What's wrong with "kindness?"

"If I knew for certain someone was coming here now to do me some good, I'd run for my life." [Thoreau, Walden]

• Parents routinely describe themselves as acting in my children’s best interests

• What such “acting” entails, usually, is doing what I think best

• The latter phrase clearly describes what’s actually happening: the parent is substituting their own judgment about what the child “needs” for what the child might actually prefer

• This pattern is frequently repeated when I decide to help you, instead of asking you what you prefer

• “Kindness” thus often takes the form of substituting one’s own preferences for what might actually be my choices

• This tendency to privilege my own feelings is concealed behind my “good intentions”

• But it is, nevertheless, an action that expresses my superiority

• Paul, in his 2nd letter to the Romans [Romans, 2:20] unintentionally expresses this: after advising his readers to “do good to their enemies” he goes on to say that this is worth doing because it will embarrass them [literally, “will heap coals of fire upon their heads”]

• I’m of course arguing that it is always best actually to ask others what they would prefer

• My having “good intentions” does not justify substituting my own judgment for your wishes

• The photo above captures the late Pope Francis in some quiet moment abotu a year ago; I imagine him, knowing his own death to be near, fearing that the next pontiff—more or less in the mode that has characterized almost all pontificates—will return to the “conservative” forms of placing the church above all other interests

• One example: in 1992 Pope John Paul II announced that Galileo was right to claim his telescopic observations had proved the truth of the “heliocentric theory” and that the church had been wrong to punish him

• This admission came 359 years after Galileo was brought before the Inquisition in 1633!