Kindness

It was a deceptively cold blue-sky day in New York City at the close of winter, wind biting into me as I walked with no particular destination in mind from the Empire State Building towards lower Manhattan.

What I wanted was shelter, and potentially a burrito. Instead, I happened upon the Museum of Sex, which announced itself with a large, silver sign but was otherwise housed in a nondescript building on Fifth Avenue that beckoned nobody.

In a past life, I would have been too embarrassed to walk in. My family are half Catholic and half Protestant, a heady combination of shame and prudishness that has produced within me a perpetual motion machine powered by the tension between furious guilt and the heat produced by sexual repression.

On this day, though, my face was ice and I thought the history of silent-era pornography – or ‘stag’ films as they were known – would at least warm part of me up. The gallery space was filled with grainy old footage of people having sex at comically high frame rates, which was good for a laugh, but I was unprepared for what I would discover on the floor above.

The museum had recently begun a move away from kitsch pornographic amusement (although not entirely) and, at the time I visited, featured a photographic exhibit by Laia Abril that loosely charted the history of abortion in different countries.

From panels of photographs I learned about the 1915 criminal case of Maria R., an unmarried Catholic servant girl in Austria, who attempted to abort her unwanted pregnancy by lying down with an eighteen-kilogram stone positioned on her abdomen. She did this over several evenings and after her fourth attempt, she started bleeding. A few days later, as the exhibit panel explained, the foetus was ‘expelled’. The court found that the stone had caused the termination of her pregnancy.

There was also the story of Samita, a 35-year-old woman in India, who inserted a grapevine stalk into her uterus to induce heavy bleeding. She almost died.

The wire coat hanger also made an appearance in the exhibition – its use is experiencing a resurgence in the United States because access to safe, legal abortion is becoming more difficult – as did stories of women who sought to ingest poison in a bid to end their pregnancies.

Each framed photograph and its accompanying information panel made up a catalogue of a bitter war on women, often perpetrated by men in an attempt to keep their own ‘mistakes’ private, but also by men in general who colonised not just the sex lives of the women with whom they consorted but their wombs as well.

In 1928, a 22-year-old Brazilian schoolteacher called Philomena wrote to her boyfriend, Romeu, informing him that she was about to have an illegal abortion and that she may not survive.

‘I did what you advised me to do and what I should do,’ she wrote. ‘I ask you to forgive [my] numerous mistakes; of love alone, I committed them.’

Philomena did not survive the abortion.

In the end, the story that floored me was of an unnamed woman – featured in a large black-and-white photograph – who performed about 5000 abortions on women in France and across Europe between 1973 and 1992.

‘It was always the same,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘A woman would lend her home to four or five or ten women to perform the abortions on the kitchen table. In France, Italy and Spain, women came to us with different situations and problems, with or without children, with or without money. Who was I to choose?

‘We decided to take them all, as long as their pregnancies had not passed twelve weeks.’

Alongside her photo was a story that jagged my heart. She described a particular woman, who came ‘all alone and sad’ to one of the host’s houses for her abortion. Imagine the terror of that moment. While this woman waited her turn, a friend of the host – a man – began talking to her before suddenly leaving the room. When he returned, he held a single rose which he gave to her. ‘When it is her turn for the abortion,’ the woman who performed the abortion was quoted as saying, ‘he began to play the piano.’

Perhaps it was the singular frost of that day, or the weariness of travelling or because I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, but the idea of that moment made me cry. It was beautiful. It was kind in the truest way we know of kindness: sincere, and unadulterated by transaction. It served, in the poor soul so afraid in that room, to elevate her condition above its miserable present.

‘What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,’ author George Saunders once wrote. ‘Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.’

He’s right. We all remember them in our own lives, too. Portions of the one life we get have been spent in cool detachment when someone was hurting or needed help. Malice is not required. Villains are not indifferent, but indifference can be harmful.

I recall those moments of studied inattention, like Saunders did, and they make me recoil. What is it, I have often thought, that stops us from engaging more readily in the heady wonder of benevolence? And what was it that made that man play the piano for that frightened woman, about to go through a medical procedure on a kitchen table? Did he know what it must have meant to her?

