Random facts of kindness

• Last Updated: February 27. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 27. 2009 5:30AM GMT

A child labourer picks cotton in a supposedly kinder age: Phillips and Taylor argue that kindness is in crisis, but citizens in developed nations generally take better care of each other today than a century ago; it is much kinder to ask children to take too many tests than to force them to work too many hours in a cotton field. Corbis

Were people more casually benevolent to each other in the old days? Caleb Crain reads a new book on the history and psychology of kindness, but finds mean reasoning behind its alarm over our callous age.

On Kindness
Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
Hamish Hamilton
Dh80

Kindness is in danger, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor claim in a new book on the subject. It “has become our forbidden pleasure,” they write, and today “there is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of.” Children are at risk of growing up amid the “cultural disaster” of widespread disbelief in its existence. To investigate, Phillips and Taylor have written a portmanteau of a book: half history, half psychology. First they describe how the idea of kindness has changed in European culture across the centuries; then they analyse the perils the impulse is subject to in the developing human mind.

The history is comprehensively researched and elegantly written. Phillips and Taylor trace kindness back to the joy that Roman thinkers such as Seneca and Cicero believed was to be found in friendship and even in generosity toward relative strangers – a joy that was a good in itself, distinct from any benefit that might come to the do-gooder when his favours were returned or his reputation in the community improved. Kindness stumbled in the Christian era, Phillips and Taylor write, when thinkers like Augustine attached to it the idea of self-sacrifice, and it descended from a refined pleasure to a mere duty. Whereas pagans had thought kindness a natural feeling, Christians believed God alone could bestow it.

By the time the English materialist Thomas Hobbes published his treatise Leviathan in 1651, kindness felt so distant from ordinary life that it seemed reasonable to claim that people would treat one another like brutes unless restrained by laws and the threat of force. During the Enlightenment, a group of Scottish philosophers, including David Hume and Adam Smith, tried to return to the ancient idea that humans were naturally social. They celebrated sympathy, the capacity to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others, as a force that gave the social world a gentler texture and much of its meaning. In France, meanwhile, the philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested that pitié (pity) was easier to find in children and savages than among the civilised. To restore to people their natural compassion, Rousseau claimed, children would have to be educated in a new way, so as to protect and cultivate their natural sense of pity. Envy and fear turned pity rancid in most cases, he wrote, but if confidence and a capacity for enjoyment were nurtured, perhaps people would become strong enough to resist the corrosive effects of social inequality and rivalry – and manage to live in harmony.

Such a dream seemed briefly possible during the French Revolution, but the revolution redressed inequality with violence rather than education, and then the violence metastasised into the Terror. In the 19th century, as Europe and America industrialised, individuals retreated into their shells, isolated by the capitalist ideology of competition, and kindness once again subsided from a pleasure to a duty. Kindness, in the form of charity, tried to bridge growing socioeconomic inequities, but sceptics considered charity to be little more than a way for the rich, particularly rich women, to relieve their guilt and to mask the pleasure of bullying the poor about their bad habits. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, care of the sick and support of the poor were professionalised and bureaucratised, a process that afforded the poor more dignity but rendered irrelevant whatever feelings may once have linked donors and recipients.

This is not a new story, but Phillips and Taylor tell it succinctly and gracefully – though it bears repeating that their account is limited to the European tradition.

The book’s premise of a kindness crisis, meanwhile, invites scepticism. Phillips and Taylor tell a few newspaper anecdotes about children stressed out by standardised tests and about nurses cynically ordered to smile, and they point to Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to curtail state-run welfare in Britain and Ronald Reagan’s similar programme in America. But this evidence hardly proves the case. Despite some setbacks, citizens in developed nations take much better care of one another today than a century ago. It is much kinder to ask children to take too many tests than to force them to work too many hours in a textile factory. Nor do Phillips and Taylor report that people have become any less willing to cat-sit for neighbours or tell white lies about their lovers’ new haircuts, though one can imagine clever sociologists devising a way to collect such data. Phillips and Taylor’s standard of proof seem to be that of the author of a sermon or an op-ed; a touch of alarmism has been manufactured in order to justify addressing a perennial concern.

There is, however, an even deeper problem than lack of evidence: kindness might not be the sort of thing that leaves evidence behind at all. It isn’t obvious, for example, that people are kinder in societies where citizens are well-treated. They might feel kindness more readily when people around them are suffering. Then there’s the gap between kindness intended and kindness administered. You might think it’s kind of you to tell me about a job opening, but I might feel oppressed by your sense that you know what I should do with my life. You may insist, in your defence, that you meant to be kind. But I might answer that you can’t be sure what you meant – that your motives may have been hidden from you. It turns out to be difficult to talk about kindness without a theory of the human mind.

Psychoanalysis offers one such theory, and Phillips and Taylor turn to it in their book’s second half. In these chapters, Cicero’s and Rousseau’s ideas about friendship and sympathy are simply set aside; for the most part, the only concepts considered are those of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Donald W Winnicott, a mid-20th-century British analyst who focused on the mother-child bond.

