On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Kindness isn’t sexy. It doesn’t dazzle you with wit and charm and verve. We want to be with the kind, even if we don’t want to be the kind. People envy the rich, the beautiful, the powerful, the courageous, and the wise. Do we ever envy the kind? Envy, in fact, is the vice that, in the classical tradition, opposes kindness. Perhaps this seems strange until we look at what kindness truly is. Kindness isn’t mere niceness. Although kind and nice are nearly synonymous now, the history of both words shows a once-sharp difference that is still helpful to consider today. Nice comes from a Latin word that means “unknowing” or “ignorant” and in Middle English came to mean “senseless” or “foolish.”4 The linguist Henry Watson Fowler opines, in his characteristically colorful way, that the current meaning of nice as similar to kind came about when nice became “too great a favourite with the ladies who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.”5 In its etymology, kind means something radically different from mere agreeableness. Indeed, kind, rightly understood, can include all sorts of disagreeableness. Kind comes from the same root from which we get the word kin. To be kind, then, is to treat someone like they are family. To possess the virtue of kindness is to be in the habit of treating all people as if they were family. Kindness is like love. The love we have for family members takes different forms. It is no...