Gould: Kindness
“Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoticed and invisible as the ‘ordinary’ efforts of a vast majority.”
—Stephen Jay Gould in The New York Times (9/26/2001).
A longtime friend, Dr. Steve Thomason, Dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, sent out this nearly twenty-year-old Gould quote some time ago for all of us to consider. Humans seem unable to avoid being dualistic, viewing life as a well-balanced struggle between good and evil. In fact, it is difficult to avoid thinking of evil and failure and missing the mark to have greater power and strength over us in our lives. We receive all “A”s but one “B” on our report card. We agonize and only remember the “B.” We remember only the one line we missed in our class play, and discount the brilliant lines we remembered. We obsess over our rejection letters, rather than celebrating our college acceptance or recent job promotion. Most physicians think daily about the diagnosis we missed, and forget the thousands we made correctly. We forgot to visit our friend the week or day before she dies, but in our grief, we discount all the hundreds of other visits we made during her illness.
The morning, noon, evening, and late-night news can seem overwhelming when we are told about all the human tragedies, deaths, and violence. Perhaps on a good day, there is one last thirty-second segment about someone’s kindness.
Gould, an evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, contends that the forces in the world are not evenly divided, and that reality is overwhelmingly composed of kindness, not evil. Gould believes the problem is that these acts of kindness are so small that they go unnoticed. On the other hand, evil and failure stop us in our tracks, immediately get our attention, and blind us with their bright orange glare.
How can we wear a fresh pair of glasses and begin seeing the world differently? That is the pathway to even more apparent acts of kindness. It starts with a small, simple step called gratitude. I have many friends who survive unbelievable tragedies by making and reciting a gratitude list each day, most often at night before they go to sleep. I have spiritual friends who even send me their daily gratitude lists. By their actions, they encourage me to do the same.
Gould is challenging us to remember the kind acts we constantly see, especially when we feel overcome by some evil act and begin to believe that darkness has overtaken our world.
When I think of kindness, I remember our friend, Reed, who died much too early, but left so many acts of kindness still living in this world.
