As I often do, I had a wonderful conversation with one of my patients the other day. This 80-something year old lady was accompanied by here daughter. They were both born in Germany and the mother remembered vividly the horror of the WWII years. We spoke of the suffering of the German people and others as the war progressed. The daughter then asked, rhetorically, whether there would come a day when wars would cease.
I was intrigued with this question. My reply was that the nature of man precluded that (cessation of wars) from happening. The daugher was truly surprised to hear me say that if her countenance was to be believed. She told me that people are “good.” I agreed but suggested to her that even a casual look at history and perhaps some introspective look at our own lives would bear out my point of view. That is, we are created good but have a predisposition to do evil and act in selfish ways and that these actions can lead to pain in our lives and in the lives of others. I suggested that when we abandon the control of such tendencies, in certain cases, the course of history could be changed for the worse as in the case of Hitler, Stalin and the countless others throughout time.
The daughter then revealed that she was a professor at the local university in the neurosciences. After lamenting briefly the unfairness of her “control” over her students (which seemed unrelated to our present discord), she thought that they were all so “kind” and ”good.”
This statement may be at the heart of current liberal (or is it “progressive”) thinking. It seems the professor has confused being kind with being good. While no one can reasonably suggest that being kind is not a part of being good, it seems shallow to me to suggest that mearly being kind, is to good.
“Kindness cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering”, while Love “would rather see [the loved ones] suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes”. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
I think to be good, one needs to be loving. And to love someone means to desire that which is most profitable for them. To love someone is to desire the ultimate good for them. And herein lies the dilemma that some face; for to be good and loving may require that we risk being viewed as unkind (at least as kindness is defined in the modern world.) It seems to me that when we desire good for those that we love, we need to require or impose certain things upon them. For example, a parent who disciplines a child or seeks the pain of vaccination for that child does so for the ultimate good of the child even if the child views those actions as “unkind.” That is, to be good or loving, to really desire the best for the object of one’s goodness, may require actions or words that can be interpreted as unkind.
So if one sees kindness as the ultimate kind of love, one will permit the object of the kindness to pursue reckless ways if only to be viewed as kind.
And this may explain in part why liberals will endorse (or at least fail to condemn) reckless and harmful actions in others. For to criticize a young husband-less girl for having a child or to suggest that gay sex is unhealthy may be viewed as unkind and therefore unloving.
Could it be then that this is what propels some to unusual and (to my mind) illogical ideas and acts. Perhaps in some cases, but what is required however is to convince like-minded people that kindness is not, in fact, the greatest virtue.
