Kindness and “Projective Disgust”

Kindness in Folk Tales

A common theme in folk tales is the younger brother or sister who is kind to the needy fish, or old woman, or bird and thus is rewarded, while the selfish older brother or sister is punished for being mean. The moral of such stories is that kindness pays.

Today, you would think that hardly anyone had read those old stories. When I told my husband I was writing a column about kindness, he said, “You should call it, ‘Kindness is Dead.’”

He was referring, of course, to the loud and angry voices of extremists so prevalent in the United States and around the world. These days, the divisive political climate in our country makes it hard to remember that we were ever civil toward one another.

Yet is kindness really dead?

The Kindness of People

At the hospital where I’m a chaplain, I work with numerous gentle, enthusiastic, caring nurses, doctors, and cleaning staff. They exude kindness. Regardless of a patient’s political persuasion, ethnicity, or religious preference, these professionals do their best to treat each one with respect.

Yes, I have seen thoughtlessness and irritability. We are not equally kind, nor can any of us always be gentle. Besides, some patients are harder to be kind to than others. It’s natural to prefer the person who smiles and thanks you rather than the one who snipes at you. Unfortunately, the sniper may need our kindness more than anyone else.

Kindness can heal the wounds that make us bitter and snappish. Rarely do such wounds heal right away, however, and we can get impatient when we fail to see results. Kindness can’t heal everything.

Still, it doesn’t make us feel better when we resent those who refuse to respond to our efforts the way we think they should. Even so, I’ve met with many patients and clients who express anger toward those they’ve helped. Maybe it’s the children they brought into the world and for whom they worked so hard. Now these young adults pay them back by ignoring or abandoning them. It could friends, ones for whom they “bent over backwards” and who now won’t help them in return.

Kindness towards Others

We expect reciprocity. It’s part of our unspoken, but understood, social contract. Like the selfish brother or sister in the folk tales, people who take more than they give end up ostracized and alone.

Oddly enough, so do those super-generous types who berate others for being selfish or ungrateful. A common complaint I hear from such self-effacing people is, “After all I did for her, now she won’t even answer my phone calls.”

I have witnessed a few calls between such patients and their child or friend. If someone talked to me the way they talk to their loved ones, I might not answer their phone calls, either. Sometimes, when we think we’re selfless and kind, we’re actually being manipulative and judgmental.

There is a way to give gifts and bestow favors that looks more like cruelty and control than like kindness. When you find yourself bitter toward someone to whom you were generous, take a moment to consider your part in the situation. You may find you are not completely innocent.

Have We, as a Culture, Ever Been Kind?

I don’t mean to imply that people never take advantage of us. Of course, this happens. Spiritually ugly people exist, and they can harm us. As much as possible, we need to protect the vulnerable, including ourselves, from the world’s predators, whether they are our friends, our employers, or our elected leaders. We need to bring kindness to our families, our schools, our prisons, our courtrooms, and our political offices.

I do not say bring back kindness, for there have been few times throughout the history of humanity, regardless of where you look in the world, when civility and compassion were the norm. Even when it was, such respect was typically reserved for particular people, such as those without blemish, who had pale skin, who worshiped the correct god, and who made love in an acceptable manner.

After so many years of proclaiming the rights of women and children, of people with disabilities or dark skin, of gay and lesbian individuals, of Jews or Muslims or atheists or even, in some circles, Christians, why do we still vilify entire classes of people because of how they look, whom they love, or what they worship?

Learning Disgust

To answer this question, I refer to something my son told me about when I mentioned the Recovery Church topic for this week. He said that in her book, The Monarchy of Fear, Martha C. Nussbaum talks about “projective disgust.” [1]

Now, we need disgust. Without it, we wouldn’t avoid the decay and offal that spreads disease. Nonetheless, disgust is not a natural emotion. For example, babies find feces and snot as alluring as anything else. Therefore, we must be taught what is gross. Different cultures and subcultures find some things disgusting that others do not, such as a meal of insects or an elderly woman.

