Gratitude and kindness

Many books, documentaries, even Shakespeare’s King Lear, explored these virtues and, of course, their opposites - ingratitude and unkindness, exposing the ugly parts of “human nature.” A community gets further disfigured when ingratitude and unkindness get mixed with discrimination, petty jealousies and bad-minded spite, coming unexpectedly from self-righteous pinnacles. Harsh, but true.

An event last Monday inspired my interest in gratitude and kindness.

Two former students of the University of Southern Caribbean (USC), Professors George and Esther Simmons sponsored a breakfast- type “Distinguished Lecture” at the Hilton Hotel. Obviously, it cost a lot. But they have kindly done this for over ten years now.

They also support the university library.

Why? Professor George Simmons, now 90, graduated from the Caribbean Union College (Now USC) in 1945 and never forgot the days he studied and lectured there – a memory energised by Seventh Day Adventist beliefs. He remains grateful.

He pays annually for a distinguished professor to travel from the USA to give this special lecture.

Last Monday, it was Professor of Philosophy, Susan Wolfe, on the soul-searching topic, “Meaningfulness: A Third Dimension of a Good Life.” The respondent, social scientist Thomas Isaac, developed professor’s search for meaning in life and the dilemmas in separating an objective from a subjective source of life’s “meaning.” In my modest presentation as event-patron, I noted how respect, courtesy, kindness and gratitude get defeated in public life. As former USC President, Dr Vernon Andrews explained, Professor Wolfe’s lecture and the connected speeches were another USC contribution to society.

So last Monday’s event was about finding and giving “meaningfulness” to make life better, reminding me of Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen, who, admitting the power of self-interest, has been pushing economics to know the difference between “how to make a living and “how to live well.” In his classic On Ethics and Economics, he said, “the nature of modern economics has been substantially impoverished by the distance that has grown between economics and ethics.” His views played an important part in my own book, Psychonomics and Poverty– a challenging search for life’s meaning beyond money. (University of the West Indies, 2000, 280 pp) Any definition of poverty as money alone is a sterile view.

But back to the golden values – gratitude and kindness. It is said, he who shows kindness should forget, but he who receives should always be grateful. I have been amazed time and again to see how easy it is for people to be ungrateful, finding one excuse or another to be ungrateful. But then, gratitude dragged out, loses its virtue.

Just as kindness must come from the heart, so too should gratitude be willingly returned. Professor Simmons did that.

Look, if all this sounds a bit mushy, it is mainly because of Professor Wolfe’s stirring adventure into the never-ending search for “good” meaning in life. The search remains largely philosophical - hard to get grounded in everyday life. Of course acts of kindness, small and big, happen every day, A lot of it even left unnoticed, without gratitude. When I listen to the debates on the 2016-17 budget, I get the feeling that we have become so far removed from the essentials of what a good life is all about. So many things more mercenary and less meaningful.

But like the downfall of Adam Smith’s “cooperative community,” the search for money seems more powerful than the search for meaningfulness in life. But, according to some of the questions posed last Monday, what if the search for money brings full meaningfulness to that person? Does an assassin find meaningfulness? Does meaningfulness also bring happiness? Who decides? Like the early philosopher said, a true education is when the search for answers raises more questions.

This happened Monday, thanks to the kindness of Professors George and Esther Simmons and the USC.