The Socrates Express

9. How to Be Kind like Confucius

5:34 p.m. Somewhere in lower Manhattan. On board the New York City subway F train, en route to nowhere.

I’ve been riding the F train for a long time—longer than most commuters, and mental health professionals, would advise. I have taken the train to Jamaica, Queens, and to Coney Island, Brooklyn, and many places in between. For a solid week, the F train has been my home.

I am not insane, I assure you. I am a man on a mission. I am looking for kindness. I concede the New York City subway is an unlikely place to find it. Many consider it a heartless underworld. That’s why I’m here. I figure if you can find kindness on the New York subway, you can find it anywhere.

I scan my surroundings with Thoreau eyes and Schopenhauer ears, alert to the slightest inkling of benevolence. Three young people board. Colleagues, clearly. I catch snippets of their conversation. She needs to quit.… No, she needs to get fired. No kindness there.

I spot a Hispanic man wearing a New York Yankees cap who accidentally jostles another passenger. “Excuse me,” he says. Scan. A woman holding a small white dog tight against her chest stumbles, then pinballs into no fewer than three passengers. “Sorry,” she says. Both were certainly polite, but were they kind? Politeness is social lubricant, kindness social superglue. Polite cultures are not necessarily kind ones.

The young man sitting next to me is wearing a hoodie and torn jeans. Earphones securely inserted, he is slumped over, asleep. Or so I think. When a teenager approaches, selling candy bars to raise money for his school, the man perks up, fishes a dollar bill from his pocket, and hands it to the teenager. Then, without missing a beat, he returns to his music and his slumping. I remind myself, once again, to always question assumptions.

My companion on the F train is a strange hodgepodge of a book called The Analects. It’s how we know Confucius. He didn’t write it. His disciples did, distilling his wisdom to its essence, and perhaps adding a dash of their own views, as Plato spiced Socrates. The Analects is the perfect subway read. Consisting of a series of short dialogues and snappy sayings, it’s easily digested piecemeal, between station stops. The book’s herky-jerky rhythm mirrors that of the F train. One moment Confucius is expounding on the virtues of filial piety, the next he’s advising which color robe to wear.

It’s tempting to conclude the book contains no unifying themes or cogent ideas. Yet it does. The F train may move in fits and starts, but it’s still heading somewhere, and so is Confucius.

When we pull into the East Broadway station in Manhattan, I disembark and climb the stairs and am greeted by one of those cruel early-spring days that feel like winter. Zipping my jacket and wrapping my scarf tight, I head west, in search of the man.

After a few blocks, I turn a corner and am dwarfed by a housing and commercial complex with an impersonal, Soviet aesthetic. Confucius Plaza has all the charm of a Greyhound bus station.

I walk past the Confucius Social Day Care Center and the Confucius Pharmacy, turn right at the Confucius Florist, and there, sandwiched between Confucius Optical and Confucius Surgical Supplies is… Confucius.

He must be ten feet tall, but somehow he doesn’t make me feel small. He is sporting his trademark beard, long and thin, simultaneously neat and unruly. His hands are clasped, his eyes wise. Aimed at Bowery street, Confucius’s wise eyes see all. They see the Lin Sister Herb Shop and the Abacus Federal Savings Bank. They see the Ball Room Dance Studio (“Learn to Dance Ballroom/Latin!”) and they see the Golden Manna Bakery. They see kindness, too: a gaggle of schoolchildren, five-year-olds, steered by their adult minders, as a cold wind whips through Confucius Plaza.

I pause at the bottom of the statue, where an inscription, in Chinese and English, reads: “The Chapter of Great Harmony.” In this passage, Confucius imagines a utopia where rulers are wise, criminals scared, and everyone like family. It was a bold vision, given that, at the time—the fifth century BC—kindness was a newfangled idea.

I stand there for a long while, oblivious to the spring cold, picturing this perfect world and the imperfect man who conceived it a long, long time ago.

Confucius had a difficult life, even for a philosopher. He was born into a fairly affluent family, but when he was only three years old, his father, a military officer, died. Confucius was raised by his mother, who struggled to make ends meet. Confucius helped by holding a number of menial jobs. All the while, he studied Chinese classics such as I Ching, or “Book of Changes.”

