Book 17 on my Kindle. On Kindness by Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor
I didn't like this a lot, I don't think I finished it. It seemed oddly mean-spirited, seemed to under-rate how kind people actually are. I remember them saying this sort of thing a lot:
"It is now generally assumed that people are basically selfish, and that fellow feeling is either a weakness or a luxury, or merely a more sophisticated form of selfishness."
Which doesn't seem true to me.
Anyway, these are the bits I highlighted. In most instances I'm not really sure why.
"BEING KIND ALWAYS MAKES US FEEL BETTER, AND yet being kind is not something we do as often as we would like."
"‘A SIGN OF HEALTH IN THE MIND’, DONALD Winnicott wrote in 1970, ‘is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.’ To live well, we must be able to imaginatively identify with other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity."
"Modern western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness."
"But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of western history this has been widely acknowledged. Even the Stoics – those avatars of self-reliance – recognized man's innate need for other people as purveyors and objects of kindness."
"Far from a realm of freedom, the private market is profoundly coercive, he argued, forcing people into situations that thwart their natural altruism. The Gift Relationship condemned the American practice of paying for blood, which, by eliminating the need for personal generosity, undermined human fellowship. The commercialization of what ought to be a gift relation estranged people from each other, Titmuss insisted. The ‘universal stranger’ (that is, all of us in our dependent relations on each other) became no longer an object of solicitude but an alien being, and communal ties were fatally eroded. The Gift Relationship was enormously influential, and remains a revered text in social welfare circles. But it is also a poignant work, Canute-like in its defiance of the rising tide of privatization that, in the decades since its publication, has swept through the public sector."
"The taboo surrounding ‘dependency’ became even stronger, as politicians, employers and a motley array of well-fed moralists harangued the poor and vulnerable on the virtues of self-reliance. Prime Minister Tony Blair called for ‘compassion with a hard edge’ to replace the softening variety advocated by his predecessors."
"Science may be the modern religion, but not everyone trusts its pseudo-certainties, or derives consolation from them."