"...To live well, we must be able to imaginatively identify with other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring about others, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, is what makes us fully human. We depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very being. The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic.
Modern Western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness. Only small children, the sick, and the very elderly are permitted dependence on others; for everyone else, self-sufficiency and autonomy are cardinal virtues. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. The ideal lover or spouse is a freewheeling agent for whom the giving and taking of love is a disposable lifestyle option; neediness, even in this arena of intense desires and longings, is ultimately contemptible.
But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of Western history this has been widely acknowledged. Even the Stoics -- those avatars of self-reliance -- recognized man's innate need for other people as purveyors and objects of kindness. 'Individualism' is a very recent phenomenon. The Enlightenment, generally perceived as the origin of Western individualism, promoted 'social affections' against 'private interests.' Victorianism, individualism's so-called golden age, witnessed a fierce clash between champions and critics of commercial individualism. In the early 1880s historian and Christian activist Arnold Toynbee, in a series of public lectures on the Industrial Revolution, tore into the egoistic vision of man preached by prophets of free-enterprise capitalism. The 'world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection' envisaged by free marketeers was 'less real than the island of Lilliput,' Toynbee snorted. American Transcendentalists of the same period attacked the spirit of 'selfish competition,' and established communities of 'brotherly cooperation.' Even Charles Darwin, that darling of modern individualists, strongly rejected the view of mankind as primarily selfish, arguing for the existence of other-regarding instincts as powerful as self-regarding ones. Sympathy and cooperation were innate to man, Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871), and a key factor behind humanity's evolutionary success."
-- Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2009: pp. 95-7.