The transition is abrupt and a little jarring, but Freud wasn’t much interested in conscious acts of imaginative connection of the sort praised by Rousseau and his Scottish counterparts. In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud called the commandment to “love thy neighbour as thyself” not only wrong but unjust, and he once recommended that an psychoanalyst should take as a model the emotional coldness of a surgeon and put “aside all his own feelings, including that of human sympathy.” He preferred to investigate the connections that people made with others under internal compulsion, sometimes without their own knowledge, and he believed that such identifications were caused by sexual frustration and by attempts to hold on to lost love or to an idea about oneself that had proved untrue. In psychoanalytic writings, kindness is often seen as part of a misleading, superficial layer of emotions, to be sloughed off in the search for crueler truths. Somewhat paradoxically, Phillips and Taylor seem to hope that they will rescue kindness by debunking it. Once the reader learns how ambiguous and limited kindness really is, they seem to believe, she will prize it all the more, thanks to her better understanding.

There are two intellectual dangers here. First, Phillips and Taylor may be trying to eat their cake and have it, too. Freud saw people as animals who have agreed to be uncomfortable with their animal nature in order to create a superstructure called culture. Kindness belongs to culture, though it may draw on energies and attitudes from our animal nature. Will you really see kindness better once you’ve seen through it?

Second, psychoanalysis uses a restricted set of carefully defined concepts, and “kindness” is not among them. In order to write about kindness in a psychoanalytic way, therefore, Phillips and Taylor have to translate it. They try out a number of analogies. For example, kindness might correspond to attachment, the bonding that occurs between mother and infant when they are healthy, or it might correspond to compliance, which occurs when a child has to mould his personality to meet a needy parent’s wishes. Sometimes Phillips and Taylor suggest that kindness is no more than the shadow of a child’s narcissism – of the magical omnipotence he feels before he has learned to distinguish himself from his mother. Or they suggest it’s a shadow of a child’s efforts at reparation – his attempts to make it up to his mother for his own hungry attacks on her. At one point they even flirt with the idea that sexuality might be “Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’” (though in a historical chapter, while discussing Rousseau, they note that “desiring people, especially for sex, is very often inimical to kindness”).

Bonding, compliance, narcissism, reparation, and libido are very different concepts, all related in some way to kindness. But none is precisely equivalent to it. Once kindness has been translated into psychoanalytic terms, are we still talking about kindness?

As a writer, Phillips has made it his career to translate Freud’s ideas out of psychoanalytic jargon and into a more essayistic register. When he succeeds, especially when he turns his attention to literature, he does so brilliantly. As I read the psychoanalytic chapters of On Kindness, however, I began to wonder about the project of such translation. I found myself worrying whether enough had been preserved – whether nuances of Freud’s or Winnicott’s thought might have been inadvertently dropped. And I also found myself wondering whether enough had been lost: Why was I reading an exercise in translation at all? Freud and Winnicott are both very readable, and it’s a shame for new books to pass up the opportunity to say something new. Perhaps, in giving up an established specialist vocabulary for an everyday one, one risks losing, or at least delaying, the ability to move a conversation forward.

Something is lost in translation, for example, when Phillips and Taylor parse Freud’s 1912 essay On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love. Freud wasn’t concerned with kindness when he wrote it; he was trying to figure out why so many of the upper-middle class men he treated had trouble making love to women they respected, such as their wives, but found sexual satisfaction easily with women they didn’t, including servants and prostitutes. Freud posited that love has two currents, one affectionate and one sensual, and that at puberty, if a person’s attempts to explore sensuality outside the home are frustrated, he may fuse some of his sensuality with the affection he still feels for his parents. Because incest is taboo, the fusion becomes unconscious, and it interferes later when he tries to make love with anyone who reminds him of his parents. “Kindness is the way we stop ourselves desiring,” Phillips and Taylor write, but the claim is too sweeping. In Freud’s thinking, holding on to our mothers and fathers is the way we stop ourselves desiring, and kindness is merely a trigger. Thanks to a penchant for apophthegms, Phillips and Taylor reduce a complex dynamic to a flaw mysteriously inherent in kindness itself, and come close to saying that no one ever has sex in a tender mood.

They have better luck with Winnicott. With extremely damaged patients, psychoanalysts sometimes adopt an almost maternal role, and in the 1947 essay Hate in the Countertransference, Winnicott explored the difficulty of maintaining that role. Like children, mentally ill adults can be extremely provoking, and an analyst needs strength and insight to refrain from retaliating. Winnicott insisted that the analyst will not succeed unless she understands her own hate. To suggest the benefit of such an understanding, he told a story about a runaway, “the most loveable and most maddening of children”, who stayed with the Winnicott family during the Second World War. “I never hit,” Winnicott wrote, but he did sometimes lose patience. Whenever he did, he told the boy that “what had happened had made me hate him”. Then he locked the boy outside the front door until the boy rang a bell to be readmitted. In time, the boy’s relationship to the Winnicott family came to be “one of the few stable things in his life”, Winnicott wrote, and Phillips and Taylor quote the insight Winnicott drew from the experience: a child taken into a second home “can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated”. Phillips and Taylor argue that kindness is only real when, like Winnicott’s care for the boy, it holds love and hatred, commonly thought to be immiscible, together in a single emulsion. This goes further than the discussion of Freud’s essay toward explaining people’s shyness about kindness. It suggests that kindness is a pleasure more like growing flowers than picking them, more like playing an instrument than downloading a song. Despite Phillips and Taylor’s claims, it may not be any rarer today than it’s ever been, but it’s easy to see what makes it a minority taste.