A More Loving World

How to increase compassion, kindness and joy

The School of Life

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781915087225
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Communication & Public Speaking

An empowering guide to creating a kinder, more loving world.

The modern world is richer, safer and more connected than ever. But it is also a far less loving world than we need or want: impatience, self-righteousness, moralism and viciousness run rampant, while forgiveness, tolerance and empathy seem in short supply.

This book reminds us how much humans long for, and depend on, love. Far from a romantic or idealized fantasy, love is a powerful and dignified force that can save us from cruelty, defend us against chaos, and usher in hope and courage. We all crave forgiveness and fair treatment. In a world full of technical advances, corporate greed, and automation, this book argues that the true goal of civilization should be extending patience and kindness to everyone we meet.

With the right encouragement, all of us are capable of immense kindness. But without it, we can also quickly descend into something far darker. This inspiring book reminds us of our better natures and mobilizes us to fight for a kinder, more loving world.

• A FOCUS ON HUMANITY AT LARGE: And our friends, family, and even colleagues.
• EXPLORES ATTITUDES: Towards failure and forgiveness within society.
• REMINDS US OF THE GLOBAL NEED: For love and kindness.
• CHAPTERS INCLUDE: A Loveless World, Attitudes that Foster Love, Attitudes that Hinder Love, and Towards a More Loving World.

II.

Attitudes That Foster Love

We are all children

Perhaps the finest way to foster a loving attitude towards others is to recall, in the face of difficulty and noxiousness, when we are met with reprehensible or maddening behaviour, that we are in the end all children.

The claim is an odd one. Adults are clearly not children. They have powers of reasoning that quite outstrip those of younger people; they have options and a sound grasp of right and wrong; they are capable of causing serious damage; they should know better. We have every right to lose our temper with them and, where necessary, to lock them up for a long time without compunction. We are tough with adults because we know that they have moral agency. If they have done wrong, if they have offended us, if they have lied or hurt, they had a capacity to do better, which they ignored at their reasonable peril.

Children, on the other hand, are well known for their powers to melt our hearts. Partly this has to do with their physical appearance: with their large eyes, their full cheeks, their unthreatening statures, their tiny, fat, fleshy fingers. Their manner, too, is winning: their habit of mispronouncing words, their way of talking to themselves, their relationship with their soft toys, their fascination with unusual but distinctive small corners of the world (with buttons and brick walls, with our glasses and the cat’s tail).

So powerful is their capacity to win us over, we might find it impossible to hate any child whatsoever – a daunting thought in the case of some of the world’s more egregious future adults.

Children’s power to elicit love can’t just be due to their powerlessness, dependence and sweet appearance. The matter is more solidly grounded in psychology. Children attract our tenderness because, when they act in ‘bad’ or tricky ways, it tends to be easy to work out why they have done so. We can – far more than in the case of adults – discern a path that leads from benevolence and good humour to viciousness and rage. It isn’t just that children do less wrong than adults, it’s that we can work out why they have done so. They hit their little sister because they were feeling left out; they started to steal things from other children because their parents were going through a divorce; they ran away from the party without saying goodbye because they were panicked by a sense of unworthiness.

Adolf, aged 9 months, c. 1890

Overall, when it comes to the psychology of children, we discover a surprising and gentle truth: that ‘badness’ and difficulty are invariably the result of some form of pain. The child does not start by being dreadful, they become so in response to injury, fear or sorrow. It isn’t that the child is by nature an angel – their character contains innately aggressive elements, it’s just that these first have to be mobilised by negative external forces.

To argue that this benevolent principle might apply to adults as well as children is a challenging proposal for many of us. When confronted by nasty or terrible behaviour, our thoughts, for understandable reasons, do not generally turn to imagining why it might have occurred. We are too taken up with the injury we have witnessed or sustained to start a psychological investigation. Our minds are dominated by the extreme thoughtlessness of our opponents. We are in no mood to wonder why things came to be as they are. We’re satisfied with nimble and compressed reasons: because they’re an arsehole; because they’re crazy. This will do for now.

Furthermore, investigating the psychology of wrongdoers threatens to undermine any efforts to stop them from doing something awful again. We need to focus on getting bad people fined, reporting them to the police, shaming them publicly, firing them or sending them to prison. Nothing should get in the way of blocking people’s capacities to inflict further harm.

Yet it is always open to us to wonder why someone acted as they did – and here we are liable to stumble on a provocative and revolutionary idea: the reason why little children and adults do wrong is – despite the differences in age and size – exactly the same. One may be no bigger than a chair, the other can be gigantic and able to carry guns, post lengthy screeds online or start and bankrupt companies, but in the end, the psychology of blunder, meanness and anger is always the same: evil is a consequence of injury. The adult did not start off evil, their difficult sides were not hardwired from the start, they grew towards malice on account of some form of wound waiting to be discovered.

It is the work of extraordinary patience and humanity – it is the work of love – to go in search of what these wounds might be. To search is morally frightening because we too easily imagine that it might require us to wind up thinking well of behaviour we know is abhorrent. It doesn’t at all: we can remain appalled while simultaneously tracing a path back to the true catalytic factors. The work can also be practically frightening because we imagine that it might require us to leave someone at liberty to cause us or others yet more pain: but again, we can keep the wrongdoer safely behind very high bars even as we sensitively explore the origins of their violations.

