The pursuit of kindness seems to have been abandoned

As a self-appointed historian, never studying it but using it as a guide to action in my own life, you could say that often I am wide of the mark. That may well be the case. But there is the chance that sometimes – sometimes – my historical illiteracy may throw up points worth considering. 

If I look at the world at the moment, it seems to me as if it’s dedicated to disagreement. As if the most important activity is to disagree. Disagreeing has a long history and may well be the most constant part of human life. 

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Athens, the source of much of philosophy and culture, contained the most disagreeing of men, Socrates. He spawned a school of disagreement because he thought that most humans were wrong. Out of this grew others, like Aristotle who perfected disagreement and added new legs to this philosophy so that over the centuries disagreement became increasingly a part of everyday intellectual life, among a very small group of people who were fellow disagreers, ie, intellectuals. 

Schools grew up to perfect the better classes as disagreers, arguers, debaters – not the people who were treated like machines for production. Human society didn’t seem to develop unless it was fighting over some argument, some religion, some interpretation of God. 

All this arguing and disagreeing produced what are called the best human minds. In Rome, Cicero became a major figure, disagreeing it would seem in order to perfect mankind with a greater degree of nicety. Being nice – that was the goal. Make people nice to each other. 

Empires came and fell where they largely said bollocks to all this niceness. “We just want everything,” they seemed to say. Control everything, have no opposition. Just a monopoly of their power. As is the case now with competing powers: they just want everything. 

Our biggest industries and businesses are no different. They want to eternally scale up as if they were the latest version of the Roman or – later – the British Empire. 

Read more:

• 11 ways to spread kindness without spending money
• Kindness is needed to tackle homelessness – and not just at Christmas
• In the real world, kindness and cooperation will always triumph over political combat

But back to the struggle for niceness as perfected by disagreeing: religions, which always professed a love of the weak and the poor, spilled reservoirs of blood in the pursuit of their own view of God. And really, aside from some millennia-long handouts, gave little to the weak and the poor. 

Wars and revolutions were fought over what was supposedly a levelling-out of the niceness; so that everyone hopefully could eventually get clean underwear and a dry bed at night. And a full tummy. That of course is yet to be achieved. 

The pursuit of niceness, though, needed fighting for and needed industrial revolutions to destroy people to create prosperity so that there would be a larger class of people who could live ‘nicely’. 

Two world wars and dozens of cold wars, fought fiercely and bloodily, bring us to the current cacophony of disagreement on the pursuit of niceness, and its companion that hid for so long – truth. 

Now everyone claims the truth as the truth. That they are the truly true. Of course, political parties were built to compete for the vote, though not necessarily the truth. But now social media makes everyone potentially a pursuer of the truth. We are swimming in a welter of opinion. And it seems niceness has lost its foothold in the process. 

Disagreement shows no signs of going out of fashion: the future looks as if it contains an increase in it, not a diminution of it. But why this long trawl through a somewhat personal view of history? Largely because I’m an old bloke and I am astonished at the extent of its growth in my own lifetime. A weird situation where once upon a time people were in the audience but now they all seem to be on the stage. 

I am myself in the opinion and disagreeing field and have been for most of my adult life. Opinionated to a fault. Yet it seems we may well explode with opinions and disagreements, and politics has been reduced to an inability to see our way through the disagreement. All in the name of truth.

Is there any peace in any of this, any tranquillity? Or is it just a continuing increase of the nervousness that seems to beset the world? Capitalism itself seems intent on making us more agitated and connected to each piece of disagreement. Its products poisoning our peace. Our children are being drugged by smartphones, with adults not far behind. 

Perhaps there will come a time when it will all collapse and we’ll end up like the fallen empires of the past, but with no decent buildings left behind to prove that once we aspired to some beauty and culture. Just a pile of polluted seas and polluted minds.

Whatever the future is it’s looking grim, and to think it might have all begun under trees in Athens where people were taught to disagree. But at least they didn’t have the technology to make a complete pig’s ear of it. 

Forgive this diatribe against this terrible consumerism and its persistent encouragement of disagreement. The pursuit of kindness seems to have been abandoned. Though I recently met a philosopher from Oxbridge who says her life work has been trying to get people to be kind to each other. I’m beginning to see that she might have something, and that my cynicism at her efforts is misplaced. 

After all wasn’t Big Issue invented to create kindness in our communities? Thoughtfulness, not just disagreement? The pursuit of niceness for all. I do hope that that’s how we are perceived as we try and weather this bad weather which is thrown up in the pursuit of a universal kindness. 

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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