I wonder if the issue is a sense that kindness makes us vulnerable to being hurt or taken advantage of? Anyway, here's the review/article.
Read the rest of the review.Love thy neighbour
Kindness has gone out of fashion. In the age of the rampant free market and the selfish gene, compassion is seen as either narcissism or weakness. So why have we become so suspicious of one of our most basic - and pleasurable - human qualities, ask Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
- The Guardian, Saturday 3 January 2009
- Article history
St Lawrence distributing alms: fresco by Fra Angelico (1447-1449) Photograph: /Corbis
Kindness was mankind's "greatest delight", the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many people find these pleasures literally incredible, or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know; that as a species - apparently unlike other species of animal - we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking and that our sympathies are forms of self-protectiveness.
On Kindness
by Adam Philips & Barbara Taylor
Hamish Hamilton, £14.99Kindness - not sexuality, not violence, not money - has become our forbidden pleasure. In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else's shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness - like all the greatest human pleasures - are inherently perilous, they are none the less some of the most satisfying we possess.
In 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume, confronted by a school of philosophy that held mankind to be irredeemably selfish, lost patience. Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: "He has forgotten the movements of his heart."
For nearly all of human history - up to and beyond Hume's day, the so-called dawn of modernity - people have perceived themselves as naturally kind. In giving up on kindness - and especially our own acts of kindness - we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being.
Kindness's original meaning of kinship or sameness has stretched over time to encompass sentiments that today go by a wide variety of names - sympathy, generosity, altruism, benevolence, humanity, compassion, pity, empathy - and that in the past were known by other terms as well, notably philanthropia (love of mankind) and caritas (neighbourly or brotherly love). The precise meanings of these words vary, but basically they all denote what the Victorians called "open-heartedness", the sympathetic expansiveness linking self to other. "No less indiscriminate and general than the alienation between people is the desire to breach it," the German critic Theodor Adorno once wrote, suggesting that even though our alienation, our distance from other people, may make us feel safe it also makes us sorry, as though loneliness is the inevitable cost of looking after ourselves. History shows us the manifold expressions of humanity's desire to connect, from classical celebrations of friendship, to Christian teachings on love and charity, to 20th-century philosophies of social welfare. It also shows us the degree of human alienation, how our capacity to care for each other is inhibited by fears and rivalries with pedigrees as long as kindness itself.
For most of western history the dominant tradition of kindness has been Christianity, which sacralises people's generous instincts and makes them the basis of a universalist faith. For centuries, Christian caritas functioned as a cultural cement, binding individuals into society. But from the 16th century the Christian rule "love thy neighbour as thyself" came under increasing attack from competitive individualism. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) - the ur-text of the new individualism - dismissed Christian kindness as a psychological absurdity. Men, Hobbes insisted, were selfish beasts who cared for nothing but their own well-being; human existence was a "warre of alle against alle". His arguments were slow to gain ground, but by the end of the 18th century - despite the best efforts of Hume and others - they were becoming orthodoxy. Two centuries later it seems we are all Hobbesians, convinced that self-interest is our ruling principle. (The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction "love thy neighbour as thyself" must be ironic because people hate themselves.) Kindly behaviour is looked upon with suspicion; public espousals of kindness are dismissed as moralistic and sentimental. Kindness is seen either as a cover story or as a failure of nerve. Popular icons of kindness - Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa - are either worshipped as saints or gleefully unmasked as self-serving hypocrites. Prioritising the needs of others may be praiseworthy, we think, but it is certainly not normal.
Today it is only between parents and children that kindness is expected, sanctioned and indeed obligatory. Kindness - that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself - has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality). No one yet says parents should stop being kind to their children. None the less, we have become phobic of kindness in our societies, avoiding obvious acts of kindness and producing, as we do with phobias, endless rationalisations to justify our avoidance.
