Phillips Adam - On kindness

On
Kindness

ADAM PHILLIPS
and
BARBARA TAYLOR

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2009 by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in slightly different form in 2009 by
Hamish Hamilton, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2009

A portion of the chapter A Short History of Kindness
originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Believer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Adam.

On kindness / Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-22650-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-374-22650-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Kindness. I. Taylor, Barbara. II. Title.

BJ1533.K5P45 2009

177.7dc22

2008041267

Designed by Abby Kagan

www.fsgbooks.com

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

On
Kindness

Kindness, or the lack of it, has been getting a lot of press recently. Media gurus lament the selfishness of our times, while newspapers regularly feature stories like the one about a wealthy stockbroker who, at the peak of his career, decided to spend his weekends doing volunteer work with deprived children. He was amazed at his own reaction. Helping kids just makes me so happy, I feel like a different person. His astonishment is echoed in headline reports of studies of what makes people happy, which show kindness registering much higher on the happiness scale than self-focused behavior. A recent report described an experiment carried out by the American psychologist Martin Seligman (author of Authentic Happiness), who recruited a group of university students to test out philanthropy versus fun. Guess which one gave them the bigger kick? the reporter chortled. Ive felt that kick too, every time I buy someone a pint.

Reading these stories, we began to wonder why people today are so surprised by the blindingly obvious. Why do the pleasures of kindness astonish us? And why are stories about kindness often so corny or silly, so trivializing of the things that matter most to most people?

The pleasures of kindness were well known in the past. Kindness was mankinds 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 speciesapparently unlike other species of animalwe are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking, and that our sympathies are forms of self-protection.

This book explains how and why this has come about. It shows how the kind lifethe life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of othersis the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing. People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it. Living according to our sympathies, we imagine, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. We need to know how we have come to believe that the best lives we can lead seem to involve sacrificing the best things about ourselves; and how we have come to believe that there are pleasures greater than kindness. Kindness, we will argue in this booknot sexuality, not violence, not moneyhas become our forbidden pleasure. What is it about our times that makes kindness seem so dangerous?

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 elses shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindnesslike all the greatest human pleasuresare inherently perilous, they are nonetheless some of the most satisfying we possess. How have we come to repudiate them? 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. How do people come to forget about kindness and the deep pleasures it gives to them?

On Kindness seeks to answer this question. Written by a historian and a psychoanalyst, it reveals the cost and, from a historical point of view, the peculiarity of modern attitudes to kindness. For nearly all of human historyup to and beyond David Humes day, the so-called dawn of modernitypeople have perceived themselves as naturally kind. This book shows when and why this confidence evaporated and the consequences of this transformation: how in giving up on kindnessand especially our own acts of kindnesswe deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being. We mutually belong to one another, the philosopher Alan Ryan writes, and the good life is one that reflects this truth. Today this truth has gone underground. Independence and self-reliance are now the great aspirations; mutual belonging is feared and unspoken; it has become one of the great taboos of our society. Why?

To answer this we begin by looking back at ideas about kindness from the classical age onward. Kindnesss original meaning of kinship or sameness has stretched over time to encompass sentiments that today go by a wide variety of namessympathy, generosity, altruism, benevolence, humanity, compassion, pity, empathyand that in the past were known by other terms as well, notably philanthropia (love of mankind) and caritas (neighborly or brotherly love). The precise meanings of these words vary, but fundamentally 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 humanitys desire to connect, from classical celebrations of friendship, to Christian teachings on love and charity, to twentieth-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 a pedigree as long as kindness itself.

For most of Western history the dominant tradition of kindness has been Christianity, which sacralizes peoples generous instincts and makes them the basis of a universalist faith. For centuries, Christian