I mean, it feels good to perform even the smallest act of kindness.

I spent much of my early twenties reckoning with this apparent moral twist: is there any way to be kind without receiving something in return?

Is there a way to be truly, wholly selfless and, if there is, does it matter?

For all my mental contortions on the subject, George Price did it worse.

The American evolutionary biologist, who derived a single formula explaining Darwin’s natural selection, tried to repeat his career success by attempting to discover the perfect mathematical framework for human altruism.

Specifically, he became obsessed with whether it was possible to be truly selfless or whether every dose of magnanimity came with even the smallest expectation of perks. Great thinkers since Darwin had wondered about this because animals and humans alike have been known to sacrifice themselves for the apparent greater good, creating a thorny problem for the very notion that evolution must prompt each individual to survive and replicate its genes at all costs.

This was all the more difficult a question because it wasn’t always obvious whether the animal, strictly speaking, had any control over their martyrdom. Like, if a bear crashed a picnic and everyone ran away but I was the slowest so got killed, I could imagine researchers being so appalled at my lack of athleticism that their only conclusion could have been: he must have done that deliberately.

Price’s search would drive him mad and contribute – alongside the religious delusions he began suffering, potentially because of a thyroid condition – to his suicide.

Look, I didn’t say there were easy answers. The genius, who himself had abandoned his wife and children and moved to London in his quest for good (couldn’t see the trees for the forest, I suppose), eventually began taking homeless people into his own house and giving away every last item in his possession. Often, he would wander over to the railway stations of Euston and King’s Cross and give people whatever they asked for. Money, clothes, food. Nothing was too much.

When the lease on his house ran out, he became homeless himself. This was a short-lived rush and, by the close of 1974, George Price had nothing left to give. In early January the next year, he killed himself in a cold Euston squat house with a pair of nail scissors.

There were a few currents that swirled together in Price’s desperate search, but the original spark came from the family he abandoned. What were human families for, he wondered. Specifically, what is the point of fatherhood?

In my honest opinion, he took the concept a bit too far. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. You know the drill.

In a way, George Price failed his experiment of giving without purpose because he had set out to prove something – and proof, we know, can be a kind of reward for the faithless. Sometimes we demand absolute certainty in things because we cannot be satisfied with mere belief. Not necessarily in a religious or spiritual sense, but in matters of the heart nonetheless.

In her poem ‘Kindness’, Naomi Shihab Nye teaches us that sorrow is so often an entree to the deep wellspring of kindness. We must wake up every day with sorrow, she says, and test its dimensions by speaking it out loud. In doing so, we are made aware of all sorrows. We are given access to the true state of things – all that hurt – and asked to be gentle with it.

I think this understanding of sorrow is where the best form of such generosity is born.

There are those of us who, however imperfectly, seek to brandish good will because they have looked into the mouth of the world and found it a place of gnashing cruelty, certain pain and overbearing discomfort. Sorrow is a universal entitlement of our species. None, living or dead, have managed to avoid it. Some feel it more keenly than others, however. These are the people who have been abused or discarded, found despair when they went searching for love; the ones who met injustice with a hyper-individualistic justice they knew would never cover the cloth but pressed on anyway because covering some of it is better than leaving a blank space. They are the chronically ill, the terminally ill and the students of assorted distress. We find kindness, too, among the poor and the dispossessed who, in having nothing, know in their bones that the distance between happiness and hopelessness can be a single crack of light.

In my experience, the kindest people it is possible to meet are those who have been, or still are, in the dirt.

Again, it’s Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that breathed life into the concept for me. In the closing pages, as the Joad family is pulled deeper into false promises and desperation, Ma encounters a man at a general store who has been made to work there for a pittance. Nevertheless, he provides a ten-cent loan for some much-needed sugar.

‘Thanks to you, I’m learnin’ one thing good,’ Ma says. ‘Learnin’ it all a time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.’

