Absurd Reality, part 2: Mandatory Gratitude

I have said that adopted people owe no one gratitude for their adoptions. I’m going to explain this thought by linking it to the idea in my previous post that adoption creates an absurd reality that resists our efforts to make sense of it.

Jonathan Lear, whose work I cited in that post, is interested in the place of gratitude in ethical and social life. In “Gratitude and Meaning” he discusses Aristotle’s analysis of gratitude, which goes roughly like this. When you are grateful, you recognize that someone has performed a no-strings-attached act of kindness, with nothing further required from you in return. It is a genuine act of kindness (kharis in Greek), and not something done with the expectation of repayment or reciprocation. It is not transactional: a favor bestowed is not part of an exchange in a “gift economy,” although actions like it, and the feelings of gratitude they elicit, are important elements of a functioning social order, as Aristotle understands it. And yet we sometimes use the phrase “debt of gratitude.” Why?

Distinguish two senses of a “debt” of gratitude. In one sense, a debt of gratitude is something I owe to the person to reciprocate for the favor they bestowed on me. But if that favor has no strings attached, then there is no such thing I owe, and therefore it is confused to speak of a “debt.” But maybe there is something else that is expected of me when someone does me a no-strings-attached favor, which is to show gratitude. I should acknowledge the kindness (the kharis), perhaps by writing a thank-you note. Then I have a “debt of gratitude” in a more minimal sense: that of being obliged to show gratitude to my benefactor in some way or other.

It isn’t clear to me that gratitude imposes a debt even in this more minimal sense. That is, I’m not sure that gratitude is ever mandatory, even where you might be expected to show gratitude for a favor bestowed on you. But there is a fine line to walk here. Lear reveals it in the following sentence: “Even gratitude [Lear’s italics] is not required or asked for, but that is part of why gratitude takes itself as an appropriate response.”1 So even if gratitude is not mandatory, it is “appropriate” (or “sufficient,” as he also says) to express gratitude. The idea, roughly, is that if a person feels no inclination to express gratitude in response to a no-strings-attached act of kindness—if they experience no sense that it’s appropriate or called for to express gratitude—then it’s hard to make sense of the idea that they actually feel gratitude at all. Compare anger. Imagine saying, “I am really angry about what he did to me, but I have no desire to do anything in response, not even just letting him know that I’m not OK with it.” This is different from saying, “I’m angry but it isn’t worth it to respond.” You might have reasons for keeping quiet about your anger. But it’s different—and puzzling—to think that you might be angry and yet not care one way or the other about doing anything in response. If you didn’t care at all, then you wouldn’t really be angry. Emotions call for particular kinds of response; we don’t just experience them as internal episodes, detached from action. Seeing red isn’t like seeing chartreuse. And this is true of gratitude too. If you’re grateful, you have, and you see that you have, a reason to acknowledge it: to thank the benefactor, or to honor them in other ways.

With all this in mind, we can analyze the demand that adoptees be grateful for their adoptions. Let’s start with the more minimal sense of the debt of gratitude. I think many people suppose that adoptees acknowledge, or should acknowledge, that their adoptive parents are benefactors who bestow upon them no-strings-attached benefits. This is part of the familiar “savior” narrative/complex: to adopt is to rescue a child from a bad situation and give them a better life. Even if the adoptee does not “owe” gratitude in a strict sense, it is part of recognizing these acts of kindness to see that it is appropriate, or called for, to express gratitude for them, and to honor the benefactors.

The difference between the minimal and the stronger senses of “debt of gratitude” gets tricky at just this point. For what counts as an expression of gratitude for having been adopted and raised by one’s adoptive parents? How does one honor them as adopters? Or, to turn the question around: What would count as an expression of ingratitude? I have written about the pain it caused my adoptive father to learn about my searching for, and meeting, my birth mother and her family. Many responses center on the idea that I caused him pain because I acted contrary to what a truly grateful adoptee would do. But if that is so, we seem to be talking about the stronger sense of a “debt of gratitude,” because we now have in view particular things I owe him in response to what he has done for me: maybe I owe it not to search at all, or at least to keep it a secret from him and the rest of my adoptive family. But then the gift my adoptive family gave me—my rescue from relinquishment, my upbringing—has strings attached after all. There is an agreement, spoken or not, that binds me and prohibits certain actions. This goes well beyond the idea that I should express gratitude to my adoptive family.

