Sometime ago, I went to visit Carolina, the devoted woman who took care of Maria Julia, my favorite maiden aunt, during her last years. She said: “Look, you have the Evil Eye! But don’t worry. I’ll do my prayers and you’ll feel fit again.” Respecting her beliefs, I just thanked her. But deep inside, I hardly believed that she could cure my malaise. Not an illness, just a malaise. A tiredness caused by hurting disappointments.
I knew vaguely what the Evil Eye means, because it’s a folk belief typical of my Mediterranean culture. But when Carolina dropped olive oil in a glass of water, watched the result and remarked: “Oh, yes! You are burdened with envies!” I didn’t make the connection. I can have lots of defects but I’m not an envious person. Indeed, I even can hardly conceive what is it to feel envious. Of course, as a Christian, I know that is one of the seven deadly sins. But no more.
Time passed and, recently, I felt lucky to read a beautiful text on kindness, a neglected quality in our modern societies, apparently ruled by self-interest, competition, selfishness, and greed. The text was a kind of illumination, because it demonstrated how important kindness – which, at first glance, one can dismiss as an individual trait, a mix of nice words, gestures and empathy – was as a cement employed to build the best of our civilization. From humanitarian movements that aided to acquire what we now know as the universal human rights, the 19th century philanthropists who took care of the hungry, the sick and the poor or the establishment of the National Health Service and a welfare state in the last century.
A TOOL TO CHANGE THE WORLD
As an idea, kindness is nothing new. It was an important concept to Greek and Roman philosophers; it permeates the Bible, and is valued in every big religious tradition. What enlightened me was the notion that it is not just a personal matter or a mood but a tool to change the world. At a personal level, it is not exactly easy to define; on the contrary, it is hard to define. Just like joy, one has to feel it. Of course, we know when people are being kind to us but, at a social level, it is even harder to delineate the concept in all its amplitude.
Aristotle, a sort of father of Western thought, included kindness among the emotions and defined it as being “helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped.” St. Paul, when he states that “love is kind,” adds a new light. Because we cannot imagine love without kindness, and the opposite must also be true: there is no kindness without love for our neighbor. What is really hard to imagine is to think about the modern world, where the neoliberal market economy is a kind of no truce war between and inside nations – social Darwinism would speak of the survival of the fittest – as a global system suddenly flooded by love.
Let me share a personal reflection that I did before reading the enlightening text. Indeed, it has become an important part of my intellectual and spiritual evolution, even if, at first, I didn’t notice it. In my youth, I used to put intelligence and culture ahead of every other quality. Only when I grew older did I begin to give primacy to kindness. Perhaps because I experienced unkind acts from people I thought were intelligent and cultured. Certainly, I did commit also such acts due to my intellectual idolatry. Fortunately, I have had the privilege of meeting several real kind people in my life. This changed my perspective in dealing with others and the world. It was like sensing the light after noticing the deep shadow.
THE DARK POWER OF ENVY
After reading the enlightening text I mentioned, I was captivated by the contours of kindness. For a start, I began searching randomly the Internet. I browsed Wikipedia, and found there something very interesting. Kindness is one of the seven contrary virtues, opposed to envy, one of the seven deadly sins. The concept was coined by an epic poem by Prudentius circa 410, where he described the “weapons” needed in the battle to save the soul. Another research gave me additional information: envy was only included in the list of the deadly sins in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great. In a way, I felt justified in my ignorance of envy. Christianity itself took centuries to realize how harmful it is.
Then I thought about Carolina’s Evil Eye and the harm produced by envies. And remembering the light/shadow approach, I felt inclined to learn a bit more about envy. My eyes fell upon a psychologist’s quotation: “(It) occurs when a person lacks another’s (perceived) superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it.” The definition is perfect. But anyway, I felt that I needed something more and, remembering that folk knowledge has a very useful down-to-earth wisdom, I returned to the concept of the Evil Eye (mau olhado in Portuguese; malocchio in Italian) and found the following description in a text by Jill Stefko: “It is believed that there are two types of malocchio, malevolent and involuntary. Most of the cases are believed to be the latter. The involuntary type is when a person may admire or be envious of another’s children, livestock or property.”
After that, I went to the site of Encyclopedia Britannica and found that mau olhado/malocchio is as widespread as kindness itself: “Belief in the Evil Eye is ancient and ubiquitous; it occurred in ancient Greece and Rome, in Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions, and in indigenous, peasant, and other folk societies, and it has persisted throughout the world into modern times.” Envy must be indeed very powerful, to be feared by so many and diverse civilizations and peoples along the millennia. Perhaps this was exactly the key I was looking for: only an equally powerful virtue would be able to fight it.
DEMOCRACY WITHOUT PAIN
I returned to Wikipedia for a definition of kindness: “It is the act or the state of being kind and marked by charitable behavior, marked by mild disposition, pleasantness, tenderness and concern for others.” Then I turned to the philosophers to contrast it with envy. For Aristotle, it is “the pain caused by the good fortune of others,” while for Kant, it is “a reluctance to see our own well-being overshadowed by another’s because the standard we use to see how well off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our own well-being but how it compares with that of others.” In either definition, it is obvious that it causes pain. Bertrand Russell recognized that envy is one of the most potent causes of unhappiness and considered it a universal and most unfortunate aspect of human nature, because not only is the envious person rendered unhappy by his envy, but also wishes to inflict misfortune on others.
However, the 20th century agnostic thinker found in envy a social role, as a driving force behind the movement towards democracy, one that must be endured in order to achieve a more just social system. I think he was talking about the force that makes men willing to be equal and emulate those who are more successful than them. A legitimate wish that, in my humble opinion, can be achieved without envy. In this matter, we must turn to religious ethics: in Buddhism, taking joy in the good fortune of another is a highly regarded virtue and considered the antidote to envy. And I think this joy can be much more powerful than the feeling of envy.
When I think about my Christian heritage, I find that it is imbibed by the joy that is deeply tied to charity and love, and that this joy is indeed a vital source of personal and social transformation. As I said before, it is difficult to imagine our global society, which is caught in the middle of one of the most complex and harsh crisis in history, flooded by a joyful love. But I know that, even in the middle of a storm, there are uncountable acts of kindness. And there is where my hope lies. In Chinese ideograms, crisis can mean a catastrophe but also an opportunity; and, as Christians, we have a good chance to heal our ailing world with the strong medicine of individual and collective loving kindness.
Returning to Carolina’s Evil Eye, I must recognize that the rituals she performed at the time didn’t make me feel better. It was inside me that I found the cure. I admit that, in a way, she was right: I was burdened by “envies” that were inflicted on me by some of my closest friends. A long time went by before I was able to overcome my malaise. I had to do it myself: trying to understand other people’s actions or words, finding in me the strength to not feel bitter or resentful, and, finally, responding the unkindness with kindness. After that, I felt a better person and more willing to do my humble part in turning our society into a better one. Believe me, even a kind disposition works – like a charm.