In early 2020 I took myself to New York, that fabled city I had longed to visit, to do research for this book. And it was there, in that place where the schism between rich and poor is repulsive and unavoidable, that the guilt of my own frolic with a newly minted book advance in my pocket took hold.

To be clear, this was a lot of money for someone like me. More than I had ever known at any one time. And I was spending it, like an absolute wanker. If ever there were a Venn diagram of punchable offences, I’d be at the centre.

Still, I was there in the skin of a boy who knew the precise volume of poverty; how much space it can take up inside a person. My family toured its edge of oblivion like it was the crater of an active volcano.

I understood perfectly well the relative value of the American bank notes in my wallet to me and to the man or woman on the street. This is a particular talent of the poor, I think. It is not exclusive to them, but you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

When I’d given away all of the actual cash in my wallet to the rough sleepers and other beggers, I came across one particular homeless man called Cardell Jackson who had lost his job four months before and was out begging for scraps to feed his family, temporarily holed up in a shelter from which they would soon have to move.

‘Man, I don’t have any cash on me,’ I explained, ‘but let me take you somewhere to get some food.’

‘Sir, I’m just looking for a little extra for my wife and kids,’ he said.

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Pick anywhere around here and we’ll dine in and order more to go.’

Cardell, bless him, picked a fancy new place that had only recently opened. The clientele were well-to-do folk on a night out with their partners and friends.

When we walked through the door, a hush descended on the room. It was like stepping into the vacuum of space, I imagine, except it was the other diners’ eyes being sucked out of their skulls, not ours. Cardell was carrying a piece of tarpaulin he used as an umbrella and an oversized backpack in which he kept a baffling array of what could only have been pots, judging by the clanking sound they made.

Because it used to be the case all the time, I still get nervous when I walk into a store that has any item priced above $50, assuming the staff will shortly ask me to leave. But I placed my credit card on the counter and waited for the server to come over. When she did, she made eyes at me that seemed to enquire: Are you in trouble, sir? Do I need to call anyone?

I ordered a rum and coke for me and a vodka fire-engine for Cardell, who was now studying the menu. He pretended he could not see properly, though I soon discovered he could not read.

‘Does it look like I give a fuck?’ I asked him. And it was true. I didn’t want him to think this had become an exercise in pity, because my own mum had always taught us people did not require it. We had come for dignity, or nothing at all.

Cardell ordered a take-away lobster bake, spaghetti bolognese and onion rings for his family, and a steak for himself. While we ate, we talked about the grind of living, wearing the half-horrified glances of the other diners like medals. The two of us talked for an hour over another round of drinks and parted ways close to midnight. I eventually lost sight of Cardell in a plume of steam rising through a grate from beneath the road.

And then I sat with myself at an Irish pub and wondered what it was that I felt.

‘People who come from your place, they always want to protect the underdog,’ my therapist said to me, a few months later, during one of our regular sessions in Sydney. ‘Because it is kind of a way of protecting ourselves. Random acts of kindness are a way of healing, it’s a corrective emotional experience and I tell everybody to do that even if they don’t need to.’

One cannot be kind if we do not first start by being generous with ourselves.

I don’t want this to come off like some new-age ‘live your truth’ mantra because, let’s face it, that’s how we got anti-5G conspiracy theories and an anti-vaccination movement whose members would rather their children get measles than read a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Nor is this a version of the overwrought trope of ‘self care’ which has a kernel of worthiness at its core that is too often strangled or repurposed as middle-class luxury.

The self-directed kindness I speak of here isn’t a bubble bath or lanolin face mask, though I have been known to use both liberally. It is far more rudimentary in its way, and more difficult to pull off. What we must give ourselves is a rigorous compassion, the kind that doesn’t absolve wrongdoing or poor behaviour but allows us to meet both from a place of understanding.

Writer and essayist Esmé Weijun Wang told a short story recently about how it ought to work. When Wang was in middle school, a student broke a beaker in science class and Wang sprang into action, cleaning up the broken glass with her bare hands. She was only twelve but, she said, back then, ‘I thought that was my job to be good, that was my job.’ Now Wang is an adult and her best friend has a saying borrowed from that distant memory, which is deployed whenever Wang hurts herself in the service of becoming the Good Girl:

Don’t pick up the glass with your bare hands.

