At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can’t get for themselves. This is normally and logically understood to mean something material. We overwhelmingly associate charity with giving money. But, in its widest sense, charity stretches far beyond financial donations. Charity involves offering someone something that they may not entirely deserve and that it is a long way beyond the call of duty for us to provide: sympathy.
We are often in trouble of a distinctive sort. We’re not quite in a ditch; we may even have a little money, but we are in difficulties nevertheless, as much at the mercy of strangers as if we were beggars – and equally unappealing to the hard-nosed and impatient. Just like the most scabrous of panhandlers, we have lost any claim on the respect of the righteous.
We may have done something highly foolish or disreputable. We may have been inconsiderate or hasty. We may have lied or lost our temper. Perhaps our deficiency is one of temperament: under the pressure of disappointment, our personalities have grown sour or boastful. Or we come across as dispiritingly shy or cynical in our dealings with others.
We need charity, but not of the usual kind; we need what we might term a ‘charity of interpretation’: that is, we require an uncommonly generous assessment of our idiocy, weakness, eccentricity or deceit.
We need onlookers who can provide some of the rationale we have grown too mute, cowed or ashamed to proffer. Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They must intimate that early trauma and let-down must have formed the backdrop to later transgressions. They will remember that the person before them was once a baby too.
The charitable interpreter holds on also to the idea that sweetness must remain beneath the surface, along with the possibility of remorse and growth. They are committed to mitigating circumstances; to all the bits of the truth that can cast a less catastrophic light on folly.
In cases of financial charity, the gifts tend to go in one direction only, from the rich to the poor. Those who give may be generous, but they tend to experience only one side of the equation, remaining for all their lives the donor rather than the recipient. They can be reasonably sure that they won’t ever be in material need, which is what can lend a somewhat unimaginative or aloof tone to their generosity. But when it comes to the gift of charitable interpretation, none of us is ever committedly beyond need. Such is our proclivity for error and our vulnerability to reversals of fortune, we are all on the verge of needing someone to come to our imaginative aid. And therefore, if for no other reason, we have a duty to remain constant providers of generous interpretations of the lives of others. We must be kind in the sense not only of being touched by the remote material suffering of strangers, but also of being ready to do more than condemn and hate the sinful around us, hopeful that we too may be accorded a tolerable degree of sympathy in our forthcoming hour of failure and shame.
Our societies are very interested in winners but don’t really know what to do about losers – of which there are always, by definition, a far greater number.
For a long time, around success and failure, the rhetoric tends to be upbeat. We hear about resilience, bouncing back, never surrendering and giving it another go. But there’s only so long this kind of talk can go on. At some point, the conclusion becomes inevitable: things won’t work out. The political career isn’t going to have a come-back. There’ll be no way of getting finance for the film. The novel won’t be accepted by the thirty-second publisher. The criminal charges are forever going to taint one’s reputation.
Where does responsibility for success and failure lie? Nowadays, the answer tends to be: squarely with the individual concerned. That’s why failure isn’t just hard (as it has always been), it is a catastrophe. There is no metaphysical consolation, no possibility of appealing to the idea of ‘bad luck’, no one to blame but oneself. Suicide rates climb exponentially once societies become modern and start to hold people profoundly responsible for their biographies. Meritocracies turn failure from a misfortune to an unbudgeable verdict on one’s nature. We trust that the world is more or less just – and that, the odd exception aside, people will secure roughly what they deserve. Those who are condemned and broken did something wrong; those who succeeded worked hard and were good. The status of a person has to be a more or less reliable indicator of their effort and decency.
But not all societies and eras have seen success and failure in such a stark and forbidding light. In ancient Greece, another rather remarkable possibility – ignored by our own era – was envisaged: you could be good and yet fail. To keep this idea at the front of the collective imagination, the ancient Greeks developed a particular art form: tragic drama. They put on huge festivals, which all the citizens were expected to attend, to act out stories of appalling, often grisly, failure: people were seen to break a minor law, or make a hasty decision, or sleep with the wrong person and the results were ignominy and death. Yet what happened was shown to be to a large extent in the hands of what the Greeks called ‘fate’ or ‘the gods’. It was the Greeks’ poetic way of saying that things often work out randomly, according to dynamics that simply don’t reflect the merits of the individuals concerned.
