Two millennia ago, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius called for kindness by connecting it to instinct, saying, "We were made for cooperation." Centuries later, Darwin rejected species individualism and proposed deliberate, systematic cooperation to survive. Rebecca Solnit validated instinctive kindness anecdotally with resounding evidence that all social classes worked together after disasters.

Jan Morris shared a touching story in her diaries about an unexpected kindness she received from a stranger and warmly reflected that maybe people everywhere are waiting to be kind in their small way —a perfect thought.

Rudbeckias mean 'support and encouragement.' Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

If kindness is natural, is it possible to engage, energize, or even scale such kindness? How do we grow delicate high-touch moments into a cultural zeitgeist? Can we, or does it lose the instinct and, thus, its very nature?

In their 2009 collaboration, On Kindness, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor emphasized the social inclinations that underpin kindness. They also critiqued human attempts to modernize, scale, and institutionalize kindness.

In Victorian times, Christian caritas remained the epitome of kindness. Serving God meant serving one's fellows through the vast array of philanthropic agencies sponsored by churches. Secular individuals and organizations absorbed this ethos, with professional bodies emphasizing the altruistic motives of their members while politicians paraded their public spiritedness. In Britain, self-sacrifice and social duty became keynotes of the 'imperial mission,' attracting hordes of high-minded men and women prepared to shoulder the 'White Man's Burden.' Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, an army of philanthropists descended on poor Americans, determined to elevate their morals while alleviating their hardships. Power suffused with kindly purpose became a militant practical force, moulding social relations domestically and globally are looked at askance

Spreading "ripples of kindness" throughout England, the Take Heart organization crochets pocket-sized hearts with notes saying, "You are not alone." They leave them around communities for people to find. Learn more.

Phillips and Taylor rightly demonstrate that caring for others in this self-righteous way reinforces a distinction between "us" and "them:" the former suited to help and the latter to receive. The reputation of the receiving constituency was then diminished over time to dependency, neediness, and, ultimately, weakness. At the same time, helpers moved to a status of imperial godliness. 

Needing others is perceived as a weakness. Only small children, the sick, and the very elderly are permitted dependence on others; for everyone else, self-sufficiency and autonomy are cardinal virtues. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. The ideal lover or spouse is a freewheeling agent for whom the giving and taking of love is a disposable lifestyle option; neediness, even in this arena of intense desires and longings, is ultimately contemptible.

After the First World War, when caritas fell short of preventing unspeakable bloodshed, Western states like Great Britain sought to institutionalize kindness as a cultural norm and human right. The world saw kindness "without condescending coerciveness of the Victorian Society."

The creation of the National Health Service, in particular, dramatically improved the lives of most Britons. The values associated with the NHS - service based on common human needs, equal treatment irrespective of ability to pay - commanded widespread allegiance in 1948 and still do so today, despite a host of destructive 'reforms' aimed at undermining them. The present-day NHS is, in many respects, an archaism, a dinosaur of public altruism that stubbornly refuses to lie down and die. Strenuous attempts by succeeding governments to commercialize it have done much damage, yet the caring ethos survives.

The essence of reciprocal kindness is the soul of NHS nurse Christie Watson's memoir, The Language of Kindness, in which she writes, "We are all nursed at some point in our lives. We are all nurses." During her twenty-year career as an NHS nurse, Watson found the most in-exhaustible stores of kindness in these high-touch environments: "As difficult as it is at times, there is a patient at the center of it."

Watson is exceptional, but as we collectively experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, care workers usually are. But even a system built with kindness in mind has limits in its ability to deliver kindness. Phillips and Taylor illustrate how attempts to scale kindness too much can become comical, even surreal.

In 2007, Blair's government issued an instruction to the NHS nurses to smile. A cabinet spokesman explained, 'One of the things that came out of the focus group discussions was that they didn't feel nurses gave the impression that they cared enough. They felt, for example, that they should smile more.' This was followed by the announcement that nurses' smileyness ('empathic care') would be measured and the scores published on an online 'compassion index'. 'If some jumped up bean-counter comes near me with a "compassion index," a nurse blogged on the Guardian website, 'he'll get it administered rectally.'

The government attempted (and failed to achieve) a gross promotion of kindness. That rarely works on an individual level, let alone a national one. Does seeing someone with a "Be Kind" shirt make you kind? Does it make the shirt-wearer kind? Hardly. Ultimately, On Kindness delivers the truth that the instinct of kindness cannot be proscribed or automated, a function of power or moral superiority.

The pleasures of kindness could never be the pleasures of moral superiority, domineering beneficence, or the protection racket of good feelings. Nor are acts of kindness to be seen as acts of will, effort, or moral resolution. Kindness comes from what Freud called - in a different context - 'after-education' that is, a revived awareness of something that is already felt and known. Not a temptation to sacrifice ourselves, but to include ourselves with others. Not a temptation to renounce or ignore the aggressive aspects of ourselves, but to see kindness as being in solidarity with human need and with the paradoxical sense of powerlessness and power that human need induces. 

Acts of kindness involve us in different conversations; our resistance to these conversations suggests that we may be more interested in them and want much more from them than we let ourselves know.

“Simple Acts of Kindness, II” by Marilyn Yee. for The Examined Life.

Returning to kindness means a connection to ourselves and others, equally loving outwardly and inwardly. It is neither grandiose nor self-denying; it begins and ends with the individual's need to fulfill their social nature. The instinct to help a stranger in need. Strangers everywhere, all the time, waiting for a moment to be kind, to receive kindness. Read more on the nature of brotherly love, George Saunders's speech on kindness as our human legacy, Maya Angelou's motivation to become a better human, and multiple artists on the need for kindness in today's society.