All compassion is self-pity, DH Lawrence remarked, and this usefully formulates the widespread modern suspicion of kindness: that it is either a higher form of selfishness (the kind that is morally triumphant and secretly exploitative) or the lowest form of weakness (kindness is the way the weak control the strong, the kind are kind only because they haven't got the guts to be anything else). If we think of humans as essentially competitive, and therefore triumphalist by inclination, as we are encouraged to do, then kindness looks distinctly old-fashioned, indeed nostalgic, a vestige from a time when we could recognise ourselves in each other, and feel sympathetic because of our kindness - if such a time ever existed. And what, after all, can kindness help us win, except moral approval; or possibly not even that, in a society where "respect" for personal status has become a leading value.
Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers. But agreeing to talk about winners and losers is part and parcel of the phobic avoidance, the contemporary terror, of kindness. Because one of the things the enemies of kindness never ask themselves - and this is now an enemy within all of us - is why we feel it at all. Why are we ever, in any way, moved to be kind to other people, not to mention to ourselves? Why does kindness matter to us? It is, perhaps, one of the distinctive things about kindness - unlike an abstract moral ideal such as justice - that in the end we know exactly what it is, in most everyday situations; and yet our knowing what the kind act is makes it easier to avoid. We usually know what the kind thing to do is - and when a kindness is done to us, and when it is not. We usually have the wherewithal to do it (kindness is not an expert skill); and it gives us pleasure. And yet we are extremely disturbed by it. There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.
"A sign of health in the mind", Donald Winnicott wrote in 1970, "is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us." To live well, we must be able to identify imaginatively with other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring about others, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, is what makes us fully human. We depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very being. The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic.
Modern western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness. Only small children, the sick and the very elderly are permitted dependence on others; for everyone else, self-sufficiency and autonomy are cardinal virtues. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. The ideal lover or spouse is a freewheeling agent for whom the giving and taking of love is a disposable lifestyle option; neediness, even in this arena of intense desires and longings, is ultimately contemptible.
But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of western history this has been widely acknowledged. Even the Stoics - those avatars of self-reliance - recognised man's innate need for other people as purveyors and objects of kindness. "Individualism" is a very recent phenomenon. The Enlightenment, generally perceived as the origin of western individualism, promoted "social affections" against "private interests". Victorianism, individualism's so-called golden age, witnessed a fierce clash between champions and critics of commercial individualism. In the early 1880s the historian and Christian activist Arnold Toynbee, in a series of lectures to working men on the English industrial revolution, tore into the egoistic vision of man preached by prophets of free-enterprise capitalism. The "world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection" envisaged by free marketeers was "less real than the island of Lilliput", Toynbee snorted. American transcendentalists of the same period attacked the spirit of "selfish competition", and established communities of "brotherly cooperation". Even Charles Darwin, that darling of modern individualists, strongly rejected the view of mankind as primarily selfish, arguing for the existence of other-regarding instincts as powerful as self-regarding ones. Sympathy and cooperation were innate to man, Darwin argued in the The Descent of Man (1871), and a key factor behind humanity's evolutionary success.
Darwin championed kindness on scientific rather than religious grounds. For most Victorians, however, Christian caritas remained the epitome of kindness. Serving God meant serving one's fellows, through the vast array of philanthropic agencies sponsored by the churches. Secular individuals and organisations absorbed this ethos, with professional bodies emphasising the altruistic motives of their members while politicians paraded their public-spiritedness. In Britain, self-sacrifice and social duty became keynotes of the "imperial mission", attracting hordes of high-minded men and women prepared to shoulder the "white man's burden". Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, an army of philanthropists descended on poor Americans, determined to elevate their morals while alleviating their hardships. Power suffused with kindly purpose became a militant practical force, moulding social relations domestically and globally.
Today Victorian kindness is condemned for its moral self-righteousness, its class biases, its racial-imperial mentality. Nietzsche's sneer at 19th-century philanthropists as persons of "bad conscience" is widely endorsed. Nor did these good Samaritans lack critics at the time - from Oscar Wilde, with his well-publicised loathing of the "sickly cant of Duty", to radicals and socialists determined to replace charity with justice, elite kindness with universal rights. The horrors of the first world war exposed the hollowness of imperial-sacrificial rhetoric, while the erosion of traditional social hierarchies following the war undermined the service ideal. Women who had long touted self-forgetfulness and dedication to others as "female duty" began to contemplate the benefits of equality instead. Perhaps women were not always bound to care for others more than themselves? "Poor-peopling", as Florence Nightingale dubbed women's philanthropic labours in slum neighbourhoods, began to fall from fashion, and many welcomed its passing, looking instead to trade unions and government to eradicate poverty rather than softening it. By the early 20th century, "good works" had lost their moral glow.
