It Was Always about the Kindness

Rev. Douglas Taylor

December 8, 2024

Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/ySn_S_5Qjuk

I don’t know if any of you have responded to the current political troubles and social anxiety by hunting out bits of uplifting news. That’s one of my techniques. I have been digging up feel-good news stories and anecdotes of humanity at its hopeful-est. It helps me digest the rest of the news. Earlier this week on social media someone from Iceland posted their concern for a baby swan frozen on the ice and dying. People started chiming in, worrying until … naturalist Kerstin Langerberger replied to the post, saying: “I am on my way with the necessary equipment.”

It turns out ‘necessary equipment” for this situation meant: a friend, some thermoses of warm water, and a surfboard in case the ice failed. Langerberger went out on the ice, found the baby swan, thawed and freed it. The bird recovered quickly and flew off. A happy ending.

I love that ‘a friend’ was included in the list of ‘necessary equipment.’ It makes me wonder about the experience of the friend who accompanied the naturalist. “You are going to do what? And you want my help? What exactly do you need me to do?” Sometimes what’s needed is some expertise, some particular skill. Sometimes what’s needed is a companion to ride alongside. We help each other in a variety of ways. We make the world a better place. Some days we save a baby swan.

I remember a conversation with someone back when we were both in our 20’s. We were on staff at a youth camp and were helping one of the high-needs youth process some social interactions that had not gone well earlier in the day. Later, this other young adult and I were talking, and he reflected to me a challenge he was wrestling with. He had expressed before that he was a survivalist, could live off the land, loved hiking and all that. But this outdoors athleticism was all framed for him in his deep belief in what he saw as Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest. “The problem,” he confessed, “is how the kid we just helped would not survive without a lot of support – and that’s not how survival-of-the-fittest works.”

But what if my friend had it wrong? Darwin’s idea of natural selection and ‘survival of the fittest’ is often – I have more recently discovered – misunderstood. At its base, the concept is simply saying that to pass on your genetic material to the next generation, you need to survive. To survive, you need to fit the demands of the world you live in. Darwin was not saying only the strong are fit or only the intelligent are fit. He was saying only the fit survive. So what does it mean to be ‘fit?’

In some ways this reminds me of theological arguments about what, exactly, is the ‘image of god’ in humanity. Is it our physical form? Our intelligence? Our goodness? Our capacity to love? I recently bumped into the idea that perhaps the image of God we carry is not found in our individuality, but in our collective. What if the image of God is experienced in community? Because that’s certainly the answer to Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest. He was not talking about individuals surviving. He was talking about species.

The key to our human survival as a species is found in how we support each other in communities. Other creatures have other traits, sharks and finches evolve to fit differently in the world. So did we. What defines ‘fit’ is different for different species. But somehow, we humans have taken the phrase to mean – only the strong survive. In the introduction to their 2021 book, Survival of the Friendliest, Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods write this:

“The idea of “survival of the fittest” as it exists in the popular imagination can make for a terrible survival strategy. Research shows that being the biggest, strongest, and meanest animal can set you up for a lifetime of stress. Social stress saps your body’s energy budget, leaving a weakened immune system and fewer offspring. Aggression is also costly because fighting increases the chance that you will be hurt or even killed. This kind of fitness can lead to alpha status, but it can also make your life “nasty, brutish, and short.” Friendliness, roughly defined as some kind of intentional or unintentional cooperation, or positive behavior toward others, is so common in nature because it is so powerful. In people, it can be as simple as approaching someone and wanting to socially interact or as complicated as reading someone else’s mind in order to cooperatively accomplish a mutual goal.” (p xvii)

So we join together to support each other. We save the baby swan from freezing on the ice. We help a kid struggling with disadvantages. We don’t just leave people to suffer and die. That’s not how our species evolved. The ‘fittest’ among us are not the strongest or the smartest or the ones who create the best tools. Instead, natural selection has amplified those who are kind and help build the community.

There is an anecdote about Margaret Mead that illustrates my point here. The story is found in Dr. Ira Byock’s book about palliative care and may be apocryphal but even if it is not something she really said, it is in keeping with the sentiment of Margaret Mead’s style.

“A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.
Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.
Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.”            (Ira Byock, 2012, The Best Care Possible)

I would counter that ‘healed femurs’ is humanity’s version of survival of the fittest. Mead, in this story, names compassion. I’ve been talking about kindness. In the book I quoted from earlier, Survival of the Friendliest, they propose that friendliness is a key trait that opened our evolving species to surviving when others like Neanderthals went extinct. By evolutionary perspective or by religious sentiment, we are talking about how it is not brute strength or clever resourcefulness that is our greatest trait as humanity. How we support each other is what makes us human.  

Unfortunately, here is the spot where it all gets muddy. Friendliness, or kindness or compassion, is a trait that has been naturally selected to make us a strong species. And there is a shadow side in this evolutionary theory. Despite the benefits of kindness, there remains ample evidence that our species is not always kind. We still have violence and territorialism and gangs. We still have war and pogroms and death marches and genocide. And according to the research in the book, it is linked to the key trait of friendliness.

“We have a tremendous potential for compassion [the authors write] and we evolved uniquely to show friendliness to intragroup strangers. But our cruelty to one another is connected to this kindness. The same part of our brain that tamed our nature and facilitated cooperative communication sowed the seed for the worst in us.” (p121)

The shadow of kindness is cruelty, and the record shows we have ample capacity for both. The social scientists have studied cruelty with experiments around prejudice, conformity, and compliance with authority (p132) to try to explain how the holocaust could occur. But the big reveal I found in this book about friendliness is the impact of dehumanization.

In proclaiming that kindness is the mark of our fitness for natural selection, it is a statement about how we interact with others. But which ‘others’ are we talking about? We are supportive and friendly with those who are in our group.

In evolution, this played out as Homo sapiens shared the world with Denisovans and Neanderthals and possibly Homo erectus. It was important for us to distinguish the ‘other’ so our species could survive and thrive. Our friendliness and kindness extended to Homo sapiens only. Fast forward a few hundred thousand years and we still have this part of our brain fully functioning to protect us from ‘the other’ while we support and care for ‘our own kind.’

It plays out in the way we dehumanize some groups of people so it is easier for us to harm them and kill them, or more likely to simply stay home and ignore the atrocities become it is happening to those we do not think of as human. Religiously, we are challenged to expand our concept of who belongs and who is excluded. I would argue that Jesus’ central parable – the Good Samaritan – is a direct challenge against our predisposition toward dehumanizing some people.

And there is a lot of dehumanizing rhetoric in our political and social situation today. The impact of these ideas is not academic. There are people with power now who are playing up the cruelty side of our best quality as humanity. I caution us against the urge to dehumanize them in return.

The solution is to expand who we mean when we say we until it includes all humanity, all the world as kin. The word ‘Kind’ has its etymological roots in the word ‘Kin.’ I say it is crucial for us to resist that evolutionary urge to dehumanize the ‘other’ and to instead expand our sense of who belongs. Kindness, I believe, is the key distinction of our humanity; and it is also the solution to the cruelty living the shadow of our best quality as humanity.

Over the coming weeks, as we move through both Christmas and then the inauguration, listen for the messages about kindness, cruelty, belonging, and dehumanization. Listen and choose the path that brings out our humanity. Listen, and choose life.

In a world without end,

May it be so