The great Greek tragedians – Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles – recounted stories of essentially respectable, intelligent and honest men and women who, on account of a minor and understandable error or omission, unleashed catastrophe and ended up in a very short time dead or ruined. The way in which these stories of downfall were told was intended to leave audiences stunned by the recognition of how easily any life might be undone and how a small mistake can require us to pay the ultimate price. They were to walk out of the theatre afraid for themselves and filled with pity for the cruelty of the fate dealt out to the unknowing and unfortunate heroes soaked in blood on stage. Having followed the slow unfurling of events from prosperity and esteem to disgrace and disaster, audiences would be in no mood to pass easy moral judgement. It would make no sense to dismiss Oedipus or Medea, Antigone and Electra with anything approximating the catch-all, infinitely damning modern term for those who do not make it: losers. These great fictional characters belonged to a far nobler, more dignified and more humane category which tragedy helped to map: that of the tragic failure, the person who loses without thereby forfeiting the right to sympathy and mercy.
Tragedy is the sympathetic, morally complex account of how good people can end up in disaster. It attempts to teach us that goodness is seldom fairly rewarded or error paid for in commensurate ways. The most shocking events can befall the more or less innocent or the only averagely muddled and weak. We do not inhabit a properly moral universe: disaster at points befalls those who could not have expected it to be a fair outcome, given what they did. The Greeks were the originators of a remarkable, appalling and still-too-seldom-accepted possibility that failure is not reserved simply for the evil.
We are used to according automatic respect to the central figures of great tragic works, but there is nothing inherently noble about the personalities of Hamlet or Madame Bovary, Jude the Obscure or Anna Karenina. That we accord them dignity has to do with the way their stories have been told to us; if we had left the task to the media, they would have been indistinguishable from the usual objects of popular ridicule and loathing.
The real purpose of tragedy is not to teach us to be kind to fictional creations, it is to encourage us to apply a complex lens to the travails of all those around us and, crucially at points, to ourselves. Without having any of the dramatic talent of a Sophocles or Shakespeare, we need to tell our own stories of loss and error with some of the same generosity that they employed, thereby holding on to what can often feel, especially at our lowest points, like a hugely improbable idea: that though we have failed, however stupid our mistakes, we remain deserving of that gracious and grand epithet, a gift from the Greeks to all humankind: a ‘tragic failure’.
We may sometimes wonder how certain irritating people have come into our lives. After spending time around them, what dominates our awareness of them is their flaws: how rigid they can be, how muddled, self-righteous, vague or proud. We grow into experts in their deficiencies of character.
We should in our most impatient and intemperate moments strive to hold on to the concept of the weakness of strength. This dictates that we should interpret people’s weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points (even if none of these benefits are apparent right now). What we’re seeing are not their faults, pure and simple, but rather the shadow side of things that are genuinely good about them. If we were to write down a list of strengths and then of weaknesses, we’d find that almost everything on the positive side of the ledger could be connected up with something on the negative. The theory urges us to search a little more assiduously than is normal for the strength to which a maddening characteristic must be twinned. We can see easily enough that someone is pedantic and uncompromising; we tend to forget, at moments of crisis, their thoroughness and honesty. We know so much about a person’s messiness, we have forgotten their uncommon degree of creative enthusiasm. The very same character trait that we approve of will be inseparable from tendencies we end up regretting. This isn’t bad luck or the case with one or two people, it’s a law of nature. There can, perplexingly, be no such thing as a person with only strengths.
