What is kindness? Can you measure it?
By: Jack Goldingham Newsom
Tags: Measurement, Society, Kindness

Kindness is something we talk about often, but what does it mean to be kind? Is it different in different cultures? And is it possible to measure the kindness of a city or culture?

Published on the Objektion Project here.

Photo by Tom Parsons on Unsplash

What is kindness? It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot these days, with many denouncing the end of a common humanity as our cities grow and become more anonymous, and seemingly cruel with it.

I will start immediately by recognising that kindness, whilst it may have an overarching definition which we will seek to find here, is not practiced in the same way in all communities. The point of view from which we enact kindness changes depending upon the nature of the culture and society in which we are. I need look no further than my own experiences to point this out: in New Zealand, one can (and should) smile, say hello, and interact with strangers and ‘random people’ on the street, without reflecting upon the danger of the situation or whether or not somebody has negative intentions with their interaction. In Paris, France, where I currently live, there is a reason why the city’s inhabitants walk straight-faced and quickly through the streets, and avoid eye contact or even recognition of the other in their path: the frequency of dangerous encounters is much higher, so a kind of ‘protective gaze’ has been developed to safeguard oneself. To me, that seemed alienating, strange, and inhuman almost; but to Parisians it is a necessity. I stepped into the pool of dangerous encounters unwillingly, simply because of my naiveté about what kindness was, and how I should show it.

Many people come up to me on the streets of Paris, and to each I have a smile and a “bonjour” ready to give away at the slight of a hand or a mumble in my direction. Why not, I figured, show some ‘kindness’ on the streets, to these people who are somewhat marginalised and have much less than I do, both materially and socially. If people walk past you, and ignore you all the time, you must begin to start to question your humanity; to question your participation as a human being in a city ripe with connections and discussions. For those already desensitised to a lack of openness by their fellow citizens, an expression of such openness by one person is something to be relished, to be remembered. However, this sign of recognition could also not be a gesture of ‘kindness’ — an as yet undefined term — but rather a signal of interest, one which is pointing to something else, one which meets another human need, or leads in another, unknown direction. Misinterpreted gestures further close up Paris’ citizens from our general understanding of kindness. When an offer to buy a supposedly homeless person a coffee when he asks for one turns into an unexpected chance for him to fulfil his sexual pleasures, or when a smile across the street because of someone’s disgustingly loud behaviour turns into an offer to go to the public restrooms together, one does, understandably, close up.

Thus, an analysis of kindness based on the smiles, and the gestures, and the transfer of small resources on an everyday basis to those in need is not necessarily going to equal kindness in the most general sense. That is a practical and situational type of kindness, one which is allowed to flourish in certain communities who allow such behaviours, or in certain communities where the relative danger to the self is low. However, in highly charged communities like Paris, kindness still exists — that I am sure of — but it does not exist in the same way that many anglophone countries expect it to. And perhaps that is why Parisians, and Europeans in general at times, come across as rude and unkind. They simply do not practice kindness in the same way that others are used to; they do not practice general openness because it brings with it a state of permanent insecurity: of watching the reactions of every person one shares a smile with, to make sure the smile does not grow into something else.

Perhaps you have noticed the language above referring to the level at which we are acting with each other: ‘open’ and ‘closed’ are terms used frequently to describe a certain level of hospitality that we have towards another person, and I think these are useful for understanding what kindness is. Common understanding would probably not go so far as to talk about kindness in this way, but if we consider kindness like a door, we can get some of the way to understanding what it is we are talking about.

A regular door opens one way — either outwards or inwards. When someone else opens the door for you, you have a freedom to not engage with the door itself, and are free to walk in. When the door is closed, and no-one is around, you cannot simply walk through. You have to open the door yourself, taking a risk to check if it’s locked or not; if it’s stuck or jammed, if there’s someone else on the other side who you could hit with the door as you open it. If you want to enter, though, you must open the door yourself.

