On kindness

I wrote this piece about kindness for the School of Life column in the Observer magazine:

Does modern society suffer from a deficit of kindness? In a recent book on the subject, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argue that kindness is an unfashionable, endangered virtue. They attribute this to the ascendancy of free market individualism and the lack of trust it engenders, which creates “a life of overwork, anxiety, and isolation”.

It is certainly true that kindness is rarely invoked in contemporary public rhetoric. The voguish word for our straitened times is not kindness but “fairness”. When everyone must bear their “fair share” of economic pain, kindness is likely to be regarded as a luxury we can ill afford, perhaps even as a form of sanctimony or concealed self-interest. Kindness now tends to be outsourced to specific groups, such as care workers delivering “care packages”, or reduced to the scripted concern of the customer-server relationship: “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

But in our daily lives, there is no evidence that kindness is in decline. Each era creates its own types of kindness. Children, who consume more of their parents’ lives than ever before, generate networks of kindness as adults share chauffeuring, sleepover and cooking duties. And while the casual cruelty of internet comments pages might suggest that kindness requires face-to-face interaction, the internet’s interactivity also inspires random acts of kindness among strangers: the recent lovebombing of Keanu Reeves, after he was photographed looking fed up on a park bench, is an example.

Granted, it may be easier to be kind to glamorous film stars, but surely the point about kindness is that it is spontaneous and can’t be legislated for. If, as philosophers from the Greek Stoics to Rousseau have insisted, we have a natural empathy with our fellow human beings, then kindness will surely survive the temporary setback of hard times.