No. It is never more important to be kind than clever. Never.
We have a clear example of this at the moment, with the Paralympic games. The founder of the games, Dr Ludwig Guttmann, revolutionised the care of spinal injury in the UK. Until his innovations, a patient with a spinal cord injury had a life expectancy of less than two years, with most patients dying from bedsores and urinary tract infections.
Guttmann's methods were resisted all the way by his colleagues and the nurses working under him, because they seemed wilfully cruel. Guttmann reduced the sedation of patients, even if it meant that they were in constant pain. He had patients turned every two hours, day and night, even if they were terribly sleep-deprived. He forced patients to exercise and undergo painful physiotherapy.
The results were nothing short of miraculous. Within a matter of years, patients who were previously seen as hopeless incurables were being sent home to live long and fulfilling lives. The medics around Guttmann simply lacked the vision and insight to realise that these patients could be treated effectively. They were kind and caring people, but they could do nothing but dose their patients with morphine and watch them die.
Kindness is nothing but a particular sort of shortsightedness. Being a decent and moral person often requires one to do something that is entirely correct but deeply unkind. Medicine is the most obvious example, but we all live with such challenges every day. Do we give our children candy or broccoli? Do we tell a friend that their haircut is unflattering? Do we tell a relative that their partner is a philanderer? Often, the moral choice is not the kind one.
I don't see what your anecdote has to do with kindness. Presumably both Guttmann and his colleagues were all kind enough to want to reduce suffering; Guttmann just happened to be more correct about how to do so. Neither approach was more or less kind than the other, but one was more effective.
Additionally: I don't see what the anecdote has to do with the linked article, which was about marketing and customer relations. No one sane is saying that the world would be better off with no clever people, or that it's somehow a choice. The point was simply that for a business with customers, merely "executing well" doesn't work as well as being genuinely nice to your customers.
Then jdietrich turned the whole thing into a giant strawman about an obscure doctor using a different interpretation of "kind".
The effective approach was seen as deeply unkind, for reasons I elucidated - it resulted in a great amount of suffering in the short-term, for reasons which seemed futile to everyone but Guttmann.
Kindness is essentially a static phenomenon - it can offer nothing more than a slight temporary improvement. Clever is permanent and revolutionary. Clever is what eliminates smallpox, clever is what puts airbags in cars, clever digs irrigation ditches and makes pesticides.
Kindness is personified by Mother Teresa - a well-meaning person who can offer only succour to the dying. Clever is Guy Henry Faget discovering promin and Calmette and Guerin creating a TB vaccine.
Clever goes totally unnoticed most of the time, but its impact immeasurably outweighs compassion. How many humanitarians do you need to feed as many mouths as Norman Borlaug did? Who did more to alleviate suffering due to HIV/AIDS, the hospice movement or GlaxoSmithkline?
> The effective approach was seen as deeply unkind
What I'm getting at is you have an overly narrow definition of the word "kind". I would argue that Guttmann was actually MORE kind, regardless of how shortsighted people may have seen it.
> One of Mother Teresa’s volunteers in Calcutta described her “Home for the Dying” as resembling photos of concentration camps such as Belsen. No chairs, just stretcher beds. Virtually no medical care or painkillers beyond aspirin, and a refusal to take a 15-year-old boy to a hospital. Hitchens adds, “Bear in mind that Mother Teresa’s global income is more than enough to outfit several first class clinics in Bengal. The decision not to do so... is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering, but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”
> She has also been criticized for her view on suffering. She felt that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus.[1] Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International, criticised the failure to give painkillers, writing that in her Homes for the Dying, one could "hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. On principle, strong painkillers were not administered even in severe cases. According to Mother Teresa's philosophy, it is 'the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ'."[2]
[1] Byfield, Ted (20 October 1997). "If the real world knew the real Mother Teresa there would be a lot less adulation". Alberta Report/Newsmagazine 24 (45)
I probably wouldn't have even mentioned this if you hadn't explicitly said "succour to the dying". 'Succour' is the last thing Mother Teresa offered. After all, Suffering Is Good.
This has turned into an argument over the definitions of words, instead of an argument over anything in reality. Is it "kind" to subject spinal cord injury patients to short-term misery in order to give them longer-term relief from their injuries? Or would "kindness" flinch away from this and try to minimize their short-term pain? You're using the former definition of kindness, and jdietrich and the article are using the latter. Both are useful concepts.
Citing one example of where cleverness was more effective than kindness falls far short of proving the statement that it is never more important to be kind than clever; you might want to tone down its sensationalist tone. A single counterexample will refute it :-)
To say that "Kindness nothing but a particular sort of shortsightedness" falls into the same problems of provability. Kindness is a great many things more than a particular sort of shortsightedness.
The idea you put forward seems to imply that basic human emotions are unreliable all the time, in all places - when in fact they work great at most times and in most places.
Kindness is not independent of cleverness, or of morality, or of decency. The common senses of the words do bleed together.
For example, were Dr Ludwig Guttmann to accidentally cause the deaths of fifty patients, his colleague might comment, "Dear Doctor, that was not frightfully clever of you," and he would say that because the Doctor had done something monstrously unkind towards them and their families.