If we transfer this image over to the concept of kindness, the door becomes the situation: the gap or space between two people who could potentially have an interaction. Some people leave the door which lies in front of them open: they are always approachable and always hospitable to anyone who walks in. Others leave their door closed, but open it to certain people that they know, because the security feature on their door recognises that there isn’t a danger. Others can always open this person’s door — it’s not locked, and they will be able to access the same person who lies behind it. A further type is the door that is locked, and only opened to certain people. This is a certain kind of closedness, where the person is not willing to engage in mutual interaction with the other, unless a certain sign is present which encourages them to unlock their door. The fourth type, in this analogy, could be the person whose door is permanently locked. This indicates a theoretical limit — so whilst this does not happen among people in the world (at least I don’t think it does), it shows a state of completed closedness, of not letting anyone, both stranger and known people, into their space of interaction.

By way of illustration, the following diagram attempts to pictorially represent this idea. Openness and closedness lie on the same continuum at either end, and this is because they represent situations of polar opposites. Person A is the first situation above, person D is the last. The continuum could, theoretically, continue beyond the limits described here, because even the lock on a door can be broken, and even the presence of a door indicates the possibility of being closed, which in the situation of being fully open, would not be present.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida details the same kind of idea under the discussion of hospitality, within the framework of democracy. He believes that at the core of democracy is the idea of hospitality, which can take on two forms: one is absolute hospitality, which is a complete openness, a complete willingness to engage with the other and give to the other. This, Derrida claims, is an impossibility, because whenever we give to the other, or open ourselves up to another person, we are only able to give with limits, and to a certain person in a certain circumstance. Thus, the only practical type of hospitality is a conditional, or limited hospitality, where people give in concrete situations. Within the discussion of democracy, Derrida says that absolute hospitality lies at the end of a trajectory upon which democracy seeks to follow, but it is ultimately impossible to achieve this. It’s a goal for democracy, a goal that we will continue to follow forever, because it is impossible to be completely open to the other.

How can we illustrate this in a practical example? Consider the role of the state — the French state, for example. In France, we choose to give welfare support to certain people who meet certain conditions. We choose to give asylum status to certain refugees who present their needs and fulfil the criteria stipulated upon arrival. What would happen if France opened up its welfare system to people across the world, who had no connection to France? This would be a completely hospitable system; one which displays no closedness or regulations which inhibit access to the system, but for France it would be completely unachievable, it would be impossible, because people who do not contribute to the system would begin taking a lot from it, and very quickly the country would run out of money to support anyone. France thus has to make a decision to limit its hospitality to the citizens of its country. It tries to be as open as possible, to make the conditions as fair as possible, along the trajectory of openness and hospitality, but in the end a state of complete openness is, practically, impossible.

On an individual level, this theoretical idea of hospitality describes the same thing as the door analogy above. If we were to measure the degree of hospitality, or openness to the other, of the citizens in a place such as Paris, it would likely be much lower than in a country such as New Zealand, where encounters with the other are much more frequent. At the country level, however, both countries are probably quite similar — they only share their resources among the citizens of their respective countries, and have a small budget for aid to other countries.

But is hospitality the same thing as kindness? Perhaps such a digression into the concept of hospitality has not brought us closer to understanding kindness. The problem could be the same one that we had at the beginning, however now we have expanded it and brought it to light. The current theoretical understanding of concepts such as kindness and hospitality doesn’t seem to reflect the social conditions of particular communities, to then fairly represent their ‘kindness.’ The kind of kindness one finds in Paris is different to that found in other countries — this much we know, but we cannot yet represent this with the idea of openness, because it only represents one side of the situation.

In every encounter of kindness there are two people involved. Due to the different natures of acts of kindness, it’s nigh impossible to put labels on these people, beyond person one and person two. Acts of kindness could involve a giver and a receiver, they could involve two smiles, where both give and receive, they could involve no aspect of giving, but rather one simply of connection, or circumstance: like saying ‘thank you;’ to listen to someone could be kindness, refraining from criticising someone and actually saying nothing could also be kindness. Kindness is both about a certain level of generosity, which is the idea of giving and receiving, but at the same time it’s about a considerateness, a receptivity towards the other and to their nature, their needs, who they are, and the context in which you both are.

