Counting Blessings
Things seem bad right now. It is time for a little context.
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Six years ago, my friend and I traveled to Ethiopia - we were there to meet a number of Ethiopian pastors and to assess if we could provide some training for them. I had been to Malawi a number of times in that same timeframe as well. In this trip, we were based in Dire Dawa, in the Eastern part of Ethiopia, and we loved being able to walk around and experience the city and the people and the coffee stands. The coffee available in the street - I can picture the unique way they made it - grinding the beans in a bowl, placing the coffee pot in the embers of the wood fire - the smell of which was all over the city. That was 2018. You aren’t supposed to travel to Dire Dawa today - at least the State Department recommends against it (and communicates pretty directly that you are on your own if you do). The Travel Advisory Level is 3 - which is Reconsider Travel. Level 4 is Don’t Travel. But in 2018, things were more stable. We did get a report (after the fact) that Al-Shabaab, the Islamist group operating in that area, was trying to find out where the pastors were meeting. And we did hear gunshots in the distance, lots of them, one night - more stable, but not what we would consider stable. We also experienced in our years visiting Ethiopia the random death of a small bus full of people killed because the lack of vehicle safety and the premature death of one of the pastor’s infant children from a condition that could have been treated elsewhere. There was just more instability, poverty, and lack of agency than I could relate to - a much different life from what I take for granted. And things have gotten worse since them, it seems.
I say all this to say that we have things pretty good. Yes, I know, things seem not so good right now. And I can take the illustration above to say that we have things much better than most people - which is true. But I want to say instead that we take things for granted that not only aren’t true in much of the rest of the world, but that haven’t been true for almost all of human history. Take a look at the graph below. It starts in 1820 but we know (and will see below) that things were not better before then. It was somewhere around 1980 that the number of people not living in extreme poverty exceeded those who lived in extreme poverty. And now we have about eight times as many people living above the line of extreme poverty as we have below it. Most of the people we encountered in Ethiopia had enough to eat - which would not have been the case fifty years earlier. Poverty, to be sure - but much better than even in recent history. And even with all the political instability they have now, this is still true.
In fact, it is true all over the world. The graph below shows only a small handful of countries where the per capita GDP is below this subsistence poverty line.
I know this is a low bar, but if you go to the site referenced, you can slide the time backwards to see how rapidly this has improved over the years. Here is what it looked like in 1950:
Keep in mind this is adjusted relative to the level of prices in 2017 - and that GDP is our country was $15,912 (adjusted for 2017 prices) in 1950. Things are not just better economically throughout the world, they are remarkably better here. And if you take the longer view, what you see is that almost all of what we call human progress - economic and technological progress is what we tend to call human progress - has occurred in the last, say, forty years.
OK - enough charts. You get it, things are better - way better. Thanks for the Social Studies lesson. At least, things are better economically - which leads to advances in technology, health care, housing, and lots of other areas.
But it doesn’t seem like it, does it? It doesn’t feel like it. What’s up?
There are a lot of answers to this question. We have a political and media and cultural context in which catastrophizing everything is the first impulse. We have an ‘us and them’ stance which requires blaming the evil and powerful ‘them’ for all the evil - and a steadily improving world sort of messes that narrative up. We have a tendency to curate a fake version of ourselves for public consumption - which, because lots of other people are also doing this, leads us to believe that everyone else has it better and has more things and has better experiences and, really, has a better life. And what do all of these things result in? Anger. Anxiety. Depression. Disorientation. And Ingratitude. It is the last one I want to look at, I am probably not qualified to look at the others.
Most of us take what we have for granted and many of us feel that we are losing out on something that others have. Or, even if things are better now, that we lost out before on something so we are not as far as we ‘should’ be. Everything is relative to a set of expectations that excludes a fallen world and our own fallen nature - so any setback is not placed next to the many blessings we have received but can so easily ignore. And so we lack gratitude. If we expect a life of unbroken health for ourselves and our loved ones, of ever rising success and prosperity, of continuing security, of constant enjoyment … all expectations that surely won’t be met in this actual life in this actual place among these actual people - we will not be filled with thankfulness. We will think we have grounds for grievance, even if we, in what we convince ourselves is virtue, don’t act on the grievance.
I have experienced many young people who feel that they have, uniquely, a legitimate grievance because they have grown up in a time of economic uncertainty. I will pass over the observation that I have lived through all of those times as well. Even so, a useful question in life is “compared to what”? Those who grew up in almost every decade in the last century certainly had things worse - WWI, the great pandemic, the crash, the depression, WWII, the Cold War, war in the Middle East, assassinations, hostages in Iran, stagflation, domestic bombings in the 70’s, the dot com bubble crash, 9/11 … etc. But these previous generations may not have had things worse compared to their expectations.
