‘Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know’. But this was not always the case, argue Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and Barbara Taylor a historian, who have come together to produce a historical and contemporary analysis of kindness.

Their overriding thesis is that competitiveness and individualism, coinciding with the rise of modern capitalism, have brought about the loss of our general inclination to enjoy being kind to others. People who are kind realise how pleasurable it is. Kindness can be pleasurable! Yet we have come to regard kindness as moralistic and sentimental. Kindness opens us up beyond ourselves, ‘it is potentially more promiscuous than sexuality’ (p12). The authors assert their belief that ‘children begin their lives “naturally” kind’ (p9), agreeing with Nietzsche that the moral requirement to be kind is a sinister symptom arising with Christian European culture.

The Stoics believed in oikeiôsis, the attachment of self to other. The Stoics were famously self-reliant, but communal, united by reason and mutual affection, as emperor Marcus Aurelius stressed. The Epicurians spoke of the extravagant joys of friendship, ‘which dances around the world’ (p19). David Hume and Adam Smith also believed in the natural sociability of man. In this respect they were like the pagans of old, but quite unlike post-Augustinian Christianity, where, the authors assert, ‘kindness became linked, disastrously, to self sacrifice’ (p19). With Christianity, kindness became universalised as divine love which irradiated the soul with caritas, redeeming our ‘original sin’. Without God, man had no kindness.

Luther and Calvin were even more ‘ferociously anti-human’, which, according to the authors, ‘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’ (p24). Protestant caritas was institutionalised – charity in the modern sense. From here, the link is made between Protestantism, capitalism, Hobbes’s Leviathan, expressing the hedonistic ‘warre of alle against alle’.

The defenders of kindness persisted in spite of the march of waspish capitalism, however. Enlightened Anglicans insisted that ‘true pleasure was always generous’ (p26). This was taken to an extreme by the ‘benevolists’, ‘Friends of Mankind’ with much ‘moral weeping’. The position of the authors here is that kindness is not secondary to the ego, not an afterthought, but primary, á la Rousseau’s, Emile. Children are naturally friendly, it is a species thing, as are animals and ‘savages’. ‘As a small child, Emile feels an instinctive pitié for his parents’ (p34). Nonetheless, the blot of Rousseau’s ‘exceptional callousness’ in his private life is acknowledged! With the French Revolution, Rousseau became an ‘icon of revolutionary kindness’ (p39). So kindness became part of the radical cause. However, the terror of the Revolution destroyed this dream, in tandem with the influence of Thomas Malthus, whose dystopic vision concluded, in effect, that egoism was the engine of human civilisation and progress.

By the 19th century, kindness was corralled, ‘ghetto-ised’ into specific groups – romantic poets, clergymen, charity workers, and especially women, who ‘were naturally prone to sympathetic incontinence’ (p42). Add to this the Christian celebration of maternal love and the gender divide is complete, with men espousing the higher forms of charity while women are regarded as spontaneously kind, ‘the angel in the house’ of the Victorians. For Wordsworth and Dickens, children were the last vestiges of kindness in a cruel world. John Stuart Mill espoused brotherly love, while in France, August Comte developed a neurological theory of kindness.

The battle lines were drawn between the altruists, warm hearted women, humanitarians, Christian socialists, versus the ‘cold’ market principle of Hard Times. The very broad notion that ‘kindness is part of the fabric of human subjectivity’ (p46), that kindness itself was pleasurable was forgotten when the emphasis shifted decisively towards the Christian split between gratification and duty of care for others - kindness as self-denial. Freud and psychoanalysis are in here too: ‘moving away from the tender heart to the inflamed genitals’ (p47).

Yet Phillips in his sections on psychoanalysis, quoting from Freud and Winnicott’s work, temper what might have become an all too sentimental take on kindness with a number of Freudian themes which make kindness more complex. Psychoanalysis depicts two attitudinal currents side by side: one current that is erotic towards and debasing of others and other that is affectionate and kind. The key question that divides psychoanalysts (although Phillips plays down the division): ‘Do we crave sensuous satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy or relationships? Do we want good company or good sex?’ (p60).

This is a false choice, the authors admit, because there is no sex without some measure of kindness, although if we are too kind the sex is unsatisfying. As Phillips says, ‘It is not kind to over protect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality’. Philips acknowledges, following Freud, that hate is our first relation to the world, but suggests that the reason for this hate is self-protection, ‘which love could, if we were lucky, help us to recover from’ (p64). However, Freud stresses that it is desire per se, and its satisfaction that attracts us, not so much the object (other) of our desire. As Phillips admits, ‘we are more in love with our desire than we are with other people’ (p77). Using Freud’s word, the object-person we desire is merely ‘soldered’ onto our desire. And of course the use of the term ‘object’ says it all! We are only kind to the object insofar as they will keep on satisfying us. Sex described by Freud is ‘transgressive in its intent’ (p80).