When he looked around he saw a people splintered into warring factions and governed by rulers more interested in personal gain than public good. This wasn’t only immoral, he thought, but impractical. Confucius sensed there was a better way, says journalist Michael Schuman in his excellent biography. “Swords and shields would not win an empire; burdensome taxes and military servitude would not woo loyal subjects. Benevolence was the correct and only route to power and prestige.” We’ve strayed from the Way, Confucius proclaimed. We need to get back on course.

His message landed with a deafening silence. If anything, the corruption and misrule grew worse. The final straw for Confucius came in the form of dancing girls. Hundreds of them were dispatched from a neighboring state. The local ruler, clearly distracted, failed to show up at the royal court for three days.

“I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as he loves sex,” Confucius said, before departing on what would be a thirteen-year exile. He traveled from state to state, offering his services as wise counsel to any ruler who would listen. None did.

Confucius returned home, weary but not defeated. He decided to teach, and thank goodness. Had he succeeded in obtaining a position as royal advisor, we might not know him today. He refused no student, regardless of background or ability to pay. Tuition was a small bundle of silk or a bit of cured meat, the beef jerky of its day.

Confucius was an intimidating presence in the classroom. The Master, as he was known, came across as “an uptight fuddy-duddy, a tireless stickler on points of propriety,” writes Schuman. He would not sit on a mat that was not straight, and maintained perfect posture, even when alone. When he saw a young man sitting “with his legs spread wide,” in an early display of manspreading, Confucius scolded him, calling him a “pest” and rapping him on the shin with his cane.

Yet the Master could also be gentle, lighthearted even. He sang and played the lute. He laughed and joked with friends, and found pleasure in the everyday: using his elbow as a pillow, for instance, while eating coarse rice.

Thousands of miles separated Confucius and Socrates, yet the two philosophers had a lot in common. They were nearly contemporaries. Socrates was born less than a decade after Confucius died, in 479 BC. Both men occupied precarious positions, admired by their disciples, mistrusted by the elites. Both had an informal, conversational teaching style. Both questioned assumptions. Both valued knowledge a lot and ignorance more. Neither cared for metaphysical speculation. (When a student asked Confucius about the afterlife, the Master replied, “If you cannot understand life, how can you understand death?”) Both were sticklers for definitions. “If words are not right, judgments are not clear,” Confucius said.

Words mattered to Confucius, but no word mattered more than ren. It appears 105 times in The Analects, far more than any other word. There’s no direct translation (Confucius himself never explicitly defines it), but ren has been variously rendered as compassion, altruism, love, benevolence, true goodness, consummate action. My favorite is “human-heartedness.”

A person of ren regularly practices five cardinal virtues: respect, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. Confucius didn’t invent kindness, of course, but he did elevate it: from an indulgence to a philosophical linchpin, and the basis for good governance. He was the first philosopher to place kindness, and love, at the top of the pyramid. “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire,” said Confucius, articulating the Golden Rule some five hundred years before Jesus. For Confucius, kindness is not squishy. It is not weak. Kindness is practical. Extend kindness to all, says one Confucian, “and you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.”

The F train isn’t only a train. It is a culture and, as with all cultures, certain rules apply. Some are written, others understood. I look around and see the written variety everywhere. Thou shalt not lean on doors or hold doors. Thou shalt not pass between cars. Thou shalt not eat or drink. Thou shalt stand clear of the closing doors.

Confucius could have written these rules. He saw great value in li, or “proper ritual conduct,” as expressed in classic Chinese texts such as The Book of Rites. Here’s a small sample, on the subject of proper dining habits.

Do not roll the rice into a ball; do not bolt down the various dishes; do not swill down the soup. Do not make noise in eating; do not crunch the bones with the teeth; do not put back fish you’ve been eating; do not throw the bones to the dogs; do not snatch at what you want. Do not spread the rice to cool; do not use chopsticks in eating millet.

I read that and sigh. This is my image of Confucianism: a rules-based philosophy where one honors one’s parents, does not question authority, and always, always, stands clear of the closing doors. No wonder it is Lao-Tzu, with his warm and fuzzy wu wei, or “non-doing,” who is the darling of the New Age crowd, not Confucius. If Lao-Tzu is the surfer dude of Chinese philosophy, Confucius is its substitute teacher.

