A few thoughts and ideas on kindness
“I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else……. .To be kind – it covers everything, to my mind.” Roald Dahl
“When whole groups fail to care, cultures of hate, retribution and vengeance can be created that reproduce the traumatic conditions of their own making. There is less chance of the kind of citizenly care that provides a bulwark against political corruption, unbridled market forces or religious fundamentalism.” (From The Capacity to Care: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity by Wendy Hollway, 2006, p.2)
Today’s piece includes a few thoughts, ideas and books related to the overlapping human capacities for care, kindness and acts of generosity.
Care
I read somewhere that care can be understood in the light of Donald Winnicott’s concept of “holding” [briefly discussed in the previous post], in which the basic needs are met in ways that create possibilities for a person to flourish. So, care here is understood as a facilitating environment that allows someone to develop agency, creativity, spontaneity, and a sense of safety and belonging. Winnicott’s idea of the true self requires a good holding environment early on, in which the infants aggression, creativity, expression and needs are met and tolerated, an environment that balances interdependence and individuality without falling into individualism. His concept of holding could be considered as lying on a continuum from the private and personal to the public and political. Also, Winnicott and others’ work has influenced the recent interest and literature on the politics of care and the exploration of how a state could care for its citizens in non-controlling ways and the ways it could increase inclusion and equality.
Wendy Ann Hollway’s care ideal, suggests that an adult will have the capacity to engage in four kinds of care. Hollway, was a professor I had while doing an OU degree, whose approach and qualitative research model that integrate psychoanalytic theory with social science to understand (inter) subjectivity, identity, and social relations, has resonated with me and influenced my way of perceiving things. Her work focuses on affective and relational aspects of knowledge, and along with Tony Jefferson, she created an interview research method that incorporates the unconscious dynamics that occur between researchers and participants.
In a nutshell, Hollway’s care ideal, assumes that an adult will have the capacity to engage in four kinds of care. First, they will be capable of reciprocal interdependent care receiving and care giving. Second, they will be capable of providing the non-negotiable, asymmetrical demand for care that has always been required of mothers and is required of fathers and others who ‘mother’ babies and young children. Third, they will be capable of self care. Fourth, they will be capable of extending their care to both human and non-human objects (the environment or non- human animals). She explores how these capacities can be achieved through the development of the self, the mind and morality, how the capacity to care about and to exercise caring agency is supported or undermined by the available practices and discourses that have implications for care, and what kind of conditions and dynamics either foster or erode the development of a good enough capacity to care.
Kindness
Aristotle defined kindness as “helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped.” In the Cambridge dictionary it is defined as “the quality of being generous, helpful, and caring about other people.” Poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes about kindness: “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things, / feel the future dissolve in a moment / like salt in a weakened broth. / What you held in your hand, / what you counted and carefully saved, / all this must go so you know / how desolate the landscape can be / between the regions of kindness…..” An act of kindness is an act we do, often spontaneously, arising from our empathic attunement to others, for no other reason than to offer support, encouragement, help, joy or a sense of inclusion to the people close to us, but also to strangers. Kindness might also involve our standing up for others, resisting non kindness concerning not only the ones close to us, but also strangers and those unknown to us in distant places.
On Sunday (14 / 09 / 2025) we watched two Greek sailing boats leave the harbour of the small island I live on to join a fleet of forty four boats from ports from all around the world to sail to Palestine in order to open a humanitarian corridor and help end the ongoing genocide of the people there. Susan Sontag wrote that “Compassion is an unstable emotion.” It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Perhaps the people participating in this risky venture are translating their compassion into action, an action of kindness one could say. In his novel Life and Fate Vasily Grossman writes: “Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness…… This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being….. This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind….. It is as simple as life itself.”
Charles Darwin believed that our human capacity for kindness was actually instrumental to our evolutionary success, our survival as a species. It seems that kindness was one of our defense strategies, which helped us survive in a world full of bigger, stronger and faster animals and harsh conditions. Our cave men ancestors that were better able to take care of their tribe, the women, children, the sick and the elderly gained an evolutionary advantage against those who failed to do so. Scientists have argued that their motives were at a deeper level self-serving, which might also be true. Moreover, research studies today show that being kind has a positive physiological and psychological impact on the person doing the kind act, too. Apart from feeling good after acting kindly, which is relatively easy to observe, it seems that it has a positive impact on our psychological and physical health, as well.
