HUMANITY HIKER

The last of the kindness virtues is faith.  I define faith as believing in something you cannot know from experience.  Usually this is applied to God, or something that transcends the material realm.  We can experience things that transcend us, but such experiences are deeply spiritual and personal and we cannot share the meaning with others as we can with material experiences.

Faith also applies to our social lives.  You never know for certain based on past experience the future direction of a society.  To have faith in someone, a community or in humanity means believing in, but not knowing, their potential based on past experiences.

When I give presentations on kindness and community I wear a shirt that says “Believe in Humanity.”  I have such faith in humanity for two reasons.  Natural small band societies, autonomous communities, are tremendously diverse.  Some of these societies we might abhor.  Yet only in intimate communities with a large measure of autonomy is there universal access to the necessities of housing, food and health care.  Genuine kindness resides in the context of a small community, not a large nation state.  Experiential evidence based on what is natural for humans bolsters my faith.  Civilized, large mass societies never have provided such evidence of adequately caring for all.  There is much irony in what we view as “civilized” or “civility.”

The other reason is the reality that we tend to live up or down to expectations.  Forget what is natural.  If we believe the Enlightenment philosophers, modern economists or mass media that we naturally are bad, if we instead have faith in civilization when history reveals throughout the inhumanity of civilizations, we will live down to those base expectations with the forever unfulfilled hope that civilization will save us from ourselves.  We work hardest for the causes we believe in.  We must believe in ourselves, our intimate communities, to realize the kindness in us that makes the world a better place.

During our hike across the country hundreds of people were kind to us.  Almost all of them wished us to “Be safe” or “Safe travels” upon our departure.

Think about the irony in that.

It’s a topic I’ve covered before, when we first returned from the journey.  The people wishing us to “Be safe” or “Safe travels” failed to heed their own advice, particularly those that took us into their homes.  Neither happiness nor kindness draw from being “safe” or “secure.”  Risks must be taken to display your caring for another person.

Dictionary definitions of “courage” tend to make it sound heroic, with an emphasis on facing “fear” and “danger.”  I consider “courage” as the willingness to risk safety, security or comfort for a virtue, such as kindness or community.  I leave out the thrill seeking that many adventurers, including myself, have done simply for our own pleasure, no matter how dangerous.  However, I include small, seemingly insignificant acts such as sacrificing one’s comfort for the sake of a community function.

Courage thus becomes a virtue itself.  Without it we might care, but would not venture beyond caring to kindness if any risk was involved.  Courage is right by helping a group function and survive through the big and small risks taken by individuals to make things better.  Courage is good in that we feel better from daring more then from fearing.

So don’t “Be safe.”  “Be kind” or “Be happy!”

This summer I am a Program Director for a residential YMCA camp; that interferes with my posting on a regular basis.  Picking up where I left off regarding kindness virtues, the next one is humility.

I view humility as accepting that one is part of a larger, greater whole, rather than at the center or most important part of that whole.  Humility can be contrasted with arrogance, or being self-absorbed.  Ironically, being too critical of yourself also contrasts with humility, as overvaluing the importance of your own flaws.  We can see in this regard that humility and being humble is much different from humiliation.

Humility is “right” for an altruistic species, our original nature, for how we were meant to be.  There are accounts of early nomads keeping their lead hunters humble by insulting the game they brought home to eat.  Humility is “good” in that we enjoy humble people more than we do arrogant, self-absorbed or overly critical people.  Humility breeds kindness when we look beyond ourselves to feel and react to the needs of others.

As we walked across the country there was a direct correlation between the type of road we walked on (when not on trail, bike paths or hiking cross-country) and how frequently people stopped to offer us kindness.  On paved roads people seldom stopped, on ATV roads people always stopped.  This comes as no surprise, it’s more of an inconvenience to stop a fast moving car than a slow one.  There’s also something deeper at work which also should come as no surprise.  People with a hurried lifestyle are disinclined towards kindness.  People at leisure are more inclined to spend some of that leisure being social and, consequently, being kind.

In addition to promoting kindness, leisure is right in that it promotes the health, the antithesis of stress.  It’s good in that leisure promotes happiness as well.  A leisurely lifestyle was normal for early nomadic societies under natural conditions, despite the false images to the contrary portrayed by an “Enlightened” society.

As an experienced teacher I’ve acquired a sense of when my “audience” is paying attention or not.  When I gave talks across the country about kindness, community and humanity the part that garnered the most attention was when I pointed out we have empathy.  Most humans have the ability to feel each others joys, to feel each others pain.  Empathy is the foundation for why we are an altruistic species under the conditions of small band society, unaffected by centralized, paternal influences.  Empathy is the reason why it is right to behave altruistically; empathy is the reason why most humans feel good when they do so.  Empathy as a virtue is the driving force behind kindness.

Kindness is a virtue that best resides in the context of community, a local setting of intimacy.  Kindness requires several virtues in their own right.  I list them here:

Empathy
Leisure
Humility
Courage
Faith