Gratitude as an Antidote to Despair

“We come now to the very brink, where hope and despair are akin. To waver is to fall.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

In his excellent book Sex and the Unreal City, Anthony Esolen makes an interesting observation about the expansive insights one might glean from The Lord of the Rings: "When my daughter was young, she would often be asked, not usually by fellow homeschoolers, why she kept reading The Lord of the Rings. I told her to reply, 'Because I want to know what's going on in the world.'"

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings right now. As I have read through the trilogy this time, I have been especially struck by Tolkien’s focus on fear and despair as central weapons in the enemy’s arsenal for defeating the forces of the good and true and beautiful.

The malevolent enemy who stalks Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth is Sauron, the lidless eye, who occupies the tower in the forsaken land of Mordor, from where he spreads his cancerous darkness of despair across the earth.

Demoralization has long been understood by students of war as a powerful weapon for defeating one’s foes. Demoralized soldiers will not fight. No weapon is more potent when it comes to eliminating the threat posed by an enemy. Victory is assured when your opposition has been immobilized by despair.

As I have been reading and pondering Tolkien’s emphasis on despair as a tool of malevolence, my thoughts have been drawn to how the internet seems increasingly to be a source of fear and despair. “Doom scrolling” is a term invented solely to describe the internet phenomenon of people obsessively focusing on negative news online. Doom scrolling is something increasingly done by people of all ages and socio-political orientations. There’s something about bad news which captures the morbid fascination that seems to be such a prevalent attribute of we human beings.

Online immersion in bad news, combined with a continuous stream of reasons for being outraged, is leaving many people adrift with a sense of despair and powerlessness. The never-ending litany of frustrations and disasters that greet us online can seem overwhelming and unstoppable. People are thereby robbed of a sense of their own agency or effectiveness, and can easily come to view our present cultural decline as something that is irresistible and thus inevitable.

Doom scrolling starts to resemble a self-inflicted act of demoralization -- something that could easily have been a tool among the many nefarious arts of Sauron.

I want to suggest that, on this national time of Thanksgiving, intentional gratitude is actually an antidote to despair. Gratitude is a subversive act of agency, a kind of guerrilla insurgency against the darkness. With gratitude we remind ourselves that, whatever chaos and catastrophe exists in the world, chaos and catastrophe are not all there is. Gratitude is an overt act of remembering, and one which can counteract our unhappy predisposition to be drawn, by our fears, to the Sauronic tower of despair.

Someone has said that “gratitude is a gift of hope we give to ourselves.” Perhaps, in that way, gratitude is a kind vaccine against despair, but one which happily doesn’t also give us myocarditis.