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Best Books of the Year So Far
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It's not easy being human. We're complex creatures, possessed of intellect, driven by instinct, bedeviled by emotions. We're necessarily interdependent in a competitive culture that extols self-sufficiency. Extending kindness makes us genuinely happy; being seen extending kindness makes us look self-serving or, worse, weak. We are suspicious of kind acts and the people who commit them. If you were to seek Freud's counsel on all this, he'd say we hate that we love so we idolize what we desire to help rationalize our needs. What a mess.
If only Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, authors of a small, elegant book, "On Kindness," could do more than delineate the trouble and track its origins. If only they could point the way to a kinder life for all of us. If only somebody universally respected -- Oprah? -- made this book required reading now, before, say, the next episode of "Survivor." If only capitalism and Goldman Sachs and third-party health insurance administrators and the classroom bully could take a lesson from Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau or even Dickens, as set out so clearly in "On Kindness." If only...
But Phillips and Taylor, while clearly proponents of a kind society, do not lobby for change as much as they detail the decline of kind behavior in societies made up of people who find one of the sincerest forms pleasure scorned. They write, "An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity." This image, they say, shows us "deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other." This image we have of ourselves shows our motives to be "utterly self-seeking" and our sympathies suspicious "forms of self-protection.Read more ›
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This is a little book that I bought in local bookshop adjacent to Costa and quickly read from cover to cover while commuting. I was interested in this title because my relative studies kindness (and benevolence) as a topic in Russian literature so I thought by reading that book I could better discuss it. Approx. one third of the book narrates the evolution of the meaning of kindness from Classical Greece and Rome to earlier Christianity, Augustine, then to Hobbes (Leviathan), Enlightenment, and finally, Rousseau (Émile). The second third is a lengthy treatise on the interpretation of kindness from psychoanalytical perspective (Freud, Winnicott). The final third is about the role of kindness in the modern Western society. Interesting read (although a bit repetitive sometimes) that prompted me to buy Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 and to reconsider the role kindness in a modern corporation workplace.
Dmitry Vostokov Literate Scientist blog
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Excellent historical overview on the world view of "kindness". Very worthwhile for anyone interested in transforming current attitudes towards caring for humanity.
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I am stunned that this book received such good reviews. It is intellectually flabby. Let me offer one example. In the opening pages the authors claim that 'we have become phobic of kindness in our societies' and that 'we imagine... kindness is the saboteur of the successful life'. They ask 'how do people come to forget about kindness and the deep pleasures it gives them?' In short, they argue that society and individuals have turned away from kindness. They offer no proof of this and bandy the word 'we' around assuming that their premise is self-evident and we, their readers, will agree. I don't agree. Kindness is not something that lends itself to being measured. We can't say there was more or less of it at a particular time or place. Different people may have expressed different attitudes to it at different times but the authors' habit of quoting the great philosophers down through the ages in support of their case is not the same as offering proper evidence. I should add that the books continues as it begins. The authors make claim after claim without any adequate justification or proof. I became so annoyed by their spurious arguments that I had to stop reading about half way through. I flipped to the end to see if it became any better. It didn't. They have chosen a good subject but fail to do it justice. My advice is don't waste your money or, more importantly, your time.
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50 of 51 people found the following review helpful
Not a coffee table book. Not a "be nice" sermon from the land of the bodhisattvas.
This book is a rigorous argument, based on the history of European ideas and psychoanalytical doctrine, that we fail to recognize and value intelligently one of life's greatest pleasures: generosity. It goes deep into the the scientific and political sources of our contemporary confusion and unhappiness.
The authors explain brilliantly how misunderstanding the paradoxical relation between kindness and hatred contributes to our chronic ambivalence toward other people and hence our inability to choose our actions well.
Beautifully written and succinct: the sort of book you finish in an afternoon and will definitely read again.
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