In the 1870s, when he was living in Paris, the American novelist Henry James became a friend of the celebrated Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was also living in the city at that time. James was particularly taken with the unhurried, tranquil style of the Russian writer’s storytelling: he spent a long time on every sentence, weighing different options, changing, polishing, until – at last – everything was perfect. It was a hugely ambitious, inspiring approach to literature.
But in personal and social life, these same virtues could make Turgenev an aggravating companion. He was almost impossible to pin down for an appointment, writing florid, nuanced letters of apology for his delays and changes of plan. James would invite him for lunch for 1 p.m., Turgenev would agree, then suddenly change his mind twenty minutes before, sending a note to say that he’d had to leave town on an urgent trip. Eventually he’d make an appointment that seemed to work, but would show up an hour and a half late.
James might have been tempted to end the friendship forthwith, but he had the wisdom not to interpret Turgenev’s disastrous timekeeping as an isolated part of his personality but rather to see it as an emanation of the very same side of his character that enabled him to produce some of the greatest literary works of the age. The same trait might generate Fathers and Sons and, around appointments, six cancelled meetings. Musing in a letter about Turgenev’s greatness as a writer and his trickiness as a friend, James remarked that the Russian novelist had thoroughly exhibited the ‘weakness of his strength’.
The theory of the weakness of strength invites us to be calm and forensic about the most irritating aspects of those we live around. There is no comfort in being told that these aspects are not real or significant. The consolation comes in not viewing them in isolation, in remembering the accompanying trait that redeems them and explains the friendship, in recalling that a lack of time management might have its atonement in creativity or that dogmatism might be the offshoot of precision.
It is always an option to move away and find people who will have new kinds of strengths, but – as time will reveal – they will also have new, fascinating and associated kinds of weaknesses.
Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.
One of the fundamental paths to sympathy is the power to hold on, in the most challenging situations, to a distinction between a person’s overt unpleasant actions and the more pitiable motives that may underlie them. Pure evil is seldom at work. Almost all our worst moments can be traced back to an unexotic, bathetic, temptingly neglected ingredient: pain.
A traditional folk tale known as ‘Androcles and the Lion’, originally recounted by the ancient Roman philosopher Aulus Gellius, tells of a Barbary lion – nine feet long with a splendid dark mane – who lived in the forested foothills of the Atlas Mountains (in what is today Algeria). Usually he kept far from human settlements, but one year, in spring, he started approaching the villages at night, roaring and snarling menacingly in the darkness. The villagers were terrified. They put extra guards on the gates and sent out heavily armed hunting parties to try to slaughter the beast.
It happened around this time that a shepherd boy named Androcles followed his sheep far into the high mountain pastures. One evening, he sought shelter in a cave. He had just lit a candle and was setting out his blanket when he saw the ferocious animal glaring at him from a corner. At first he was terrified. It seemed as if the angry lion might be about to pounce and rip him to pieces. But then Androcles noticed something: there was a thorn deeply embedded in one of the lion’s front paws and a huge tear was running down his noble face. The creature wasn’t murderous, he was in agony. So instead of trying to flee or defend himself with his dagger, the boy’s fear turned to pity. Androcles approached the lion, stroked his mane and gently, reassuringly extracted the thorn from the paw, wrapping it in a strip of cloth torn from his own blanket. The lion licked the boy’s hand and became his friend for life.
The story is a reminder of what kindness demands. We resent others with unhelpful speed when we lack the will to consider the origins of their behaviour. The lion is in terrible pain, but has no capacity to understand what is hurting him and what he might need from others. The lion is all of us when we lack insight into our own distress. The thorn is a troubling, maddening element of our inner lives – a fear, a biting worry, a regret, a sense of guilt, a feeling of humiliation, a strained hope or an agonized disappointment that rumbles away powerfully but just out of range of our standard view of ourselves. The art of living is to a large measure dependent on an ability to understand our thorns and explain them with a modicum of grace to others – and, when we are on the other side of the equation, to imagine the thorns of others, even those whose precise locations or dimensions we will never know for certain.
