Britain’s got talons

How cruel are the British people today? We certainly have a public history as battlers and brawlers. The image of a Brit at large—from Boudicca with a scythe to the football hooligans of the 1970s and 1980s—is not a soft and tremulous thing. As for now, the anecdotal evidence cuts both ways. In the media, we see a tide of sympathy for public figures afflicted with certain kinds of disaster: Princess Diana or Jade Goody dying young, Gordon Brown or David Cameron losing a child. This reaction often contains an excessive curiosity tinged with ghoulishness, but the latter element does not invalidate the former. Television talent contests like The X Factor or The Apprentice indulge an appetite in millions of people for having a laugh at someone else's expense, but mockery can quickly turn to admiration. Take the huge popularity of the singing phenomenon Susan Boyle, a hot favourite in ITV's hit show Britain's Got Talent. She described herself as "looking like a garage." There were cutaways to sneering faces among the judges and the audience when she stepped onto the stage for the first time, but they melted into appreciation almost as soon as she started singing.

In other contexts there is a frank, brutal public appetite for seeing famous people brought low. "Jen dumped a THIRD time," crows a bestselling magazine about the actor Jennifer Aniston, pictured looking grim and sad, while other weeklies tout photos of celebrities without make-up or sagging half-dressed on the beach. How we behave in our own homes and workplaces is not the same as what we manifest of ourselves in the media, but there is a connection. Sometimes there is inappropriate leakage between celebrity and non-celebrity worlds.



Let's start with the names that were on everybody's lips six months ago, those of surreal jester Russell Brand and cheesy chat-show host Jonathan Ross. During the course of a radio show, they left a series of messages on the answering machine of the actor Andrew Sachs revealing that Brand had had sex with Sachs's granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. The subsequent furore stirred complex emotions. Sachs told the Guardian in May that though the affair caused his family pain, it gave his career a welcome boost. When it actually happened, my first thought was that two members of a self-constituted elite—celebrity broadcasters—had misjudged what their audience would tolerate. We, their listeners, were kinder than they thought we were, or at any rate less cruel. When Sachs was upset, we were indignant. When his granddaughter was aggrieved, we were too, despite some wobble when it turned out that she had worked as an S&M cabaret artiste. We empathised with both of them, partly on the grounds that two (relatively) ordinary people had been exposed by the spotlight of celebrity. A line between real and unreal had been crossed.

And yet. Where is the line between the kindly feelings that I, and many of the British public, had for Sachs and his granddaughter, and the schadenfreude that gripped us when we learned that Brand had resigned and Ross was suspended? We took pleasure—actual glee—in their pain. And there was more gloating when Ross failed to win an award at the Baftas.

I think I was seeing Brand and Ross as "other": big stars, arrogant, people with more money than sense (and more money than me, which is never a plus point), who had acted without regard for the powerless, and who should therefore be humbled and stripped of power. At the time I felt that thousands of British people were standing up for the rights of the less famous not to be abused by the more famous, and also for a common sense variety of kindness: everyone knows you don't tell a girl's grandparents about her sexual exploits.

Later, though, I was troubled by a second perspective. For even while I told myself I was defending kindness, I was also refusing to remember how, for instance, I myself get carried away when I'm with someone very close who has the same sense of humour. I did not consider that the two jester-kings might have depended on a sensible producer to edit what was, after all, not a live show. I allowed myself to feel unkind because these two were "not like me." By disliking them, I was unconsciously proving I was better than them. Yet my feelings towards Ross and Brand in fact made me, and the large number of British people who felt the same way, unkind.

We were touched by the spirit of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here, the marathon television reality game where celebrities are punished for what the public imagines to be a privileged life by being made dirty, sleepless and hungry in a camp in the Australian jungle. We are free to enjoy being unkind, because we have deemed them to be not our own kind. This is the derivation of the word "kind": Old English cynd, gecynd, which is linked to kinship, "of one's own kind." It is easy to see how quickly this concept tips us into cruelty, for those who are not of our kind may not deserve our kindness. Celebrities are the new non-persons in modern lives. If the gods punish them from time to time, well and good.

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Can modern philosophy enlighten us on the subject? Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor's recent book On Kindness (Hamish Hamilton) is an extended essay about the failure of kindness in modern society. For the most part it is about the inadequate model of kindness in contemporary philosophy, particularly in Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic accounts.

