The Lost Art of Gratitude

She bent down. The journal in question was stored on the bottom shelf, and its volumes as a consequence were dustier. She ran her finger along the spines, and stopped at the year she had written down. She eased the book from its shelf, a tight fit, and then took it to one of the tables at the window. From the dim semi-darkness of the book stacks to the light of the window table—the contrast was sharp, and she shut her eyes for a moment. But then she turned and looked out through the great sheet of glass, out to the rooftops of Marchmont across the Meadows; and beyond that, just visible in the distance, the inner slopes of the Pentlands. She had climbed there with Jamie on a bright day in January when the hills had been covered in snow right down to the burns below. The wind had come in from the west—a knife-like wind in spite of the broad sunlight and the high cloudless sky. Off the tops of the hills powdered snow had streamed in thin white veils from the ridges, blown by the whistling wind, white against blue, like smoke from the top of a volcano. Now, in the summer, the hills were nothing to do with January; green, blue, gentle.

She opened the volume and found the page she was looking for: “Reflections on Free Riding,” by Christopher Dove, M.A., D. Phil., senior lecturer in philosophy, University of Durham. It had been written before Dove was appointed to his chair at the newly minted university in London where he now professed, a university that Isabel thought sounded more like the destination of a bus rather than a place of learning. The lack of charity behind that thought jarred, and she reminded herself that Dove’s institution would be doing good and useful work, even if it was unglamorous, and pedestrian, and staffed by self-important people like Dove: education, however administered, was a good in itself, and not everyone could receive it in a grove. More than that, it might well be all the more precious when passed from teacher to pupil in a prison cell, or in a tumbledown classroom, or by the flickering light of a candle. No, it was mean-spirited to tar Dove’s university with the brush that should be reserved for him, and she would not think like that. Or she would try not to. Yet how could any academic institution worthy of the name not see through a man like Christopher Dove …

She began to read Dove’s article. Free riding, he explained, involved taking the benefit of collective action without contributing in return. I know that already, thought Isabel. The free rider might not vote, then, because it might be irrational to expend the energy involved in seeking out a polling station when he knows that his vote will make no difference to the outcome. How ridiculous! Isabel read on, her irritation increasing with each page. Dove, it seemed, was pinning his colours to the mast of the free rider, endorsing the argument made by a small group of philosophers who had supported this thoroughly dubious position. It was unadulterated selfishness, she thought; an example of the individualistic posturing that had once been so fashionable and had encouraged both greed and economic disaster. It was not rational to look after oneself at the expense of others, for the simple reason that we sank or swam together. But of course Dove would have thought this a clever position to affect: to take out a pin and prick long-established notions of civic duty. Cast a vote? Why bother if it takes one away from something more individually enriching. Did he really believe that?

Isabel struggled to contain her irritation. She had a job to do and she began to tackle it, making her way through Dove’s footnotes and writing down the cited references. The literature on the subject was surprisingly large and Dove was not one to hide his learning under a bushel. Isabel wrote down each citation, noticing that one article, in particular, seemed to have caught Dove’s attention. “Self and Community” had been published in an American review ten years earlier and was the work of one Herbert Ponder, adjunct professor of philosophy at a Southern California university. “Ponder’s defence of the enlightened self-interest position is masterly,” wrote Dove. “Indeed, it is widely regarded as the locus classicus of the argument against pointless involvement in joint action.” It is not enlightened, she said to herself. It is the opposite of everything that the Enlightenment stood for.