People are bad, always, because they are in difficulty. They slander, gossip, denigrate and growl because they are not in a good place. Though they may seem strong, though their attacks can place them in an apparently dominant role, their ill intentions are all the proof we require to know as a certainty that they are not well. Contented people have no need to hurt others.
The theory should help us to reverse some of the humiliation that comes from being attacked. It is only too easy to imagine that those who have hurt us are somehow invulnerable and noble; we readily remember reasons to be ashamed of ourselves. However, to hold on to the idea that hurt generates meanness casts our opponent in the subservient role. It isn’t us who must be pitiful but our attacker who feels such a need to crush us. One has to feel very small in order to belittle.
The theory helps to restore a kind of justice that we may not ourselves directly be able to administer. The explanation of the origins of nastiness changes how we assess our opponent. No longer are they necessarily strong and impervious. We have not been able to punish them, but the universe has in a sense, and the clearest evidence for the sentence lies in the unhappiness that is powering their attacks. They have not got away with injuring us; their punishment lies in the pain they must be enduring in order to have such an urgent need to lash out. We, who have no wish to hurt, are in fact the stronger party; we, who have no wish to diminish others, are truly powerful. We can move from helpless victims to imaginative witnesses of justice.
This may sound overly convenient; but it is also plainly true. We are not beyond improvement, of course, but people simply never need to harm others if they are not first tormented themselves.
The logic of the argument points to how we might, when our short-term irritation has worn off, deal with those who have injured us. The temptation is to grow strict and inflict punishment back. But with a better understanding of the insecurity and sadness that power ill temper in the first place, there is only one plausible, though extremely challenging, way forward: a response of love.
For most of history, the idea of being ‘polite’ has been central to our sense of what is required to count as a kind and civilized person. But more recently, politeness has come under suspicion. While we may not reject it outright, it’s not a word we now instinctively reach for when we want to explain why we like or admire someone. Politeness can seem to carry almost the opposite of its traditional connotations, suggesting an offensive or insolent degree of insincerity. A polite person can be judged as a bit of a fake and, in their own way, really rather rude.
The rise in our collective suspicion of politeness has a history. In the late eighteenth century, an ideal of Romantic anti-politeness emerged, largely driven forward by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who powerfully redescribed politeness in terms of inauthenticity, servility and deceit. What was important for Rousseau was never to hide or moderate emotions and thoughts, but to remain – at all times – fundamentally true to oneself.
Rousseau’s writings generated highly influential attitudes to which we remain heirs. What ultimately separates the polite from the frank person isn’t really a knowledge of etiquette. The difference doesn’t hang upon considerations of which knife to use at a formal dinner, when to say please or thank you, or how to word a wedding invitation. It comes down to a contrasting set of beliefs about human nature. The polite person and the frank person behave differently chiefly because they see the world in highly divergent ways. The following are some of the key ideological issues that separate them.
Frank people believe in the importance of expressing themselves honestly principally because they trust that what they happen to think and feel will always prove fundamentally acceptable to the world. Their true sentiments and opinions may, when voiced, be bracing of course, but no worse. Frank types assume that what is honestly avowed cannot really ever be vindictive, disgusting, tedious or cruel. In this sense, the frank person sees themselves a little in the way we typically see small children: as blessed by an original and innate goodness.
Tellingly, we don’t usually think that the strictures of politeness apply to the very young. We remain interested to hear about whatever may be passing through their minds and stay unalarmed by their awkward moments, infelicities or negative statements. If they say that the pasta is yuck or that the taxi driver has a head like a weird goldfish, it sounds funny rather than wounding. The frank person taps into just this childlike optimism in their uninhibited approach to themselves. Their trust in their basic purity erodes the rationale for editing or self-censorship.
