Quid Pro Woe

How Malignant Gratitude Makes America Sick

#QuidProQuo trended on Monday. When I saw the Twitter hashtag, I knew Trump was at it again.

(10/20/20 10:58AM update: Exxon insists that Trump’s story was a “hypothetical” quid pro quo; the journalist, Aaron Rupar from Vox, made the “hypothetical” implication clearer in a follow-up tweet)

Quid pro quo, a Latin term, literally means, “this for that,” a trade or transaction regarding gifts and favors. “I’ll give you X, if you give me Y.” Quid pro quo happens in uneven power arrangements — a higher-status benefactor targeting gifts to a lesser status beneficiary, with the desired result to ultimately increase the wealth or power of the giver. Quid pro quo was the way business was done in the ancient Roman empire and in corrupt empires and institutions ever since. In yesterday’s tweet, Trump indicated that he either did — or would — trade valuable drilling permits for a cash donation to his political campaign.

While writing my book Grateful in early 2017, it was hard to imagine that the Trump presidency would be so completely mired in transactional gratitude. But in scandal after scandal, through impeachment and to today, the politics of quid pro quo has been central. Quid pro quo – doing something to get something in return – is more than just an unjust business practice. In western culture, the underbelly of malignant gratitude reinforces indebtedness and inequality.

From Grateful:

Social scientists and psychologists argue that gratitude will make us happier, develop greater resiliency, and provide better outcomes of health and well-being.… As a personal practice, gratitude helps us navigate challenges and be more content with our lives, but if we fail to understand the larger social consequences of gratitude, then it is little more. Indeed, if we still carry around inside a deep structure of gratitude as debt, obligation, and payback, it serves to reinforce hierarchical structures of injustice. (p. 163) 

In American history, the most vicious use of malignant gratitude was in the slave system. Slaveholders believed that those they enslaved “owed” them gratitude — for the “gifts” of food, clothing, housing, and work that the “benevolent” masters had given them. The greatest of all the gifts bestowed by masters on the enslaved was Christianity — and white southern preachers regularly regaled those held in captivity to appreciate the goodness of their overlords. For the enslaved, if you failed to be sufficiently grateful in your attitude and your hard work you were an ingrate. And ingratitude — the failure to return quo for the master’s quid — resulted in punishment by both the whip and the law.

I’ve often said it should be called “quid pro woe” because this twisted form of gratitude makes us miserable. That’s why many people don’t like gratitude. They know gratitude can be manipulative, even demeaning, perhaps violent. Demands for favors. Debts of gratitude. Threats of retaliation. This is what corrupted gratitude looks like, that strange Latin term quid pro quo. It is hurtful on a personal level; it is poisonous to communities; it twists politics and economics toward the worst injustices. And although Trump is the most dramatic example of it, we live in a transactional world, where we daily give into smaller temptations of quid pro quo and gratitude demands. We are so accustomed to it that we often fail to notice how insidious it is.

And, even through quid pro quo has long been recognized as toxic to democratic societies and is considered ethically suspect and even illegal, President Trump has regularized it in American public life.

What’s to be done? How do we move beyond this?

In Latin, the opposite of quid pro quo is pro bono. Pro bono, “for the good, for free,” means something is given with no expectation of return. That’s what gratitude should be about — not a tool to control others, but a virtue that recognizes we live in a world of gifts, where we are all recipients, and where we all share what has been given. Benevolent gratitude — the sort that heals and unifies — is when gifts are given for the good of receivers and no exchange is implied or expected. This would be a world free of threat, a world of grace.

I often liken it to a table of thanks: Where all are seated, where all are fed. There is enough.

As American Thanksgiving approaches, I invite you to imagine a pro bono sort of world. Pay attention to how you understand gratitude, how you might (intentionally or unintentionally) participate in quid pro quo and how you can move away from transactional gifts. Open your heart to the possibility of a world where all gifts are truly free, no payback expected or implied. What would a politics of gratitude look like free from quid pro quo?

And imagine Twitter where #QuidProQuo never trends again. Only #Grateful.

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INSPIRATION:

Gratefulness can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live. 
― David Steindl-Rast

Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
—Wendell Berry

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed. 
― Maya Angelou

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Grateful is available in a number of formats from major booksellers and from your local independent bookstore. Click here for more information.

A video course on Being Grateful in Difficult Times features my lectures on the personal and public practices of gratitude — as well as interviews with writers and activists on gratefulness — is available from Convergence.

A gift! Enjoy this 7-Day Guide to Gratitude to strengthen your practices of gratefulness in these tough days. Pro bono! Enjoy.