness
Thoughts on Margaret Visser’s ‘The Gift of Thanks — the Roots and Rituals of Gratitude’
by T.J. Elliott
I was trying to find another book by Margaret Visser who had entranced me about a dozen years ago with a volume called The Geometry Of Love. I read that beautiful essay before going to Rome for the first time in December 2011, and was moved by its examination of the meaning of the churches described — Sant’ Agnese and Santa Costanza — to take the #60 bus out the Via Nomentana to visit them. As marvelous as that day trip was to see catacombs, mosaics, and bell tower, the internal journey that the book inspired with its skillfully woven sources and stories of these ancient churches was even more profound and illuminating. Starting with a single place, Visser illuminates eternal universal truths about the sacred and the trajectories of our souls. I was grateful to read it and then to visit Rome to feel it yet again.
And then by one of those algorithmically arranged accidents of the Internet, I encountered while searching for something completely different another title of Margaret Visser’s: The Gift of Thanks. I couldn’t find her essay on fate in my local library, but they did have a book about gratitude by the same author. And so I came upon this extensive exploration of ‘the roots and rituals of gratitude.’ Its publication was over a decade ago and that makes a review seem superfluous, but I thought readers might find the ideas stimulated to be of interest. Especially how I get from gratitude to shamelessness. Wait for it.
‘Nudae Gratia’
The phrase ‘Naked Are The Graces’ or as it was originally said frequently by the Romans ‘Nudae Gratia’ appears early in the book. As Visser points out, “The ancient Roman graces were three beautiful, young, naked (or, in earlier times, skimpily dressed) virgin goddesses. They were shown dancing with their hands and twined, sometimes in a circle but usually in a row, with two facing forward and the middle one backward.” What did they stand for? Every element of ancient mythology stood for something even if that ‘something’ changed over time or struck various groups in very different ways. Visser continues, “The Graces, it was generally agreed, represented the social obligations of giving, receiving, and returning gifts and favors. They danced holding hands because a benefit passes from one person to another and eventually returns to the giver.”
Why did I find this interesting? To start with, I was one of those kids who read all of the mythology books in the children’s library and then managed to cajole the upstairs librarian to let me read a few of the ones in the adult section as well. I’ve never been able to get enough of Venus. But the more important reason for finding this particular representation intriguing has to do with my abiding fascination with why we are grateful.
That as impressive a civilization as the Romans constructed over many centuries (but which also grew out of and borrowed from other civilizations — the Etruscans, the Greeks, even the Carthaginians) placed gratitude very high within the hierarchy of their culture’s values suggested that there was something within us long ago recognizing the importance of this noun.
Visser confirms this opinion by noting that “Nudae Gratia was the phrase a Roman would sagely produce in conversation: ‘naked are the graces.’ It meant that one should be open hearted and without hidden intentions when giving, receiving, and returning gifts and favors.” (For me, this highlighted that a danger of gift giving existed even for this ancient civilization: turning the donation into an expected exchange, a tit for tat.) The Greek influence upon this Roman practice can be seen in Aristotle who believed “that the very existence of the state depended on exchange and proportionate reciprocity — good for good and evil for evil — and that the Graces embodied exchange, the necessary underpinning of society.” Aristotle felt that the graces reminded us not only to return the kindnesses offered to us but also to sometimes be the person who gives the gift spontaneously.
Given that I have spent a significant amount of time over the last year first crafting and then directing my play Honor, these ideas of entwined elements like honor, shame, and gratitude holding Society together continue to be of interest to me. And the connection seems especially important right now when the definition of each is unclear if we look at some very public actions across the political spectrum.
“good for good and evil for evil” .
That simple recipe from Aristtole fans out into many other considerations in Visser’s book, but her point that ancient societies guided by thinkers such as Aristotle forefronted their cultures with a framework of honor and shame grabbed my attention. She notes that these ”guiding and controlling principles, one’s honor, and its opposite, shame, are constituted by the judgment of other people, for these others have to do the honoring. After all it is they who, in the end, allot his imposing ’size’ to an honorable man. They need information with which to make up their minds about whether he deserves this admiration. Honor accordingly requires enactment: physical demonstrations of intentions and attitudes, not only from the vulgar, but also from the honored few.”
Returning to all of the practices of ancient civilizations does not seem like a good idea; slavery, misogyny, and other evils somehow were able to fit within that framework. Visser points out that rage often accompanied any supposed trampling of Honor. She cites Homer’s Iliad in which rage — ‘menin’ — “is the first word in European literary history. It opens Homer’s Iliad, an epic whose subject is honor and rage and heroism, and which sings to us of rejection upon rejection of common sense.” But the decline of the gratitude, the absence of honorable behavior and the abandonment of any attempts to avoid shame in our own day does seem to have significant costs to our culture.