Kindness aligned to power degenerates easily into moralistic bullying - as many recipients of present-day welfare services know to their cost. William Beveridge, the architect of the British welfare state, was acutely aware of this danger. Entering public life in the twilight years of Victorian philanthropy, Beveridge repudiated what he described as the "doing things for other people" spirit of organised charity, announcing his intention to approach social problems scientifically rather than sentimentally. "I utterly distrust the saving power of culture and missions and isolated good feelings ..." All human action was ultimately selfish, he declared. However, this was not a viewpoint that Beveridge - passionately committed to the relief of suffering - could maintain for long. His 1942 report, laying out the principles of cradle-to-grave welfare provision, was hailed by admirers as "practical benevolence". He began political life as a Liberal, and ended it as a socialist committed to the altruistic values he had earlier dismissed, eulogising the "spirit of social conscience" as the foundation stone of a good society. "The happiness or unhappiness of the society in which we live depends upon ourselves as citizens."
The kindness that Beveridge favoured was determinedly modern and demotic, caritas without the condescending coerciveness of Victorian philanthropy. For his friend and brother-in-law, the Christian socialist Richard Tawney, kindness of this order required equality. Inequalities - of wealth, privilege, opportunity - were inimical to fellow feeling. The "religion of inequality" worshipped in Britain, Tawney wrote in 1931, "vulgarised" and "depressed" all human relations. His sentiments strongly influenced the labour movement, undermining free-market ideology and bolstering support for welfare principles.
The present-day NHS is in many respects an archaism, a dinosaur of public altruism that stubbornly refuses to lie down and die. Strenuous attempts by succeeding governments to commercialise it have done much damage, yet the caring ethos survives, testimony to what Richard Titmuss, one of the NHS's most influential champions, described as the universal human impulse to "help strangers". Why should anyone care whether a person entirely unknown to them gets the healthcare he or she needs? On the Hobbesian model of human nature this makes no sense at all; yet the evidence that people do care, Titmuss believed, is overwhelming.
Margaret Thatcher's 1979 electoral victory marked the defeat in Britain of the Beveridge/Tawney/Titmuss vision of a kindly society, while the rise of Reaganism in 80s America saw a similar erosion of welfare values there. Kindness was downgraded into a minority motivation, suitable only for parents (especially mothers), "care professionals" and assorted sandal-wearing do-gooders. The "caring, sharing" 90s proclaimed a return to community values, but this proved to be rhetorical flimflam as Thatcher and Reagan's children came of age, steeped in free-market ideology and with barely a folk memory of the mid-century welfare vision. With the 1997 triumph of New Labour in Britain, and George W Bush's election to the American presidency in 2000, competitive individualism became the ruling consensus. The taboo surrounding "dependency" became even stronger, as politicians, employers and a motley array of well-fed moralists harangued the poor and vulnerable on the virtues of self-reliance. Tony Blair called for "compassion with a hard edge" to replace the softening variety advocated by his predecessors. "The new welfare state must encourage work, not dependency," he declared, as a plague of cost-cutting managers chomped away at Britain's social services.
Capitalism is no system for the kind-hearted. Even its devotees acknowledge this while insisting that, however tawdry capitalist motives may be, the results are socially beneficial. Untrammelled free enterprise generates wealth and happiness for all. Like all utopian faiths, this is largely delusory. Free markets erode the societies that harbour them. The great paradox of modern capitalism, the ex-Thatcherite John Gray has pointed out (False Dawn, 1998), is that it undermines the very social institutions on which it once relied - family, career, community. For increasing numbers of Britons and Americans, the "enterprise culture" means a life of overwork, anxiety and isolation. Competition reigns supreme, with even small children forced to compete against each other and falling ill as a result. A competitive society, one that divides people into winners and losers, breeds unkindness. Kindness comes naturally to us, but so too do cruelty and aggression. People placed under unremitting pressure become estranged from each other. Like the bullied child who bullies others in turn, individuals coerced by circumstances become coercers. Sympathies contract as open-heartedness begins to feel too exposed. Paranoia blossoms as people seek scapegoats for their unhappiness. Such scapegoating is a self-betrayal because it involves sacrificing our kindness. But this is a price many pay when tribal loyalties, sometimes vicious in their expression, replace wider communal bonds. A culture of "hardness" and cynicism grows, fed by envious admiration of those who seem to thrive - the rich and famous, our modern priesthood - in this tooth-and-claw environment.
