Welcome back to the Cultivating Character series, where we explore the human virtues that interconnect and unify the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions. These consilient virtues include courage, humanity, justice, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence.
In the last post we covered courage, where we found that courage sets our hearts ablaze, illuminating the daunting path ahead and defrosting the windows from which we view the world. We also discovered that one reward for nurturing the character strengths of courage (bravery, persistence, and authenticity) is vitality; a blazing heart invigorates, producing competence, enthusiasm, and zest.
But what good is a blazing heart if its warmth can’t be shared with others? And how do we know what path to take in the first place? What windows should we defrost—what gives us direction?
The answers lie in love and kindness, whose guiding threads pass through our hearts to gently tug us together. The collective embrace of love and kindness tame the flames of courage, turning what would be a contentious chaotic inferno into a warm, supportive embrace. A lone flame greedily devours its surroundings until it fizzles to nothing; removing constraints increases entropy, the thermodynamic tendency toward disorder. Life itself is a process of erecting constraints towards what we love, channeling the heat from our flames away from chaos and toward common good.
Today, we dive into the virtue of humanity, the character strength involved in tending and befriending. Humanity in this sense focuses on one-to-one relationships, and is composed of the character strengths of love, kindness, and social and emotional intelligence. We will touch on each, learning along the way why love evolved to bond families and why kindness evolved to bond communities; why love and kindness, when confined, can cause more harm than good; and the role of intelligence in unlocking the trinity of courage, love, and wisdom that lifts life towards the stars.
Embrace
Love: A Local Infinity
“They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The seeds of love sprouted from the soil of biological evolution. From brooding birds to cuddling canines, the roots of love spread across the animal kingdom. For us Homo sapiens, love evolved to tackle three unique challenges. First, we had to survive as animals with the longest period of immaturity and dependency; second, we had to find and retain a mate long enough to reproduce; and third, we had to provide care to our vulnerable offspring so that they, too, survived and reproduced.
These three adaptive challenges produced love for our primary sources of care (child-to-caregiver love), passionate desire for sexual and emotional closeness (romantic love), and love for those who depend on us to make them feel secure and cared for (caregiver-to-child love).
Let’s set our focus on the formative child-caregiver relationship, where evolution has bestowed children with behaviors that try to leverage the security that caregivers provide—behaviors that helped keep babbling bright-eyed babies from meeting an early demise. In a typical healthy relationship, children seek to stay nearby their primary caregiver (normally their mother), and prolonged separations tend to provoke distress. A model caregiver serves as a haven for their child, providing reassurance and comfort in times of need and providing a steady base from which the child can explore the world.
These proximity management strategies compose the foundations of attachment theory, a well-established and extensively studied theory that stipulates that children develop different styles of attachment in response to their developmental milieu.
When a caregiver serves as a reliable attachment figure for a child, satisfying their developmental demands, threads of love pour unabated from parent to child. These threads envelope the developing child in a protective cocoon, shielding them from the chilling effects of abuse and neglect while they sprout their wings.
If the cocoon is bound too tight for too long, however, the wings never sprout. These threads are borne from cowardly and selfish love. As those we care for encounter hardship, some of us can’t bear it and remove the obstacle, forgetting that growth requires overcoming. The paradoxical nature of selfish love can be confusing because it feels like we are providing care when, really, we’re tending to our own anxieties and congratulating ourselves for it (we’ll set this topic aside until the end of the post).
Anyway, when selfless love rains, it pours. A litany of research has shown that, in early age, securely attached children maintain healthier balances between dependency and autonomy; require less guidance and discipline from teachers; and are less likely to show attention-seeking behaviors, impulsivity, frustration, and helplessness. Later in life these benefits compound: those with secure upbringings tend to cope better with the stresses of life and are more skilled at forming enduring social ties bolstered by trust and intimacy.
But what happens when love pours unsteadily and intermittently?
When caregivers are insensitive (unskilled at reading their child's signals), intrusive (interrupting free play to hold their child), and inconsistent (in response to their child's distress), their children tend to develop an ambivalent attachment. The children learn that they can’t count on or predict the reactions of their caregiver, which manifests into clinginess, anxiety, and exaggerated separation distress. This ambivalence creates a disorienting schism in the mind of the child, whereby they seek comfort from their caregiver but then angrily resist that comfort once it’s provided.
