The American conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, speaking on the Sam Harris podcast (# 296), said he would to see people taught gratitude rather than having the sense of resentment and entitlement we see currently. Goldberg was talking in the American context, but the point has obvious relevance elsewhere, including the UK.
I write not without sympathy for Goldberg, but feel duty bound to raise questions about pushing gratitude, especially in any public context. As Goldberg would recognise, gratitude for living in a (relatively) good society fits quite happily with seeking futher improvement and reform. What is incompatible with such gratitude is revolution and missionary fervour. For all that violent revolutions are likely to be destructive and lead to tyranny that exclusion connects to the deep problem that gratitude is anti-dramatic. In a dramatic story gratitude fits at the end, when the action and conflict are finished. For a society or political system reconciling with drama leads to the dangerous game of dramatising (say) a heroic past, which readily leads to making enemies in the present and myopic fixation on the past.
This is not the only reason why gratitude is most often easier in interpersonal relations than in a public arena where people do not know the actors personally, but merely see an image of them. It only takes a few instances of absurdity like Norwich city council closing a bicycle rack to turn a healthy expression of gratitude in the Queen's funeral to something farcical. False expressions of gratitude readily play a part in unctious insincerity.
A still darker way gratitude may be shifted into something else is the relation which can emerge with resignation or despair. We may indeed be grateful that so far nuclear weapons have not been used in the Ukraine war. But there is a short step from that to despairing acceptance of brutality mixed with raw terror of annihilation.
None of this is what Goldberg would wish, but - not for the first time - I echo that old warning: 'Be careful what you wish for'.