In her story, Wang went on to say: ‘I don’t know who needs to hear this but: don’t pick up the glass with your bare hands.’

Kindness to others can only come when you have paid deep attention to your own flaws and accepted them anyway. Yes, it springs from sorrow, but only when we have made peace with the hurt that dwells inside us. Such a detente is necessary not only for yourself, but for others. If you feed that hurt so much, it outgrows you and it must find somewhere else to go.

That’s the simple arithmetic of it.

Personally, I don’t think there is a way to be kind without experiencing at least a murmur of goodness. I also don’t think that it matters.

As I have been writing this book, I have returned time and again to this piece from David Whyte on vulnerability, a perfect medium through which kindness can travel.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

There are benefits to what feels like bravery in that first choice. Performing random acts of kindness makes us happier, according to a recent experiment from researchers at Oxford University.

The study of 683 people by Lee Rowland and Oliver Scott Curry asked what none before them had yet considered: did it matter if the target of your spontaneous goodwill was family, someone you barely knew, yourself or a complete stranger?

In short, no. Happiness increased for people in every group.

But get this. Even paying active attention to someone else being kind is enough to get that juicy hit of cheer. I can vouch for this approach. You don’t even have to be there in person. Just queue up a video compilation of kindness and go to town.

Sometimes when I’ve had a bad day or if I’m procrastinating in the shadow of a larger task or, if I’m perfectly honest, just migrating between various instances of intellectual paralysis, I will seek out these feel-good videos or stories.

There is a school of thought that these entries in the kindness canon are mawkish or, at a minimum, insubstantial in the face of a more systemic cruelty. But isn’t that type of thinking part of the problem?

I’ve been riddled with that cynicism myself, depending on the phase of the moon, and it tends to be counterproductive. Getting muddled about the utility of small gestures when there is a bigger picture ignores the fact there is no beach without each grain of sand.

In biology, and the study of other complex systems, there is a property known as ‘emergence’, which describes behaviours of an entity that only appear at a larger level and which could not have been achieved by the constituent parts on their own.

Life itself is the best example. How did we go from elemental particles of matter that themselves are totally lifeless to breathing, thinking, doing organisms? How did they organise themselves in the first place to even get to a stage where some threshold was crossed to breathe life into them? We have ideas about this, but right now we just do not know.

In this same way, the institutions that govern us emerge from us. If you want systemic change, feed it from the core. Start with kindness.

It’s worth noting that, although kindness can make you happier, this is not a manifesto to live happily. Fuck that noise.

I cannot count the number of times someone has intimated that I should just be happier, as if this state of being could be ordered from a menu. ‘Why don’t you just get the Big Mac?’ they might as well ask.

Happiness as a goal is a rort. If you don’t believe me, stare into the eyes of one of those wellness influencers and see if the experience doesn’t immediately give you a panic attack.

Look, I’ve been there. On the rebound from one of my many all-consuming lows, it is often difficult to pinpoint whether the new feeling I have is happiness or a mania dressed in the wrong clothes. Here, you might find me speaking at twice the usual rate of words while declaring that I am, indeed, a ‘new man’ and going on grand adventures. Maybe I’ll learn piano, or French! Maybe I’ll start hosting grand dinner parties where I invite interesting people over and then talk about nothing but Chekhov, thereby recreating the plays of Chekhov in which the characters always end up talking to the wrong people.

These things are never happiness, however, and believing that they might be is a worrisome thing. Let’s be very clear about this. Happiness exists as a counterpoint to grief, loss and the many fluctuations of ordinary life. Its sails cannot be hoisted inside a bottle, like a replica ship, and stored for all time on the mantlepiece. We do not deliberately come into its possession, nor consciously maintain it when we do. It happens to us, when the conditions are right. We should stand ready to receive it.

For moments, or entire stretches of time that ache with the sensation of permanency, I have felt desperately sad, such that nothing could penetrate the atmosphere of my own longing. I do not imagine I am alone in this, even among people who would not typically be considered depressed.