While the authors support the enlivening idea that children become, in a real, active way, kind, they claim that adult life fails to support this kindness, so that as children grow up, they become less so. The authors describe how in the post-Freudian world, which has seen the brutality of two world wars, kindness is constantly under suspicion. It may be seen as concealed aggression, as seduction, or as a form of narcissism, in which case the giver of kindness is no more than a "master of self-approbation." Finally, the "kindness of Christian humility" is especially suspect, seen as a self-frustrating ordinance that avoids a more sexual, complex form of love at the cost of self-hatred, impotence and frigidity (surely just another unkind prejudice: evangelical Christians living near me are well-supplied with children). In Phillips and Taylor's account, kindness survives only in the fenced-off arena of parenthood, where unreal expectations are placed particularly upon mothers. All in all, kindness is made to sound very alarming.

So what do the two authors recommend? They say that what we need is "the recognition of kindness as a continual temptation in everyday life that we resist." Most ordinary people would be puzzled by this. I do not spend my life resisting the temptation to be kind; if anything, I spend it resisting the temptation to be selfish. Of course, tyrants may be afraid of being kind, because kindness might look like weakness. But do most people really fight against kindness? At a conscious level at least, we value it, enjoy it, and are as kind as the stresses of life allow us to be. Most people appreciate kindness in their friends and loved ones, and encourage it in their children. I think Britain's Got Talent singer Susan Boyle enjoyed her record internet viewing figures partly because people enjoyed watching cruelty turn to kindness as those sneering faces were transfigured by more generous feelings.

Who is it really that fears kindness? I suspect it is mostly intellectuals. Some newspaper reviewers make a virtue of cruelty, as if the artists have done something wicked that needs punishing, or as if the critic must outshine as a destroyer what the artist has done as a creator. Such reviewers lack—or on principle reject—empathy with what the artist is doing. They are afraid of showing kindness because they might be accused of being soft or sentimental. Kindness has become confused with stupidity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Phillips and Taylor's book is rendered occasionally chilly by what seems to be a fear of looking unintelligent. On the first page they ask: "Why are stories about kindness often so corny or silly, so trivialising of the things that matter most to most people?" Yet they give no examples of what they mean, leading readers to fear that the stories they have most been touched by are corny or silly—adding to the suspicion about kindness that the book claims to deplore. Perhaps they mean the light relief or feelgood stories that the papers and newsreaders offer to distract us from the horrors of the main stories. But why exactly are these corny or silly? Sometimes the language they are told in is formulaic or clichéd, but language does not make the stories themselves—of unexpected good deeds, everyday heroism, or just good luck—silly.

A kind of snobbery is at work. Phillips and Taylor are laying down a protective marker that says, "We are not corny, we are not silly; just because we write about kindness, do not presume to despise us." Yet that anxiety causes a slight narrowing into unkindness, from time to time, in a book whose overall tone is imaginative and thoughtful.

Kindness, of course, can be thought of as a biological as well as a social issue. Phillips and Taylor give short shrift to what they label the "pseudo-certainties" of evolutionary biologists: those who look to animal behaviour and the distant origins of homo sapiens for clues about the evolutionary function of both co-operative and selfish behaviour. To me, though, human and non-human animals are a continuum, so science offers a valid additional perspective here. Famous experiments reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1964 showed that macaque monkeys would for many days resist their desire to press a lever which would provide them with food, if pressing it also administered an electric shock to another monkey placed within their view. Of course non-human animals kill and eat other animals, but so do we.

In 2006 I chaired a joint event between the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society called "Mind—the Gap?" which took as its theme the rapidly changing scientific understanding of the likenesses between human and non-human animals. The other writers were Doris Lessing and Will Self; the scientists were Nicky Clayton, an expert on behaviour in the corvid family (crows, scrub jays and magpies) and Andrew Whiten, a primatologist studying the development of intelligence in social groups. What emerged was a radical account of animals as self-motivated, thinking subjects. Pet owners and those who work with animals have of course always known that non-human animals have complex sentient lives and need no scientists or novelists to tell them so. But for society as a whole, accepting that non-human animals are not so different from humans, are indeed kin to us, is a big step. If we accept that animals have autonomy and consciousness (rather than merely the right not to be tortured for cosmetic testing) we might be forced to change the way we live.

In respect of non-human animals, the British already seem kinder than the norm. We have a long history of affectionate relationships with pets, deem a fairly narrow range of species fit for the pot, donate to animal charities and feel a growing unease about factory farming, especially when outbreaks of diseases like swine flu hit the headlines. We must not exaggerate the extent of our kindness, however. The interests of one species will never totally coincide with those of another. As I walked through the outskirts of the Scottish town of Bonnyrigg on a spring morning recently, mulling my conclusions for this piece, I saw, in the small, neat garden of a terraced house, a miniature gravestone set in the middle of a square of gravel and protected by a post-and-chain fence. I bent closer to look at the inscription, thinking "I will quote this in my article. It must be the beloved family pet." This is what I read:

Here there lies Stiff and hard The last damned cat That crapped on my yard.