The polite person, by contrast, proceeds under a grave suspicion of themselves and their impulses. They sense that a great deal of what they feel and want really isn’t very nice. They are indelibly in touch with their darker desires and can sense their fleeting wishes to hurt or humiliate certain people. They know they are sometimes a bit revolting and cannot forget the extent to which they may come across as offensive and frightening to others. They therefore set out on a deliberate strategy to protect others from what they know is within them. It isn’t lying as such; they merely understand that being ‘themselves’ is a treat that they must take enormous pains to spare everyone else from experiencing – especially anyone they claim to care about.
Paradoxically, the polite person who is pessimistic about their own nature doesn’t in fact end up behaving horribly with anyone. So aware are they of their own dislikeable sides, they nimbly minimize their impact upon the world. It is their extraordinary suspicion of themselves that helps them to be – in everyday life – uncommonly friendly, trustworthy and kind.
The frank person operates with a charming, unconscious assumption that other people are at heart pretty much like them. This can make them very clubbable and allows them to create some astonishing intimacies across social barriers at high speed. When they like listening to a particular piece of music at high volume, they will take it as obvious that you probably do as well. Because they are very enthusiastic about spicy food, or never want to add salt to a dish, it doesn’t cross their mind to ask if you actually like this restaurant or would favour a salt cellar on the table. They are correspondingly undisturbed by the less obvious clues about some of the dissonant feelings that may be unfolding in the minds of other people: if someone is a bit quiet at a meeting, it doesn’t occur to the frank person to worry that they might have said something wrong or badly misjudged the situation.
For their part, the polite person starts from the assumption that others are highly likely to be in quite different places internally, whatever the outward signs. Their behaviour is therefore tentative, wary and filled with enquiries. They will explicitly check with others to take a measure of their experiences and outlook: if they feel cold, they are very alive to the possibility that you may be feeling perfectly warm and so will take trouble to ask if you’d mind if they went over and closed the window. They are aware that you might be annoyed by a joke that they find funny or that you might very sincerely hold political opinions quite at odds with their own. They don’t take what is going on for them as a guide to what is probably going on for you. Their manners are grounded in an acute sense of the gulf that can separate humans from one another.
The frank person works with an underlying sense that other people are internally for the most part extremely robust. Those around them are not felt to be forever on the verge of self-doubt and self-hatred. Their egos are not assumed to be gossamer thin and at perpetual risk of deflating. There is therefore understood to be no need to broadcast constant small signals of reassurance and affirmation. When you go to someone’s house, the fact that the meal was tasty will be obvious to everyone, not least the person who spent the day preparing it. There is no need to keep stressing the point in a variety of discreet ways. When one meets an artist, there’s no need to mention that their last work was noticed and appreciated; they’ll know this well enough. And the office junior must have a pretty clear sense that they are making the grade without any need to stop and spell it out. The frank person assumes that everyone’s ego is already at least as big and strong as it should be. They are even likely to suspect that if you praise someone for the little things, you’ll only inflate their self-regard to undue and dangerous proportions.
The polite person starts from a contrary assumption that all of us are permanently only millimetres away from inner despair and self-hatred. However confident we may look, we are very vulnerable – despite even great outward plaudits and recognition – to a sense of being disliked and taken for granted. Every piece of neglect, every silence or slightly harsh or off-the-cuff word has a profound capacity to hurt. All of us are walking around without a skin. The cook, the artist and the office junior will inevitably share in a craving for evidence that what they do and are is OK. Accordingly, the polite person will be drawn to spending a lot of time noticing and commenting positively on the most apparently minor facets of others’ achievements: they will say that the watercress soup was the best they’ve had for years (and that they’d forgotten how much they liked it); they’ll mention that the ending of the writer’s new novel made them cry and that work on the Mexico deal was particularly helpful to, and noticed by, the whole company. They will know that everyone we come across has a huge capacity to be hurt by what we sometimes refer to as ‘small things’.
There’s likely to be an associated underlying difference in attitudes to money and love in the context of work. For the frank person, money is the crucial ingredient we want from other people in our professional lives. They therefore don’t feel any great need – in service situations, for example – to express gratitude or take particular pains to create a semblance of equality with an employee. The waiter or the person at the car-hire desk has, they feel, no special need of kindness on top of the money they will already be securing through the transaction.
