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- Author: Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor
- Full Title: On Kindness
- Category: #books
- Kindness—that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself—
- 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 it is makes it easier to avoid. We usually know what the kind thing to do is—and kindness when it is done to us, and register its absence 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. We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us. 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.
- What is new perhaps is how easily people today are persuaded not to take kindness too seriously. How has something so integral and essential to ourselves become so incidental, so implausible to us?
- Bearing other people’s vulnerability—which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, to yank people out of it—entails being able to bear one’s own.
- The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities
- real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences.
- Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.
- Kindness was man’s duty but also his joy: “No one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purposes. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.”
- Stoics were famously self-reliant, but the self on which a Stoic relied was not singular but communal.
- “A man’s true delight,” Marcus Aurelius counseled, “is to do the things he was made for. He was made to show goodwill to his kind.”
- This joyous element in pro-kindness thought was suppressed by post-Augustinian Christianity. Kindness became linked, disastrously, to self-sacrifice, which made it a sitting duck for philosophical egoists such as Thomas Hobbes, who could easily demonstrate that self-sacrifice was rarely practiced, even by its most ardent proponents. Pagan kindness, by contrast, had no truck with self-sacrifice.
- People were kind not because they were told to be but because it made them feel fully human. To “love one another” was a joyous expression of one’s humanity, not a Christian duty.
- Only the man who displayed reason and fitness for civilized society—which in turn required wealth and standing—was regarded as fully human.
- The development of Christianity from a Jewish sect into a universalist faith was marked by a strong assertion of kindly values. Adopting the Greek word for love, agape, Christian teachers described it as a divine love that, flowing from heaven into the human soul, irradiated the soul with caritas. To “love thy neighbor as thyself” was the great moral law.
- the parable of the Good Samaritan became, as it remains, the emblematic account of Christian kindness, of sympathies that overleap ethnic barriers and sectarian divisions to turn all people into friends and neighbors.
- a theme that reached a pinnacle in the writings of St. Augustine, who in his City of God (A.D. 426) argued for a “Holy charity” to encompass “the whole world,” pagans and sinners as well as God’s faithful: “A man’s friends are [all] with whom [he] is joined by membership of the human society.”
- The paradox of an increasingly hierarchical Church preaching universal brotherhood was not lost on low-ranking members of the faith.
- dream. In 1649 the Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley, after being attacked and driven from his home, lamented the “selfish imaginations” of power-hungry men who sought “to teach and rule over” their fellows.
- The Good Samaritan parable strongly implied that kindness was a natural human disposition, and some early Christian thinkers endorsed this. But the claim was vehemently denied by St. Augustine and other Church Fathers who insisted that caritas emanated from God alone; that without God man had no kindness nor any other innate virtue.
- Note: There must be an out, right? Kindness and other innate virtues certainly exist in nonbelievers, so presumably God emanates those through them as well (and believers exhibit it imperfectly, if at all) … which makes it a distinction without a difference.
- the hatred of present-day right-wing Protestants for “liberals” and “secularists” has a very long pedigree with little kindness in it.
- The Protestant Reformation demoted kindness from its foremost place in Christian moral self-understanding. Protestant caritas, with some notable exceptions, was institutionalized and limited—charity in its modern sense.
- Prophets of the commercial system, such as the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, approved individual pleasure-seeking while denying that it generated social conflict.
- Benevolence—the Enlightenment buzzword for kindness and all its cognates—was a primitive instinct, the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson wrote, against whose delights the pleasures of self-love paled by comparison. “To be kind is the greatest measure of human happiness.”
- “Sympathy” today means pity or compassion, but for all of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century it was a much larger concept, referring to a mutual sharing of feelings among people—literally, “fellow feeling.”
- Note: Which is meant today by “empathy”?
- The sympathetic self was an expansive self, one for whom the happiness of others was the sine qua non of its own well-being. Sympathy was a touchstone of humanity;
- “altruism,” a term first coined in the 1850s by the French philosopher Auguste Comte,
- Kindness at the end of the nineteenth century meant self-denial, an ethos highly vulnerable to the dominant egoism of the age—especially as pleasure itself became increasingly egoistical.
- Either the natural kindness between mothers and children is a bad and misleading way of preparing the child for reality, or we should be working to make the reality of the social world more like a good family. Why are mothers and children often kinder to each other than to anyone else? How does this happen, and can anything be done to the social order to avert it?
- aggression itself can be a form of kindness; that when aggression isn’t envious rage or the revenge born of humiliation, it contains the wish for a more intimate exchange, a profounder, more unsettling kindness between people. In short, psychoanalysis makes sentimentality and nostalgia, not hatred, the enemies of kindness.
- It is now generally assumed that people are basically selfish and that fellow feeling is either a weakness or a luxury or a more sophisticated form of selfishness.
- as if kindness itself, and all that it entails, is a developmental achievement. In short, only an adult, who has learned to bear frustration, is capable of putting the needs of someone else before her own. The once-celebrated kindness of the child today tends to be ignored, sentimentalized, or pathologized. Fellow feeling does not come, as we say, naturally.
- Fellow feeling is good as long as we don’t have too much of it and recognize that it isn’t really fellow feeling at all. Religious people may still attach great significance to it, but among the secular-minded the case for kindness tends to be made only skeptically, with a knowing wink about the realities of human egoism.
- Perceived as a duty, kindness seems to be something we don’t bother with unless we’re coerced. We are kind out of fear of being punished if we aren’t kind. Whereas kindness as a desire, as something integral to what desiring is, is irresistible. Ordered to be kind, we are likely to be cruel; wanting to be kind, we are likely to discover our generosity.
- by refusing the extortion of kindness, we allow it as a pleasure.
- we feel for more people than we desire—sexuality hives us off. Fellow feeling joins us to various and diverse other people. Kindness is extravagant.
- But it is only in the modern era that the child’s tenderness, the child’s natural kindness, has been so much under suspicion.
- the modern obsession with child-rearing may be no more and no less than an obsession about the possibility of kindness in a society that makes it harder and harder to believe in kindness. Talking about child development and about parenting may be one of the only ways we have now of talking about fellow feeling.
- Our lives, from the beginning, depend upon kindness, and it is for this reason, as we shall see, that it terrorizes us.
- The modern child is perceived as someone who can lose the necessary momentum of development if she has too much fellow feeling for her parents.
- It is only if the parents consent to being treated callously—that is, without concern for their own needs—that the child can be the entrepreneur of her own growth.
- A society that romanticizes kindness, that regards it as a virtue so difficult to sustain that only the magically good can manage it, destroys people’s faith in real or ordinary kindness. Supposed to make everything happy and right, magical kindness cannot deliver the realistic care and reassurance that people actually need. Magical kindness is a false promise.
- parents and children are unable to collaborate with each other in the ordinary business of growing up. Committed to magical kindness—to the avoidance of frustration at all costs—parents can only fail.
- Whatever else it is, psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other.
- Why are we ever unkind? And one answer would be, to secure, insofar as it is possible, our emotional (psychic) survival. The fundamental threat to our survival is, for want of a better way of putting it, loss of love, the threatened or actual loss of what our lives depend upon,