Love thy neighbour: Why have we become so suspicious of kindness?

As a follow-on to my note about the sign in front of St. John's Episcopal Church, this Guardian article discusses the evolution (or, as some might argue, devolution) of our attitudes toward kindness.

The great paradox of modern capitalism, the ex-Thatcherite John Gray has pointed out (False Dawn, 1998), is that it undermines the very social institutions on which it once relied - family, career, community. For increasing numbers of Britons and Americans, the "enterprise culture" means a life of overwork, anxiety and isolation.

Nevertheless, in spite of our relentlessly resilient selfish genes, we manage to stumble back to kindness and generosity.

Yet still kindness is an experience that, so far at least, we have been unable to give up on. Everything in our contemporary ethos makes kindness sound sometimes useful (that is, effective), but potentially redundant: a vestige from another time, or just part of a religious vocabulary. Yet still we desire it, in some way knowing that kindness - the unromantic kindness, which encourages a feeling of aliveness as compatible with, indeed integral to, a feeling of vulnerability - creates the kind of intimacy, the kind of involvement with other people, that we both fear and crave. That it is kindness, fundamentally, that makes life seem worth living; and that everything that is against kindness is an assault on our hope.

via MeFi