When I saw in the news that the University of California, Los Angeles was going to use a $20 million donation to establish a Kindness Institute, my first thought was: “Only in California.”
My second thought was: “Hang on. I’m in California, and this place it could use a bit of kindness.”
I had just been speaking at a conference in Los Angeles. Local leftists, evidently angry at the existence of conservative Angelenos, had protested, calling the organizers Nazis — not a nice name, especially given that the organizers were Jewish. They were angry, too, at the hotel that had hosted the meeting, scrawling “Nazi” on its front. Again, not nice: The hotel owner was also Jewish. (Woke Californians seem to have a thing about calling Jews Nazis — just ask Ben Shapiro or Dennis Prager.)
Like most conservatives, I take a measure of odium for granted. The previous week, I had been at the Conservative Party Conference in the United Kingdom, where delegates were greeted by the traditional chants of “Tory scum off our streets!” and “Margaret Thatcher six feet under!” Local lefties hung effigies from a bridge beneath a sign reading, “130,000 KILLED UNDER TORY RULE TIME TO LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD.”
I wouldn’t normally mention it, having no interest in claiming victimhood. But it occurred to me, reading about the proposed Bedari Kindness Institute, that a study of altruism and empathy, drawing on economics, behavioral psychology, and evolutionary biology, is overdue.
Until now, I assumed that humanity was becoming more humane. The Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer famously described the process as the “expanding circle,” meaning that we recognize a moral obligation to wider and wider groups — first our tribe, then our nation, then the human race as a whole, and one day, perhaps, other animals. As our empathy grows, violence declines — along with slavery, the abuse of women and children, and the persecution of minorities. The evidence was marshaled with devastating force in Steven Pinker’s 2011 magnum opus, The Better Angels of our Nature.
While homicides, wars, and the like are indeed becoming rarer, our public discourse is paradoxically becoming angrier and more acrimonious. Think how easily we, as the horrible saying goes, “cancel” people because of one clumsy remark. Kevin Hart is a homophobe! Al Franken is a dangerous predator! Sarah Silverman is a racist!
The people rushing to make these claims almost never believe them. But an increasing number of us get a high from deploying the fiercest outrage we can muster. We deliberately refuse to consider context. To borrow a phrase from Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals, our age is marked by the “political organization of hatreds.”
Just because leftists tend to be more censorious than rightists, don’t imagine that it doesn’t happen both ways around. Take the confected fury about Justin Trudeau having darkened his skin when he was in his 20s. Does anyone really imagine that woker-than-thou Trudeau is a racist? Sure, he is dim and out of his depth. But why do we have to claim that he can’t also be a well-intentioned human being?
One answer might be Twitter. But the really alarming thing is that politicians are starting to speak, act, and vote as if they were tweeting. They posture for effect, they lob dehumanizing insults, they play to their respective galleries, with little thought for the real-world impact of their actions. They violate norms, ignore precedents, and tear up guardrails in order to try to get at the other side. Result? Half of all Democrats now admit to hating — hating — Republicans and vice versa.
Let me quote some words from the novelist and philosopher C.S. Lewis, apt to our present mood:
“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.”
Lurking just underneath our modern sensibilities is a primordial tribal viciousness. We have smothered it under layers of affluence, Christian morality, and learned behavior. But it is still there, encoded in our genes. Unless we learn how to keep it latent, the open societies we take for granted may turn out to have been an anomalous blip. So thank you, Bedari Foundation and UCLA. Let kindness slip away, and totalitarianism follows.