Yet the polite person knows that we take a lot of ourselves into our jobs and need to find respect and a form of love from them as much as we need cash. So they will be conscious of an additional need to contribute smiles and a pleasant word or two to the person stamping their passport or changing the bedclothes in the hotel. These people are doing their jobs for the money of course, but payment never invalidates an equally strong emotional hunger for a sense of having been useful and appreciated by another person, however brief and functional the encounter may have seemed.
The frank person is often very kind but in a bold way. They are interested in enormous acts of generosity and kindness towards major sections of humanity: perhaps the rescue of the whole continent of Africa or a plan to give every child in the country an equally good start in life. But a consequence of their enthusiasm can be a certain impatience with smaller gestures, which they may view as a distraction from larger causes. There is really no point, they may feel, in spending time and money sending people flowers, writing notes after a dinner or remembering birthdays when a fundamental transformation of the human condition is at hand.
The polite person also cares passionately about spreading kindness, love and goodness on a mass scale, but they are cautious about the chances of doing so on any realistic time horizon. Yet their belief that perhaps one can’t improve things enormously for a huge number of people in the coming decades makes them feel that it is still very much a worthy goal to try to effect modest, minor improvements in the lives of the few humans one does have direct contact with in the here and now. They may never be able to transform another person’s prospects entirely or rescue the species from its agony, but they can smile and stop for a brief conversation with a neighbour. Their modesty around what is possible makes them acutely sensitive to the worth of the little things that can be done to attenuate the bitterness of existence. Far more than their frank counterpart, they’ll often find time for a chat.
The frank person has a high degree of confidence as to their ability to judge relatively quickly and for the long term what is right and wrong about a given situation. They feel they can tell who has behaved well or badly or what the appropriate course of action should be around a dilemma. This is what gives them the confidence to get angry with what strikes them (immediately) as rank stupidity, or to blow up bridges with people they’ve become vexed with, or to state a disagreement emphatically and to call another person stupid, monstrous or a liar to their face. Once they have said something, they know they can’t take it back but they don’t really want to. Part of their frankness is based on the notion that they can understand at speed the merits of any situation, the characters of others and the true nature of their own commitments.
The polite person is much more unsure on all these fronts. They are conscious that what they feel strongly about today might not be what they end up thinking next week. They recognize that ideas that sound very strange or misguided to them can be attempts to state – in garbled forms – concepts that are genuinely important to other people and that they themselves may come round to with time. They see their own minds as having great capacities for error and as being subject to imperceptible moods which will mislead them, and so are keen not to make statements that can’t be taken back or to make enemies of people they might decide are in fact worthy of respect further down the line.
The polite person will be drawn to deploying softening, tentative language and holding back on criticism wherever possible. They will suggest that an idea might not be quite right. They will say that a project is attractive but that it could be interesting to look at alternatives as well. They will concede that an intellectual opponent may well have a point. They aren’t just lying or dodging tough decisions. Their behaviour is symptomatic of a nuanced and intelligent belief that few ideas are totally without merit, no proposals are 100 per cent wrong and almost no one is entirely foolish. They work with a conception of reality in which good and bad are deviously entangled and in which bits of the truth are always showing up in unfamiliar guises in unexpected people. Their politeness is a logical, careful response to the complexity they identify in themselves and in the world.
Both the frank person and the polite person have important lessons to teach us. But it may be that at this point in history it is the distinctive wisdom of the polite person that is most ripe for rediscovery and articulation, and that may have the most effective power to take the edge off some of the more brutal and counterproductive consequences of the reigning ideology of frankness.
