Only gratitude can save our planet
WINNIPEG, MB—Margaret Visser has a reputation for coaxing startling revelations from such mundanities as the evolution of the flight attendant, the grooming of beards, the origins of avocados and what table manners have to do with the Eucharist.
Now she has turned her incisive pen loose on two words the average Canadian uses approximately 100 times a day.
"Thank you," we may be surprised to learn, has tales to tell. We may even have to call upon it if our world is to survive.
Visser says she was goaded to research the rituals of giving thanks after someone neglected to thank her for a favour. "I didn't do it because I wanted to be thanked; I didn't do it to get something; but when I didn't get thanked I was furious," she says.
At 400 pages, The Gift of Thanks (Harper Collins, 2008) is Visser's most thorough excavation of a social phenomenon yet. During the four years she worked intermittently on this project she slogged through "a huge amount of really boring stuff." The bibliography is 18 pages of fine print.
"I always look for things that people take for granted," the white-haired 68-year-old explains in her South African lilt, sipping tea. "That interests me the most—to point out to people that lettuce is interesting."
Visser lives in Toronto and Paris. She was born in South Africa, studied at the Sorbonne University and taught classics at York University in Toronto for 18 years. In September, St. Margaret's Anglican Church flew her to Winnipeg to deliver its annual Slater-Maguire Lecture.
Her newest book is neither a sermon nor 10 easy steps to a grateful life, Visser warns. "I can't tell people what to do, that's never been my project."
It wasn't even written for Christians per se.
"I'm not addressing religious people; I'm addressing it to anybody who can understand what I'm talking about," says Visser. "I do put in the historical fact of the contribution of Christianity to the notion of gratitude…and then of course religion just breaks in. When you get into higher reaches of the transcendence that is gratitude, you get to extraordinary things like Etty Hillesum thanking God while she's in a concentration camp."
Gratitude, says Visser, is "the first step in the transcendent.
"It's where the human being receives what they want and instead of just snatching what they want and leaving, they turn to the person who gave it to them and consider the giver. That is a turning away from yourself, and it's far from natural."
For decades anthropologists have tried to write off gifts and gratefulness as survival mechanisms, Visser says. "The gift is thrown into the darkness. I think modernity is probably founded on that: on the commodity versus the gift and the gift being lower and darker."
But if we hope to weather the ecological crisis of our planet, we'll have to call upon something deeper than rules of exchange.
"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 existence," Visser writes. "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."
"Gratitude that we have this beautiful earth, gratitude—if possible, and if you believe in God—to God," she says. Because gratitude requires a giver, "or it isn't gratitude at all.
"If we don't manage to feel it, then we're not going to survive."
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