What is to be done?
Having lived in both the UK and the US I've noticed a few differences that touch on kindness. On the whole, individuals on a one-to-one basis are not much different in the two countries. Americans in small towns are more inclined to spontaneously stop their cars to let pedestrians cross the road, while this is unheard of in the UK. In the UK people seem more inclined to invite others into their homes, while Americans often seem to be to busy to do this or it simply doesn't occur to them.
ReplyDeleteFor most Britons hunting animals is barbaric, while far more Americans see nothing wrong in blasting wild animals into non-existence. Not to mention each other -- Americans are something like seven or eight times as likely to murder each other.
The largest difference though is with attitudes to healthcare. To the vast majority of Britons it's axiomatic that if someone is sick then they should be taken care of, and that the cost of healthcare should be shouldered by society as a whole -- those who are more fortunate have a moral duty to take care of those who are less fortunate. While many Americans may share this view, the country as a whole is willing to countenance many tens of thousands of people dying each year because they can't afford access to health care, and literally millions suffering both physically and financially as a result of illness.
I don't think, however, that this makes Britons -- seen individually -- as being (much) morally superior to Americans. The modern Briton has inherited rather than created the National Health Service. Its existence has supported the notion that providing access to health care is a moral obligation of society as a whole. I suspect that if such a system were set up in the US attitudes would similarly change. Few people argue for the abolition of Medicare or Social Security, and those who do find little support. I think this is one case where small political, historical, and social differences (including the prevalence of lobbying in the US) create large differences in social structures, without individual citizens of the two countries being much different from each other.
Interesting comments, Bodhipaksa. I can't speak to Britain nor to Arizona, but in Los Angeles, I very much see a recent loss of kindness as a driving (double entendre intended) principle of human relations. Sure, there are individual acts of kindness every day, but as a society -- on the roads, in our offices, out at the market -- something entirely opposite seems to now be valued.
ReplyDelete"Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers," says the article and I see this all around me. Indeed, I have frequently been told that my commitment to personal ethics has stopped me from so-called "getting ahead." (Not that I find that a worthy goal if it means abandoning all principles.)
It is implicit in every aspect of life around me. People don't stop at stop signs because their own fast progress is more important than the safety of others. I recently watched as hundreds of people drove by an elderly man who had fallen in the street, while only a few bothered to help, bothered to be late to their next appointment and get involved in something uncertain and messy simply because a total stranger's life was at risk. Equally, at work, the advice is given to "never be seen as the nice guy" because you will be taken advantage of mercilessly by those more ambitious and ruthless, if less talented.
We see it even in our national politics -- the wild media excitement over Sarah Palin's "attack-dog" style full of nasty quips, the suggestion that if we don't spy on people and torture people, we'll somehow be "soft" and conquerable in our "naive" niceness.
I suppose regardless, whether you think we Americans are kinder than Brits or not, it's hard to argue against the author's conclusion: "That kindness, fundamentally, makes life seem worth living; and everything that is against kindness is an assault on our hope."
I wouldn't disagree at all with the proposition that there's been a decline in kindness. I remember the shock of the Thatcher era kicking in when I saw selfishness being touted as a beneficial force in society, and felt I'd stepped into an alien world.
ReplyDeleteAny decline in kindness has obviously not been uniform, however. It's no longer acceptable to have "whites only" hotels or restaurants, for example, and it's much more possible to be an "out" gay person without being an outcast (or worse).
Here's hoping that kindness comes back into fashion, however!