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.
Kindness - 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?
Nothing, many would say. Human beings are innately selfish and that is that. Newspapers bombard us with scientific evidence to back up this pessimism. We read about greedy chimpanzees, selfish genes, ruthless mate-selection strategies, even about meerkats - those famously cooperative creatures - who instead of looking out for their fellows spend most of their time "watching their own backs". Richard Dawkins of "selfish gene" fame lays it on the line: "Human society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we deplore something, this does not stop it being true ..." Yet Dawkins does not despair: "If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish ... Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs."
Although we must accept that nature makes people nasty, "we" - that is, altruistic people like Dawkins who somehow, mysteriously, have escaped their genetic destiny - can none the less set things right. Here we are truly in the realm of magical kindness, akin to the type experienced in infancy, but which now is required to overcome not just ordinary human unhappiness but the realities of human biology. The speciousness of Dawkins's diagnosis of the human predicament is matched by the absurdity of this solution.
Natural altruism too has its scientific defenders. Evolutionary theorists demonstrate the high replicability prospects of kind people's DNA, while neurologists report ramped-up activity in the posterior superior temporal cortices of the brains of altruistic individuals. A host of studies purport to show generous behaviour among animals, especially among ants, whose willingness to sacrifice themselves to the needs of their colonies deeply impresses tabloid journalists. In all these cases, however, the underlying imperative, scientists argue, is the securing of long-term interests, especially species reproduction. From a natural-scientific perspective, kindness is always ultimately "selfish".
Science may be the modern religion, but not everyone trusts its pseudo-certainties, or derives consolation from them. Many people still look to "Christian values" to resupply a sense of human fellowship which, in a secular world, has lost its ethical moorings. But the Christian record on kindness does not inspire confidence (Jonathan Swift's "we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another" still seems apt); nor do most other religions fare much better. The contemporary spiritual scene, with its vituperative slanging matches within and between faiths, makes a depressing sight even for non-believers. The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk writes in passionate defence of the "unique human talent" to "identify with the pain, pleasure, joy, boredom of others", including others whose attitudes one detests ("identifying with someone is not agreeing with them"). But when Pamuk wrote from the viewpoint of radical Islamists (Snow, 2002), he was vilified as a "headscarf professor".
Better, it seems, the cheap certainties of us-versus-them than any disturbing intimations of human fellowship across cultural divides. Hate and alienation today seem to be experienced as more comfortable, more efficient, than fellow feeling. Yet fellow feeling is what people want. Mutual sympathy and kindness remain great desiderata of social existence. As Rousseau, Wordsworth and many since have argued, childhood holds the key. It is often said of small children now that they are naturally cruel, but it is less often said that they are naturally kind, instinctively concerned for the well-being of others, often disturbed by the suffering of others and keen to allay it. Nineteenth-century accounts of the "innocence" of children, distrusted today as overly sentimental, were also an attempt to speak up for children's spontaneous kind-heartedness. Loss of childhood innocence was, among other things, the loss of a more affectionately trusting nature. After Darwin and Freud we have more ways than ever before of describing our suspicions about our more benevolent feelings - and indeed, about children as innocent. But there is a crucial fact worth putting as simply as possible: the easy kindness of childhood, the reflex of engaged concern that children show for others, all too easily gets lost in growing up; and that this loss, when it occurs on a wide enough scale, is a cultural disaster.
The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise. We are kind because it makes us feel good about ourselves: kindly people are self-approbation junkies. Encountering this argument in the 1730s, the philosopher Francis Hutcheson dispatched it briskly: "If this is self-love, be it so ... Nothing can be better than this self-love, nothing more generous." In Emile Rousseau made the same point in greater psychological detail. Emile's kindness, Rousseau shows, is an extension of his amour de soi (natural self-love). Emile "enjoys his pitié" because it expresses his vitality; only the self-caring child who enjoys being alive will "seek to extend his being and enjoyments" to others. Rousseau's portrait of Emile shows very well why it is kindness that is the most envied human attribute. People think that they envy other people for their success, money, fame, when in fact it is kindness that is most envied, because it is the strongest indicator of people's well-being, their pleasure in existence.
So kindness is not just camouflaged egoism. To this old suspicion, modern post-Freudian society has added two more: that kindness is a disguised form of sexuality, and that kindness is a disguised form of aggression - both of which again reduce kindness to a covert selfishness. Insofar as kindness is a sexual act it is seen as a seduction (I am being very nice to you so I can get to have sex and/or babies), or as a defence against the sexual event (I'll be so kind to you that you will forget about sex and we can do something else together), or as a way of repairing the supposed damage done by sex (I'll be nice to you to make up for all my harmful desires). Insofar as kindness is an aggressive act it is seen as a placation (I feel so aggressive towards you that I can only protect both of us by being very kind), or a refuge (my kindness will keep you at arm's length). "One can always, for safety, be kind," as Maggie Verver says to her father in Henry James's The Golden Bowl.
In each of these accounts it is assumed that we are self-protecting, self-gratifying creatures for whom kindness is one of our many strategies to secure our isolated and isolating needs. It is a picture in which our interest in ourselves and others is radically impoverished. Yet still kindness is an experience that, so far at least, we have been unable to give up on. Everything in our contemporary ethos makes kindness sound sometimes useful (that is, effective), but potentially redundant: a vestige from another time, or just part of a religious vocabulary. Yet still we desire it, in some way knowing that kindness - the unromantic kindness, which encourages a feeling of aliveness as compatible with, indeed integral to, a feeling of vulnerability - creates the kind of intimacy, the kind of involvement with other people, that we both fear and crave. That it is kindness, fundamentally, that makes life seem worth living; and that everything that is against kindness is an assault on our hope.
Posted by Shona Lockhart, 5th January 2009