I have a certain allergy, however, to saying that kindness, or any concept, is situational, because this essentially removes the possibility for us to find an overarching understanding of the term. It means that we cannot but understand it in a certain context and surroundings, which is not the case. We do have conceptually higher understandings of kindness. We have related terms such as generosity and considerateness which do not require practical instantiations to comprehend them. What, then, is the concept of kindness? We are back at the beginning.

For now, I do not know how to answer this question in any more detail. Perhaps this general idea of ‘kindness’ is actually better represented by the concept of courageous openness in a city like Paris. Parisian kindness, then, is something else, and something different — something that I’m still yet to figure out.

A related question, and what will occupy the latter half of this reflection, is to ask about the possibility of measuring, or at least comparing, the degree to which cities display kindness. Although there is still a conceptual fuzziness surrounding the nature of kindness, this does not stop us from looking into how, or whether we would even want to measure what some call the ‘kindness quotient’ of a particular city, community, or even culture.

On the face of it, measuring the kindness quotient of a city seems like a good idea, and comes with good intentions. It means we can look at countries or cities that have a particularly high kindness quotient, and see why this is and what makes these people decide to be more kind than other people. Then, for organisations and companies who have a goal of spreading kindness, or inspiring a spirit of kindness, they can use these practices and techniques in their projects, to help raise the amount of kindness in their communities. The idea is that we can measure development, we can measure GDP, we can measure happiness even, so why not measure kindness as well?

I don’t think we can, or should, measure kindness. Perhaps for this concept, we should be satisfied with some degree of conceptual clarity, and not seek quantification or the import of the concept into our scientific framework. We could keep kindness as a graspable concept that is enacted in different ways, and leave our investigation to the attempt to provide conceptual clarity and understand the concept. Through greater understanding, we would be able to understand culturally specific instances of kindness, as well as a more global definition, and avoid making unfair comparisons which are unable to quantify both the degree of openness of the people involved, and the nature of the common humanity which is being shared and displayed in acts of kindness.

Kindness is displayed in actions, but it is not the action itself that would constitute kindness — the action may be the physical manifestation, but kindness seems to also require a kind of benevolence on the part of the actor, a spirit of goodwill which accompanies the action. An act of giving, in Paris for example, requires the actor to both confront the possibility that the person they give to may have ulterior motives and may not be who they say they are, and also to confront themselves and be prepared to lose something — be it their time, their social anonymity, or their material possessions — in order for this act to take place. How can all of this be first observed, then measured and collated, then adjusted to account for cultural difference, and finally be represented in a number, image, or other one-dimensional measurement tool?

Thus, we should resist the desire to bring all our concepts under the scientific roof, even if this roof does seem to be providing shelter and safety for the discussion of many other concepts. Perhaps this comes from a bias as a philosopher, but I do think that distinctly human concepts and faculties should be intentionally left out of the scientific framework, and should not try to be measured. Of course the assumption here is that science will not be able to account for everything, and that the world-view of science has its own limitations and faults; an implicit critique of science is thus recognisably present in my resistance to its enveloping concepts such as kindness.

If we don’t take a measurement-based approach to understanding kindness, then how else could we understand it? Conceptual clarity in philosophy can come from these kind of reflections on both our shared theoretical understandings of kindness, and an examination of the practical examples of kindness in an attempt to find a larger definition; one that is more encompassing of the examples that we continue to identify. We could look historically at how cultures and epochs have understood kindness; we could look into the term’s etymology; we could conduct a study into the phenomenology of kindness and seek to describe both the structures of conscious experiences of kindness, and the subjective what-it’s-likeness to be kind to someone. All these things do not requirement measurement, or overly condensing a complex human action into something numerical in an attempt to make comparisons, which, as has been explained, miss the finer details of context and intention in cases of kindness.