helpfulness towards some one in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped.In slightly more contemporary terms, he downplays the utilitarian argument (though any kind act hopefully actually helps the recipient) and argues that the motive for kindness is of prior importance: any hint of self-interest renders an act unkind.
Kant might help us here: the conditions for kindness have to include free will and an understanding that your action is one that you would like to be applied universally (i.e. you wouldn't mind being on the receiving end yourself). Kindness is one of his 'imperfect duties': beyond the basic expectations of humanity, but falling short or failing is acceptable because perfect kindness is an impossibility. Moving beyond that, Kant insists that you absolutely must not treat other people as a means to an end. I can't remember off the top of my head whether he discusses kindness per se, but he does say that a world without charity might be more efficient, but would certainly be unbearable. He also talked about cruelty to animals: it desensitises the individual, making their duty to develop compassionate sensibility towards other humans less likely, and therefore breaking the categorical imperative.
Much has been written about neoliberalism in the last couple of decades, some of it by me and definitions are hard to establish, but the core of it, it seems to me, is the replacement of Aristotelian and Kantian emphases on disinterested empathetic behaviour with a model of human relations derived from financial models. The self becomes a product to be carefully designed and then marketed; interactions with other human beings are to be considered transactional; any encounter can be accounted for in terms of profit and loss. It can be summed up in the poetic epigraph to the paper linked to above:
As nature's ties decay,
As duty, love and honour fail to sway
Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,
Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe.
Hence all obedience bows to these alone.
Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Traveller' (1764), 349–54.
I've also written occasionally on this blog about the overlooked need for kindness in all spheres. I've been the recipient of kindness from colleagues, students and strangers so many times. I might even, accidentally, have been kind myself in moments of weakness. Within a neoliberalised world, one in which we've unconsciously internalised its values, consciously adopted them or – perhaps most often – been forced into neoliberalised relations by a hegemonic system, the unexpected, random nature of kindness is something I value more and more. Being brought to tears by a cake that magically appears on your desk after a bad day, a stranger going out of their way to return your lost property (which happens to me about twice a month), or a kind word out of the blue are what make a spiritual difference amidst a social structure deliberately designed to maximise exploitation and inequality.
So you can probably imagine my reaction to my university's decision to hold a Random Acts of Kindness Week. An institution with an enormous gender and racial pay gap, one which reserves real-terms pay rises for senior management only, one which has actively promoted climate-damaging activities, one which promotes neuro-linguistic programming as a management tool amongst its many contributions to unkindness, has decided that Organised Kindness is a thing. In basic semantic terms, it's a contradiction: awareness of an defined event renders any act committed within it un-random. In Aristotelian and Kantian terms, it's a contradiction too: consciousness of doing a kind act or the hope of a 'freebie or prize' renders it Utilitarian rather than altruistic. Not just the individual acts either: the whole event is a Utilitarian plot, because it's a cheap attempt at generating some good PR.
Still, it might relieve some of the crushing pressures of the neoliberalised university, perhaps? Well, here's the kicker. The Random Acts of Kindness Week is sponsored – drum roll – by Sodexo.
Some highlights:
Sodexo (formerly Sodexo) runs private prisons, cleaning services, probations services, school food, military catering contracts, childcare voucher systems and much much more. It's one of those companies that specialises in feeding off the public sector, promising 'efficiencies', by which they mean lower pay, vicious anti-union campaigns, horsemeat in your lasagne, ATM-style probation and rehabilitation and structural sexual and racial inequality. They sidle up to institutions like universities and promise to make all their 'problems' (i.e. cleaners wanting an hourly wage they can actually live on) go away.
The idea of acts of kindness being 'sponsored' in any way both revolts and baffles me, and suggests that my university's extremely highly-paid management, already talking about contracting cleaning services out to save even more money (and coincidentally solving the gender pay gap by taking the lowest-paid women off the books) has lost all moral compass. The idea of offering incentives for acts of kindness indicates that (as Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson's excellent book demonstrates) university managements have fully internalised the worst aspects of neoliberalism, and have abandoned critical thought and notions of the public good in favour of the mantra of efficiency.
I know that I'll be criticised internally for being a killjoy or a carper, but the point of being an academic in a university is to retain a sense of critical autonomy. Those at the top have constructed a perfect system, for them: cash, respect, privacy, baubles, autonomy and power flow up, while precarity, fear and surveillance flow down. Tone-deaf efforts like this simply emphasise the distance between us and them: thinking that some corporately-sponsored warm words and 'freebies' will heal the wounds of a vicious system demonstrate how divorced they are from the rest of us. Defining a space for and promoting 'random acts of kindness' with corporate sponsorship is an act of power which directly contradicts the philosophical values of altruism, whether you're an Aristotelian, a Kantian or something else. It puts kindness under a neoliberalism tractor beam, defining it as a transactional good which can be measured, confined and financialised – everything that kindness isn't.
The vampires are circling and all the fat-cats can say is 'bite me'. Be kind: but do it spontaneously, and don't expect prizes.
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