The ultimate virtue

When I was growing up, the only virtue that no one questioned was kindness. It was the ultimate in the list of heavenly virtues of chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience and humility.

But there is another view of kindness that I was not aware of. In much of the west kindness was often considered to be a sign of weakness. In the age of the rampant free market and the selfish gene, compassion was seen as either narcissism or weakness. In this pragmatic and aggressively competitive culture, kindness was viewed as one of those effete virtues lacking in charisma or clout. In this society, everyone is intensely independent. People rely on themselves, not on others. They do not like having others do things for them. They do not like having to depend on anyone. Kindness runs counter to this obsessive need for self-sufficiency when others offer help.

Kindness has often been defined as helpfulness towards some one in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped. Kindness is great if shown to one who is in great need, or who needs what is important and hard to get, or who needs it at an important and difficult crisis; or if the helper is the only, the first, or the chief person to give the help. After all kindness has been the foundation of the world’s great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it a pleasure we often deny ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?

We are constantly being told that humanity is selfish and motivated only by sexual gratification and the promise of power over others. In this conception of society - driven by competitive individualism - kindness has become the new taboo. It lives on as a hollow parody of its true self. Kindness is either the kind of selflessness achievable only by superior, saintly beings such as Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa, or is dismissed as a form of self-interest in disguise.

But what is the thing that most scares us human beings? What is the monster hiding under the bed? The unexpected answer is kindness.

Do not think I am not grateful for your small
kindness to me.
I like small kindnesses.
In fact I actually prefer them to the more
substantial kindness, that is always eying you
like a large animal on a rug,
until your whole life reduces
to nothing but waking up morning after morning
cramped, and the bright sun shining on its tusks.

Often, kindness is perceived as a camouflaged demand, its motive perhaps hidden from the giver of favors. The giver’s unknowingness may be what most irritates the poet. Both the suspicion of kindness and the discomfort of exposure are familiar to most of us. For we are, each of us, battling back against our innate kindness, with which we are fairly bursting, at every turn. Why? Because real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can.

In their brilliant book, “On Kindness”, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor examine the pleasures and perils of kindness. Bursting with often shocking insight, this brief book returns its readers to what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind’s “greatest delight”: the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion. It argues that a life lived in instinctive, sympathetic identification with others is the one we should allow ourselves to live.

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said, "Whether one believes in religion or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness. We can be kind to others by allowing them to be kind to us and by showing deep gratitude in return.”