Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst, Barbara Taylor a historian, specifically a historian of ideas. Between them they explore the concept of "kindness", its status among human attributes and the value that has been ascribed to it over the years. "Kindness" is a rough equivalent of the Christian non-erotic love, or charity, though it was embraced as a virtue and a source of pleasure by Cicero, for one, and by the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, before it was extolled famously by St Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians. Charity, except in the limited context of organisations such as Oxfam or Mind, is not an attribute much favoured today, being thought inimical to equality and the recognition of rights. Part of the purpose of this short book is to reinstate it as something necessary both to our personal happiness and our communal well-being. This seems to me a totally admirable aim.
Kindness to others arises out of sympathy. As the authors note, there is much evidence that other animals besides human beings (or "men" as they properly designate them) can enter into the sufferings and fears of others of their kind. But it is human animals alone who, because of their imaginative powers, can enter into the feelings of other people far removed from them, whom they cannot see or touch, but whose plight as fellow-humans they can share
In the Gospel of St Luke, a lawyer is told by Jesus that to live well he must love his neighbour as himself and, when he further asks who is to count as his neighbour, Jesus answers with the story of the good Samaritan, for many the very essence of Christianity. Kindness here arose spontaneously, not in obedience to any rule, in fact in defiance of convention. But as Christianity became increasingly ecclesiastical and hierarchical, with the consequent corruption of the priesthood, the good Samaritan was forgotten.
The new Protestantism declared man to be fundamentally sinful, such good actions as he could do dependent on the grace of God; and so the possibility of natural kindness disappeared. Separately, in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes, an atheist and materialist, presented a picture of human life as a perpetual struggle for power, a war of all against all, which could be civilised only by the absolute political rule of a sovereign.
It was Hume, that most humane and far-sighted philosopher, who, in his A Treatise on Human Nature (1740), introduced sympathy as the necessary foundation of morality. He insisted, in his later work, that sympathy for others was experienced by everybody, part of the nature of man. But the most powerful exponent of man's natural goodness was Rousseau, whose influence on Romanticism throughout Europe it is impossible to exaggerate.
The most fascinating part of this story is how the great charitable philanthropists of the 19th century, the industrial giants of their day, the founders of schools, hospitals and universities, came to be denigrated, charity itself becoming suspect, a thinly disguised form of imperialism, an assertion of power or an assuaging of guilt.
Having given us an entirely readable and absorbing short history of kindness, or caritas, Phillips and Taylor follow up with two chapters on the psychoanalytical take on the concept. This is a bit of a shock to the reader, the gear-change needed being quite violent. It is not the common difficulty of relating particular case histories to generalities and trends, but, rather, that the apparatus of psychoanalysis demands a suspension of scepticism that most of us do not feel when reading history, however compressed. There, we get caught up in the story, can recognise the trends and say: "Just So." But because the emotions and impulses of the individuals studied by psychoanalysts - their aggressions, their desires, their hatreds and their loves - are for the most part unrecognised even by them (except perhaps after lengthy treatment), one has the constant desire to stop and say: "I don't get it." Things become a bit easier when we leave Freud behind and move on to psychoanalysts such as Bowlby and Winnicott. The idea that enduring, reciprocal love or tolerance between parents and children cannot arise until both parties know the worst of each other and learn to accept each other as they are seems profoundly true. This is certainly kindness.
The joins between the two parts of the book are mended, in part, in the final chapter. Psychoanalysis has, according to the authors, revealed what history has more openly demonstrated and philosophy has, sometimes, argued - that "human beings... are ambivalent creatures. Kindness comes naturally to us, but so too do cruelty and aggression". Compassion is a virtue, and what Hume would call a natural virtue, but we may easily be tempted to suppress our compassion, which is always risky and may sometimes misfire. Yet one thing is beautifully demonstrated in this last chapter. "Caring", as we now know it (including "care-packages" and pre-ordered smiles), is no substitute for kindness. The critique of the Blairite descent from the ideals of the NHS, a service that started in kindness, is funny but sad.
I hope that the brevity of this book will not tell against it. A concentrated essay on a limited but deeply important subject is to be highly valued.