We listed some reasons above why it doesn’t usually seem like things are better. There is another one - things may not be better in some important ways. It is better in ways we take for granted, and worse in ways we take for granted. We are broken and so is the world and economic progress does not make that go away. That might be another misplaced expectation - that if we all move toward prosperity together, all the big problems will fade. The world is worse in ways it couldn’t be worse before - precisely because we have more wealth than we need - worse in ways that only wealth makes possible.
Last week, my son Evan sent me an article in Harper’s magazine from a few years ago by Tonya Gold that wonderfully and awfully and brilliantly illustrates this. It is a cutting look at the very expensive unhappiness of some who have accumulated much. Here are some of those observations dressed up as a restaurant review, a review of some of the most exclusive and expensive restaurants in America -
It is not, to me, food, because it owes more to obsession than to love. It is not, psychologically, nourishing. It is weaponized food, food tortured and contorted beyond what is reasonable; food taken to its illogical conclusion; food not to feed yourself but to thwart other people.
…
How does the food taste? To ask that is to miss the point of Through Itself. This food is not designed to be eaten, an incidental process. It is designed to make your business rival claw his eyes out. It could be a yacht, a house, or a valuable, rare, and miniature dog. But I can tell you that the cornet of salmon — world famous in canapé circles — is crisp and light and I enjoyed it; that there are six kinds of table salt and two exquisite lumps of butter, one shaped like a miniature beehive and another shaped like a quenelle; that a salad of fruits and nuts has such a discordant splice of flavors it is almost revolting; that the lamb is good; and that, generally, the food is so overtended and overdressed I am amazed it has not developed the ability to scream in your face, walk off by itself, and sulk in its room.
…
Here the chef is in control. The client, meanwhile, is a masochist waiting to be beaten with a breadstick, spoiled with minute and sumptuous portions that satisfy, and yet incite, one’s greed. The restaurant seethes with psychological undercurrents and tiny pricks of warfare. It is not relaxing.
Tonya Gold, A Goose in a Dress, Harpers, September 2015
‘Food not to feed yourself but to thwart other people’ … ‘designed to make your business rival claw his eyes out’ … ‘spoiled with minute and sumptuous portions that satisfy, and yet incite, one’s greed’ …
These kinds of problems do not show up in the happy trends we started with. In a sense, they are enabled by them. We are the problem, and the happy trends just make more of our brokenness accessible for more people. Don’t hear me say that wealth is the problem. The New Testament is sometimes misquoted to say that money is the root of all evil - instead it tells us that the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil.1 We don’t even have to have it to be guilty, we just have to really want it. Wealth allows different aspects of our brokenness to flourish.
For you or I perhaps it isn’t a fancy restaurant - but it could be a house or a car or a look … all can have thwarting other people as the main (if unspoken) purpose. Because we were made for other blessings, better blessings, these - for all their exclusivity - do not satisfy.
Even so, by God’s grace, we are blessed with these better blessings. With all our brokenness, God chooses to bless us - if we can just see it.
Jesus encountered ten men who all seemed to have grounds for grievance - who wouldn’t be allowed near the exclusive people and places illustrated in the reviews. They were lepers and, as such, had lost everything. They were plunged into a life of poverty, rejection, isolation, loneliness, and shame.
Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy[a] met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”
When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.
One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.
Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
Luke 17:11-19
I can understand. Not sure I would have gone back. I would have been thinking that I had lost so much - so much lost time to regain. All had seemed lost for so long, it would be easy to let that loss define me. But, of course, all of life had been, against all expectations, returned as well. All ten might have been thankful for being healed, but only one went out of his way to express it. That ratio probably expresses my experience with gratitude.
Take
I could have included above lots of other reasons why things may seem worse than they are - things that lead us away from gratitude. There are other reasons that have to do with just us. If we believe that politics or the culture war is everything, we have a built in reason to believe changes in the political or cultural environment that go against our preferences take us to an almost doomsday scenario. We have an incentive, once we have misplaced our priorities in such a way, to need a doomsday scenario to justify our responses to the world.
I am not saying that doomsday, or what we would call doomsday, can never come. I am just saying we should not invest our identity in the notion that it is just around the corner (if we lose this election, if this law passes or fails to pass, if ….). I’ll have more to say about “doomsday” in another post.
But here is a quick doomsday aside from our restaurant critic:
Through Itself is such a preposterous restaurant, I wonder if a whole civilization has gone mad and it has been sent as an omen to tell us of the end of the world — not in word, as is usual, but in salad.
Tonya Gold, A Goose in a Dress, Harpers, September 2015
Links
Travel Advisory for Ethiopia - U.S. State Department
Our World in Data - Economic Growth - Global Change Data Lab
A Goose in a Dress - Tonya Gold, Harpers, September 2015
