Opportunistic Kindness

On August 18, 1989, Herbert Richardson was executed, by electrocution, at Holman Prison in Altmore, Alabama. Richardson was a black Vietnam veteran suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). While in Vietnam, Richardson’s platoon was ambushed. Only he survived, but with major injuries. He recovered physically, but not emotionally, and was eventually discharged. Back in the United States, after decades of personal struggles, Richardson accidentally murdered a ten-year old girl in a misguided effort to win back an ex-girlfriend. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

Though Bryan Stevenson’s best-seller is mainly about a different death-row inmate, Just Mercy includes an account of Stevenson’s unsuccessful attempt to prevent Richardson’s execution, and their time together on Richardson’s final day of life.

(It’s worth noting that Herbert Richardson, a black man, was executed for a death he didn’t intend. Though Derek Chauvin, a white man convicted of murdering a black man, has not yet been sentenced, he won’t be executed. According to experts, Chauvin will likely end up imprisoned for between ten to thirty years. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, which implies intention, but not pre-meditation. This jarring discrepancy between the sentences accorded to Richardson and Chauvin, a black man and a white man, is a travesty we have somehow institutionalized.)

Twenty-something minutes before Richardson’s execution, Stevenson was allowed to visit him. Here is Stevenson’s account of Richardson’s last words:

“All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ When I woke this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came to me, 'Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long. ‘What can we do to help you?’ This evening, ‘What do you want for your meal, how can we help you?’ ‘Do you need stamps for your letters?’ ‘Do you want water?’ ’Do you want coffee?’ ‘Can we get you the phone?’ ‘How can we help you?’ “

Herbert sighed and looked away.

“It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.” He looked at me, and his face twisted in confusion.”

Richardson’s confusion is understandable. Why would people be so much more eager to help him in his final hours than during the rest of his life? Is kindness typically opportunistic rather than ubiquitous? Is that the best we can do?

Here are a few perspectives:

1. People were ubiquitously kind to Richardson, but he never noticed it. That seems unlikely. Like many Vietnam vets, Richardson led a marginalized existence. He likely had people in his life who at times treated him kindly, but his life doesn’t seem like one marked by a continuous pattern of kindness.
2. Richardson had grown so much from his experience on death row that his very presence stimulated kindness. Also unlikely. Richardson remarked on the level of kindness accorded him specifically on the day of his death. It was a binary event. Beyond that, the stress of facing death stirred up anxiety and turmoil in Richardson in the weeks leading up to his execution, just as it would affect most people, though he did achieve a level of serenity on his final day.
3. Of course people were kind to Richardson. It was his last day of Life! That’s how it should be. This is the most obvious answer.It’s not satisfying. That’s the point of this article. Something’s “off” with that logic. It may be human nature to behave this way, but that doesn’t imply it’s rational. Or desirable. Something about Richardson’s dire circumstances — he was about to die — provoked a surge of kindness toward him. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why Richardson, or any of us, wasn’t treated with this level of kindness every day of his life, rather than only on his final one.
4. (Most) Human beings aren’t capable of treating others with consistent unconditional kindness. As we go through the nuts and bolts of our lives, we may be kind. We may not. We’re opportunistic. What consistently inspires kindness? A significant event, like Richardson’s impending death. An impending death inspires kindness. A disturbed vagrant inspires avoidance: I typically cross the street if see a disturbed vagrant approach. That doesn’t make it right. It’s just what I do. It’s what a lot of people do. Of these four explanations (and there may be others), this seems the most plausible. We can be kind. We are kind. There are limits. For most people, kindness is not 24x7x365. It’s not ubiquitous. It’s opportunistic.

What is it about acute circumstances that inspires kindness to a degree that chronic problems don’t?