I confess: the words “proper ritual conduct” do not appeal to me. Not a single one. For me, ritual is something you rebel against, not embrace. Blindly following tradition flies in the face of philosophy’s rallying cry, as articulated by Kant: “Dare to think for yourself!” But there is more to Confucianism. Much more. It doesn’t advocate mindless allegiance to ritual. Motivation matters. “Ritual performed without reverence—these are things I cannot bear to see!” Confucius said.

And there is a reason for his punctiliousness, one that relates directly to ren, to kindness. Kindness is not free floating. It needs a container. For Confucius that container is li, proper ritual conduct. You may not see value in these rituals. That’s okay, Confucius says. Straighten your mat as if you cared, eat your food in the prescribed manner as if it mattered. These might seem like mundane matters. But it is on this quotidian foundation that kindness rests.

Confucius’s goal was character development: the acquisition of moral skills. And no skill was more important than filial devotion. Each page of The Analects is watermarked with a wagging, parental finger. A son is obliged to honor his father, even if it means covering for his misdeeds. And these obligations don’t end with a parent’s death. The obedient son or daughter must continue to behave as his or her parents had wished.

Confucius demands unswerving but not unthinking devotion. If an elderly parent veers off course, by all means redirect him, but do so judiciously, respectfully. Filial piety is a means, not an end. Just as we go to the gym not to sweat but to get in shape, we practice filial piety not for its own sake (only) but to develop our kindness muscles. Caring for an elderly parent is heavy lifting. Confucius adds a few pounds by insisting we do so cheerfully, with a genuine smile.

The family is our ren gym. It is where we learn to love and be loved. Proximity matters. Start by treating those closest to you kindly, and go from there. Like a stone tossed into a pond, kindness ripples outward in ever-widening circles, as we expand our sphere of concern from ourselves to our family to our neighborhood to our nation to all sentient beings. If we can feel compassion for one creature, we can feel it for all of them.

Too often, though, we fail to make the leap from familial kindness to a broader benevolence. Too often parenting remains “an island of kindness in a sea of cruelty,” as two contemporary authors put it. We need to escape the island or, better yet, enlarge it and invite others to join us.

“Stand clear of the closing doors.” I stand clear, following proper ritual conduct. Nearby, a woman cradles an enormous Dunkin’ Donuts cup, in clear violation of the no-eating-or-drinking rule. A man not more than five feet away outdoes her by retrieving an entire pizza from his backpack and chowing down.

A recorded announcement startles me with its directness: “Attention passengers: Do not carry your wallet or phone in your back pocket.” It’s a reminder that others can’t be trusted, that kindness has no home here, in the big city. If you want kindness, go to a small town, or so we think.

As we pull into the Fifty-Third Street station, the doors slide open and the car fills with the sound of a busker singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” He’s a bit off key but it is touching despite that fact, or perhaps because of it.

The song, I realize, is Confucius’s utopian “Great Harmony” set to music. Callousness is the result not of cruel intentions but of a failure of imagination. The unkind person can’t imagine the suffering of another, cannot put himself in her shoes. And yet it’s easy if you try, says John Lennon, and Confucius, too. “Since you desire status, then help others achieve it, since you desire success then help others attain it.”

Did the brief burst of John Lennon affect the mood on the train? Did it make us more prone to human-heartedness? It’s impossible to quantify, of course, but I’d like to think so. I’d like to think kindness begets kindness.

I exit at Canal Street and decide to stop at a Chinese restaurant for lunch. It is crowded, like the F train, though less rickety and with a more pleasant aroma.

“How many?” barks the host, accusingly, as if I’ve interrupted an important meeting.

“One,” I say, sheepishly holding up an index finger.

“You sit with other customers, okay?”

It is not okay, but I don’t say so. I don’t want to disappoint the barking man. He sits me with a group of German tourists.

A New York City Chinese restaurant is not an obviously kind place any more than the F train is. The service is brusque at best. The waitstaff not only barks at you but expects you to order, and eat, quickly.