The anxieties and stresses experienced by the ambivalent attached are inherited, in large part, from a caregiver’s inability to reliably attend to their child. Insensitivity, intrusiveness, and inconsistency at their core derive from a lack of attention. And, as a loss averse organism, our attention is most attracted to threats.
Catastrophic threats aside, whether we react to or respond to threats is key to whether threats are diminished or magnified. Notice the distinction here. When we respond to threats, it implies tempered, controlled, and organized action; when we react, it implies unpredictable, impulsive, and scrambled action. Responsiveness is proactive, fostering a stability that allows caregivers to balance attention between loved ones and stressors; reactiveness brings with it an instability that thrashes the attention of the caregiver between the people they love and the threats they hate. We should all strive to be more responsive, less reactive.
Reactivity can cause us to hurt those we love. Think of the parent who snaps at their child, be it from a simple bid for attention or a clumsy mistake. If we look deeply, we find that the reactants lie not in the child but in the parent’s unresolved stress, whose source may range from ever-increasing financial dues, device induced sleep-deprivation, or childhood traumas of their own. As stress goes unresolved, it piles into a daunting tower, and we desperately cling to states of peace that allow us to momentarily avoid its looming presence. Unfortunately, anything that threatens this illusion, and thus our peace, is met with vicious vitriol, even if that thing is someone we deeply care for.
When we are flooded with threats, genuine or fabricated, the strands of love curl inwards to protect the self from the crashing waves of conflict. This defensive mobilization pulls the threads away from anything extending beyond self-interest, leaving behind only cobwebs for loved ones. Infants of parents caught in this unfortunate trap tend to develop what is called an avoidant attachment, as their bids for comfort and close physical contact are rejected. Raised under these painful conditions, children understandably learn to actively avoid connection with their caregiver (e.g., keeping distance and avoiding eye contact), since bids for connection are often met with painful rejection.
Later in life, tragically, those with upbringings marked by neglect are primed for exploitation. Unable to rely on loved ones for comfort, they search for comfort elsewhere. The void in the hearts of the neglected attracts swaths of opportunistic entities, eager to pack that hole with pleasure. Pervasive perpetrators of this exploitation are companies that create addictive non-durable products, also known as limbic capitalists.
The prototypical limbic capitalists, to name a few, occupy the industries of gambling, fast food, and social media. Most of their revenues come from ten to twenty percent of their customers, a minority which is occupied by the heaviest using consumers: addicts.
Addicts, I believe, tend to be those with the deepest holes in their hearts—the neglected. Unfortunately, the pleasures filling their voids are empty, devoid of meaning. The emptiness makes consumption easy to do but never satiating, creating a cycle of fleeting pleasurable peaks followed by prolonged troughs of dissatisfaction. Limbic capitalists are aware of this profitable cycle, encouraging dependence while cowardly hiding behind the claim that they are “just giving consumers what they want.” But what we want isn’t always what we need.
The consequences of childhood upbringing, whether lovely or traumatic, are not confined to just the family. The attachment patterns developed in parent-infant bonding, for instance, bleed into romantic love and beyond. Research suggests that the neural circuits and hormonal processes responsible for parent-infant bonding are repurposed in adulthood to develop and maintain romantic bonds. And these consequences expand beyond just romantic partners. Secure children grow up and elevate the whole; traumatized children grow up and burden it, and nobody chooses to be a burden. A point of leverage in the complex web of societal challenges lies in the gestational period of humanity’s future—the family.
How can we hope to make peace with others if even our families can’t get along?
Expand
Kindness: Radiating Infinity
Love and kindness are both within-group affinities, how they differ is where exactly those group boundaries are drawn and the intensity of the affinity. The unnegotiable nature of genetic relatedness between family members, and the reproductive potential of a mate, reinforce the supportive feelings—the unconditional love—we feel for these people. No conditions can free us from the web of genetic relatedness to our family, so our love often sticks to these few. Love is the familial glue.
The conditions of kindness are less exclusive. Love provides a strong, supportive embrace local to kin or mates; kindness extends those boundaries outwards, radiating courageous warmth to the supporting cast: our tribe. Ancestrally, community was instrumental for human survival and sexual networking; so, tending to communal bonds was in our best genetic interest. And, when a collection of self-interested individuals band together, something interesting happens: their self-interests intertwine and coalesce into a higher order group-interest that transcends each individual.