Anything that reminds us that we aren’t pure and clean, that we are of the earth and dirty, that we are animalistic, scares us. “Human beings in all cultures,” Nussbaum writes, “and alone among the animals, exhibit anxiety about being animals.” [106] It’s why some people can’t accept that we descended from “the monkeys,” why Galileo was found guilty of heresy, why we invented angels and heavens, and why the soul is considered blessed and the body sinful.

But we can’t avoid our animal selves. No matter what we do or say or think, we live in bodies that fart and shit and sweat and menstruate and drool. Even sex, one of humankind’s most pleasurable activities, at least when performed in a loving and consensual manner, is full of things we consider gross such as body fluids, strong odors, grunts, and groans. No wonder “good girls” aren’t supposed to enjoy it.

Mortality and “Projective Disgust”

Why do we cringe from the truth of our embodiedness? Because we fear our mortality. That’s why we cringe from anything that reminds us that one day we will grow old, die, and decay. In the end, we learn to associate disgust not just with things that can make us sick, but also with things that are different.

To protect our vision of ourselves as pure and godly, we project onto others the parts of ourselves we loathe and fear. In this way, we create isms of all kinds. Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and the stigma we place on the mentally ill and addicted are only a few of the ways we learn to feel good about ourselves at the expense of someone else. Our fear of dying can be so strong, we behave like the sign-bearing white-supremacist woman Nussbaum cites who, when she came face-to-face with a female counter-protester, screamed, “I hope you get raped by a nigger.” [2]

Disgust and fear make us do things that seem unimaginable when we are in our rational, sane, compassionate minds. I suspect this white-supremacist is capable of being kind to her family and friends while completely justifying her rage at Mexicans, blacks, and the liberals who support them. To look inside her own soul instead of blaming her problems on others is probably too painful for her to even attempt. After all, if Nussbaum is right, this woman’s disgust protects her from realizing that she, too, will die. You might say the white-supremacist is fighting for her life.

Loving Ourselves

Given this, one way to get out of this cycle of anger and hatred is to love ourselves as we are, to revel in our full, embodied being. Each of us is noble, beautiful, funny, and lofty. We are also each beastly, lustful, vulnerable, coarse, ugly, lonely, childish, weak, and strong. The more of ourselves we can embrace, the more we can embrace all parts others. It’s like the aphorism that says we have to love ourselves before we can love anyone else. Before we can be kind to others, we have to fully see, accept, and be kind to ourselves.

That’s why it’s so important to help one person heal at a time. With so much wrong in our world these days, when our forests are literally burning up because of global warming, when we can’t trust our own president, when antagonism threatens multiple countries, I can be left questioning what difference it makes if I help one person feel a little less fragile, a little more beloved.

Yet in my better moods, I remember that the work of changing one person at a time is as important as the work of those politicians and protesters and journalists and academics and judges and police officers who strive to protect dignity and wholeness, who model compassion, and who, in the depths of their hearts, are kind. That’s because they wouldn’t be kind if they didn’t understand what it means to be born as fragile babies, in a bloody mess, out of the bodies of women. To one degree or other, the poor and the powerful both must heal their hearts. If we don’t grow in acceptance and compassion as individuals, we won’t do so as a society.

Above All Else, Be Kind

That’s why we need to keep listening, counseling, writing, singing, reaching out, educating, and making friends. Some of us must be active in the struggle to maintain our democracy on a political and systemic level. I honor and respect that and am grateful to all who do so.

At the same time, some of us must continue to try to change hearts, one person at a time.

First, though, whether we are political or personal, we must change our own hearts. You, and I, and the woman who complains that her children never do enough, and the white-supremacist who projects a deep and seething hate, are responsible for our own healing.

That work is never done. Our hearts can always become more open, more wise, and more kind. Whether your work is global, local, or individual, learn to accept that wonderful and graceful animal part of yourself that knows so deeply and completely how to love. Embrace your mortality so you can accept that of others. Continue touching hearts with your gentle warmth and compassionate understanding. Every day, in every way you can, maintain truth and dignity, honesty and grace, and above all else, be kind.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

1. Nussbaum, Martha C., The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018, 108.
2. Ibid 122.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

Copyright © 2018 Barbara E. Stevens