Kindness: Christian virtue or health advice?

I’m fascinated by the way that old ideas often return wearing new livery. The latest health advice against Covid-19, and other ailments is – ventilation. That is, a dose of fresh air which Florence Nightingale was advocating back in the 1850s, and which every convent school practiced, before the era of the (less healthy) air conditioner.

And the human behavioural advice now enjoying a new vogue is – kindness. ‘Be kind’ is a rallying-cry from the trendsetters. ‘Kindness’, once a normal Christian virtue under the aegis of ‘charity’, has re-appeared wearing a more scientific hat.

Happiness

The psychologists and health boffins are now saying that kindness produces ‘happiness’ hormones like serotonin and oxytocin. The Harvard Business School is teaching that being kind is recommended for health – it reduces stress and blood pressure, and may save you from depression.

The pharmaceutical scientist Dr David R. Hamilton writes books showing that kindness impacts the brain, the heart and the immune system, and it can increase your lifespan.

I think we always knew that being kind makes us feel better, although it wasn’t recommended for such narcissistic reasons: it was advanced as a Christian virtue, as in “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Compassion was the necessary accompaniment of kindness.

But kindness was sometimes to be tempered by prudence, or even discipline. A line was drawn between kindness and indulgence. It wasn’t considered kind to spoil a child, because it would cause her to grow up self-centred and peevish. My mother, always kind in practice, cited Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet that “I must be cruel, only to be kind”. Sometimes you had to take tough measures to achieve a greater goal. Parents sent their children away to austere boarding schools because they believed, in the long run, that it was for the child’s benefit.

Kindness has always been extolled, although there was also a distinction between ‘being kind’ and ‘being soft’. Be kind, yes, but being soft means being taken for a mug.

Perhaps the perfect Christian would allow herself to be made a fool of, for kindness’ sake. I encountered a woman who didn’t complain about being burgled, saying she concluded that the burglar’s need was greater than hers. This seemed heroically altruistic. And yet, supposing her attitude served to encourage a young offender, who went on to career of crime which harmed many other people? Would that have been a kindness?

The American ‘Random Acts of Kindness’ movement, which sprung up a few years ago, was a generous idea about performing spontaneously kind acts for strangers; it’s interesting to see the boffins now flagging up kindness as a health measure. Old wine in new wineskins!

More hostile for Catholic writers today

It’s 40 years since the death of the Tralee-born writer Alice Curtayne, and to mark the anniversary the Kerry Writers’ Museum recently sponsored an on-line talk, presented by her grandson Niall Rynne.

Alice Curtayne, born in 1901 and died in 1981, was a renowned Catholic writer of the mid-twentieth century. Some of her best-known books are currently being reissued by an American publisher, Cluny Media. Her 1939 novel House of Cards, which I reviewed in the pages of The Irish Catholic, was republished last year: a riveting insight into a young Irishwoman’s working life in England and then in Italy in the 1930s.

Her Catherine of Siena – a very popular biography when first published in 1929 – will be reissued by Cluny next year. She also did biographies of St Brigid, St Oliver Plunkett, and Francis Ledwidge, among many other works on Irish history, faith and culture.

As Niall Rynne illustrated, she travelled on successful speaking tours of the United States in the 1950s and was much honoured there. She married the writer Stephen Rynne in her late 30s, and they had four children, living on a farm in Prosperous, Co. Kildare.

Alice Curtayne is an attractive character and well deserves the American publisher’s revival of her books. Yet she was also fortunate in her timing: the work of a Catholic writer was welcomed during her lifetime, and that helped to amplify her voice. A Catholic writer today finds a more hostile reception.

See www.kerrywritersmuseum.com for playback details of this interesting talk.

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Sadly, one of the social trends emerging from the lockdown, in England and Wales, is yet another rise in the number of abortions, which have increased to their highest point ever recorded. The greatest increase is among women over 30, rather than associated with teenage pregnancies. The reasons given are the uncertainties of life under lockdown.

The birth control pioneer Marie Stopes claimed that abortion would be reduced to virtually nil once reliable contraception was available to all women – women could control their fertility by preventative, not destructive, measures. I wonder what she would say to the inexorable increase in terminations?