SOCIETY: BRIAN DILLONreviews On KindnessBy Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor Hamish Hamilton, 117pp. £14.99
OF THE slack pieties by which we live today, the notion that our relationships can be triaged into “healthy” and “unhealthy” must rank among the most stupid and sinister. Love, hate, jealousy, dependence, longing and regret: all of this and more is smugly pathologised in our search for a way of being together that will not compromise our various, ill-defined “needs”.
Most of all, we fear that we might lose ourselves in the act of being kind to one another, and so hedge our native benevolence round with petitions for autonomy, fulfilment, “respect” and self-expression. In the process, we do not exactly become cruel, but rather franchise out the concept of kindness to an array of ethical contractors – parents and children, spiritual types, certain celebrity paragons – who are bound to let us down. It is not that we no longer value kindness – in fact, we imagine a kind of “magical kindness” in others – but we feel unable to pull off the trick ourselves.
This is, broadly, the argument of On Kindness: a slim but dense volume by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor. If it sounds at first like a reactionary line – the familiar plaint of the media commentariat against modern manners, a simple nostalgia for the moral certainties of yore – this is partly because we have grown so used to hearing the dull voice of duty behind every mention of compassion, community and civic sympathy. On the contrary, assert Phillips and Taylor, kindness is one of humankind’s original pleasures. This was a truth known to Marcus Aurelius, for whom kindness was “the greatest delight”, as to Theodor Adorno, who wrote: “no less indiscriminate and general than the alienation between people is the desire to breach it”.
How then have we arrived – if this is indeed where we are – at our present state of self-absorption and civic anomie? If Phillips’s and Taylor’s “kindness” looks initially like Christian charity, this too is evidence of how much, historically, we have misunderstood the subject. From at least St Augustine onwards, caritas was a matter of overcoming our naturally fallen nature, what Martin Luther called the “wholly spoiled and perverted” character of man. To be kind was an act of will, not of inclination, as it had been for the Greeks. It was this strenuously ascetic version of kindness that Friedrich Nietzsche rejected in On the Genealogy of Morals – it is not kindness as such that Nietzsche considers weak, but this ceding of responsibility to a higher authority that we hope will make us good.
In part, On Kindness is a brisk history of the idea of natural human benevolence: a notion that flourished briefly in the 18th century, before it was trumped by a narrow, resentful, mercantile reading of the human spirit as Darwinian super-species, Freudian ego-monster or (latterly) “selfish gene”. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, kindness was a fact of human nature: we were bound together by sympathy, fellow feeling and (dread word nowadays) pity. Such was the force of this idea of a sensus communis, that it inspired both the French Revolution and a fashion for smiling benevolence among the moneyed and titled. Both historical movements were scorned by the century to come: the Victorians may have made a show of their philanthropy, but according to Phillips and Taylor they also believed that kindness was a merely feminine adornment to unsentimental betterment by exploitation.
On the face of it, the writings of Freud are entirely of a piece with the modern suspicion of kindness. If we truly believe today, as the authors have it, “that people are basically selfish, and that fellow feeling is either a weakness or a luxury, or merely a more sophisticated form of selfishness”, it is surely because we have inherited Freud’s scepticism regarding each other’s motives. Thus, unbidden favours seem “manipulative”, easy compromise a “passive-aggressive” ruse. But psychoanalysis actually reveals a more fundamental (and much more unsettling) truth: by facing the psychic monsters inside ourselves and others, and appraising each other realistically, we have the capacity to be properly kind for the first time. All of this amounts to something more than a manifesto for small acts of thoughtfulness in our daily lives – it suggests a politics of kindness that Phillips and Taylor go some way towards sketching when they cite, for example, the altruistic core (now somewhat decayed) of the UK’s National Health Service.
The stakes are in fact higher than such local issues: “kindness” originally invoked kinship, a fealty to family, class, nation or race. But true kindness, of the rigorous (and pleasurable) sort advocated by Phillips and Taylor, is kindness towards the outsider, the guest, the alien or interloper.
On Kindness is elegantly argued: admirers of Phillips’s devious, paradoxical way with psychoanalytic insights (in such works as On Flirtation or Side Effects) will not be disappointed.
But it is sometimes distracting, in so short a book, to spot the sutures between Phillips’s Freudian reflections and Taylor’s historical narrative. And the thesis can sound parochial: both authors seem to assume too easily that “we” are all as seriously self-obsessed as each other today. It’s to be hoped that either Phillips or Taylor pursues at more generous length, and with a wider geopolitical brief, the ideas so invitingly précised here.
- Brian Dillon's memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin) was published in 2005. He is UK editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. His Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives will be published later this year