Are we lacking today in such gratitude as the kind that Visser cites as a precious virtue when it “clear-eyed and informed by love”? Answering that question is complicated because generalizations lend themselves to refutation by plentiful exceptions. But if we were to compare ourselves to the behavior described below by Xenophon (and cited by Visser), I think that we would find our culture lacking currently in one important respect connected to gratitude: shamelessness. “Ingratitude, Xenophon believes, is the companion of shamelessness, by which he means that ungrateful people are capable of caring nothing for the opinions of outraged others. Honor and shame are opposites that support each other. The true enemy of shame is not honor but shamelessness, which is both a refusal to keep the rules of honor and a resistance to the pressures of shame; it is the ultimate falling off in an honor culture, and, as Xenophon perceives, ‘leads the way to every moral wrong’. If in an honor culture people cease to care about reputation, then important moral matters that cannot be regulated by law are left with nothing to maintain them. Ingratitude is one of those ungovernable matters; in conjunction with shamelessness it can also lead to the dismantling of an honor system. For if gratitude helps knit society together, ingratitude will prevent relationship from forming and break the links already in place. ”
Shamelessness as the sickness
Consider those phrases as you contemplate contemporary American society: ‘a resistance to the pressures of shame … leads the way to every moral wrong’, ‘ungrateful people are capable of caring nothing for the opinions of outraged others, ‘if gratitude helps knit society together, ingratitude will prevent relationship from forming and break the links already in place.’ What happens when the opinion of others either matters less or the bar for good opinion is set so low you’d trip over it? While ‘cancel culture’ might be thought of as an important public shaming mechanism, its targets seem disparate and even random and its effects uneven; bad pennies do turn back up. Visser and Xenophon note ‘important moral matters … cannot be regulated by law’, but neither can Twitter, Facebook, and internet magazines of punditry and opinion regulate them. The attacks in cancelling campaigns are more bloviation than blow darts when it comes to piercing the target’s reputation.
In fact,the river of digital discourse in which cancellations usually streams is polluted by ingratitude and shamelessness The insistent falsehoods of current political discourse reflect a disdain for the integrity of the medium (Yes, I know there are cat videos) and a disregard for the notion that any principles or limits of conduct should exist. The desire to ‘dump’ on or vilify the opposing party even when the facts fail to support such accusations occurs on both sides although the shamelessness of those who defend insurrection and deny justice is more frequent and egregious.
Why? We have as a nation largely lost the idea of ‘concordia’, which Visser describes as ‘all being of one heart.’ Is it mythology that our ancestors were all of one heart? Finding transgressions to that concept is easy: racism, anti-Semitism, et al. But we also have the time after 9/11, the World War II battle against fascism, the myriad rescues of those battered by natural disasters, the Go Fund Me campaigns for indigent sick, and many other examples of when our joy at being part of something larger is expressed through generosity. But those convergences seem to be rarer rather than proliferating.
What has changed? For me, shamelessness is the culprit. The list of actions and utterances that once ignited shame and now pass with barely a titter of protest is longer than the credits of an action movie. We have so much to be thankful for and yet we spend our time trying to wreak vengeance on those with whom we disagree. We know that truth matters but we promote obvious falsehoods to keep the echo chamber of our followers, of our tribe, ever resounding. We understand intuitively that our gratitude for what we have been given should lead us to consider the needs of others generously yet our efforts to pull the ladder to opportunity up after ourselves so quick and sharp that we risk splinters and other injury.
Shame is missing whether it is billionaires lambasting the poor, sons embarrassing their fathers both living and dead, legislators lying (or worse stealing), or vulgar loudmouths rejecting the judicial repudiation of their sins. Shamelessness like this corrodes the bonds of society especially one purporting at this outset (in admittedly flawed fashion) “that all men (sic) are created equal.”
What to do? What to do?
This wave of shamelessness is so epidemic that attempting to take on all of its different aspects at once would be folly. Instead, I came away from this book encouraged by guidance that the author gleaned from another ancient source: Aeschylus. The Sixth Century BC Greek playwright ended his trilogy the Orestia, “with a scene in which Vengeance agrees to give way to Blessings. The furies, goddesses of Vengeance and kin murder, turn into Eumenides (kindly ones). They are eventually persuaded that it would be better for them to accept honor for their power to bring fertility to the land than to Live In Perpetual rage, producing blight.” In other words they should give gifts that would induce gratitude rather than insults and injuries that only insight further harm. Their chorus sings:
“Let us not give bloodshed for bloodshed
But rather joy for joy
Let love be their common will
Let them hate with single heart
… Much wrong in the world is thereby healed”
Notice that the chorus comes to this metamorphosis on their own. That is the trick: other people aren’t going to make the change. We have to recognize and enact ourselves a clearer idea of what is honorable and what is shameful. G.K Chesterton once responded to a newpaper’s query of ‘What is wrong with the world?’ with a two word diagnosis: ‘I am.’ We have to set a standard for ourselves and perhapswill also be an example to help others make the turn.
And this not just DIY improvement project: this change matters for our world. Toward the end of her book, Visser states that “Gratitude, replacing selfishness, greed, and disregard, will, in my opinion, have to be called upon to help us surmount the ecological crisis that now threatens our very existence. Fears of disaster and the laws we make to protect the environment will certainly be necessary as both pressure to act and restraint from further abuse. But fear and the law will not be enough. What is required is nothing less than a conversion a turning around of our ideas, a change of heart, an agreement to see things from a new point of view. Fear can cause rather than a abuses, and there are infinite numbers of ways to get away with selfish convenience or greed if people care only for their own personal interests….Gratitude is necessary for the functioning of a healthy Society, precisely because it reaches into areas of life that the law can either control nor inspire.”
My takeaway is this prescription applies to our current democratic crisis as well as the environmental dangers we all face; we have to replace ‘selfishness, greed, and disregard’. But my emphasis in this initiative must include the recognition and conscious calling out of shamelessness in ourselves and others not as an accusation (as I and others have done in the past with self-satisfying humor, of course, and as tit for tat) but now as an invitation to move away from this destructive behavior. I will let you know how that goes for me in later writings but for now I am grateful to anyone who has bestowed on me the gift of their attention to the end of this essay.
