Customer Reviews

On Kindness

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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.

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."

"On Kindness" describes who we are with regard to our generosity of spirit, it explores the gravity of our psychological conflicts and it tracks how we arrived at this uncomfortable, conflicted juncture. The British authors, a psychoanalyst (Phillips) and a historian with expertise in feminism (Taylor), maintain that the kind life is natural. It's a life lived "in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others." This behavior lacks cultural support -- even a common language, it is fraught with negative sanctions and yet it makes us feel good. Kindness has become "our forbidden pleasure."

There's a lot to this small book and yet it is highly readable and infinitely fascinating: "Capitalism is no system for the kindhearted." "Parenting in particular is seen by most people today as an island of kindness in a sea of cruelty." "A competitive society, one that divides people into winners and losers, breeds unkindness." "The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise." "Our sweetest existence is relative and collective, and our true self is not entirely within us." (Rousseau) "To what shifts is poor Society reduced in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to man!" (Thomas Carlyle)

Our identification with other people's pleasures and sufferings is among our most immediate experiences, write the authors. It's akin to reflex or instinct. To identify with suffering is, of course, frightening. We feel vulnerable and yet we crave safety. As children we nurture and love our parents so they will care for us. As we grow and mature, we realize such efforts are not productive at the same time we train our vision on a broader world to which we naturally seek attachments. No man is an island, wrote John Donne. Our attachments to others fulfill our humanity. The authors leave us here, to ponder our secrets and question a society that closets the best parts of us.

I should have learned more about the book before I bought it. I was intrigued by the title and thought that it would focus on why it seems so difficult, in today's society, for people to be open, warm and kind to one another, and so much more socially acceptable to "rag on" (or be "teasingly" aggressive towards) others. Instead, it was mostly on Freud and (hence) sex. I found it difficult to read - dense and unclear, rather than direct and straightforward. (And I do have a Ph.D., so it's not that I have no experience reading challenging texts.)

That's not to say that it doesn't address the topic of kindness at all, or that I didn't get a single interesting idea out of it. But, for me, it wasn't worth it.

If you find Freud and philosophical history interesting, then you may very well enjoy this book. But if those things don't really appeal, then you probably want to skip it - it is not, in my opinion, a clearly written, insightful analysis of the role of kindness in today's social climate.

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

Very interesting concept and had some good parts; but mostly this book just put me to sleep.

I was disappointed by this book, which had been billed as a "brilliant examination" of the subject of kindness by a historian and a psychologist. The first section of the book, intended to contain a short history of kindness, limits itself to a few sources (mainly the writings of Rousseau) and tells us little about the evolution of kindness. The second section, a psycoanalytic evaluation of kindness, is full of meaningless psychobabble that tends to look at kindness only from a Freudian perspective. For the rest of us, it will leave us none the wiser on the topic.

The only semblance of insight in the entire book is this entry at page 90: "It is only when we compare real people with the men or women of our dreams that they disappoint." The author invites an interesting discussion on the place of acceptance in the world of kindness, before discarding it and moving on.

Please save your money, this book will leave you no wiser either on the history of kindness or about how to better practice it. As you may have gathered, this book was unable to restrain me from my unkind criticism of its content.