Friday, March 26, 2010
Kindness is a luxury good
I've previously classified safety as such, but I think kindness belongs to this category as well. (By "kindness" here I mean being good to strangers; love towards family members and close friends is universal.) When times are very bad, man is wolf to man (the great novel Blindness drives this point home extremely powerfully). And conversely: on average, the richer a society is, the kinder its members are towards one another. I can't prove the latter, but am convinced that it's universally true.
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I've gotta disagree with you on this one. Or, perhaps provide for a qualification. First, it probably is true to some extent that the less one has to worry about basic financial problems--i.e. the less they have to worry about stability in life-determinative variables--the more kind they will become. Perhaps. At the same time, it seems that everyone, regardless of their stability in this sense, comes to the conclusion that they must differentiate themselves from others. To the extent that those others are shared, or overlap, by two or more people, there is competition again, which might take the place of scarcity generally, in that one feels the need to exhibit the ability necessary to create stability, or accumulate goods. Eventually, the accumulation of goods is replaced with the accumulation of vanity driven items, perhaps unfortunately, and maybe not always. Just that, there's gotta be another more powerful variable at work here. Just my two cents though. One extra thought: for kindness to work as correlative with wealth, the wealth must not be concentrated in the hands of the few...
ReplyDeleteBrooks finds some info, and it ain't money that drives happiness, at least: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html?src=me&ref=general
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure; will have to think about it. One thing I am sure about about, though, is that standards change given more money per person/household, so that happiness may be harder to meet once one has more money. I distinctly remember feeling like I had the world in my pocket when I had 10 dollars--I was about 11 years old, but felt it the same.
ReplyDeleteOr, to criticize your example from a different angle--are you really sure you only had ten dollars? One of the great parts of being a kid in a rich society is that it's likely that your basic needs are provided for without you even having to worry too much about them. I don't know enough about your upbringing, so I'm simply making a conditional statement: If, when you were eleven, all your basic needs were provided for by your family, then you had a whole lot more than ten dollars.
ReplyDeleteTo put it more bluntly: A child who has a purchasing-power equivalent of ten dollars at the time you were eleven, but aside from all that is an orphan in Cambodia, is very unlikely to feel happy.
You're probably right, I just feel like it must get a little pointless eventually, and that there are diminishing returns on ego-play. Perhaps, though, money allows for an immense sense of security going into the future... and that sense of stability in the face of uncertainty, even 20 years down the road, plays a part.
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