Yet a current of subterranean benevolence runs through the place, infuses the dim sum and the bok choy, steeps in the metal teapots. It is a kindness that honors the common good. If you’re willing to share a table, everyone benefits. If you eat quickly, others waiting can enjoy the shrimp shumai also. These rules are not written but understood. They constitute the li, the proper ritual conduct, of a Chinese restaurant. They are the container that holds the kindness.

My Chinese restaurant ticks off many of Confucius’s five boxes of ren: respect, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. The staff treats me with respect, up to a point, and they are certainly sincere, something that can’t be said of haughtier establishments. They are earnest and, in their own way, kind. Magnanimous? Not so much, but four out of five isn’t bad.

Back on the F train, snaking through Queens, I scan my fellow passengers and wonder: Are they good people? Kind? Do we all possess ren, human-heartedness, or do only a few exceptional beings, what Confucius calls a junzi, a “superior person”?

The question of human nature is one of the thorniest in philosophy. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes, believed humans are naturally selfish; society tempers this brutish disposition. Thinkers like Rousseau believed man is born good; society corrupts. Still others, such as the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, doubted human nature exists at all; it is our nature not to have a nature.

Confucius fell on the people-are-good side, a notion expanded a century later by a philosopher named Mencius. “All people have a heart that cannot bear the suffering of others,” he said, and suggested a thought experiment to make his point. Imagine you’re passing through a village, minding your own business, when you spot a child teetering on the edge of a well, about to fall in. How do you react?

Most likely, says Mencius, you feel “alarm and compassion.” Instinctively, you want to help—not to win favor from the child’s parents, or praise from neighbors and friends, but because you are human and “the feeling of commiseration is essential to man.” Merely hearing this tale, we experience a “stirring of our hearts.” If you don’t, he says, you are not fully human. (Nowhere does Mencius predict people would actually help the child. A sizable gap separates compassion and action, and many a good intention has fallen into it, never to be heard from again.)

We each possess the same latent goodness, Mencius says. Just as a denuded mountain still sprouts tiny shoots, even the cruelest person retains a dormant kindness. “Given the right nourishment, there is nothing that will not grow, and deprived of it, there is nothing that will not wither away.”

Our capacity for kindness is like our capacity for language. We’re all born with an innate ability to speak a language. But it must be activated, either by our parents or Rosetta Stone. Likewise, our inherent kindness must be mobilized, and the way to do that, Confucians believe, is through study. The opening line of The Analects sings the praises of studying. “Isn’t it a pleasure to study and practice what you have learned?”

By “study” Confucius doesn’t mean rote memorization or even learning, per se. He has something deeper in mind: moral self-cultivation. What we are taught, we learn. What we cultivate, we absorb. There are no small acts of kindness. Each compassionate deed is like watering a redwood seed. You never know what heights it might reach.

I have a question for Confucius: If human nature is inherently good, why does the world seem so cruel? From Genghis Khan to Hitler, the story of humanity is written in blood. Flip on your TV or fire up your laptop, Master, and you’ll see this is still the case. The news is all bad: terrorist attacks and natural disasters and political brawls. Kindness is truant. Or so it seems.

Kindness is always there, whether we notice it or not. “The Great Asymmetry,” the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called this phenomenon. “Every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness,” he said. We witness these acts every day on our streets and in our homes and, yes, on the New York subway. An elderly woman braves a cold November day to feed the neighborhood squirrels; a businessman, late for a meeting, stops to help a single mom carry the groceries to her car; a teenager, skateboard in hand, notices an expired parking meter and drops a quarter in. That these ordinary acts of kindness rarely make the news renders them no less real, or heroic.

It is our duty, almost a holy responsibility, says Gould, “to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses.” Gould, a hard-nosed scientist, saw a practical reason for registering goodness. Kindness honored is kindness multiplied. Kindness is contagious. Witnessing acts of moral beauty triggers a flood of physical and emotional responses. Observing acts of kindness encourages us to act more kindly ourselves, a phenomenon confirmed in several recent studies.

I experience the kindness contagion firsthand. After my week riding the F train, hyperalert to acts of kindness, I become kinder myself. I hold doors for people. I pick up litter. I thank my barista—and leave a tip when she isn’t looking. These small acts won’t snare me the Nobel Peace Prize or sainthood, I realize. But it’s a start. A few more drops on the redwood seed.

