Kindness is arguably the most noble attribute in the realm of human relationships … relationships between man and his environment … man and animals … in short … man and his world. However, seems it has been trampled by individualism, ambition, competition and the deification of prosperity.
St Augustine’s suggestion that prosperity inevitably leads to depravity may turn out to be accurate.
St Augustine writes in his book “City of God” … “now ambition would not prevail but amongst a people wholly corrupted with covetousness and luxury. And the people are always infected with these two contagions, by the means of affluent prosperity”. You are depraved by prosperity…”
This degeneration of kindness in human relationships may not be such a bad thing. Perhaps it will serve as a negative teacher. Seems people are more inclined to embrace change in times of serious adversity.
A well known Chinese maxim … “Inevitable reversal of the extreme” … may be relevant here.
Any improvement of the current status of ‘kindness’ in the world must start with imagination. As more and more people imagine a kind world … the world will become a kinder place.
Oh no. Live and let live. I quite another thing completely.
Kant offers himself to behave only in ways that he would find acceptable if it were a overall rule for everyone.
“Live and let live” is a plea for negligence. It suggests that I can do what the fuck I want, and so can others.
It does not even have the codicil “do no harm.” That’s not what Kant had in mind.
Kant definitely did have a keen set of moral rules that he was able to comply with, and willing to impose those rules on all others, right up to the hilt of the third formulation.
That’s what he was saying, James.
But the chocolates and cake things was stupidity or more to the point, simply a lack of awareness. But sometimes thinking we are being kind when we are actually causing harm is not so much stupidity but wrongful interpretation. Maybe that’s the same as a lack of awareness too.
In order to have a thread on kindness, I think we have to define it as we mean it and how we don’t mean it. Give examples of it.
Kindness is not always trying to be nice…no matter what. There is a distinction between being kind and allowing one’s self to be treated as a doormat.
Kindness includes a gentle attitude toward persons and things. Morality, in which kindness is possible, is ecological. How we react to what is not us, in the physical sense, defines who we are., in a spiritual sense. We must love one another or die. Nothing else makes sense. See Aldous Huxley’s “Island” for an example of ecological morality.