# On Kindness  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor]] - Full Title:: On Kindness - Category: #books ## Highlights > Kindness was mankind’s “greatest delight,” the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. ([Location 56](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=56)) > In 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume, confronted by a school of philosophy that held mankind to be irredeemably selfish, lost patience. Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: “he has forgotten the movements of his heart.” How do people come to forget about kindness and the deep pleasures it gives to them? ([Location 71](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=71)) > But from the sixteenth century, the Christian rule “love thy neighbor as thyself” came under increasing attack from competitive individualism. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651)—the urtext of the new individualism—dismissed Christian kindness as a psychological absurdity. Men, Hobbes insisted, were selfish beasts who cared for nothing but their own well-being; human existence was a “warre of alle against alle.” His arguments were slow to gain ground, but by the end of the eighteenth century—despite the best efforts of David Hume and others—they were becoming orthodoxy. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=94)) > All compassion is self-pity, D. H. Lawrence remarked, ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=112)) > This is not a new idea: over 250 years ago Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a passionate plea for the rescue of children’s natural kindness from the corrupting effects of a divided society. ([Location 140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=140)) > Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives; everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, political and economic reality. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t also resilient and resourceful. ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=145)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > People want safety, whatever the cost. Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization, that if we no longer believe in God—in a Being who is himself invulnerable and so is capable of protecting us—we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=159)) > “No one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purposes. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.” ([Location 202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=202)) - Note: Seneca > Stoics were famously self-reliant, but the self on which a Stoic relied was not singular but communal. Stoics regarded reality as governed by a Logos, a divine principle of rationality, which manifested itself as reason in every human soul. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=205)) > Yet elsewhere Cicero argued that warm relationships extended throughout human society, and warned that people who cared more for their fellow citizens than for foreigners threatened to “rend apart the fellowship that unites mankind.” ([Location 220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=220)) > The pleasures of kindness, as Enlightenment pagans like David Hume and Adam Smith were later to insist, were powerful because they derived from the natural sociality of man. People were kind not because they were told to be but because it made them feel fully human. To “love one another” was a joyous expression of one’s humanity, not a Christian duty. ([Location 231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=231)) > individuals elected by God for salvation would escape this judgment, and even these lucky elect were encouraged to look on each other with suspicion, wary of false claims and moral backsliding. The true saint was counseled to trust no one, not even his spouse or close friends. This attitude has left some vicious legacies: the hatred of present-day right-wing Protestants for “liberals” and “secularists” has a very long pedigree with little kindness in it. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=281)) > Psychological egoists remained plentiful, but alongside them appeared a veritable army of “benevolists,” their hearts throbbing with “social affection” and “practical philanthropy.” The results were dramatic. A wave of humanitarian activism swept Britain and America, tackling evils—such as slavery, child neglect, and cruelty to animals—that long had been ignored or defended. “Friends of mankind” marched across the social landscape, leaving in their wake a rich institutional and ideological legacy. This was benevolence at its best. At its worst—and the worst became very evident as the century progressed—it descended into a mawkish cult of tenderheartedness much ridiculed by satirists. “I love to see a gentleman with a tender heart,” the predatory bailiff Timothy Twitch declared in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Good Natured Man (1768). “Moral weeping” became the vogue, especially among women who preened themselves on their extreme softheartedness. Skeptics had a field day mocking sentimentalists who wept over orphaned puppies while paying their servants starvation wages. William Blake captured the hypocrisy perfectly in “The Human Abstract”: Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody poor, And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=320)) > Thomas Carlyle later derided as the “tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality.” ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=339)) > In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume compared the transmission of feelings between people to the vibration of violin strings, with each individual resonating with the pains and pleasures of others as if they were his own. We are “taken out of ourselves” into the emotional worlds of others, Hume wrote; or, as Adam Smith put it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), “We become in some measure the same person . . . this is the source of our fellow feeling.” ([Location 349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=349)) > Rousseau who first anatomized this vulnerability that he felt so acutely. “All my misfortunes come from my need to attach my heart. . . . It is only when I am alone that I am my own master.” ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=370)) > We hate, in Freud’s view, because we are pleasure-seeking animals; but we also, in another equally important strand of the Freudian story, get pleasure from our hatred (or make our hatred bearable by making it pleasurable). ([Location 763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=763)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > If the religious question is: How can people created by a good God do cruel things? then the secular question taken up by psychoanalysts is: Why should the human animal, created by no deity, driven by sex and survival, be kind? ([Location 821](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=821)) > The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise. We are kind because it makes us feel good about ourselves: kindly people are self-approbation junkies. Encountering this argument in the 1730s, the philosopher Francis Hutcheson dispatched it briskly: “If this is self-love, be it so. . . . Nothing can be better than this self-love, nothing more generous.” ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=1280)) # On Kindness  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor]] - Full Title:: On Kindness - Category: #books ## Highlights > Kindness was mankind’s “greatest delight,” the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. ([Location 56](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=56)) > In 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume, confronted by a school of philosophy that held mankind to be irredeemably selfish, lost patience. Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: “he has forgotten the movements of his heart.” How do people come to forget about kindness and the deep pleasures it gives to them? ([Location 71](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=71)) > But from the sixteenth century, the Christian rule “love thy neighbor as thyself” came under increasing attack from competitive individualism. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651)—the urtext of the new individualism—dismissed Christian kindness as a psychological absurdity. Men, Hobbes insisted, were selfish beasts who cared for nothing but their own well-being; human existence was a “warre of alle against alle.” His arguments were slow to gain ground, but by the end of the eighteenth century—despite the best efforts of David Hume and others—they were becoming orthodoxy. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=94)) > All compassion is self-pity, D. H. Lawrence remarked, ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=112)) > This is not a new idea: over 250 years ago Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a passionate plea for the rescue of children’s natural kindness from the corrupting effects of a divided society. ([Location 140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=140)) > Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives; everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, political and economic reality. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t also resilient and resourceful. ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=145)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > People want safety, whatever the cost. Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization, that if we no longer believe in God—in a Being who is himself invulnerable and so is capable of protecting us—we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=159)) > “No one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purposes. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.” ([Location 202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=202)) - Note: Seneca > Stoics were famously self-reliant, but the self on which a Stoic relied was not singular but communal. Stoics regarded reality as governed by a Logos, a divine principle of rationality, which manifested itself as reason in every human soul. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=205)) > Yet elsewhere Cicero argued that warm relationships extended throughout human society, and warned that people who cared more for their fellow citizens than for foreigners threatened to “rend apart the fellowship that unites mankind.” ([Location 220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=220)) > The pleasures of kindness, as Enlightenment pagans like David Hume and Adam Smith were later to insist, were powerful because they derived from the natural sociality of man. People were kind not because they were told to be but because it made them feel fully human. To “love one another” was a joyous expression of one’s humanity, not a Christian duty. ([Location 231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=231)) > individuals elected by God for salvation would escape this judgment, and even these lucky elect were encouraged to look on each other with suspicion, wary of false claims and moral backsliding. The true saint was counseled to trust no one, not even his spouse or close friends. This attitude has left some vicious legacies: the hatred of present-day right-wing Protestants for “liberals” and “secularists” has a very long pedigree with little kindness in it. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=281)) > Psychological egoists remained plentiful, but alongside them appeared a veritable army of “benevolists,” their hearts throbbing with “social affection” and “practical philanthropy.” The results were dramatic. A wave of humanitarian activism swept Britain and America, tackling evils—such as slavery, child neglect, and cruelty to animals—that long had been ignored or defended. “Friends of mankind” marched across the social landscape, leaving in their wake a rich institutional and ideological legacy. This was benevolence at its best. At its worst—and the worst became very evident as the century progressed—it descended into a mawkish cult of tenderheartedness much ridiculed by satirists. “I love to see a gentleman with a tender heart,” the predatory bailiff Timothy Twitch declared in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Good Natured Man (1768). “Moral weeping” became the vogue, especially among women who preened themselves on their extreme softheartedness. Skeptics had a field day mocking sentimentalists who wept over orphaned puppies while paying their servants starvation wages. William Blake captured the hypocrisy perfectly in “The Human Abstract”: Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody poor, And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=320)) > Thomas Carlyle later derided as the “tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality.” ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=339)) > In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume compared the transmission of feelings between people to the vibration of violin strings, with each individual resonating with the pains and pleasures of others as if they were his own. We are “taken out of ourselves” into the emotional worlds of others, Hume wrote; or, as Adam Smith put it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), “We become in some measure the same person . . . this is the source of our fellow feeling.” ([Location 349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=349)) > Rousseau who first anatomized this vulnerability that he felt so acutely. “All my misfortunes come from my need to attach my heart. . . . It is only when I am alone that I am my own master.” ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=370)) > We hate, in Freud’s view, because we are pleasure-seeking animals; but we also, in another equally important strand of the Freudian story, get pleasure from our hatred (or make our hatred bearable by making it pleasurable). ([Location 763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=763)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > If the religious question is: How can people created by a good God do cruel things? then the secular question taken up by psychoanalysts is: Why should the human animal, created by no deity, driven by sex and survival, be kind? ([Location 821](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=821)) > The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise. We are kind because it makes us feel good about ourselves: kindly people are self-approbation junkies. Encountering this argument in the 1730s, the philosopher Francis Hutcheson dispatched it briskly: “If this is self-love, be it so. . . . Nothing can be better than this self-love, nothing more generous.” ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003H4I59E&location=1280))