When I read this today (Oscar the cat and the science of kindness) I was indignant and dumbfounded that someone could be so fucking dense (emph mine): 

“In a world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty, why is there still empathy, sympathy and kindness? There must be some  evolutionary advantage, otherwise those traits would have long since vanished. And yet we are so often squeamish when faced with acts of kindness, as if they were soft-headed embarrassments and signs of weakness. Or worse: mere narcissism and self-interest masquerading as something else.” 

WTF?  What has been written here is psychopathic. The implication being that it is advantageous to be ‘selfish & cruel’, especially ‘genetically speaking’ – which is another way of saying the best way to reproduce is through rape. The author (Kenneth Kidd) seems oblivious to the fact that humans are social creatures, and that we appreciate those who show us kindness. I mean, reproduction does mostly occur between people who like each other at the time, does it not? I’ll grant his position is merely one of argument, and that he’s not actually as psychopathic as all this is. However …. 

He uses the cat (quoted below), and the quoted above, as a build up to stating that humans are social creatures. But he doesn’t take that as a given, rather, he quotes sources. In other words, ‘research suggests’ that humans are social creatures, but not movie nights, dating, pub rounds with friends, etc. 

There’s no reason at all for the traits of kindness and empathy to have vanished, and every reason for them to have coexisted. What should make us squeamish is that such thoughts could be expressed at all in such a manner. It takes for granted that our society is cruel, as if this is a norm, rather than the aberration. A society of ‘overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty’ is a failed society, and it used to be termed barbaric. 

Nowadays we tend to look more kindly on barbarism, obviously. 

Further on in the article, he states: 

“Are we naturally kind or selfish egoists at heart? 

Much flows from how you answer that question, how, on balance, you view human nature. 

Consider, for instance, the Christian tale of the Good Samaritan who helps out an injured Israelite, someone he doesn’t know, even though Samaritans and Israelites are long-standing enemies. 

This is arguably the pre-eminent tale of Christian kindness. It seems to imply that empathy, compassion and caritas, or brotherly love, are natural human dispositions. But then, as Phillips and Taylor note, St. Augustine happened along with a profoundly different view. Rather than being native to humans, caritas was deemed to be divine, bestowed by God. 

Without God, there could be no kindness or other virtue, because we’d lost the possibility of being naturally good with the expulsion from Eden.” 

This to me seems entirely idiotic. (An aside dear reader: I hope you and I see eye to eye, and that you are as dumbfounded as I am. If not, I am left to explain, as I am, why this is shite. But I also feel the need to explain regardless, so that there’s some documentation in  future databases that not all hearts had been so eclipsed in our time). 

It is true that the Romans were cruel; and that there was much cruelty in the past. This suggests the so called ‘genetic’ line of thought which equates optimal reproduction with rape. It was an accomplishment of Christianity (which may have its roots in Buddhism) and a legacy which we used to take for granted (before we once again became blasé about torture) that Western society became more self-consciously gentle, in its abandonment of slavery, torture, and tyrannical government. 

Christian civilization, remembering the torture of the forums, wrote their history to make the Romans cruel and inhumane. However, Christ’s story of a stranger helping anoher did not need academic analysis to be made clear to its first hearers; it was in a challenge to hardened hearts, one that Palestinian supporters aim toward Israelis today – treat everyone as you would like to be treated and expand your notion of family to include all, as we are all children of God. Though the Samaritan and Israeli were traditionally enemies, they transcended their tribalism to be brothers of a species. This was clear two thousand years ago and was written down for that reason: It was a call for early Christians to recognize one another as members of a family of God. 

The soul hungers to be treated with respect and kindness, and as such this is quenching a thirst that has gotten used to the dryness of stone hearts. Augustine, a repentant sinner, found his source of kindness in the Church, and he did not know what we know about the history of humanity: that it did not begin 4000 years ago in a garden. Augustine layered that story with a lot of metaphoric meaning, but he also was incredulous to the idea that salvation could happen without God because he himself had been a great sinner and could not understand his transformation into an asexual hermit without projecting that into this myth. Which is to say that Augustine universalized his biography and considered his early years of sinfulness to be an example of normal human life without God. 

With that clear, let’s leave Augustine out of 21st Century discussions shall we? 

Kidd’s rhetorical question appropriately answered would tell us that humans are complicated, not simple, and that we have the capacity to be both kind and cruel. That we are naturally both kind and egotists, but that we are taught to exagerate our egotism. O
ur education system – our society – encourages the later; it rewards us when we are cruel. This talk of ‘squeamishness’ is an example of how it discourages kindness. We could have a society of beautiful gentle people, but we’d have to treat our children better and forgo all this bullshit with regard to grades, sports and celebrity, and really come down hard on them when they mock fat & ugly people. An example of the season: we might stop purposefully decieving them about Santa Claus, only to chalk up their later disapointment in learning the truth as a rite of passage.

Instead we have a society that values ignorance and hatred, that glorifies militaristic discipline as honourable, assigns undue virtue to the symmetrical, and that sorts its citizens into “winners” and “losers”. 

The examples Kidd uses to argue for kindness as an achievement of civilization (rather than a repression) come from the rise of the militaristic nation state: after Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (the need to police the encouraged cruelty of a cruel society) he writes “Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith — were all fighting to restore kindness and compassion as something natural to the species.” Notice that he used the word fighting to describe their work. 

To summarize my point here: people are both kind and cruel: crueler with strangers than they are with family. Throughout the West’s recorded history, there was a tendency toward authoritarian governance which encouraged a dog-eat-dog model. Christianity was revolutionary in that it encouraged the kinder side of human nature (until it too became authoritarian). The Western model of the nation-state is militaristic, further encouraging the unkind, and now we’ve had four hundred years of that nonsense, so that it seems “natural” that the unkind is the norm, whereas the empathic is the un-evolutionary aberration. In a “world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty” there’s not enough discouragement of this behaviour in favor of more gentle minds. 

“[Oscar the cat] makes regular rounds, entering each room to smell and look over the patients. If all is more or less well, the white-breasted tabby moves on to the next room. If he instead snuggles up to a patient, purring and nuzzling, the nurses immediately start calling relatives. Oscar won’t leave until the patient has breathed his or her last. 

Now, the intriguing question is not so much how Oscar can make such accurate prognoses, but why he lingers, holds this vigil. Is Oscar comforting himself or the patient? If he were upset, sensing a bad situation, wouldn’t Oscar be better off elsewhere, getting petted? And if he’s not upset, why is Oscar so generous, receiving nothing in return? Oscar not only appears to feel empathy, but to act on it, to show kindness.” 

It doesn’t surprise me at all that a cat would behave in the way described. What I find surprising is that one feels the need to explain it at all, and to seek a selfish explanation for it at that.