Once the full stories of our trespassers become known, our perspective may swiftly rework itself. The bully who pursued us online had once worked as a porter, then been fired some years back and fallen into depression and was facing the bankruptcy courts. The angry populist politician was remorselessly belittled by a powerful father. The sexually impulsive person used their addiction to calm themselves down from some unmasterable anxieties related to early emotional neglect. Our judgement on behaviour never has to change, but our sense of why it occurred can be transformed.

The discipline of psychotherapy has been central in helping us to chart the sometimes unobvious or contrary connections between a symptom and its genesis. Boastfulness may have its roots in fear; anger can mask terror; hatred can be a defence against love. A haughty air can take hold as a way of compensating for invisibility. A satirical manner can be a shield against an exiled longing for sweetness. Most of the time, psychotherapy assists the victims of injury to overcome their traumas; it can accede to a yet more complex and morally subtle mission when it helps us to see more deeply into the minds of those it is easy to dismiss as monsters.

Human beings have not always thought well of small children. For most of history, misbehaviour was punished with a firm hand. Children who stole or told lies were sent to their rooms or hit with a belt. It took us a long time to be able to trust that there must always be a secret agony behind a withheld truth or a theft.

We now realise that not only is it kinder to enquire after such agonies, it is also a great deal more effective. If the goal is to educate children towards goodness and sweetness, a belt isn’t the optimal tool. We reform people by showing generosity towards the suffering that accounts for their so-called sins. As we keep forgetting, no one ever becomes kinder through being bullied or publicly shamed. Mockery is not a good instrument for reform. People do not change when they are shouted at; they improve when they are given enough love and security to dare to confront their own failings.

The penal system in most nations has learnt half this story. It will tend to place people below the age of 18 in separate young offenders’ institutions, which aim to treat inmates with a degree of kindness and hope – in order to delve into the psychology of transgression with a view to understanding and overcoming its causes. But after this age, for the most part, prisoners are locked up in bare cells and the key is – metaphorically – thrown away. They should have known better, after all.

Yet we are all young offenders, as it were, however old we might actually be; we all need our crimes – no matter how small they may be – to be treated with a degree of sympathy and empathetic investigation. It is no particular achievement to be furious with problematic people and to call them freaks and fools; it is an exquisite feat of mind to be able to imagine them as still, at some level, infants in the cradle.

We are powerful enough to damage others

One of the reasons why we may end up acting more destructively and cruelly than we should is that it can take us a long time to fathom how someone like us could cause trouble for anyone. By ‘someone like us’, we mean someone who is as unpowerful, as put upon, as much subject to the whims of others, as obscure and forgotten as we generally feel ourselves to be. We know that certain people can be dangerous: those who run corporations, for example, or the heads of governments or investors in oil companies (we might get incensed when we think of what these mighty sorts get up to). It’s just that we’re nothing like this. We’re ordinary; we’re not in the midst of history; we’re not privileged; we’re the victims.

This sense of innocence tends to take hold when we are very young. At that time, it is obvious that we are not qualified to do much damage at all. We are weak before the world and it is always more likely that someone else will be the aggressor.

Parents make unfair demands on us; teachers bully us; strangers might interfere with us.

From this, we may continue to trust in our own inability to aggrieve others. We therefore don’t try hard to reassure other people that we like them and that they are of value: why would they need to hear such messages from someone like us? We don’t rush to tell our hosts that their hospitality was satisfying; they surely know it anyway. We don’t feel we should pay someone a compliment; they obviously have more important friends than us to take care of their self-esteem. If we’re feeling oppressed and angry, we might sit down at our computer and lash out at a famous person online: it clearly can’t matter to them; they wouldn’t be listening to a character as negligible as we are. And thereby, bit by bit, on the back of touching feelings of innocence and powerlessness, we end up adding more than our fair share of poison to the collective bloodstream.

To be a loving person is to wrestle with a profoundly improbable idea: that however modest our position in society might be, however much we may have been maltreated in the past, however mesmerised we are by the deplorable behaviour of powerful individuals, however shy and frail we are, we are constantly capable of causing other people significant hurt.

Loving people understand the extreme psychological susceptibility of everyone who crosses their path. They might have a neighbour, someone who is much more successful than they are and who holidays abroad several times a year, whom they still take care to share a few warm words with in the morning, knowing how a blank stare can hurt even someone who goes paragliding in the summer and has an elegant car. Even though one of their old friends is now a professional chef and seems confident about their work, the loving guest nevertheless bothers to write a witty and careful few lines of thanks after a dinner. There may be a big gap in age or status between them and their boss, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t say something encouraging when this figure has to go into hospital for a routine operation.

The loving know that you can be employed at the dry-cleaner’s or work as an attendant at a cinema and still play a role in someone’s life through a small act of graciousness and solicitude. At the same time, they are aware that you could leave an unkind comment online – just a few words reminding a celebrity living thousands of miles away that they’re a piece of shit – and thereby help to strip away one of the last reasons why someone might bother to keep living.

The loving know how much everyone suffers from feelings of self-doubt, worthlessness, loneliness and pain beneath a veneer of imperviousness and strength. They may not have the precise details to hand, but they grasp enough about the general picture: how much each one of us is ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• I. A Loveless World
• II. Attitudes That Foster Love
• III. Attitudes That Hinder Love
• IV. Conclusion: Towards a More Loving World
• Picture credits
• Copyright