This happens because natural selection acts simultaneously at various scales. For humans, the primary scales (where selection pressures are strongest) are the levels of the individual and family. The reason we exist is because our ancestors survived and multiplied; they fed themselves, found themselves mates, cared for their children.
But collaboration conferred benefits that couldn’t be ignored. Grouping together allowed members to occupy roles better suited to their strengths, creating divisions of labor akin to the organizations of cells within their bodies. The brain learns, the gut digests, the immune system protects; teachers nurtured learning, farmers prepared food, soldiers fought rivals. The cardiovascular system connects and unifies organs into a harmonious whole—a body. Every organ depends on the cardiovascular system. And kindness connects people, unifying them into a harmonious whole—a community. The vessels of kindness pierce through the hearts of the community, pulsing between them the life produced by the flames within each heart. Maintaining group coherence depends on kindness. Kindness is the communal glue.
Nature first used the threads of love to weave together the family, and later repurposed those threads to weave together the community. Because the original use of the thread was suited toward family, love comes easily and produces a tight knit. Kindness is more relaxed, its thread extending further out to weave together nonkin with a gentle tug.
The gentle threads of kindness can, at times, develop a binding strength comparable to those of love. This can occur, for instance, when large groups of people are brought together by a shared interest, whereby the event demands synchronous attention and engagement from the audience. This could be a concert, a sports game, a religious congregation, or a military march. As the attention and intentions of the group harmonize, each individual self melts into the group to produce a collective effervescence. When this happens, it feels magical, and this is no mistake. These magical feelings evolved as a group-level adaptation to encourage and reinforce group bonding.
The roots of this particular group-bonding tradition date back to campfire song and dance, and may reach even further back to primate rain dances. Fast-forward to today, and humans have created music festivals amassing attendees in the hundreds of thousands. An exemplary modern proponent of boundless love can be found in the culture of electronic music festivals, also known as raves. Attendees of raves engage in a practice called PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect), in which strangers exchange homemade bracelets and punctuate the encounter with a hug. The threads of love and kindness reach deep into raves, weaving through melodies and connecting the hearts of strangers.
It’s obvious that raves are also host to a fair share of irresponsible alcohol and drug use. A feeling that people crave when attending a gathering is, as we’ve discussed, the melting of self-consciousness into the collective consciousness. Individuals prone to self-consciousness may feel they need the social lubricant provided by drugs and alcohol to dissolve the boundaries of their ego, so that they can fully immerse themselves in the experience. Sadly, excessive use can cause individuals to lose not only themselves, but the group to which they desperately long for, as they lose themselves in an abyss of stimulants and depressants.
I’ll here make brief mention of a less flattering side of love and kindness. When we confine our love and kindness due to selfishness or groupishness, which we always do to some degree, those beyond the boundaries can be subject to harm. A mosquito sucks our blood for love of its larvae. A fox devours a hare out of love for itself and its cubs. A harsh reality we must come to terms with is that the tribal conflicts which plague our past, present, and future were, are, and will all be borne out of genuine love.
Love is claustrophobic; it needs room to breath. When coupled with ignorance, love poses problems, so we all need to work on expanding our love and kindness with curiosity and open-mindedness.
Understand
Social and Emotional Intelligence: Comprehending Complexity
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing; love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.”
Lama Surya Das
The union of understanding and compassion form the bedrock of the final strength of humanity: social and emotional intelligence. This strength is the virtue of wisdom specifically applied to human relationships. We’ll have an entire post devoted to wisdom; nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to explore the social side of it while we’re on the topic.
Emotional intelligence is a trait characterized by recognizing the emotional paint that colors our perceptions and managing our emotional processes so that paint doesn’t splatter to conceal the truth. Someone who is emotionally intelligent is adept at perceiving emotions in oneself and others given the situational context, and monitoring and regulating those emotions for personal and social growth and well-being.
