What It Means to Be Kind in a Cruel World
About this episode
Novelist George Saunders discusses kindness as a discipline rather than a feeling. He describes how attention, especially the sustained attention fiction requires, can train people out of selfish mental habits, and talks about his practice of monitoring his own thoughts the way a writer watches characters. The conversation moves through his book on Russian short stories, his writing routine, and why he revises by reading sentences aloud. They also discuss harder questions: whether kindness can survive contact with cruelty, how to respond to people whose politics you find abhorrent, and the moral damage of living in a culture organized around self-interest. Saunders argues that stories let us practice inhabiting other minds, which is the precondition for treating others decently.