Occasionally Horse receives correspondence to the editor, which petitions for things to be written. As I already write day and and night like I am running out of time, I am happy to entertain such requests; including if they are serious or silly. The world is already full of enough grief, malice, cruelty and sadness, that a little bit of silliness and even stupidity in the name of entertainment is fun. Last week I was asked to write some more pieces on Eudaimonia. Here then, is the first of a few:
Kindness
Kindness is not something which comes naturally to people. The art of doing something nice for someone else, is either difficult to do because of inertia or because of our own competing interest. The wall standing in front of kindness is in fact put there by ourselves a lot of the time. I have been here on planet Earth long enough to realise that there aren't any inherently good people. The fields of economics, law, religion and even behavioural science if they don't agree on some things will all generally concede the point that at very least, humans are pretty selfish. That inherent selfishness has a way of playing itself in a multitude of ways and arguably, the entirety of criminal law and a great deal of civil law, is either looking at the formal outplaying of that, as it relates to a set of agreed rules. Arguably, every bad thing which happens in the world is the result of accident, stupidity and most commonly of all, selfishness.
It is strange that I should visit this tenth element of Eudaimonia, with something which if humans are inherently selfish that they should find so difficult to carry out. The Greek word for Kindness is χρηστεύεται (chrēsteuetai), which is derived from chréstos; which means as you would expect "to be kind". Take note of the fact that chréstos is a verb; which means that this is a thing to be done.
It probably surprises nobody that someone who is kind, or has a reputation for kindness, only accrues that reputation because they have been kind. As a verb, being kind is a quality which is performed and which is done. That might sound obvious to the point of banality but the fact that kindness consists of acts performed, is already the beginning of a state in which humans want to fight against their own nature. I almost suspect that kindness is not an action which is the default setting of humans but rather, something to be learned, something to be practiced, something to be perfected, and something which has to be continually performed.
Whether we like it or not, the centre of the observable universe is about 19mm behind people's corneas. I know that this is a fact that I keep on returning to but this is important. In order for anyone to perform kindness, there must be some other person to whom kindness can be performed to and on, and the acknowledgement that that other person exists. You will generally kind that in cases of extreme cruelty in which basic kindness is not extended, that this requires the moral gymnastics of firstly othering the other person and is then most effective when the other person is transformed into an unperson.
In order to perform any act of kindness, one must admit the fact that one is not actually the centre of the universe. Kindness as a mostly voluntary action, therefore requires us to think of that other person as being worthy enough to have an action performed for. Before we even get to any action of kindness, we first have to either break or suppress our own internal drive for selfishness. As performing kindness requires some other person and we esteem that person worthy enough, then that must by inference shift our attention away from our own desires and wants to be able to do so. It then requires that we expend something valuable to us; be it time, money, attention, care, or a combination of all of the above.
Here's the rub as to why kindness is such a hard thing to carry out. Our close bonds such as family and friends, pull on our attention constantly. We like those people. Even then though, showing kindness to the people that we like and love, is still going to require of us an expense of time, money, attention or care. Showing kindness to people we don't know and/or don't like is far harder because not only does that require of us the moral work of being unselfish but it also demands of us the same expense as before and possibly even more. People that we don't know and/or don't like, are going to draw from us a larger amount of internal moral effort, even though the amount of time, money, attention or care expended might actually be identical.
Giving someone your attention, or time, or care, or money, especially to those whom we already deem either unlovable or unworthy, is a more difficult moral work than it would be otherwise. Giving anything, even for purely altruistic reasons, still makes us do a mental calculation for return on investment; in terms of expected happiness, expected fame and fanfare and presumably for those people who think that the universe keeps score via karma or some equivalent, expected attention, or time, or care, or money in return. The problem with acts of kindness, is that the nominal return on investment is likely too be zero in most cases. Especially in cases of people whom we either don't know and/or don't like, they may not even acknowledge that we did anything for them at all.
In some respect, kindness is an outworking of what the Greeks called philos in some capacity. Kindness and the act of demonstrating it, which has already deemed that other people are worth demonstrating it to, ultimately boils down to considering the other person worthy of love and then doing that love to and/or for them. I have a suspicion though, that kindness is more likely to be the moral product of discipline which goes to the effort of imagining others as complex and worthy. That in itself is already difficult enough; to then make the expense of attention, or time, or care, or money, is harder.
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