Only to be kind
Sarah Ditum on the “be kind” bullshit:
Setting yourself up as an opponent of kindness would be extravagantly poor taste, especially now the hashtag #bekind is irrevocably associated with suicide prevention. This is unfortunate for me, because I am not a kind person; or at least, I don’t think of kindness as the quality I would like to be defined by or measured against in public life. I’m a critic, which makes it my job to say critical things.
That’s a crucial distinction. I make some effort not to be actively unkind, which I haven’t always been brilliant at, but like Sarah I don’t want that to be the thing that jumps out at you. (Fortunately it never will be.)
I’m a critic of sorts too, a self-appointed critic, and what I exercise my critic energy on is pretty much everything. Name something and I will critic it for you!
What kind of person do we want to hang out with? Someone who is self-consciously “kind” every minute, so that you start to feel like an invalid or a child? Or someone who has interesting shit to say?
I stacked the deck pretty well. That’s my incomplete kindness.
I think that paying attention to things — how they work, what they do, how people respond to them — is the highest sort of respect, even if sometimes you end up saying that the thing is flawed.
That sentence is why I wanted to do this post. Yes. Paying attention.
Kindness is more like basic equipment than a virtue. Sure you don’t want to be around people who needle you all the time, but you don’t want them damply holding your hand, either. Everybody paying attention is much better.
“If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” — Alice Roosevelt Longworth (and not, apparently, Dorothy Parker as I had thought)
“You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.” — Nick Lowe
Perfect. What makes me want to be a hermit is the hand-holders, who seem to scurry out from almost every rock that one overturns. What prevents me from going 100% hermit are the friends who let me be, occasionally saying “hey, haven’t heard from you in a while, nice to see you posting something”. Now that I’ve spent some time as a now-recovered but formerly semi-invalid, I find the damp hand-holders can throw me into an absolutely instant fury with their assumptions and their Kind Concern™. But like Sarah writes, one cannot oppose that because it’s taken to be in poor taste to tell someone to fuck off when they are (attach distressed self-pitying expression to Kind Person’s face here) “just trying to help”.
As an aside, what’s even MOAR FUN is the Kind People being gossipy little snits resulting in wannabe Kind persons from whom one never wanted to hear from again making overtures at contact “out of concern”.
Give me a Sarah Ditum over these people any day of the week, and twice on Tuesdays.
It’s also a difficult thing for me, not just because I, too, am a self-appointed critic, but also because I am tired of women being told we are “kind”, we are supposed to be “kind”, and so forth. It’s pernicious. And it is too often used to mean “turn the other cheek”, when you actually need to be protecting yourself and not allowing someone to hurt you just so you can “be kind”.
Not possible, some things are simply too cute.
Thanks Holms! Now I’ll need another 3 momnths of therapy. :-))
It’s a spectacularly good essay. A thread by Andy Lewis which references it is also worth reading, if you can bear Twitter for five minutes:
https://twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1356335580976713729
I like to differentiate between first order instances of a virtue and higher order ones. Kindness is a perfect example of a virtue that admits of different orders.
First order kindness is when one does that which is well received by someone immediately. (Example: giving up your seat for someone else.) Second order kindness is when one does something that is not immediately well received by the person. (Example: Popping someone’s dislocated shoulder back in.) With each order, the distance between the act and the target’s appreciation of or benefit from the act grows.
When people demand that we be kind, they are demanding first order kindness. That sort of kindness, however, is greedy. It sees only the immediate, and thus is prone to producing bad outcomes. It is kindness of the first order to let a child eat whatever he or she wants, be it healthy food or tooth-rotting candy. It is kindness of a higher order to limit the child’s diet so as to avoid tooth decay.
Curious how for some “being kind” is never reciprocated, only demanded. And it seems to be demanded particularly of women defending their rights and interests. It is a call for unilateral disarmament, of unconditional surrender.
Be kind? After you.
I honestly think the kindest thing someone can do for me is pay enough attention to what I say/write to tell me where I’ve screwed up/got it wrong/can improve. I’m always so grateful when people share what they know with me so that I’m smarter than I was before they did.
@Nullius your second order is the old saying “cruel to be kind”.
In poetry ladies were always being urged to be “kind” – ie shag the poet. “Unkind” ladies refrained from shagging the poet.
I do think that kindness is a value to be promoted. I think there is too much unnecessary cruelty. However it is not the only value to be promoted and it shouldn’t be prioritized over all other values.
