On Kindness

On Kindness

by

Completed: January 1, 2020
★★★

Please see my page on Adam Phillips for more. Some quotes below:

Kindness…is the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself.

Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.

…being too sympathetic…either endangers our lives or is against our nature. And in its more insidious versions we have come to suspect that the whole notion of kindness is a cover story - indeed, our most subtly self-deceiving cover story - for an ingeniously ruthless self-interest.

Ordinary kindness is not a manipulative bribe or a magical cure, but a simple exchange. In a parent-child relationship where no one is looking to the other to rescue him, each can enjoy the other without needing to transform him. The modern child is perceived as someone who is always running the risk of having to become a parent to her parents; someone whose concern for her parents’ well-being can be the very thing that waylays her developmental needs…. It is as if now parents are more dependent on their children than children are on their parents; that what we are left with after two hundred years of the intensive study of children is a world in which parents are frightened of their children, of their vulnerability, their neediness, their frustration, and their rage - and in which parents look to their children for so-called self-esteem, to give their lives point and purpose.

Indeed, the experience of sexual jealousy - the ambivalence that explodes out of it - invites us to ask our question the other way round: 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, which begins most urgently in childhood…. We are at our most merciless, to ourselves and to others, when we are sexually jealous…. The horror of it, in other words, is not only the loss of the loved person, it is the loss of the individual’s capacity for kindness. The origins of self-hatred are often to be found in failures of kindness.

Those who love without hating cannot be believed in, cannot be trusted. Kindness entails the acknowledgement of hatred. It is kind to see people as they are and not as one would like them to be.

If there is a kindness instinct, it is going to have to take onboard ambivalence in human relations. It is kind to be able to bear conflict, in oneself and others; it is kind, to oneself and others, to forgo magic and sentimentality for reality. It is kind to see individuals as they are, rather than how we might want them to be; it is kind to care for people just as we find them.

“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 imaginatively identify 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…. We depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very being.
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Modern Western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness…. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.
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But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of Western history this has been widely acknowledged…. “Individualism” is a very recent phenomenon.

The ironies are not subtle ones. Capitalism is no system for the kindhearted. Even its devotees acknowledge this while insisting that, however tawdry capitalist motives may be, the results are socially beneficial. Untrammeled free enterprise generates wealth and happiness for all. Like all utopian faiths, this is largely delusory. Free markets erode the societies that harbour them.

All book cover images are from Goodreads unless specified otherwise.

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