REASONING ABOUT THE IRRATIONAL:

Why bother being nice?: A somewhat limited look at Western thinking on altruism: a review of ON KINDNESS By Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor (Ann Harleman, August 23, 2009, Boston Globe)

Kindness, in today’s thinking, is “either a higher form of selfishness (the kind that is morally triumphant and secretly exploitative), or the lowest form of weakness . . . a virtue of losers.’’ Our suspiciousness of charity, our doubts about the possibility of altruism, our “ghettoization’’ of kindness by relegating it to women, even our sexual hang-ups, according to Phillips and Taylor, are different faces of the same essential error. What makes us want to shunt kindness off to the sidelines? Fear, of course. “The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities. . . . particularly the vulnerability we call desire.’’ Following Winnicott, the authors advocate “a more robust version of kindness.’’ “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.’’ This version of kindness accommodates ambivalence; it makes room for, and thereby transcends, frustration and hatred. It is the poet’s (or the novelist’s) version - Tolstoy, rather than Dr. Phil. In short, it’s human.

In the course of Phillips and Taylor’s discussion, then, the concept of kindness has widened to take in every human emotion. Yet their answer to the question that sparked the discussion is less satisfying than it might have been. For anyone struggling to construct an ethics outside the framework of religion...

That circle can't be squared.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 23, 2009 6:54 AM