Diplomacy is an art that evolved initially to deal with problems in the relationships between countries. The leaders of neighbouring states might be touchy on points of personal pride and quickly roused to anger; if they met head on they might be liable to infuriate each other and start a war. Instead, they learned to send emissaries, people who could state things in less inflammatory ways, who wouldn’t take the issues so personally, who could be more patient and emollient. Diplomacy was a way of avoiding the dangers that come from decisions taken in the heat of the moment. In their own palaces, two kings might be thumping the table and calling their rivals by abusive names; but in the quiet negotiating halls, the diplomat would say, ‘My master is slightly disconcerted that …’
We still associate the term diplomacy with embassies, international relations and high politics, but it refers in essence to a set of skills that matter in many areas of daily life, especially at the office and on the landing, outside the slammed doors of loved ones’ bedrooms.
Diplomacy is the art of advancing an idea or a cause without unnecessarily inflaming passions or unleashing a catastrophe. It involves an understanding of the many facets of human nature that can undermine agreement and stoke conflict, and a commitment to unpicking these with foresight and grace.
The diplomat remembers, first and foremost, that some of the vehemence with which we can insist on having our own way draws energy from an overall sense of not being respected or heard. We will fight with particular tenacity and apparent meanness over a so-called small point when we have a sense that another has failed to honour our wider need for appreciation and esteem.
Knowing the intensity of the craving for respect, diplomats – though they may not always be able to agree with others – take the trouble to show that they have bothered to see how things look through foreign eyes. They recognize that it is almost as important to people to feel heard as to win their case. We can put up with a lot once someone has demonstrated that they at least know how it is for us. Diplomats put extraordinary effort into securing the health of the overall relationship so that smaller points can be conceded along the way without attracting feelings of untenable humiliation. They know how much – beneath pitched fights over money or entitlements, schedules or procedures – a demand for esteem can stir. They are careful to trade generously in emotional currency, so as not always to have to pay excessively in other, more practical denominations.
Frequently, what is at stake within a negotiation with someone is a request that they change in some way: that they learn to be more punctual, or take more trouble on a task, or be less defensive or more open-minded. The diplomat knows how futile it is to state these wishes too directly. They know the vast difference between having a correct diagnosis of how someone needs to grow and a relevant way to help them do so. They know too that what holds people back from evolution is fear and therefore grasp that what we may most need to offer those whom we want to acknowledge difficult things is, above anything else, love and reassurance. It helps greatly to know that those recommending change are not speaking from a position of impregnable perfection but are themselves wrestling with comparable demons in other areas. For a diagnosis not to sound like mere criticism, it helps for it to be delivered by someone with no compunctions to owning up to their own shortcomings. There can be few more successful pedagogic moves than to confess genially from the outset, ‘And I am, of course, entirely mad and flawed as well …’
In negotiations, the diplomat is not addicted to indiscriminate or heroic truth-telling. They appreciate the legitimate place that minor lies or omissions can occupy in the service of greater truths. They know that if certain local facts are emphasized, then the most important principles in a relationship may be forever undermined. So they will enthusiastically say that the financial report or the home-made cake was really very pleasing and will do so not to deceive but to affirm the truth of their overall attachment, which might be lost were a completely accurate account of their views to be laid out. Diplomats know how a small lie may have to be the guardian of a larger truth.
Another trait of the diplomat is to be serene in the face of obviously bad behaviour: a sudden loss of temper, a wild accusation, a very mean remark. They don’t take it personally, even when they may be the target of rage. They reach instinctively for reasonable explanations and have clearly in their minds the better moments of a currently frantic but essentially lovable person. They know themselves well enough to understand that abandonments of perspective are both hugely normal and usually indicative of nothing much beyond passing despair or exhaustion. They do not aggravate a febrile situation through self-righteousness, a symptom of both not knowing oneself too well and a very selective memory. The person who bangs a fist on the table or announces extravagant opinions is most likely to be simply rather worried, frightened, hungry or just very enthusiastic: conditions that should rightly invite sympathy rather than disgust.
