Word: kind
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...their home in Pittsburgh and spent the evening with their son’s friends in Adams House. A shocked collection of friends remembered the aspiring doctor’s winning personality. “He was an inspiring person, deeply committed to science and medicine, but also very kind,” said Michelle C. Siao ’09, who worked in Professor Thomas P. Maniatis’s lab along with Cai. Siao recalled a story that Cai’s mother told about Peter receiving immunization shots as a baby. As the doctor came forward...
There seems to be this idea that during difficult economic times like this one, people are more inclined to be kind to one another. What's your take on that notion? When Adam and I set out to write the book, of course, we had absolutely no idea that we were going to be publishing it in the middle of a global financial meltdown. Pushing the book out into the current situation has been fascinating because there's clearly a great deal of moral questioning going on and a lot of anxiety about the mentalities that have been encouraged over...
...think people are suspicious of kindness? There is a kind of folk wisdom these days that human beings are basically grasping, selfish, nasty creatures. That's how we look at people. That's what we suspect we're really like ourselves. So we're very wary about displays of kindness. The word nice kind of captures that suspicion. It doesn't have much meaning. [Niceness] could just be a masquerade, a piece of fakery. People think that a lot because that's the ethos of our age. I think people would gratefully give up that wariness given half a chance...
Some have blamed the sharp increase in cases of depression and other mental illnesses on our increased social isolation. Do you think the lack of kindness you describe may have contributed to this? It's this question of what it means for people to need each other and just how profound and deep that need runs. But it's often quite difficult to translate that need into action in one's life. The last few decades have seen a huge increase in the numbers of people who are living outside any kind of family framework. And it's not like...
...high pitch of control over dissenters is debatable. As Pei Minxin of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out, the party learned many lessons from the debacle at Tiananmen, where at least hundreds were killed. One lesson it really took to heart was that it must win over the kind of social élites - students, urban middle classes, intelligentsia - who led the protests then. That strategy, Pei wrote in a recent paper, has been so successful that "today's Party consists mostly of well-educated bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals," leaving relatively few educated voices to complain. And despite their sometimes...