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Chapter 4 Social Atmospheres,Technology, and Nature The past era has taught us, survivors of the totalitarian regime, one very good lesson. . . . Man is not a nomnipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment.The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility. —Václav Havel, The New York Times, June 3, 1992 Social Kindness A descriptive phenomenology of kindness culminates with society itself, because individual acts and omissions and particular individuals in intimate, friendly, or casual relationships do not exhaust the ways in which the phenomenon of kindness appears to us. Accordingly, the following two chapters will attempt to provide an account of the main features of kindness as a social phenomenon. We shall see that kindness and unkindness manifest themselves in indeterminate atmospheres with deeply embedded values—particularly regarding technology and nature, which is the subject of this chapter. We shall also find in the following chapter that kindness and unkindness appear in various types of social structures , some of which are themselves intimately related to technology and nature, and in the presence or absence of community. We shall likewise see that kindness and unkindness at a social level are considerably more complex and ambiguous than they are in particular acts, non-acts, or persons. The social aspects of the phenomenon of kindness can be considered both as the widest background context that conditions individual kind acts, omissions, and persons, and as a set of unique evidences that disclose more about the nature of kindness than can be revealed by individual acts and persons. It is in this latter sense that Robert Coles once wrote instructively of psychology in the sense of the word “perhaps best understood (and rendered) by novelists such as 95 George Eliot in Middlemarch and Tolstoy in War and Peace.” Each writer, Coles points out, attempted to link the human self to “broad social and political events, even to the tides of history that bear down on all of us” (1992, 38). These are the compulsory social forces that condition our lives to which Auden (1979) gave such eloquent expression in September 1, 1939, and it is in studying these broader connections that we shall attempt to complete our descriptions of kindness. Social Atmospheres In a perceptual Gestalt, the background context, or horizon, conditions the presentation and therefore the experiential identity of the perceptual object. So also, any given aspect of the social world is presented to us within such a horizonal structure. One consequence of this fact is that, as (Karl) Marx and Max Weber, among many others, have pointed out, a society’s economic system, religion (s), ethical and political commitments, and legal system do not exist in watertight compartments. Rather, they interpenetrate and mutually express each other—just as the various aspects of a perceptual Gestalt are internally related .1 For any given aspect of the social world, there are multiple levels or concentric circles of such contexts: within certain institutions, such as families or corporate structures, particular subcultural groups, society at large, and the ways in which the society is itself inserted into the world community. As also in the case of a perceptual Gestalt, the halo of a social atmosphere that rings the presentation of any feature of the social world is indeterminate, but it is not nothing. On the contrary, in both the perceptual and social worlds, the indeterminate is “a positive phenomenon” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 6). In the social world, such atmospheres, or horizons of meaning, constitute themselves as Zeitgeists, climates of opinion that shape our perception of the social world. Some of these opinions we hold consciously, as does Franny in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, when she indicates her fear of engaging in competition.“Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values,” she explains , “and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right” (1991, 30). However, many values embedded in social atmospheres we subscribe to unsuspectingly and unconsciously, and these we shall study in Part Two. Indeterminate social atmospheres, derived from various layers of meaning “sedimented” (Merleau-Ponty) over time, are themselves more or less kind in the ways in which they define our perceptions of ourselves and other people, and in the ways in which they create behavioral...

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