Loving kindness as pathology

“Let us not become conceited, competing against one another,” says Paul (Galatians 5:26). Students compete with one another for attention and admission to schools. Such competition is, to some extent, unavoidable. It only becomes conceited when the reward is something more than the opportunity to further perfect the mind.

“To rank the effort above the prize may be called love,” says Confucius. When we begin to covet the reward more than the effort, we have left behind the love Confucius praises and fallen into the conceit Paul condemns.

When I was eight years old I took little interest in the competitive games other boys played. In fact, at one point I began running around at recess kissing all the other boys. Boys take rough play in good humor. But caress them with kindness and they are offended. Just as the Pharisees rejected the logic of the Sermon on the Mount, scorning loving kindness and continuing to live lives of competition and strife, so my young classmates rejected me, a budding little Christian.

It saddens me to this day that the psychiatrist my parents quickly brought in to “fix” my embarrassing behavior failed to even consider a religious interpretation of the situation. Tragically, the psychiatrist did indeed “fix” me, and took away from me a germ of loving kindness, a germ that would not until three decades later begin to recognize itself as virtue rather than pathology, and finally begin to grow.

My mentors wanted me to survive in a brutal world. So they taught me to be as brutal as the rest. If only they had taught me instead to patiently endure suffering, to take up my cross and follow Christ! Of what use is survival if we must banish loving kindness from our hearts to achieve it?

I desperately wish I could go back and talk to the sad young boy I was. I wish I could tell him kindness was a virtue, not a pathology. I wish I could tell him there were many others in the past who had suffered on account of their kindness. I wish I could teach him to turn the other cheek, to bless those that cursed him, and all the other lessons I had to wait three decades to learn.

“Live by the spirit and do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” says Paul (Galatians 5:16). One of the desires of the flesh is the desire, particularly prevalent in male animals, to compete for territory. The competitive behavior of human males, from football players to corporate CEOs, seems to me no more than a glorified form of this animal behavior.

In my quixotic attempts to show other boys the way of loving kindness, I was accused of disrupting their games. Now, as I and other evangelists of kindness take fine young minds off the labor market, changing them from slaves of mammon into slaves of Christ, we stand accused of disrupting the games of corporate CEOs. Men driven by ambition and greed want to be seen as role models. When we dare to show any nobler sentiment, any sentiment that might cast their brutal games in a bad light or give their savage cruelty a bad conscience, they're eager to have us cured of this pathology as quickly as possible.