Clara Jane Hendrickson | Our contradictory cornucopia

Leftovers | Finding solace in our hypocrisy

By Clara Jane Hendrickson 12/01/15 11:39pm

Last week, I enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with my family. Every year, I find myself dissecting what exactly it is I’m supposed to be celebrating on this holiday. I wonder what the exercise of giving thanks is really meant to entail. It is this time of year when I typically breach the damning question, “How much of who I am is the blessing of my unearned circumstances?” It is this time of year when I typically feel excruciatingly indebted to the fortune of my place in the world.

I often feel guilty asking such a question when I’m supposed to find clarity as I ground myself in some expression of immense gratitude. It feels that such a question complicates the relationship between thankfulness and personal influence. Is it trite to be thankful for that which is out of my control? Given that I am thankful for my unearned fortune, who is it that I am thanking? Does challenging the premise and practice of gratitude somehow distract from the sanctity of the Thanksgiving holiday and its accompanying family time? I believe the two need not be mutually exclusive — it is the nature of Thanksgiving that invites a discordant experience. In fact, it is what the holiday requires of us.

The Thanksgiving holiday reminds us that we hold many intentions and values that we do not and will not always live up to. This failure to measure up to our ideologies does not mean we should reject them wholesale. It also does not mean that we must begin to see ourselves as bad people for failing to live up to our values in the way we would like. Instead, what we learn in the exercise of giving thanks is that maybe it’s OK to fall short.

Asking tough questions of ourselves helps remind us that what we seek when we attempt to find some kind of resolution through giving thanks is not something that can be categorically reduced to just good or bad. While I may firmly root myself in a belief system, living my life by some moral compass, not all I participate in can be said to be good or bad. And I would venture to suggest that most of us are not ready for the kind of sacrifices living religiously by a values system requires — which means, we must find a way to be content with our contradictions. Determining how to be a graceful hypocrite is a challenge worth tackling.

It is OK to fall short because it is not the goal of the practice of gratitude to look for a way out of our contradictory nature. Perhaps the resolution we seek is not about giving ourselves a path towards absolution, balancing gratitude with hypocrisy. Instead, we should engage in an exercise of profound self-awareness that forces us to live with our tensions. Who do we allow ourselves to be when we understand that the match between our values and how we lead our lives is less than ideal, let alone feasible?

I am less concerned with the ramifications of not living up precisely to a moral code than I am with the ramifications if we do not even breach the tensions between our lifestyle and values. That kind of curiosity regarding our own hypocrisy prevents us from opting for merely idealism or cynicism. Idealism applies our values in a perfect, but closed, system and negates a consideration of the damning reality in which we live. Cynicism, on the other hand, opts for an effortless position that fails to see humans as agents of historical change. Instead, this view contends that humans are merely the inheritors of the world’s harsh blows.

Perhaps the Thanksgiving table we should strive to sit at is the one that treats gratitude as an attempt to comprehend our own existence and place it somewhere meaningful in an otherwise indifferent universe. Nothing is going to inherently make us better people without our effort. While Thanksgiving is one day out of the year, it is a manifestation of the everyday struggle over the choices we make that define who we are.

CLARA JANE HENDRICKSON is a College senior from San Francisco studying political science. Her email address is clara@sas.upenn.edu. “Leftovers” appears every other Thursday.

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