At the same time, the diplomat understands that there are moments to sidestep direct engagement. They do not try to teach a lesson whenever it might first or most apply; they wait till it has the best chance of being heard. At points, they disarm difficult people by reacting in unexpected ways. In the face of a tirade, instead of going on the defensive, the diplomatic person might suggest some lunch. When a harshly unfair criticism is launched at them, they might nod in partial agreement and declare that they’ve often said such things to themselves. They give a lot of ground away and avoid getting cornered in arguments that distract from the deeper issues. They remember the presence of a far better version of the somewhat unfortunate individual currently on display.
The diplomat’s tone of reasonableness is built, fundamentally, on a base of deep pessimism. They know what the human animal is; they understand how many problems are going to beset even a very good marriage, business, friendship or society. Their good-humoured way of greeting problems is a symptom of having swallowed a healthy measure of sadness from the outset. They have given up on the ideal, not out of weakness but out of a mature readiness to see compromise as a necessary requirement for getting by in a radically imperfect world.
The diplomat may be polite, but they are not averse to delivering bits of bad news with uncommon frankness. Too often, we seek to preserve our image in the eyes of others by tiptoeing around harsh decisions – and thereby make things far worse than they need to be. We should say that we’re leaving them, that they’re fired, that their pet project isn’t going ahead, but we mutter instead that we’re a little preoccupied at the moment, that we’re delighted by their performance and that the scheme is being actively discussed by the senior team. We mistake leaving some room for hope for kindness. But true niceness does not mean seeming nice, it means helping the people we are going to disappoint to adjust as best they can to reality. By administering a sharp, clean blow, the diplomatic person kills off the torture of hope, accepting the frustration that is likely to come their way: the diplomat is kind enough to let themselves sometimes be the target of hate.
The diplomat succeeds by being a realist. They know we are inherently flawed, unreasonable, anxious, laughably absurd creatures who scatter blame unfairly, misdiagnose pains and react appallingly to criticism – especially when it is accurate – and yet they are hopeful too of the possibilities of progress when our disturbances have been properly factored in and cushioned with adequate reassurance, accurate interpretation and respect. Diplomacy seeks to teach us how many good things can still be accomplished when we make some necessary accommodations with the crooked, sometimes touching and hugely unreliable material of human nature.
Part of what can hold us back from being kind is how unattractive the concept sounds. Taking pride in being kind sounds like something we might settle on only when every other, more robust ambition had been exhausted.
This suspicion too has a long history. For centuries, it was Christianity that intoned to us about the importance of kindness, co-opting the finest artworks to the task of rendering us more tender and forgiving, charitable and gentle. But it also, rather fatefully, identified a conflict between being successful and being kind – a conflict from which the idea of kindness has yet to recover. The suggestion has been of a choice between kindness and a lowly position, on the one hand, and nastiness and worldly triumph, on the other. It can seem as if kindness might be something of interest chiefly to those who have failed.
The movement known as Romanticism has further cast the kind person into the role of the unexciting bore, identifying drama and allure with the naughty and the ‘wicked’ (which has become a term of praise) while bathing niceness in an aura of tedium. The choice seems to be between being authentic, spontaneous and a bit cruel or else sweet, gentle and distinctly off-putting.
There’s a financial aspect to the dichotomy too. Kind people do not seem well cut out to win in the game of capitalism. Business success appears to demand an ability not to listen to excuses, not to forgive, not to be detained by sentiment. Kind people seem destined to end up either broke or overlooked.
Semi-consciously, kindness also seems incompatible with sexual desirability. Being erotic appears to be connected with a degree of heedless disregard and selfishness. We want our friends to be nice, but appreciate our lovers as a touch dangerous.
The three charges are desperately unfair. Niceness can happily coexist with being successful, interesting and sexual. It’s hardly possible to succeed without a deep interest in the welfare of one’s colleagues. It’s not possible to be uninhibited in bed without a bedrock of trust built on kindness (it’s rare to want to be enslaved and punished by someone we don’t fundamentally believe is very nice). We can be kind and successful, kind and interesting, kind and sexual.
Kindness is a cardinal virtue awaiting our renewed, unconflicted appreciation.