Evolutionary psychologists have studied the concept of altruism, which is widely accepted as having evolutionary advantages. “Altruism” is strictly defined as a behavior that benefits the group at the expense of the individual. Compare that with “cooperation” or “mutual benefit”, which benefit the group while being neutral or positive for the individual. Finally, “reciprocal altruism” is an arrangement in which A helps B and B helps A, a pattern with greater evolutionary advantages than conventional altruism. Game theorists’ version of reciprocal altruism is called “Tit for Tat”, a highly effective strategy when playing the kind of reward-based games favored by game theorists. In Tit for Tat, you are cooperative, or not, based on whether the other player was most recently cooperative, or not. You can help each other, and mutually benefit, or try to profit at the other’s expense.

By these definitions, kindness could be considered any of: altruistic; cooperative or mutually beneficial; or reciprocally altruistic. If Alice hurls herself in front of a bullet to save Bob, that’s altruistic: Alice risks death in doing so. Most acts of kindness are not so dramatic. A warm smile directed to a stranger is an act of kindness, a banal one, and isn’t (usually) dangerous. But a single warm smile (generally) won’t save anyone. A significant act of kindness, like giving a homeless man a job in a grocery store, could perhaps save a life. That’s an exception.

That said, the kindnesses Richardson described on his final day were uniformly banal. Most kind acts, when considered in isolation at least, don’t offer an evolutionary advantage. Some clearly do: they’re exceptions. In contrast, a continuous pattern of small kindnesses does have an evolutionary advantage, since psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated that most human beings thrive when treated consistently with kindness, at least when this occurs in early childhood. The best example is the supportive environment found in a loving home.

Psychologists have also observed, often, that people who serve others are generally happier than people who don’t, or who do so rarely. They’re also healthier and they live longer. By this logic, kindness is totally logical: be kind, be happy. But that’s not the way people behave. At times, people are kind. At times, not. It’s opportunistic. A rare few are consistently kind, ubiquitously so. That’s atypical. Even if mutual benefit and reciprocal altruism have evolutionary advantages. Even if kindness makes you happier and contributes to health and longevity. And these advantages are significant. As much as an upright posture and opposable thumbs, perhaps more so, developing reliable cooperation is a primary factor in the success of Homo Sapiens relative to all other species.

Why then, given its enormous advantages, isn’t ubiquitous kindness the norm? Why do most of us practice it only selectively and inconsistently, i.e., opportunistically ?

The dynamics of evolution are complex. As much as reciprocal altruism has structural advantages, so does selfishness. In Why Buddhism is True, journalist and college professor Robert Wright explains how evolution shaped human cognition to be primarily self-referential and self-absorbed. We spend much of our time, perhaps most of our time, thinking about ourselves and our circumstances, rather than the world around us, including the other people in it. Mindfulness is about breaking this habit. The reason mindfulness typically takes so many years of meditation and practice to develop is that the habit of being focused on ourselves is extremely powerful. We evolved that way because it facilitated survival, even though in today’s world, self-absorbed thinking and its resulting behavior has mostly outlived its usefulness.

On top of that, people do not survive childhood undamaged. Poverty, war, famine, and disease profoundly impact human development, as does sexual abuse, bigotry, alcoholism, drug addiction, divorce, marital strife, emotional abuse, bullying, and simple exhaustion. No one escapes childhood unscathed. Fortunate children are sufficiently loved to survive this gauntlet, and thrive, but not without some damage. The sort of chronic stress that many people endure in childhood, and perhaps in adulthood as well, takes its toll. For many of us, in trying to cope with life, the practice of ubiquitous kindness may feel like an irrelevant luxury. It’s not. In fact, kindness is typically a cure for the stress we experience, for the giver as much as the receiver. But it doesn’t feel that way when you’re under stress, including the stress of past injuries.

Yet few people are so self-absorbed or emotionally brittle that they would not, given a ready opportunity, fetch coffee, run an errand, or offer a special dinner to a man who will be dead before midnight.

For Herbert Richardson, the kindness of others in his final hours may have made his passage more tolerable. Or not. But it didn’t change his life. Kindness can and does change lives in profound ways. Being kind in a selective, conditional way is entirely natural, but that’s typically not the sort of kindness that makes an impact. Ubiquitous kindness makes impacts.

There are people who radiate kindness. It’s inseparable from who they are. They are few. Their impact is profound. But it’s not what comes naturally to most of us.