Kindness and Sustainability
The following text is an email response to a friend searching for an answer to the question, "What is kindness for you?"
This is my understanding of kindness based on my experience of being human and studying archaeology and anthropology.
To be kind or to perform an act of kindness toward another human being is to accept them as a member of your kin; to show that you respect them and gain familiarity with them. To be kind to another person is to let your guard down and to share a moment of intimacy with them. It is to acknowledge a need in someone else and to fill that niche. It is to put effort in or expend energy to your detriment for the benefit of the other. An act of kindness can only be judged in relation to its context; sometimes cruelty can be a form of kindness. Therefore, no act is inherently or absolutely kind. We cannot quantitively say that one act or person is more kind than another.
Where the topic of kindness becomes interesting to me is to ask whether it is must always be directed at an other. In reality we can also be kind to ourselves, expending our own energy for our own benefit. Is this true kindness? When we are performing an act of kindness to another is it ever truly for their benefit or for our own sense of fulfilment? Whether directed at ourselves or an other, at the wider scale, kindness is always acted by a member of our species for the benefit of our species. This is because kindness is a uniquely human trait. It is a form of communication, some social interaction or exchange, requiring bodies that are conscious and emotional. A focus on kindness per se is to be anthropocentric and therefore ignorant of the non-human things that we cohabit this complex world with.
From a human perspective it can seem like we can either be kind or unkind to non-human entities. For example, the decision to eat meat or use fossil fuels. This is just an illusion for kindness can only occur between one human and another. If we look at the interaction between non-humans this becomes apparent. Can a river be said to be unkind to a riverbank by eroding it? We are anthropomorphising the non-human world, imprinting it with an emotional capacity and empathising with it. What matters here is not kindness but sustainability. We must not artificially or fictitiously bring non-humans into our realm by imbuing them with human-like qualities, but instead join them in the thingly world of vibrant matter that has formed the conditions allowing our species to thrive and which one day our dead bodies will continue to be a part of. This involves looking beyond emotion; which we know can cause humans to behave in irrational and illogical ways. It is necessary to understand the world at a fundamental level as a complex meshwork of relations between human and non-human actants, and that as humans we have agency to alter and improve the relations between actants; to reconcile the biosphere with the technosphere.
Kind acts and sustainable acts are often not one and the same; it may be kind to give your daughter a lift to work, but this act is unsustainable. The task for artists and designers is to provoke and establish new, more sustainable practices without sacrificing kindness: a quality that defines our humanity and is an increasingly rare resource.
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