Ride the F train long enough and you start to notice patterns. I do. Acts of kindness are not constant. They ebb and flow. During off-peak hours, I observe relatively few. Yet during rush hour, I notice many: a muscular young man offering his seat to an older woman; an “excuse me” here, a “sorry” there. People have no less kindness in their heart at noon than at 5:00 p.m. of course. There are simply fewer kindness opportunities. Kindness expands to fit the need demanded.

During rush hour, that need swells to galactic proportions. As we inch toward Brooklyn, more and more people board at each stop. By Union Square, the train is full. We can’t possibly hold one more passenger, I think. Yet we do.

Everything happens more quickly: people rush for a seat more quickly, scan more quickly. Even the conductor’s announcements accelerate. ConeyIslandboundFtrainstandclearoftheclosingdoors.

“New Yorkers aren’t rude,” my friend Abby, a native New Yorker, said when I told her of my plan to seek kindness on the F train. “They’re fast.”

She might be onto something. Is it possible, I wonder, to act kindly quickly, or does kindness demand slowness? Slow cooking tastes better than fast food and, as we’ve seen, good philosophy takes time, too. As the F train trundles under the East River, I contemplate the relationship between velocity and kindness. Does kindness decrease as you accelerate? Confucius seems to think so. He describes the benevolent person as “simple in manner and slow of speech.”

I’m not so sure. Yes, people moving quickly are less likely to notice a person in distress, but sometimes speediness is kinder. If your house were on fire, would you prefer a slowpoke firefighter or a fleet-footed one? If you were sick, would you want an ER doctor who dawdles or one who moves quickly? If I were to collapse right here on the F train, suffering from a medical crisis triggered by excessive thinking, I’d want my fellow passengers to help swiftly, not slowly.

A friend recently told me about the time he witnessed just such an emergency on the New York subway. A woman collapsed on the floor of a train as it pulled into a station. Reflexively, her fellow passengers sprang into action. One held the door so the train remained in the station, another alerted the conductor, a third administered first aid. Mencius would recognize this display of reflexive compassion. Kindness comes naturally. Cruelty is learned.

Am I kind? I wonder. Yes, I did display Confucian ren, human-heartedness, when I helped Kailash in India. But I didn’t seek out Kailash. He found me. He was the child in the well. I deserve no more credit for my reflexive reaction than I would for sneezing in a dusty room. The world, now more than ever, demands not only reflexive kindness but a more assertive variety, too.

I hear her before I see her. A plaintive, wounded voice that cuts through me like a rusty knife. “I had a young face,” she says, addressing none of us and all of us. “What happened? I had a young face? Why?”

She is dressed in clothes that are little more than rags. She is unsteady, her large frame swaying, as if buffeted by a gale.

I look down and see the source of her unsteadiness (one source anyway). At first, I assume she’s wearing old shoes but she is not. She is barefoot. Her feet, swollen and deformed, are grotesque. They do not look like human feet.

For a long time, she stands there, swaying, not soliciting money or help of any kind. This is the worst part: the ambiguity of the situation. I feel alarm and compassion, but don’t know what to do.

Kindness is hard. Even if we want to help, we don’t know how. Better to do nothing, we tell ourselves. My fellow passengers are uneasy, too, in that subtle New York way. Some move aside to let her pass. Others double down on their straight-ahead stare. I bury my head in Confucius.

The woman moves to the far end of the car. I can’t see her anymore, but I can still hear her. “I used to have a young face.”

Then she’s gone. Everyone exhales, or so I imagine. I lift my head and reflect on what transpired. What to do when faced with such suffering? Yes, I could have helped the woman but, as I said, I didn’t know where to begin. Nobody did. How, then, can the kindness contagion take hold? Someone has to go first.

Kindness is hard. It includes empathy, but that is not enough. Confucian ritual is needed. There’s a reason we turn to rituals during life’s weightiest moments—a wedding, a graduation, a death. These events evoke such strong feelings we risk coming unglued. Ritual holds us together. Ritual provides the container for our emotional content. We F train riders needed such a container when this sad woman swayed into our car. There was none, alas, so we did nothing.

“The burden is heavy and the road is long,” Confucius said. Kindness is hard. Everything worthwhile is.