But kindness, in its inherent connection to truth, must be grounded in the real. And in a postvirtuous culture, the foil that offsets kindness will be very dark indeed. It takes little for a glimmer of kindness to burn bright in such an age. One psychoanalytic study of kindness suggests, “Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization, that if we no longer believe in God—in a Being who is himself invulnerable and so is capable of protecting us—we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other.”12
