On Kindness

Not a coffee table book. Not a "be nice" sermon from the land of the bodhisattvas. This book is a rigorous argument, based on the history of European ideas and psychoanalytical doctrine, that we fail to recognize and value intelligently one of life's greatest pleasures: generosity. It goes deep into the the scientific and political sources of our contemporary confusion and unhappiness. The authors explain brilliantly how misunderstanding the paradoxical relation between kindness and hatred contributes to our chronic ambivalence toward other people and hence our inability to choose our actions well. Beautifully written and succinct: the sort of book you finish in an afternoon and will definitely read again.

It's not easy being human. We're complex creatures, possessed of intellect, driven by instinct, bedeviled by emotions. We're necessarily interdependent in a competitive culture that extols self-sufficiency. Extending kindness makes us genuinely happy; being seen extending kindness makes us look self-serving or, worse, weak. We are suspicious of kind acts and the people who commit them. If you were to seek Freud's counsel on all this, he'd say we hate that we love so we idolize what we desire to help rationalize our needs. What a mess. If only Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, authors of a small, elegant book, "On Kindness," could do more than delineate the trouble and track its origins. If only they could point the way to a kinder life for all of us. If only somebody universally respected -- Oprah? -- made this book required reading now, before, say, the next episode of "Survivor." If only capitalism and Goldman Sachs and third-party health insurance administrators and the classroom bully could take a lesson from Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau or even Dickens, as set out so clearly in "On Kindness." If only... But Phillips and Taylor, while clearly proponents of a kind society, do not lobby for change as much as they detail the decline of kind behavior in societies made up of people who find one of the sincerest forms pleasure scorned. They write, "An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity." This image, they say, shows us "deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other." This image we have of ourselves shows our motives to be "utterly self-seeking" and our sympathies suspicious "forms of self-protection." "On Kindness" describes who we are with regard to our generosity of spirit, it explores the gravity of our psychological conflicts and it tracks how we arrived at this uncomfortable, conflicted juncture. The British authors, a psychoanalyst (Phillips) and a historian with expertise in feminism (Taylor), maintain that the kind life is natural. It's a life lived "in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others." This behavior lacks cultural support -- even a common language, it is fraught with negative sanctions and yet it makes us feel good. Kindness has become "our forbidden pleasure." There's a lot to this small book and yet it is highly readable and infinitely fascinating: "Capitalism is no system for the kindhearted." "Parenting in particular is seen by most people today as an island of kindness in a sea of cruelty." "A competitive society, one that divides people into winners and losers, breeds unkindness." "The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise." "Our sweetest existence is relative and collective, and our true self is not entirely within us." (Rousseau) "To what shifts is poor Society reduced in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to man!" (Thomas Carlyle) Our identification