On Kindness by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
128 pp., $20
More than 300 years after its publication, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and its grim vision of humankind seem still to haunt the Western imagination.
Hobbes insisted that human beings were not naturally kind or sociable, but competitive, cruel, selfish, and suspicious--driven only by the need to gratify private desires, and incapable of social life. The Hobbesian human being did not desire companionship, but feared his fellow creatures as threats to his life, property, and happiness; his life was lived in isolation and in fear of violence. As the oft-repeated lines from Leviathan put it, the life of man in the state of nature must be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short," a perpetual war "of every man, against every man."
Hobbes's portrait of the species is not flattering or comforting, to say the least; and most of the 17th- and 18th-century philosophers of human nature who wrote in his wake repudiated his ideas. The major theorists of the Enlightenment--Hume, Smith, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and others--insisted that more benevolent qualities like sociability and sympathy were the foundation of human nature and the basis of civilization. But Hobbes's vision endured.
According to the authors of On Kindness, a new book that is part theory of human nature and part intellectual history, Hobbes's unattractive portrait of humankind lingers even now in our collective consciousness, asking us to think the worst of ourselves. If we are not the brutal, lonely creatures that Hobbes supposed us, Barbara Taylor and Adam Phillips contend, we still think we are: We are still enthralled by Hobbes's misguided yet powerful notion "that we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other," a conviction that makes us fail to see that "the kind life--the life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others--is the life we are more inclined to live."
Taylor and Phillips argue that, instead of gratifying ourselves and others by embracing the kind life, we are wary of kindness and neurotic about it. We either deify those we identify as kind, or suspect that they are hypocrites and losers:
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). Nonetheless we have become phobic of kindness in our societies, avoiding obvious acts of kindness and producing, as we do with phobias, endless rationalizations to justify our avoidance.
So the openly kind become saints, freaks, and failures, while the rest of us anxiously avoid each other, even as we yearn for the shared pleasures of compassion and connectedness.
While there is a certain ring of truth in the deification/suspicion dyad that Taylor and Phillips offer in their account of general perceptions of public icons of kindness, their case for our being in the midst of a pandemic fear of kindness feels a bit thin.
Who are "the enemies of kindness" they fleetingly mention? And what, exactly, are the manifestations of the "contemporary terror" of kindness? Was there some golden age of human kindness against which contemporary societies fail to measure up? In a rather glib passage toward the end of this very brief book, it seems that perhaps capitalism--"no system for the kindhearted"--might be chief among the shadowy enemies of kindness, but the case is made anecdotally in a breezy few pages.
Here we get several jabs at Tony Blair for such declarations as "the new welfare state must encourage work and not dependency" while (Taylor and Phillips tell us vaguely) "a plague of cost-cutting managers chomped away at Britain's social services." All of a sudden, a book that had been a call to the kind life and an intellectual history of theories of personal kindness becomes, for a moment, a flimsy account of the decay of institutional kindness (welfare benefits, social security measures).
A substantial case might be made against capitalism as an enemy of kindness, but it is not made in On Kindness. Indeed, in making its slapdash capitalism-killed-kindness argument, this volume becomes that occasionally charming, but always intellectually compromising, Malcolm Gladwellian thing: a cultural critique based on a smattering of anecdotes and selected statistics.
The book's moonlighting as a slipshod cultural critique is symptomatic of a larger identity crisis: Taylor and Phillips seem generally confused (or perhaps at odds as coauthors) about what they meant their book to be, and it feels fractured and unstable throughout. In spite of its brevity, On Kindness manages to contain a disorienting hodgepodge of pieces of many books it might have been. The introduction promises that it will explain the epidemic of unkindness in which we now live, what living a kind life means, and why the kind life is the best life. But this is not what the book ultimately does.
What the "kind life" would mean in concrete, day-to-day terms is never explained. Instead, we get breezy forays into what kindness means in terms of government policy, and manifesto-worthy (but vague) condemnations of our era of unkindness, as well as an intellectual history of Western theories of kindness from the Stoics through the 19th century. There is a psychoanalytic account of human nature--including though by no means limited to Freudian ideas about our capacity for kindness--and a final section that adds Darwin, the Transcendentalists, Florence Nightingale, and assorted others as advocates of the "kind life," while identifying most major British and American political leaders of the past several decades as enemies of kindness.
In the midst of this bewildering assemblage, the intellectual history ("A Short History of Kindness") alone is worth reading. It offers a brisk, lucid narrative of the major theories of human nature, beginning with the Stoics. By far the most interesting part of this piece, and On Kindness as a whole, is the idea that post-Augustinian Christianity became too focused on man's sinfulness, and that in its obsession with human moral frailty, it discredited and damaged human beings' sense of themselves and their capacity for benevolence in ways that are with us still. Augustine insisted on kindness as the duty of man only; in this, claim Phillips and Taylor, he failed to understand that kindness could also be a pleasure and a spontaneous human response to the needs of others. Luther, Calvin, and Hobbes went further in this misapprehension, insisting even more ardently on the innate viciousness of human beings.
The pagan Stoics of the classical world had understood that the individual's happiness and even his selfhood depended upon others--on friendship achieved through kindness--and the "Enlightenment pagans" David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Shaftesbury, and Rousseau revived this line of Stoic thought in the 18th century: "People were kind," these advocates of natural human kindness argued, "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."
Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, for example, contended that we are innately sympathetic and that we instinctively imagine ourselves in the positions of others. Through this spontaneous sympathetic imagining, we feel what others feel (if to a lesser degree) and decide whether we approve or disapprove of their actions. Our sense of right and wrong is a product of our fellow feeling and we are, on Smith's model, deeply vulnerable to the sufferings and joys of others.
The rise of such benevolent theories of human nature had concrete social manifestations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries--not only a vogue for "moral weeping" and sentimental dramas, but reform movements committed to ending slavery, child labor, and cruelty to animals. In such movements, On Kindness suggests, one sees the real social power of believing in human benevolence and compassion.
But with the collapse of the French Revolution into violence and chaos--a Revolution whose leaders had built their principles of universal brotherhood and equality on Rousseau's theories of innate human sympathy and compassion--kindness, once again, lost its centrality in discussions of human nature and society:
Kindness was steadily downgraded from a universal imperative to the prerogative of specific social constituencies: Romantic poets, clergymen, charity workers, and--above all--women. . . . By the end of the Victorian period, kindness had been largely feminized, ghettoized into a womanly sphere of feeling and behavior where it has remained, with some notable exceptions, ever since.
Unfortunately, we do not hear much about these exceptions (Dickens's novels, the political writings of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle), and so ends the interesting and coherent part of On Kindness.
What this intellectual history begins to suggest is that our conceptions of ourselves as a species can have tremendous social and political power. Reimagining how we work as moral beings, and whether we are benevolent or vicious, is not merely a sterile academic exercise but a potentially powerful means of changing how our social and political worlds work. Sadly, On Kindness is no such theory: Its authors betray their subject, as they insist our culture betrays it. They abandon their subject, the power of kindness to give pleasure as it creates connections between people, for muddled asides into Freudian theory and hasty accusations. t
Emily Colette Wilkinson is a writer in Pasadena.