You are allowed to be sad. Sometimes, in this state, the very notion that we should be feeling any other way contributes to the longevity of that darkness. If it were always as easy as simply turning on the light, we would have built electricity substations for our own emotions.

We need not wait for kindness, however. It is not a state of being but a thing of doing, and it is perhaps at its most potent when all around is sorrow. There is no need to attach strings or conditions. These amount to nothing more than arbitrary control in search of moral validation. Like forgiveness, kindness should not be mediated through the prism of what you want or expect. Telling a homeless person, for example, that you’ll give them cash as long as they don’t spend it on drugs or booze is not kind. That is an act designed to validate your own moral framework. It is the unhelpful result of a saviour complex with you at its centre.

While at university, my school friend Matthew used to play us one of his favourite tracks by the now obscure musical project Lazyboy, called ‘Underwear Goes Inside the Pants’. There was one section of the song in particular that guided my thinking then and which I have never since forgotten. I’m not sure how advisable it is to divine philosophical positions from a stand-up comedian and former band member of noted musical group Aqua, but we discover inspiration wherever it may fall.

Lazyboy asks us to consider what a homeless person might do with the money other than salve their predicament? They don’t have a house. It’s not like you’ll be giving them enough for med school.

Of course, a homeless person might use it on accommodation or shelter. Or booze. Or some clothes. The point is, an act of kindness can do much for the soul and perhaps not a lot for the structural conditions of a life. It is worth asking how we expect anyone to survive long enough for those systemic forces to change, if they ever do. Maybe the test of our generosity is how willing we are to get them through that waiting.

A few years ago I met a young bloke in Redfern who asked for some money as I was walking back across the park with my groceries. I fished $50 out of my wallet and he proceeded to explain that $100 would secure him accommodation for a few nights.

His name was Matt and he was insistent that the money was for shelter. I told him time and time again that I didn’t care, he could do whatever made him safest or most comfortable. How could I possibly know what that looked like for him? It was clear in his manner that he had been browbeaten before. Matt was used to fielding questions about what he would do with the money, which is another way of saying his worth as an individual was always up for appraisal.

I offered him another $50 and he looked to be genuinely in shock, staring at it for a beat too long before looking into my eyes.

‘Can I give you a hug?’ he asked.

‘Of course, man.’

It was one of those lingering hugs, the kind that creates its own atmosphere, and I realised while we were embraced that I must have needed it as much as he seemed to.

One of the great innovations of the human brain is the ability to time-travel mentally, to imagine a thousand or more different future scenarios in which we might be stuck in this job or dating that person, winning the lotto or losing it all. We use this ability to process decisions in the here and now and we can project it onto other people, too. Babies don’t appear to be born with such a skill, though they develop it within a few years.

In some experiments, researchers test a toddler’s ability by placing an object in a box while an adult volunteer is in the room. When the adult leaves the room, the researcher swaps the object to a different box. The toddler watches this happen and they are then asked to identify which box the adult thinks the object will be in when they return to the room. The child knows where it actually is but that is not the question.

To answer it successfully they must be able to see the world with the inputs and assumptions of the other; to know that this adult can justifiably believe something that is simply no longer true.

This is the beginning of empathy.

Kindness, then, is allowing these concessions for others as we may sometimes allow them for ourselves. It means granting the complexity of life to strangers that we figure into our own thinking. And it involves the use of that mental time-travel to understand, in the marrow of us, that our own circumstances might also one day be different. It need not matter if we have suffered before, though this of course may heighten the instinct to be kind. It matters only that we can imagine it.

The righteous are simply defective in this manner. They see in themselves a string of correct decisions, even in adversity, that were made judiciously and with the full force of reason: a set of choices that could never have been influenced by the prickly impersonality of fate.

Nobody, myself included, is immune from the blunt inaccuracy of this righteousness. It swaddles us and makes a mockery of good judgement. To be fair and just is an exercise in voluminous accounting: the ledger of our past should include not only the moments when we were right but the many, conveniently forgotten, in which we were marginally, totally or even cataclysmically wrong. When the past is audited in this way, kindness follows.

