The politics of kindness — Or, if only you loved the guys on Manus like I do
Georgia Lee (a pseudonym), academic and activist, explains how kindness and solidarity are intrinsically linked - and can be the key for a new kind of politics.
If these last few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that a real politics of kindness can be radically transformational as we actively resist attempts to divide us, and bring more and more living beings within our circle of concern.
When the relationship that first led me to Manus Island recently ended it was so painful that, for a few moments, I thought I would end with it. As much as we had meant to each other, leaving me for the US became his best option, and we could no longer survive the fallout of policy decisions that were so far beyond our control.
I know, more than most, that my grief pales in comparison to what the guys in Manus have felt through the last seven years. On my many visits I bore witness to incredible suffering, often not knowing if friends I’d made there would survive their inner and outer torment through the night. Unlike them, I could always fly out and return to the mostly privileged suburbs of my home town. So I share my story not to suggest that I’m a victim here. It’s so I can tell you what happened next.
The politics of kindness
Fundamentally, this is a story about kindness — its political power and why I believe it should be at the core of everything we do. The last month has seen kindness go viral globally. This surely demonstrates the depths of the COVID crisis, but perhaps also shows that so many of us have been crying out for more kindness and compassion in our politics and public lives. Italian academic Raffaella Baccolini describes kindness as the quality of being ‘benign, compassionate, loving, [and] full of tenderness.’ It’s ‘deliberately doing good to others,’ including when we see them in pain.
Her work on kindness in times of crisis is illuminating. But well before Viral Kindness, the most pressing legacy of my experience in Manus was that it revealed the remarkable kindness and compassion of men who continue to suffer under Australia’s detention regime. These men have lost almost everything, and yet have taken enormous care to try to comfort me in my sorrow. Old friends I’d known in Manus have called me from Port Moresby, Brisbane or San Francisco to say they heard the news and wanted to make sure I was OK. Maybe their own trauma has made them wise beyond their years, but I’ve been profoundly moved by their advice to me, mostly on the healing to be found in accepting grief and loss into our lives. While each of them has more than their fair share to say on that score, they’ve reached out to me with the deepest of care, and a good deal of humour. Like the man who messaged me from detention: ‘Whenever you need to talk just text me. I am always here :)’
As we’ve heard repeatedly in these last few weeks, many of these men are still suffering. Some are locked up indefinitely in stuffy city hotels while they wait for medical treatment, rarely feeling fresh air and only knowing the small part of Australia that’s confined within those walls. Many of us have discovered it’s a tough ask when told to quarantine for two weeks. But do we now have empathy for those we’ve locked away in hotels for nine months? Just like their friends stuck in detention centres around Australia, these men and women are especially at risk of contracting COVID-19. More than 1200 doctors have warned that it’s impossible to practice social distancing in such confined spaces, and that if the virus gets in these will be incredibly dangerous places to be. Just this week has seen escalating protests among refugees detained in hotels in Brisbane and Melbourne, and detention centres nationally, as well as a growing campaign for those who want to to lend their support.
Other men sent to Australia from Manus are suffering the opposite problem — not overcrowding, but isolation in community detention where their days often begin and end in loneliness. Well before COVID forced the rest of us to reckon with staying at home — and the toll that can take on our mental health — these men had already endured many months alone while forbidden from working or studying — in my experience, two of the best activities for helping us connect. Still other men, the ‘lucky’ ones who’d been allowed to work, are now verging on despair. Their jobs are gone thanks to COVID but, unless a campaign to assist them wins, they’ll remain locked out of Medicare and Centrelink payments and have to survive with no income at all. Of equal concern are the many men still waiting endlessly in Port Moresby more than a year after promised transfers to America. COVID has now delayed sworn transfers again, and the men left in PNG are hoping furiously that the virus doesn’t take hold there, where the health system surely will not cope.
For all of these men, the ordeal is far from over. And yet, we’ve known much of their suffering for years. Like me, there have been many concerned Australians working behind the scenes to provide support to people stuck in Manus and Nauru, and those far flung through Australia’s detention regime. Still others have dedicated decades to changing the policies that have trapped them there. But as kindness now pops up in every news bulletin, it’s revived a nagging question that has long bugged me. While most of my neighbours seem like ‘good people’ — and they’re delighted by stories of people singing out windows and leaving love notes in letterboxes — as a society, just how far does our kindness extend?
Reclaiming kindness
It’s no coincidence that Peter Dutton — one of the architects of sustained cruelty to people who are seeking asylum — has disparaged kindness and compassion as weak. In 2018 he warned against even ‘a single act of compassion,’ lest the walls of fortress Australia collapse and our suburbs be overrun by the kind of outrageously caring men from Manus I’ve described. In taking this line Dutton is joining the long procession of less open-hearted folk who, for at least the last few hundred years, have devalued kindness and compassion as a ‘failure of nerve.’
This shaming of kindness is deeply interconnected with its feminisation — the psychological association of kindness with the ‘domestic’ and feminine realm. This is contrasted to supposedly rational, masculine concerns with individualism and industrialism, the sure paths to human progress. I must admit that even I wince at Baccolini’s notion of kindness being ‘full of tenderness,’ and recounting such personal stories about how the care of men in Manus has affected me. But why is that? Because I, like most of us, have grown up in a dominant culture that sees the valorisation of kindness as overly sentimental — fine for playing at, but not suitable for serious business. In the words of others before me, it’s a society that secretly believes kindness is a ‘virtue of losers.’
If writer Margaret J Wheatley is right that ‘there is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about,’ then millions of people around the world may have just said ‘f*ck that.’ Offering and celebrating kindness and connection makes none of us weak. Opening our hearts to ourselves, each other and the earth will not trash our national security. And as COVID has unfolded, old arguments that kindness would crash our economy are making way for a greater wisdom — that our fundamental interconnections mean that compassion and empathy are the only way out of our current predicaments. Where the same dominant culture that disparages kindness also valorises the self-centredness that threatens our very survival, everything has to change.
Much has been written about how, in this world still suffering heavily under selfishness and greed, kindness itself can be ‘a revolutionary act.’ Such a politics of kindness is not premised simply on the ‘random acts of kindness’ that poet and essayist Angela Smith has recently criticised. Her argument is that kindness, packaged in this way, has become ‘instrumentalised and monetised’ as hashtag-ready cultural capital, selling us the myth that solidarity is unnecessary — that our ‘individual acts of kindness are all that is required to achieve change.’
But if these last few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that a real politics of kindness is much more than that. It is intensely personal. But it can also be radically transformational as we actively resist attempts to divide us, and bring more and more living beings within our circle of concern. Where Smith sees ‘individuated’ kindness as a retreat from solidarity, I see kindness and solidarity as intrinsically linked. On this point, it’s significant to note that most of the people sending me messages of care and support this last month have been young Sudanese men. They get it that our shared future rests on a fierce kindness for ourselves and each other. Perhaps those intent on fomenting fear of refugees and supposed Melbourne gangs haven’t reached that profound insight just yet.
Smith is right that kindness won’t solve all our problems. But kindness builds solidarity. Faced with global crises on so many fronts we must take it seriously — and, as a society, extend it much farther than we ever have before. Just as each person suffering under COVID-19 deserves our unflinching support, so too do the men, women and children still punished by Australia’s cruelty to asylum seekers and refugees. Even from self-isolation there are many ways we can offer them our care. Such kindness can, in the end, be a revolutionary act. Because if you loved the guys on Manus like I do, you wouldn’t turn away until every one of them is free.
Georgia Lee tweets from @georgia_jerry