The fact that people assume that adoptees have such constraining obligations to their adoptive families (such as not to search or establish relationships with their biological families) reveals a deep tension in how we in the United States and other adopting countries regard adoptive kinship. On the one hand, we insist that adoption is just another form of family building, and that adoptive kinships are kinships like any other, save for the putatively incidental fact of being non-biologically rooted. But on the other hand, we imagine adoptees to lie under certain special constraints for which there is no counterpart for non-adopted people. We expect adoptees to feel particular ways about their adoptions and about their adoptive parents—ways that constrain what adoptees should do and not do. It is right there in the idea of adoptive parenting as a kindness (kharis, charity), as reinforced by the “savior” narrative.

Should people raised by their biological families be grateful to them? Even if I am inclined to regard people as “lucky” who are raised in their biological families (though not in all cases, by any means!), I don’t think they should feel grateful for not being severed. Nor do I think it makes sense to feel grateful for having been born in the first place. But if we accept the saviorism implicit (and often explicit) in the common understanding of adoption, and the valorization of adoption as a noble, or generous, or socially beneficial act, then we regard adoption as bestowing the kind of benefit that makes gratitude appropriate.

And so I think there is a tension between thinking of adoption as just a nonbiological means of adding a child to one’s family and thinking of adoptees, under the influence of saviorism, as lying under certain constraints, on pain of ingratitude. And the root of the problem is that adoption is absurd. The idea that adoptive kinship is just kinship minus the biological component is confused. Adoptees have (biological) families already. The idea that I as an adoptee should, for example, refrain from assigning any particular importance to my biological and genealogical relationships reflects the belief that my adoptive family’s understanding of my kinship relations should be my understanding too. To adopt a different idea—to qualify “my family” as “my adoptive family,” or to deny that my adoptive family’s ancestry is my ancestry, or to call my birth mother “my mother,” or to seek a relationship with my biological relatives and call it a familial relationship—is to repay their kindness with ingratitude.

Non-adopted people show no ingratitude to anyone by researching their family trees and seeking connection with other branches. Only adoptees, and others severed from their biological parentage, are open to that accusation. We adoptees are not “kin” to the families that raised us in the sense in which non-adopted people are kin to theirs. The idea that gratitude obliges the adoptee sneaks in just here. The hegemonic idea in our culture is that adoptees are their adoptive parents’ children in just the way non-adopted people are their biological parents’ children. So it would seem to follow that adoptees don’t owe their adoptive parents gratitude for raising them, any more than non-adopted people would owe their biological parents gratitude for raising them. But in fact we do presuppose a certain kind of “gift economy” within adoption. The adopters bestowed a kharis upon the child with the important condition that the adoptee remain loyal to the idea of adoptive kinship as kinship by other means: that their adoptive parents are their parents (full stop), just as non-adopted children’s parents are their parents (full stop). It is what the adoption industry promotes, and what their clients (prospective and actual adoptive parents) typically presuppose.

This idea of kinship can become a dominant and controlling force in an adoptee’s life without ever needing to be made explicit. My adoptive parents never needed to tell me that they, not my biological mother and father, are my true parents. (Although I did hear this explicit message a few times.) They most likely never conceived it as a price I would have to pay for what they gave me. Instead, it reflected their understanding of the purpose of adoption, under which it looked like the solution to their problem: to give them the child they could not conceive themselves. The idea of an adoptee’s debt of gratitude is as absurd as the idea of kinship on which it rests.

In this post I have spoken primarily negatively about the concept of gratitude as it figures in an adoptee’s life. In my next post I’ll reflect on the place gratitude does have in my efforts to make sense of my absurd existence.

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