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Clifford Longley |
Good Morning,
I once asked a small child what she thought was the most important thing in life. She replied, simply, “being kind.” On this, she and Russian novelist Vasily Grossman, are at one. His remarkable tour de force, Life and Fate, which has been Radio 4’s Book of the Week, leads us to the conclusion that spontaneous acts of simple one-to-one kindness lie at the heart of what it means to be fully human. Out of the mouths of babes, etc etc.
Another novelist fascinated by kindness is Charles Dickens, whose bicentenary occurs next February and about whom we are going to hear a lot more in the coming months. But there is a significant difference between his approach and Vasily Grossman’s. In Life and Fate the latter describes various moments in which the brutal grinding together of two overwhelming inhuman forces, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, throw up little glimpses of what could be a better world - represented by acts of unexpected kindness all too soon extinguished.
The Second World War is full of man’s inhumanity to man, to such an extent that all the institutionalised indifference to the suffering of others, all the industrial scale cruelty, must have begun to seem like normal existence, just the way life is.
Dickens thinks differently. Man’s inhumanity to man will always be with us, but it is still open to us to make generosity of spirit a whole way of life, as some of his characters indeed do. You could almost divide the entire cast of Dickensian characters into two groups, kind and unkind, humane and inhumane, nice and nasty. If he has a genius, it is in making goodness - kindness - sound interesting.
Neither Grossman nor Dickens were preachers of religion. But Dickens’s Victorian optimism undoubtedly springs from a Christian culture steeped in Bible stories. The archetypal tale of generosity to strangers comes in Genesis, where Abraham welcomes three strangers to his tent and offers them shelter, food and drink. An ancient embellishment says he erected his tent with no sides to it, so any stranger approaching could enter it without having to look for the door. Certainly the Good Samaritan knew all about Abraham’s tent.
Strangers needing kindness do indeed come at us from all directions, and by definition are not people like us except in their basic humanity. Religions, or indeed any system of ideas, can ultimately be judged by this crucial test. Do they dehumanise the “other”, as someone who can be persecuted, tortured, or put to death? Or do they teach that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin, towards whom acts of kindness should flow naturally? Not all religions, including my own, pass the test with flying colours. But more and more, I think, they are accepting it as the right question to ask.