Kindness in Exile
/By Don Varyu
Apr 2023
n 1991—decades before George Floyd and Tyre Nichols—Los Angeles police pulled Rodney King out of his car after a high-speed chase. Then they proceeded to ignite the modern police brutality movement. They began by fracturing King’s skull and then breaking bones in his face with a night stick. By the time they were done, King suffered multiple internal injuries, stun gun burns on his chest, and a broken leg. Although the beating was recorded on video, somehow the four police officers were acquitted. That verdict led to six days of deadly rioting. In the end, 63 were dead.
There was outrage on all sides. “How could the cops do that to that poor man?!” “How does all that burning and looting fix anything?!” However, in the end, arguably the most memorable and haunting legacy came when King himself spoke as he was released from the hospital: “Can we all get along? Can we get along? We just gotta…we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s…you know…let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.”
King’s plea for peace and cooperation came amid a growing new national focus on self-reflection and personal growth. Bookstores had wide aisles filled with self-help manuals. The implied message was, “I can make myself better,” and optimistically, “I can make the world better.”
How quaint that seems now. Our current focus is not on improving the world; it’s just holding the damn thing together. Gone is any notion of universal fellowship and harmony. Being “friendly”, “considerate” and “generous” seem hopelessly retro. You might still feel those things—but you might also feel foolish saying them out loud. If you claim, “I just want to live in a world where people are kind to each other,” friends might come to you for an intervention.
Which leads to my question: what ever happened to kindness?
Cynics might say that our current situation was predicted by scientists Spencer and Darwin when they identified “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection.” Isn’t it human nature not to be kind? To grab as much as you can for yourself…and let others fend for themselves? Actually, no. Darwin’s overriding conclusion was something different. More fundamental, he believed, was the need for a human to, “…take pleasure in the society of his fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.” In other words, he suggested humans are biologically destined to be kind. But does modern science bear that out?
In fact, it does. Current neuroscientists say the hormone oxytocin—the same one that binds mothers to their newborns—also acts in a universal sense to prompt all people to be kind. Certainly, life’s misfortunes and failures can knock that kindness right out of some, but kindness is inbred.
This is demonstrated in different ways. Some people act by remote control, giving to charities that in turn support other humans. Some will only practice kindness conditionally; for example, they will turn their backs on a program sponsored by “government”, but go all-in if that exact program is administered by their church.
But the true proof of natural kindness comes when it arrives on impulse. Darwin said that in impulsive situations, acts of kindness are, “performed too instantly for reflection or for (considerations of) pleasure or misery.” People are designed to be kind.
During the pandemic, I made a rare trip to a nearly empty downtown to get a haircut. It was cool and rainy--and eerie. There was no one in sight as I walked along what had always been a bustling block. Rehabbing from a joint replacement, I walked carefully, but when I slowed at a crosswalk, my shoe slipped on a metal grate in the sidewalk. I went down. I wasn’t hurt, but as I gathered myself, out of nowhere, a young guy came running up and said, “wow, are you alright!? Can I help you up?” He didn’t know me. We were clearly from different generations, but we also may have been separated by class or family situation or income or politics or any number of differences. But there was no time to think about that—he was acting on impulse. And I’m glad he did.
By the same token, if you saw a woman approaching a closed door with a baby in one arm and a big bag of grocers in the other, wouldn’t you instinctively move to hold that door open for her? I’m sure you would. Because kindness is baked in.
So, if all this is true on a social scale, a biological scale…what’s happened to all the kindness? Where did it go?
America has never been this openly polarized. We don’t want to hear from the other side. We often revile the other side. And we sure don’t want to help them. Screw kindness. They can figure it out for themselves. Sociologists, psychologists, and political pundits have written books on polarization and its causes. So, I’ll just point to three central causes:
Dismissiveness is now a tribal mandate. It’s very easy for liberals like me to point a huge finger of blame and derision at the MAGAS—as I often do. It’s easy to describe them as either naturally stupid, or willfully ignorant. You can just see that they’re mean--constantly sneering and howling to “own the libs.” They are uniformly unkind.
But…but…aren’t we liberals guilty of our own versions of exactly the same thing? The difference is that those on the left don’t want to “own” the rival movement—we just look at out own, and demand that we be purified. And when we do that, we are far from kind. In my lifetime, only Barack Obama’s campaign had unconditional support from all components of the Democratic party. And consider the alternative. When Trump won his nomination in 2016, everyone in his party instantly fell fully in line; not a whimper. Democrats never do this. No matter who runs, there are always whispered snipes, muffled sarcasms, and anonymous damning quotes in prominent national newspapers. All this directed at fellow Democrats. It’s not at all kind.
These are the building blocks of the cancel culture. Every Democrat is constantly surveilled by other Democrats. Any verbal misstep or alleged misdeed threatens immediate excommunication. Sadly, this is not confined to the radical left of the party. Centrist Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) led the torch and pitchfork crowd to force the resignation of fellow Democratic Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) from the Senate in 2017. Apparently, his alleged clumsy groping at office parties years earlier put him on equal footing with Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. The intra-party mob was anything but kind, hounding Franken out of office even before an investigation occurred. And that move was costly and self-inflicted. Franken’s vacated seat went to a Republican…and I wonder if that lost Senate vote might have been helpful to Democrat Joe Biden over the last few years.
The power of un-kindness. It was always thought that decent people, even if they disagreed, could still get along. In America, we would eventually compromise and come to a common understanding, even if heated words were exchanged along the way. Man, that seems so dated now. But why?
To me, everything changed the minute Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court nomination from Barack Obama--just because he could. He knew it was wrong…he knew it was unfair and unkind…but he didn’t care. There was power to grab. And that move from McConnell was all Donald Trump needed to cement his own campaign vision of cruelty and unkindness. He insulted Mexicans, women, Gold Star military families, even primary rivals from his own party. It worked. And after it did, many rising stars in the business world (as well as politics) followed suit. Aggressive founders of startups from Uber to WeWork to Elon Musk had no qualms about abusing employees if it meant more demonstrated power for them. In the 60’s, the public face of culture was the hippy. Today, it’s the startup entrepreneur. We’ve devolved from the Age of Aquarius to the Age of Acquire-Us.
The devil: social media. By now, everybody knows this story. Social media algorithms are designed to extend user engagement—the longer eyeballs are scrolling on a site, the more those eyeballs will see advertisements. For those who own these online worlds, nothing else matters. And they understand the best way to extend engagement is with anger and conflict; make people mad at the world and mad at each other. This would be disreputable and disgusting in its own right, but we’ve also seen lethal downsides. Young kids contemplate suicide because of what they see and said about them anonymously on their feeds. Sometimes they do kill themselves. At the same time, foreign governments have and continue to use disinformation and invented conspiracies to disconnect American citizens from each other. All around, kindness dies on the vine.
I’m not going to conclude by saying there’s no hope. I’m also not going to conclude by saying there is hope. I just don’t know. There’s really no precedent for what’s going on now; there’s no history to draw from. But I am convinced we’ll continue to slide unless we directly attack the three causes I listed above. Can we criticize without stereotyping and dismissing? Can we call out the corrupt exercise of power? Can we make social media at least moderately social?
Maybe the best I can do for now is finish where I started, with words from Rodney King. After the riots and the investigations and the court judgements stemming from his beating had ended, he lamented:
“Some people feel like I’m some kind of hero. Others hate me. Other people…I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to all the destruction; like I’m a fool for believing in peace.”
Well, I believe in peace. And I believe in negotiation and achieving joint understanding.
But those things sure aren’t here now, and they’re not returning to America unless we can also find the road back to common kindness.
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