After World War II, British analysts described in detail the complex kindness engendered in the mother-child bond, a kindness that must prevail over the erotic. Kindness is a way of avoiding incest. Civilisation seems to depend on it. Parents must not debase their children. However, Winnicott suggests that parents must be able to hate their children. For the child, ‘can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated’ (p92). Genuine kindness must know hate. The real bond, to feel real, has to include hatred.

The authors favour open kindness, freely given, which includes a rough erotic generosity over and against free-market individualism that creates hate and division and debases affection. Against Thatcherism, they praise the State’s ‘kindness’ in setting up the welfare system and the NHS, an example of, ‘The kindly state dedicated to universal well being’ (p101). Now all this is changing. For instance, ‘In the past womae’s association with kindness was a source of some prestige, but now it is a sign of disempowerment. Kindness may be admirable, but it’s a mug’s game’ (p108).

Well, maybe it was feminism that reduced women’s prestige. The former Irish President, Mary Robinson, recently suggested that women who stayed at home were ‘selling-out’. Maybe the authors secretly subscribe to the idea that kindness is a mug’s game. After all, they are against any sort of kindness that is sacrificial or that comes with any sense of duty. When we think that ‘carers’ in the home – people caring for their sick relatives – save the benevolent state £56bn each year – imagine then being against sacrificial kindness. What about the on-going kindness of teachers, nurses, police and so on and on. This is kindness of a different register to the spontaneous kind that Phillips and Taylor celebrate.

The authors say that acts of kindness are not to be seen as ‘acts of will, or effort, or moral resolution’ (p117). They make a false dichotomy between ‘official’ types of kindness that comes pre-stigmatised by them as ‘moral superiority’, or ‘domineering beneficience’ by ‘well fed moralists’ or ‘the protection racket of good feelings’, and unofficial kindness shown by “natural” children (reminiscent of AS Neill’s Summerhill and other disasters), animals alleged to be spontaneously kind and even ants in their social colonies. This is reminiscent of Richard Leakey’s ‘discovery’ that early hominids were essentially non-violent, when all the evidence is against this. After all only one hominid species survived!

The kindness that the authors hope for so forlornly in the current climate is haunted by the opposite: kindness as veiled egoism; as disguised sexual seduction; as a cover for aggression, or all three together. The irony, conceded by Phillips to some extent, is that psychoanalysts, with a few notable exceptions like Winnicott, paint the bleakest picture in relation to kindness. Kindness does not appear in the comprehensive index of Freud’s 24 volume Standard Edition. Psychoanalysis is scepticism and is sceptical about kindness and indeed unkind about anything good. This is the curse of psychoanalysis itself. Freud privileges the death drive over eros. The notion that kindness springs freely from children, women and animals before they are damaged by civilisation is an old story and one that probably Phillips and Taylor cannot really believe. It is a myth created by the structural effect of being situated within a civilisation. The treasured ‘lost object’ is always elsewhere, outside, other and heavily idealised.

Thus, it is not just the capitalists and free-market types that create the ‘me-first’ unkind selfish culture, the liberals have their own forms of entitlement me-first culture too, but they refuse to acknowledge it, beyond advocating enlightened self-interest. Phillips and Taylor come close to saying that left-wing people are kind, whereas right-wingers are not! Being itself presupposes what Spinoza called, conatus essendi, the struggle to survive, which does not imply much kindness to spare. Having largely dispensed with the Judeo-Christian heritage, the authors have little to go on, except that kindness and decency that still paradoxically linger in the minds and actions of many.

A discussant reviewing On Kindness criticised this ‘deconstruction’ of kindness. Kindness, like the joke, is destroyed by analysis. Indeed it is a joke to analyse something simple like kindness. In a radical sense, kindness is beyond the trade-offs of the erotic and affection; beyond a cost-benefit analysis, beyond a psychoanalysis. Kindness does not belong to anyone or any time. No one has it. For Levinas, it is ‘otherwise than being’. We could paraphrase Slavoj Žižek and call it, ‘the fragile absolute’, and Derrida in Adieu (to God) speaks of, ‘the welcome that welcomes beyond itself’. The authors are correct to point out that charity without kindness – charity is very far from always being so – is unkind. However, kindness comes from elsewhere; it is a gift that gives ‘without counting the cost’, and it is more in us than we are in ourselves. We could paraphrase Lacan by saying that, ‘Kindness is giving what one doesn’t have’. It is senseless and priceless - such is the anarchic nature of kindness that defies description and analysis.

It is tempting to think that this book, complete with it little pink highlighted title, speaks to a self-regarding ‘kindness’ - kindness as gesture – engaged in praising the kindness of the Other, while despising (being very unkind to), traditional forms of giving in the West, especially the paradoxical gifts of capitalism, enjoyed not least by liberal intellectuals. This pink version of kindness even when made more real by hate, has little in common with the ultimate and intimate connection of kindness with (symbolic) death and sacrifice, ‘the gift of death’ to use the title of one of Derrida’s last books.

Freud ridicules kindness, recounting a joke made by Heine, who declared that he would indeed be kind and ‘love his enemies’ and obey God’s commandment if God first granted him a humble cottage, good food, a bed, flowers and, ‘a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees’.