It’s hard to be against kindness but, I’ll give it a try with some help from John Steinbeck. The Winter of Our Discontent is the best fictional representation of the angst, evil, entitlement, and despair of our age that I’ve read. Among other insights, it frames modern middle class America’s great moral challenge succinctly— Avoid becoming Ethan Allen Hawley.
That’ll be difficult. Many of us are already versions of him to one degree or another. Ethan and his young family were living off the fumes of ancestral privilege that came from generations of status and wealth, but other than the family home his father lost all of that. Ethan is a not-subtle metaphor for the American dream. A look at the generational income plateau and decline over the last 50 years, and growing resentment prove Steinbeck prescient. Since he published the book in 1961, we’ve been conditioned to feel the force of Ethan’s problems, even if we wince at his solutions.
Also like us, his own moral vision occasionally achieves a clarity that condemns him. His critique of America’s affair-of-convenience with kindness is an example. As he muses about the nature of commerce, it’s power to secure wealth, and his fermenting plan to get more of it, he observes,
“There’s an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.” (p. 46).
He’s not thinking of folks who won’t work. He’s referring to America’s morally and intellectually slothful conflation of the freedom to pursue personal comfort without bothersome social obligations and the remnant instinct to be good to others by letting them do the same. For a moment, at least, Ethan sees through that, but he soon loses his clarity.
So what’s wrong with kindness? Nothing, of course, except that kindness cannot possibly supply sufficient ethical nutrition to keep a culture morally healthy. It’s the fast-food of virtues; cheap, feels good going down, and you don’t even need to get out of your car. Beginning with the Enlightenment, the West spent several centuries paring down ethics until the system coalesced, rather nicely, into “be nice.” The only moral requirement left is to avoid obstructing other’s pursuit of authentic self while we pursue authentic self.
That’s a hard value to argue with, unless it becomes a Creed. As with so many other things, the Enlightenment got swept up in the vortex of its own momentum when it made kindness the key to all virtue. In the context of western thought since then, it makes perfect sense that the notion of kindness emerged in a moral milieu like ours. “Kind” is the perfect moral paradigm for an affluent people in an age of license, but previous ages in human history would find Kind as meta-morality wanting.
The Greeks and Romans also knew a little about moral license, but their vision of the individual as an interwoven member of socio-moral order was more robust than anything one “buffered self” asks of another (to use Taylor’s term). Kindness as a comprehensive moral paradigm atomizes both virtue and the individual’s place in society. Of course, we should always be kind, but kindness is not a sufficient moral foundation. Aside from the question it begs about just what constitutes kindness, using it as a meta-ethic fails on at least two counts.
a social order cannot survive on the moral sentiment and self-perceived intent of individual members alone
First, kindness as chief end lays the foundation of ethic in the moral sentiment and self-perceived intent of the actor. If we assume there’s nothing else, that’s fine. Indeed, it’s best since the alternative is moral paternalism at best and oppression at worst. Admittedly, the authoritative urge to do good can bring about its own kind of bad. But it’s noteworthy that many who fear moral authoritarianism limit those fears mostly to sex and gender matters. The laissez faire morality of kindness is often traded for activism (socially exerted paternalism or revolutionary oppression?) when a wealthy individual wants the autonomous agency to do as they please with their money. Even when the rich want to give it to charitable causes, otherwise moral freethinkers commonly call on authoritative governance to “do good” by making sure the wealthy resource the State to do kindness rightly.
That’s not a dig on taxes. It’s simply a recognition that whether by social pressure or civic power, societies necessarily order the moral behavior of their members. No worthy moral vision would argue self-determination is a peripheral moral concept or that kindness is optional, but a social order cannot survive on the moral sentiment and self-perceived intent of individual members alone. Like fire in a hearth, kindness, and the virtue of leaving others alone give pleasant light and warmth until they are left alone.
Second, kindness uber alles grants illicit moral license. Self-licensing is a relatively new concept in social psychology, but it’s as old as dirt for everyone else. In brief, doing good as one perceives good, can paradoxically free them to do bad later, especially in the ethical domain they legitimized themselves in the previous act. A study of Scripture easily discovers examples of self-licensing. The Bible calls it hypocrisy, or self-righteousness, and refers to its practitioners as whitewashed tombs, filthy bowls, and worse.
In our setting, the concept is commonly applied to self-licensing related to sexism or racism. I voted for Obama or Clinton, so I have my woke bona fides. With that, we’re free to carry on with unacceptable views and actions, whatever those are. For those who didn’t vote that way because of pro-life concerns, they might free themselves from the obligation to actually help women in need. And that’s where the kindness paradigm fails. By centering our ethic exclusively in our most interior self, it leaves us with only the most anemic means by which to critique the sentiment that generated it.
C.S. Lewis saw this coming in the 1940 The Problem of Pain. In a passage that the lifelong Episcopal John Steinbeck may have been alluding to (I certainly have been), he observed:
I think we have become [cruel] in the attempt to reduce all virtues to kindness. For Plato rightly taught that virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all other virtues. If, being cowardly, conceited, and slothful, you have never done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbor’s welfare has not happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease (Lewis, Harper Collins, 2001, pg. 64).
I’ll close with a brief personal reflection. Looking back on the school days of my youth, it’s clear to me that we should have made much more of kindness than we did. The uncool, the other, the minority, and the different suffered for our lack of humanity. Thankfully, my millennial “kids” place a much higher value on kindness than I did as a youth, or even in my twenties, sadly. I’ve learned from them, and by God’s grace I’m a kinder man. We may ask too much of kindness in this age, but we must never ask too little of it. That said, we’ll need a much bigger list of virtues if we hope to avoid becoming Ethan Allen Hawley.