I think being kind, can be a form of disrespect, when e.g. you hide an ugly truth for someone. That was what I think when people tell me to be kind to someone who believes that some miracle cure will heal their child, being it religious or pseudo-scientific in nature.
Being kind in such circumstances often makes you complicit in the fraud that those people are often enough also the victim off.
So although I think the world needs more kindness, unfortunately the call for kindness has all too often be used to perpetrate things that IMO should be fought.
Popping your shoulder back in is definitely first-order virtue. Taking you on a bumpy half-hour ambulance ride and then forcing you to sit through X-rays before popping your shoulder back in: that’s second-order virtue.
And making you ride home on a city bus wearing only a bathing suit and a sling because you’re too cheap to park at the hospital: that’s what brothers-in-law are for.
Philosophers and moralists need to start doing some proper research in my opinion.
These debates always presuppose that all of the virtues have been found and accounted for, that none of them still hide in the deontological equivalent of the Amazon forest and that any ethical problem amounts to a Socratic dialogue about which quality we should cultivate above all else. But, like the Republican party’s calls for ‘Unity’ all of those values can and will be perverted by those amoral enough to not give a fuck. A good example is the fact that an accusation of racism is often portrayed (by racist people) as worse than racism itself: “how dare you…”
The goal usually is to get critics to shut up.
So maybe what we need here is more a laboratory than a boxing ring. A research program into finding some sort of uber-virtue which underpins all others and, most importantly, cannot be twisted out of all recognition. If nothing else, the peer-reviewing process could be quite fun!
I am reminded of a piece by Josh Spokes. Something about elevating stock phrases instead of doing actual thinking. I think “Try to be nice” is a nice stock phrase that can remind us, to not increase suffering unnecessary. But if you don’t think about when some kind of suffering may indeed be necessary, you are in trouble.
If I remember correctly his was about “intend is not magic”.
It’s not very surprising really that TRAs routinely try to sidetrack my criticisms of Gender Identity Theory with accusations that I’m not “being kind.” They can’t possibly try to define basic terms like “woman” or “gender” — concepts which support their entire argument — because it’s just too important to wring their hands over people who aren’t allowed to pee and cry over human beings who are being erased when contradicted. If I’m not crying with them because I’m sticking to the topic, it’s because I’m not “kind.” A person with feeling and compassion will skip over the pesky details which deal with the root of the disagreement and jump right into The Bathroom, where the emotional drama is..
I am kind in my own way, though. I don’t call out sleazy tactics. I politely ignore them.
And just like in the exhortation to “be kind”, often is not reciprocal. The Republicans mean “agree with me” by Unity. Muslims mean “submit to Allah” by peace. TRAs mean “if you say I am not a woman, I will call you nasty names and beat you to a bloody end with a baseball bat” by “be kind”.
Always very one way.
Religious freedom as well. “We should be free to discriminate against anyone our religion hates.”
What a Maroon: I tried to pick a first order example as minimally mediate as possible. The immediate effect of popping someone’s shoulder in is excruciating pain. That the pain is short-lived and precedes a cessation of an ongoing pain was the point. First comes pain; second, relief. Thus, relief is mediate rather than immediate.
Nullius in Verba,
I’m speaking from experience. The pain of popping it back in is nothing compared to the pain of it being out of joint, especially if you’re in the back of an ambulance.
A better example (and one that’s probably familiar to most of us) is getting a shot of Novocaine.
A related phenomenon is the demand that all public discourse should be on the level of polite social chit-chat. This was what so much of the Gnu Atheist-Accommodationism debates were about: the notion that Dawkins or whoever publishing a book or an op-ed piece critical of religion was the equivalent of sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with your family and telling Grandma that her religion is stupid, now pass the potatoes please.
There’s a difference between talking to your friend about the play you just watched them perform in, and writing a review as a critic. (This distinction works both ways — people who feel obliged to offer trenchant criticism to friends who haven’t asked for it, and then excuse it by saying “well, I’m just being honest” are also making an error.)
I wonder if social media has screwed up some people’s perceptions on this. Some people really do use social media as a form of chit-chat with their friends and family, while others use it as a public forum to discuss issues openly and critically. I wonder if the former group is assuming that everyone plays by the same rules. (I think anyone who thinks of Twitter as a private chit-chat is kind of out to lunch — Facebook may be a different story.)
If it helps, although maybe this is blindingly obvious already, I like to think of these “rules” as heuristics.