We have all displayed these episodes of suffocating moral virtue. They are difficult to admit, of course, but unfortunately in some cases, they are lifelong afflictions. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard of a hard-right or conservative American politician – usually a man – preaching the ‘crimes’ of homosexuality only to be found months or years later sucking dick underneath an airport bathroom stall.

Pastor Tom Brock, for example, left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America because they allowed ‘practising homosexuals’ to be ordained. Brock even went so far as to say God sent a tornado to the Minneapolis Convention Center during a conference where the matter was being debated, which, frankly, marks the supreme being as something of a disappointing micromanager.

Brock, it turns out, was gay. He even admitted to giving in to ‘temptation’ during a trip to Slovakia.

One-time mayor of Mississippi town Southaven, Greg Davis, took a similarly hard line against same-sex marriage and queer issues. Davis, you will not be surprised to learn, is gay. His charade faltered when he purchased $67 worth of toys from a gay sex shop in Canada and charged them to taxpayers in what can only be described as a cock-up. He’s not the first, nor the last, to be brought down by an errant dildo or its likeness.

In 2019, former Republican lawmaker Aaron Schock was photographed shirtless with his hands down the pants of another bloke who he was also kissing, otherwise known as the ‘gay trifecta’. This did not happen in private, but at the celebrity-heavy music festival Coachella.

Schock, in his time as a lawmaker, voted against adding LGBTQ people to federal hate crime protections; against the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (an armed forces policy that demanded military members erase their homosexuality under threat of being kicked out); and for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

‘What I had to share was unwelcome news to every single person in my family,’ Schock wrote on Instagram, after the pictures were published and he came out to his relatives. ‘I can live openly now as a gay man because of the extraordinary, brave people who had the courage to fight for our rights when I did not.’

We haven’t even come to those leaders of gay conversion therapy who have either come out as gay or, worse, been caught sexually abusing their so-called ‘patients’.

In September 2019, McKrae Game, the founder of the Hope for Wholeness Network – a conversion ‘therapy’ program that promised ‘freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ’ – renounced everything he had ever taught after coming out as gay himself.

‘I was a religious zealot that hurt people,’ Game told the Post and Courier in an interview. ‘People said they attempted suicide over me and the things I said to them. People, I know, are in therapy because of me. Why would I want that to continue?’

That same month, I tweeted a link to another article about Game and included my brief thoughts: ‘Annual reminder that conversion therapy is psychological torture.’

What followed was an intriguing, delicate exchange between myself and a woman that tapped something difficult to grasp within myself.

‘I’m straight and I’m furious with him. The damage he has inflicted on others,’ she commented.

The race to condemnation is often swift in such morally contemptible cases, but I wasn’t so sure it was helpful.

‘I’m torn,’ I replied. ‘I certainly think he is a victim of the religious bigotry that used him as much as he used that to ensnare others. It’s a tragedy.’

My acquaintance thought the man’s contrition was convenient and wrote that it ‘smacks a bit’ of ‘I was only following orders’.

It’s a fair claim, though I thought it more vexed than a craven Nuremberg defence.

‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘although I think this has a lot more to do with brainwashing/indoctrination from a very young age which skews my reaction. Fury is justified, I just hope it moves beyond him to the real culprits. I’m glad he was honest.’

I mention this not to admonish anyone who feels they cannot exercise kindness towards people like Game – though I’d like to think I would – but to prove an earlier point. If just one of these men (they are mostly but not always men) had been able to be gentle with themselves first we wouldn’t be here now.

It is true, also, that they did not themselves form in a vacuum, nor did the people in their atmosphere who let hatred curdle. What if – hear me out here – they, too, were inwardly kind first?

And so on and so on.

Look, I know this all sounds so anodyne. In this moment I am struggling with an occasional instinct for cynicism which threatens to white-ant my thinking. It is very easy to be dismissive without doing the intellectual work of self-directed inquisition.

We owe ourselves the generosity of such understanding.