The colleague uses (in part) his emotional faculties to determine that killing people is bad, and he uses (in part) his analytical faculties to determine ways to avoid killing people. But it's useless to try and rigidly separate the sets of faculties because they live in the same brain; there's no context where they can be exercised completely in separate.
There are a lot of schools of thought that address the paradox of short term sufferings involvement in the overall scheme of kindness. Buddhism refers to it as "idiot kindness" or "idiot compassion" if you're kind in the short term without considering the long term value of it.
True kindness is a long winded, structured and considerate thing. Feeding a junky drugs because it makes them feel better is an example of it done wrong, I would still entirely consider it kind and compassionate to will someone through a process such as what you've illustrated here if you had a genuine understanding that it was going to provide them these kind of benefits.
Clever and kind are never that clear or opposed in the sense of dichotomy. At the extremes of it maybe 'clever' looks like not helping people at all because it frees up resources for the rest of the community, or 'kind' is euthanasia. The subjectivity of it all is the integral, and hardest, part of the process of assessing what's 'best' for an individual.
> Feeding a junky drugs because it makes them feel better is an example of it done wrong
OTOH, feeding a junky drugs because a cold-turkey withdrawal would kill them (as is sometimes the case with benzodiazepines and alcohol) is pretty much the standard of care. Diazepam, trade name Valium, is the withdrawal benzo of choice for both pill-heads and wet brains, as a matter of fact, but they do sometimes give IV alcohol to alcoholics going through withdrawal.
On the gripping hand, you do have a point: Opioid withdrawal is very rarely life-threatening, and letting the dopehead sweat it out can really hammer home the whole Drugs Are Bad part, especially if followed by a massive lifestyle change.
And this further supports your main point that 'kind' and 'clever' don't really form a simple opposing pair.
Sorry, the example wasn't completely literal and a bit clumsy. Completely acknowledge the importance of those approaches and methadone programs in place that allow for a transitional pathway as well.
Your second paragraph is further into the balancing act I suppose, you could push people to full withdrawal symptoms but when we have the tech. on hand to manage the process, it raises a similar set of questions about which approach you'd perceive to produce the best result for someone.
It's why I'm glad I'm in a tech field, at least most of it is deterministic. The friends I have that work in social services have a nightmare of a job sometimes in terms of failed outcomes or unexpected results from treatments and approaches.
If kindness is taken to mean always doing what will make someone feel good in the short term then I'd agree with you but I'm not sure this is usually what is meant by kind.
In my view doing something which causes someone discomfort in order to improve there long term quality of life is in itself kind. Conversely satisfying someone's short term desires in the knowledge that it will probably have a bad effect on them in the long run would - I think - be categorised by most people as unkind.
Never say never, as the cliche goes. The example you give is an extreme that's difficult to argue with. And yet I find it difficult to agree with you. Hey, I can go so far as giving another example - Chris Barnard was accused of butchering and killing many a guinea pig before he pulled off a successful heart transplant. And yet I'd dislike myself a little more than I'm comfortable with if I applied "never" to truly random acts of kindness.
The problem with single words is it is very easy to lost on the definitions. Kindness, cleverness... what does that mean?
Here's how I would have worded it. Given a company of a 100 people working on the same product, which do you think would have a higher chance of being successful:
1) Everyone has a varying degree of intelligence but all of them shared the same (positive) moral compass
2) Everyone shares the same (high) intelligence but a varying moral compass
You are no longer talking about relative importance; you've turned it into a much simpler (and very different) question: does a homogeneous (and good) moral compass make a team's success more likely, all other things being equal?
Your anecdote gave a different result than the one in the story. This doesn't prove or disprove that it's better to be nice or clever. It only tells that there is no absolute rules like "it's better to X than X". Those rules help to illustrate some points but none are perfect science.
We have a clear example of this at the moment, with the Paralympic games. The founder of the games, Dr Ludwig Guttmann, revolutionised the care of spinal injury in the UK. Until his innovations, a patient with a spinal cord injury had a life expectancy of less than two years, with most patients dying from bedsores and urinary tract infections.
Guttmann's methods were resisted all the way by his colleagues and the nurses working under him, because they seemed wilfully cruel. Guttmann reduced the sedation of patients, even if it meant that they were in constant pain. He had patients turned every two hours, day and night, even if they were terribly sleep-deprived. He forced patients to exercise and undergo painful physiotherapy.
The results were nothing short of miraculous. Within a matter of years, patients who were previously seen as hopeless incurables were being sent home to live long and fulfilling lives. The medics around Guttmann simply lacked the vision and insight to realise that these patients could be treated effectively. They were kind and caring people, but they could do nothing but dose their patients with morphine and watch them die.
Kindness is nothing but a particular sort of shortsightedness. Being a decent and moral person often requires one to do something that is entirely correct but deeply unkind. Medicine is the most obvious example, but we all live with such challenges every day. Do we give our children candy or broccoli? Do we tell a friend that their haircut is unflattering? Do we tell a relative that their partner is a philanderer? Often, the moral choice is not the kind one.