However, were our cave ancestors really at that point in human history, able to analyse their unconscious motives, or did they to some extent respond from a place of benevolence, empathy and even altruism, inherent in the human genome. As Margaret Drabble notes in an essay (2015), in which she envisions a future, where there are no more food banks, sweat shops and gulags simply because there is enough for everyone if resources were distributed a little more rationally and evenly, “unless we really are a hateful, murderous Hobbesian species, we can surely envisage a fairer future on a beautiful planet.” Fairness and kindness are complementary and they work together.
In any case, one cannot easily imagine how as a species we could have come thus far without the millions of acts of care, kindness and generosity performed across the time we have inhabited this planet. Even when we consider our own lives, with all the traumas, injustices and indecencies that we may have suffered along the way, it is still difficult to imagine how any of us could have survived in a totally aggressive, non empathic and cynical world that was devoid of individual acts of care and kindness and care ideals in our societal structures. This brings to focus the importance of building caring communities, and highlights the necessity of nurturing environments from the cradle to the end.
Finally, the capacity for kindness more or less reflects some level of awareness that mostly there is no need to not be kind and supportive when this is needed or asked for, and also, some capacity to disengage from our natural human undercurrents of competitiveness, meanness or indifference. A study I read somewhere suggested that wisdom is the combination of qualities like curiosity, tolerance, creativity, humility, resilience and kindness. The capacity to care and act kindly requires inner strength, empathy and compassion, all of which are viewed as markers of psychological health because they indicate an ability for better emotional and social functioning. An absence of empathy and a stunned capacity for care in caregivers, for instance, leads to insecure attachments for the child, and in broader sociocultural contexts this absence results in cynicism, exploitation, aggressions and violence.
And, are there any downsides to kindness?
There is the risk of burnout, exhaustion, and what some refer to as “compassion fatigue,” if we neglect our own needs and are unable to set healthy personal boundaries. An inability to say “no” to others, for whatever reasons, can lead to being taken advantage of or being exploited. Over extending ourselves might lead to losing ourselves or losing sight of our own needs and neglecting our goals. Kindness is often accompanied by emotional vulnerability, and therefore, it can at times cause us disappointment. Also, kindness should not be confused with over-tolerance of bad behaviours or lack of assertiveness when this is necessary. Overly competitive individuals might perceive an (over) generous or kind predisposition as weakness. Therefore, kindness and generosity need to be accompanied by discernment. Intentional kindness would involve balancing compassion for others with discernment, wise boundaries and a healthy sense of self preservation. As George Eliot wrote: “It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don’t give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.”
Picture books for children and adults that explore the themes of kindness, goodness and friendship:
The three questions by one of my favourtie illustrators Jon J Muth, inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s story.
A young boy, Nikolai, is sometimes unsure about what to do or if he is doing the right thing, so he goes about asking his friends. However, he is not quite satisfied with their answers and goes up the mountain to meet Leo, a wise turtle that has lived for a very long time. He asks three questions: What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?
Amos and Boris by William Steig, a beautiful tale of kindness, love, courage and friendship between two seemingly incompatible creatures, a mouse and a whale, willing to help, to their immense surprise, a fellow mammal.
Each Kindness written by Jacqueline Woodson and illustrated by E. B. Lewis, a moving story with lovely illustrations about kindness or lack of it, inclusion and belonging, and lost opportunities.
How to Heal a Broken Wing by Australian author and illustrator Bob Graham, a tender story for younger children
Because Amelia Smiled by David Ezra Stein, illustrates the potential for kindness to have a ripple effect, and how witnessing the good and choosing to pass it on in creative ways can travel far and wide. Similarly, a picture book with no text that I found on a local bookstall a couple of weeks ago, Small acts of kindness by Slovenian illustrator, Marta Bartolj, also illustrates how one small act of kindness triggers another and then another, like a kind of chain reaction that in the book comes full circle. However, for the ripple effect to occur the observers or recipients of kindness, must perceive it as positive, and then more importantly must choose to act kindly, too, and individual acts of kindness can have a more significant impact when these acts are collective.