1. Now, obviously that title is provocative! I think it’s safe to say that, as far as cultivating virtues on an individual level goes, kindness may well be the single most important virtue. But I don’t think cultivating virtues on an individual level goes very far (beyond the individual themselves).
  2. I’ve noticed bumper stickers and t-shirts with slogans like “Be kind” or even “Be a kind f***ing human” coming into fashion. This attitude reminds me of this quote, frequently shared on social media and usually falsely attributed to Eminem: “I don’t care if you’re black, white, straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich or poor. If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”
  3. I think this attitude is naive and unhelpful.
  4. Cultivating individual kindness (or any other virtue) is neither necessary nor sufficient for making any sort of progress on the great social challenges of our time. The kindness of an individual might nibble around the edges—kindness is certainly good to cultivate, as it can help you and people around you—but nothing more than that.
  5. Rather (in my armchair social critic opinion!), the social challenges of our time universally stem from the design of institutions. Factory farming, inequality, climate change, elder abuse, social media addiction, and so on—all of these exist because of the way institutions and systems are designed, not because of some failing of human psychology.
  6. This is very similar to the idea of “systems of oppression” in intersectional activism and, in particular, the anti-racist movement. Under this conceptualisation, racism stems from the way systems oppress people. Individual failings of human psychology and virtue can certainly exacerbate small-scale problems, but viewing racism or poverty (or any other form of oppression) as simply the way that a human treats another human is (in my view) oversimplistic. I suspect, though cannot confirm, that someone living in poverty would not feel terribly reassured by Eminem’s niceness—rather, they would feel reassured if the global economic and industrial systems enabled them to feed themselves and their family.
  7. I think factory farming is a case in point. All else being equal, nobody in their right mind would want the suffering caused to animals by factory farms to exist. Nevertheless, 8 billion perfectly reasonable people around the world participate in this horrendous system, because of the way that the system and associated institutions are designed. Some of the people whom I respect and admire most in the world—including children who otherwise abhor the suffering of living beings, and including accomplished practitioners of Buddhism who have taken vows to live a life of compassion and non-violence—eat chicken and fish and shrimp.
  8. Another example is the unworthy and unconstructive state of affairs that currently prevails in US federal politics. One would be hard-pressed to argue that Americans are more radical/conservative/liberal/populist/whatever than any other comparable population of humans. The real question is: why does that political system and its associated institutions reward the harmful behaviour that we witness? (I’m not referring to either side of the aisle here—I think both sides are falling prey to a poorly designed system, as I argue here.)
  9. I’m also reminded of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was lots of sensationalist rhetoric around “hoarders” or “panic buying”. Setting aside my empirical doubts as to whether this behaviour is actually the best hypothesis to explain the observed shortages in availability, my dear and excellent friend, who at the time worked in the grocery department of a supermarket, would say “heaven forbid that people try to feed their families”.
  10. William Wilberforce and Norman Borlaug are some of the greatest figures in human history not because of their individual virtues. I’ve read enough biographies of men of those particular historical periods and demographics to know that, if you looked closely, you’d probably find some distasteful truths in their lives. They are great because they helped to dismantle systems of oppression and replace them with systems that don’t torture and kill people. (Stanislav Petrov might be a useful counterexample—but he is almost the exception that proves the rule. Why did the prevention of a full-scale nuclear war hinge on the decision of one soldier? Would it not have been safer to have a system where no individual has the power to start or prevent a nuclear war?)
  11. If a proposed solution to any problem relies on everybody voluntarily choosing to act in a certain way, then it’s a bad solution. This is the same as the concept of “desire paths” in user experience design (and, to some extent, “nudges” in behavioural economics). Good design—whether a path through a park or a local council’s recycling system or a political system—needs to take human failings into account.
  12. As such, addressing these challenges must necessarily involve reforming the institutions and systems of oppression, not individual-level changes to human psychology and virtue.