141-11-02-2010

Great Tips For Human Kindness

By W. Owen Thornton

Long have I held the notion that our lives are the summation of all that we take in.  This statement makes so much sense it seems redundant.  In two courses in Philosophy this term I have stumbled upon some ideas that will lead us to practicing human kindness in a practical manner.  In fact, in one class I learned practical tips to help me practice human kindness to a near perfect degree and I want to share that with you.

Phenomenology (the study of “stuff” or everything) is the branch of philosophy that best suits my way of thinking.  In it, there is a term called sedimentation.  Sedimentation is everything that is taken up into us: all sights, sounds, language, the attitudes we see of others as they express themselves, what we watch on television or read in magazines etc.  From these layers of ‘stuff’ that rain down upon us like the microscopic bits of dead sea life that constantly falls upon the bottom of the ocean, this sediment builds up inside of us.  It is what forms us and shapes us and makes us who we are.  And all this is good stuff … except for the sediment that gives us bias and prejudice and racial hatred and well, you name the problems we can find on planet earth and it all comes from sedimentation.

Now sedimentation is not all bad as I said.  Much of what we take up inside of us is about love and kindness and goodness and about keeping promises … all those things are inside of us too.  The problem with sedimentation is that it gives us a ‘gaze’ (another term from phenomenology) that lets us see the world as we interpret it … not as it really is.  This is the kind of thing I have been talking about in my newsletter articles from the beginning.  Our sedimentation is what makes us take important things for granted.  We see what we want to see, not what is really there.  Our sedimentation is what tends to drive us because that is what we know and are familiar with, rather than doing the things from our inner truth, an inner truth we all tend to have buried deep somewhere where we cannot get at it.

In an essay by Margaret Olivia Little called Seeing and Caring: the Role of Affect in Feminist Moral Epistemology[1] she writes about how we can overcome our sedimentation: our normal, somewhat biased way of looking at the world so that we can look at the world and see the real truth.  If we do this well, we will overcome taking the world for granted and we will be practicing human kindness.  Oddly enough, while Little is writing about is the importance of emotions in how they help us determine our morality.  Her work was not intended to be a phenomenologist paper in any way yet her work is very phenomenological in its approach.  (Her work was learned in the second branch of philosophy I have found very interesting this term: the philosophy of emotions!)

In her paper, she cites the example of a nurse.  The nurse picks up the tray of food from the patient.  We could see this as a kind act.  Or we could simply see the act as the nurse being a good nurse and doing her job.  When the nurse approaches taking the tray as a means of doing her job, she is not as good a nurse as she could be.  In this case, the nurse is caught up in her sedimentation.  She is fulfilling the list of duties required of her so she can succeed at her work, so she can get paid, so she can go home with a set of lists of jobs done and ticked off.  But the problem with the tray of food is that it is full.  The patient hasn’t eaten anything and the nurse hasn’t noticed.  Her ‘sedimentation’ has prevented her from seeing a vital and important reality.

Little suggests two things to help make the nurse a better nurse which will thereby make her a better person … a person who practices human kindness.  These two things are both in the title of her paper.  First, the nurse needs to find a way to actually care about the patient.  The patient just simply cannot be patient number 1,523 that the nurse has taken care of this year.  The patient has to become Joan Smith who is recovering from gall bladder surgery.  Joan has to be a mother of two, a husband of John … a woman of 46 who simply wants to get well so she can go back home and back to work at the advertising agency.

So when we invest ourselves in others … when we care … we start to notice different things than what our sedimentation would normally allow us to see.  But, and here’s the really concrete tip, (because telling you to care about someone is difficult to do and hard to give you specific tips on how to go about doing that (but my tip is in coming to learn things about Joan and her family and her job and her desires)) Little suggests that good nurses make a mental list of all the things they are seeing as they are seeing it.  This second tactic is like having a running dialogue inside your mind.  So, when the nurse walks into the room she sees that the food tray is pushed over to the side of the bed, and that the food hasn’t been touched.  That its mid day and the curtains have been pulled closed by someone else and that the room is dark and gloomy.  When the food isn’t consumed, and the nurse notices this, she can begin to talk to Joan about why the food isn’t consumed … and there is how she starts to practice human kindness … and how she becomes a great nurse.

Before moving to conclusion, I want to offer a second scenario of Little’s.  In this situation, the nurse cares and she is running her internal dialogue.  This time she discovers something more subtle.  Whenever Beth leaves the room after visiting Joan, Joan always appears to be a little blue.  This “catch” of the nurse’s is more difficult than the food example as it takes multiple situations of the nurse noticing certain things before the evidence is built up for her to come to a conclusion.  Upon talking to Joan about it, she learns that Beth is a doom and gloom kind of person who always talks about how long people stay in hospital after surgery, and this talk bothers Joan.  Whatever the nurse decides to do with this information, either calm Joan’s fears or perhaps to talk privately with Beth before her next visit, the nurse has practiced human kindness.

What is all this about?  Well we all get caught up in our own stuff (sedimentation) and we begin to miss things that are important (to us and others) … things that make us unkind … not because we’re deliberately doing bad things, but because we’re missing stuff we should be catching.  Important stuff is slipping past us.  The reason?  We need to strike a balance between always being on, like the nurse is when she steps into patients’ rooms and starts reciting a listing of everything she sees, and being off and letting our ‘sedimentation’ run us to the point that we become unkind because we’re taking things for granted.  We need to change our gaze on the world from one that reflects our own sedimentation – there we see what we expect to see – to one that actually sees what is really going on.  And the tip of listing everything in your vision is one you can apply to:

·         Your significant other

·         Your children

·         Your friends

·         Your poker buddies

·         Your office workers

·         Your employees

·         Your boss

·         Anyone you say that you care about.

So there are two criteria to help lead you to human kindness in this essay: Care about the people around you and list everything in your line of sight … for a while.  Because you can’t run that list all the time or otherwise you’d go a little odd!