One of the scientists who has written most incisively and elegantly about human kindness and unkindness is the sociobiologist WD Hamilton, the man whose thought lies behind Richard Dawkins's. In his three-volume collected papers, The Narrow Roads of Gene Land (2005), he accepts and extends his colleague Robert Trivers's theory of "reciprocal altruism," though he points out its name is a contradiction in terms, for altruism expects no benefits. But he also suggests that human beings have a less comfortable characteristic, one which sits very neatly with Freud's idea, in Negation, that one of the most fundamental human choices is what to take in and what to reject. According to Hamilton, social animals, including humans, have an innate tendency to recognise markers of difference in others, enabling them to discriminate against those who are dissimilar and favour their own genes.

This idea is bold and simple in its explanatory power. If we are biologically primed to discriminate against difference, this explains the way groups band together to exclude others; it would explain (though Hamilton explicitly says it does not justify) racism and sexism, ageism and youthism, and species-ism most obviously of all. The existence of so many anti-discrimination laws and positive discrimination policies in contemporary British society is, in this light, only evidence of the strength of the divisive instinct that is being legislated against.

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And so I come from psychoanalysts and evolutionary biologists to my own caste, the novelists. What do we have to say about kindness?

In many ways, the 21st-century novel is on the run before cinema. Film, with its ravishing accoutrements of colour and music and its seductively beautiful actors, has more to tempt its audience than black words on white pages. In some respects, however, the novel remains unchallenged. More than any other art form, it offers access to other people's consciousness, allowing readers to feel others' joys and sorrows; inviting them to live other lives and in so doing to gain insight into people they might otherwise never have looked at twice. It is an old argument and, if you like, a humanist one, but the novel has not been superseded in this respect.

In my recent pair of novels, My Cleaner (2006) and My Driver (2008) I use two balancing and equal central characters. One is overtly and superficially very like me: Vanessa Henman, a white British middle-aged novelist with a doctorate in literature and a tendency to absurd misunderstandings. The other is superficially quite unlike me: Mary Tendo, the black Ugandan "executive housekeeper" of the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala, who is also an aspirant writer. I write both of them in the first person; both have equal weight in narrative and human terms. There was a slight nervousness as I felt my way into using a Ugandan voice in the first book, but I decided that there was no more reason to be anxious about doing that than there was about writing through male characters, or children, or indeed the very old, all of which managed in the past. In the process of writing Mary Tendo, I had to become Mary Tendo, or at any rate find parts of myself that were kin to her, just as I did in creating Vanessa.

Of course, I am simplifying: I also made several visits to Uganda, wrote much of the new book in that country and had the book critiqued by native Ugandan writers. Insight and fellow-feeling have to be worked for, as well as assumed. But the fundamental point remains that, in each novel, my central task was to extend my human sympathies. That is what happens, essentially, every time a writer creates a character or a reader identifies with him or her. Instead of granting our fellow feeling only to those who are most like us, we have the chance in fiction to become anyone, to feel with anyone. Ideally, fiction can make both its creators and its readers kinder—at least for the duration of the book.

I add that proviso because of course the fictional world is not the real one. We are freed in this infinitely yielding imaginary space from all the frustrations and annoyances of every day, the intransigence of real life human beings acting as free and unpredictable agents, the demands they make on us, the way they bring out the worst in us and make all our attempts at empathy no more than partial successes. Nevertheless, I do believe that in some sense fiction shows the way. Perhaps a young person who reads a vividly realised evocation of an old person's life might come away with an insight into the fact that inside the white-haired, rigid-faced husk of a human being he sees in the street is a livingness like his own.

In many ways, developed societies have become less unkind over the last century. But our tendency to categorise and demonise has not gone away, and groups of people are still inventive in their ability to find targets for hatred or ridicule. (Today it seems to me the old are the easiest target, at least in the media, a young person's industry.)

In all this discussion of the "other" it must not be forgotten that humans are also curious and long for novelty. At the most basic level, we desire it, too, and the gene pool needs it. Difference is something fascinating and enriching as well as alien to us. It isn't enough not to reject people, which is all the legislators can enforce. If we are not too afraid to do so—and sometimes we are afraid, out of political correctness: might we use the wrong word or ask the wrong question?—we can have the pleasure of learning about, and loving, the unfamiliar.

And then there are the celebrities: those one-dimensional, shimmering phantasms, adorable, hateful, beyond our reach. Perhaps these secular gods perform a useful function, after all, gleaming in the distance of our digital dreams. We can grieve for their deaths without having the hard physical tasks that attend to someone dying in our own lives, the organising and communicating, the enduring sorrow or guilt. We can project hatefulness onto them without actually harming them. We can love them without being disappointed by a lack of return. And sometimes, just sometimes, when they enact human pain or joy for us, we may genuinely empathise with them, too.

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