The following example paints a picture of how our relationship with our emotions can leave a measurable impact on outcomes. Consider Amy, a talented yet timid pianist. Amy is about to perform in front of an audience, and she feels those oh-so-familiar butterflies in her stomach. Depending on Amy’s relationship with those butterflies, the situation can go in one of two directions. If she associates the butterflies with anxiety, failure, and hopelessness, those butterflies drown in fear and weigh her down. If Amy instead associates them with excitement, focus, and proof that she cares, those butterflies can be channeled to lift her toward success. In each scenario, Amy feels the exact same feelings—the butterflies—but the story surrounding the feelings changes.
Social intelligence involves ability in navigating and understanding mental canvases pertaining to social contexts. Like a detective’s wall covered with newspaper clippings and strings, the threads of love and kindness collect and connect the canvases containing the people we care about.
Social intelligence is developed through exposure to social experience. Most mammals have an evolved ritual that trains these social muscles in youth, that ritual being play. Play exposes young to the limits of their bodies and their relationships, breeding resilience and trust in personal abilities and friendships. For human youth, free play (play without overbearing adult supervision) promotes creativity, resilience, socialization, and the vitality associated with biologically congruent activity. Play forces children to negotiate with one another, and collectively police the rules of their games.
So, when we rob children of free play, we rob them of the social resiliency required to feel secure in navigating complex social landscapes. When children rely on adults to sort out disputes for them, they never flex the social muscles required to work things out among themselves. They’re instead wrapped in a cocoon of selfish love that leaves them socially and emotionally ignorant.
And evidence is showing that free play is in decline. Anxious parents, unable to fathom the thought of their children fending for themselves, breed anxious children. And when these anxious children grow up, they turn toward authority figures to sort out their problems for them, just like their parents had on the playground.
As a result, organizations of “empaths” have been proliferating and ascending the social hierarchies of industry, academia, and government, acting as pseudo-parental figures eager to extinguish the fires of emotional distress. But what if, in the process, they also inadvertently extinguished the fire in the hearts of those they’re trying to save—the bravery, the persistence, the authenticity?
If we treat people as hopeless and pathetic, we shouldn’t be surprised when they end up feeling hopeless and pathetic. What people need is for others to believe in them, and sometimes that means letting them fail so they can learn to pick themselves back up. Otherwise, how will they ever believe in themselves?
To really send this point home, consider this quote from the same Buddhist Lama, Lama Surya Das, who was also quoted at the beginning of this section. Keep in mind, this is a message provided by someone who seriously and sincerely dedicated their life to the project of spreading love and reducing human suffering.
We are being foolish when we congratulate ourselves on our compassionate behavior when in reality we are simply giving in or giving up too easily. In all likelihood we are being lazy, fearful, frightened, or even codependent. This idiotic pseudo-compassion is counterproductive, and can enable others to hurt themselves further. Sometimes to say no is far more affirming and supportive than to just say yes without reflection…Sometimes we give in because we are trying to manipulate a situation—perhaps we are afraid of rejection or we want to get something in return. We all need to be really clear about what it means to give with a pure and unselfish heart.
It feels good to take care of people, especially when it’s rewarded with money and status. It also feels good to avoid our fears, and help others avoid theirs. But the path of pseudo-compassion, paradoxically, lacks love and courage, yielding idiocy.
Love directs our view towards deeper understanding, and courage provides the light along the way. However, we often delightfully extinguish our light to avoid the inconveniences of selflessness. This is why it’s so dangerous to encourage cowardice, and why it’s so important to be vigilant for selfishness disguised as compassion. Otherwise, we’re leaving ourselves in the dark without direction, which leaves us more ignorant of what’s ahead, inevitably producing more suffering.
To conclude on a more positive note, this relationship between love, courage, and wisdom hints at the interdependency of the consilient virtues. Love tells us where to direct our efforts, courage is the effort, and, as we’ll find later, intelligence organizes our efforts toward what we love. This relationship is far from linear, instead resembling more of an interdependent trinity. Love directs us to courageously tread into the dark, and we gain knowledge; more knowledge reveals more to love; and so forth as love and wisdom intertwine, spiraling towards the stars as courage flows between their celestial dance.
And so, we’ve reached the end of our discussion on humanity, the consilient virtue associated with the one-to-one relationships that connect our hearts to those we care for. However, as more and more people cooperate, connecting the hearts among the whole is challenging. Rather than exhaustingly tying every specific heart together, groups have woven the threads of love and kindness into a net cast upon society. This unifying net is better known as justice, the next virtue in the Cultivating Character series.