Why Kindness Became Better than Aggression

Of the two photos, the other one lost, this one shows me with a kind expression on my face.

Psychology and the Growth of Personality

This is another essay originally published in New Jersey Federated Sportsmen’s News, published by the New Jersey Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs. It’s relevant to my Literature and Philosophy blog category, because the “why” question of kindness becoming better than aggression involves a philosophical and psychological theme.

I couldn’t have included “Psychology” in the title of the blog category. That would have lengthened it out of proportion to the dropdown menu, but psychology remains a passionate interest of mine that is showing up in my blog.

I never forget taking a psychology course at County College of Morris. I was just curious. I had no definite academic goal in mind, but as I say, I was interested in psychology.

The instructor asked each of us to tell the class what we’d major in.

“Philosophy,” I said.

“Philosophy!” The instructor exclaimed. “What are you going to do with the degree?” he chuckled. “Clean toilet bowls with it?”

I had no answer, but my self-assurance hadn’t budged.  

And every time we had a test, I was the first to finish and walk out the door. When we came back for the next class session, I was always mentioned by that instructor for having scored the highest grade.

I’ve been ambitious all these decades about my learning. I guess I was 37 when I took the CCM course, and all these years later, it feels like a confirmation. I read psychology avidly, and I knew I had a fairly extensive knowledge of it. But to have scored as well as I did in class is special.

Psychology is often thought of as about the growth of the personality, and my essay is no different. It does more than contrast kindness and aggression; it may suggest that kindness can grow out of aggression as a counterpoise to it.

       Twin Pines     

In my teens, I found a half-acre pond on the grounds of a local airport that serviced Cessna twin engines—Twin Pines Airport. I tried to locate it in April 2021, when I traveled to Lawrence Township, New Jersey. On the way there, I snapped a photo in Princeton for another essay, “The Iron Bridge,” also published in New Jersey Federated Sportsmen’s News. The airport is gone. It closed in 2008, and I saw no evidence that the pond still exists.

During those teenaged years, I used to venture onto the property cautiously, as if I might be seen as an intruder, but the pond had a wooded shoreline, located out of the way where nobody seemed to mind a kid doing some bass fishing. On at least two occasions, I fished with a friend while I carried a 35mm camera loaded with black and white film. Each of these trips resulted in an 18-inch largemouth for me, which might have been the same fish, released after getting caught. Besides the bass, the trips resulted in two photographs.

In the first, my face revealed a fiercely determined aggressiveness. I treasured that photo, because my friend Bates had captured the fighting energy that drove my life forward through challenges. In the tumble of events, it got lost and never has turned up among my things, nor has the negative. I felt as if I had lost something very important and I couldn’t let go of the memory, but the other photo, which I didn’t identify with as much, portrays me with a kind face

How the Janus-faced opposites of kindness and aggression would present themselves one after the other, probably concerning the same bass, and possibly the only two times I went to the pond with a friend who could photograph me at all, is one of the mysteries of the psyche. After all, any of us is influenced more from deep within than we know. I developed each photo in the darkroom of Lawrence High School, but I probably never noticed the psychological differences expressed.

I do know it took me years to realize the photos were a pair. Twins of a sort. Related. The attitude the second photo—of my kind face—realizes the inclusiveness of the other. It suggests—the kind photo—an openness to understanding how differences go together. Fishing involves both fierce determination and the kindness of appreciation. Or at least it can.

Aggression and the Will’s Need of Direction

An angler’s fury during a bluefish blitz can border on madness when the mood is right, and a good bass can bring out fire from within as well, but if not for the kindness that brings all the aspects of fishing together, what’s the use of determination? The will without reasonable direction is useless.

Aggression can lead to a cul de sac. Fire from within extinguished in the meaninglessness of burnout, the original intent to achieve something serious resulting in dull servitude, enslavement to a master who demands the rekindling of strenuous efforts to no good end. That master can be anything or anyone but not your native self. It can be a way of fishing that once felt so good that you over-committed to it and don’t let go, now that it’s a grind and some other way to fish would relieve the anxiety held back.

It’s not that the quickening of pulse and prowess should be distrusted, but that the appropriation of energy comes first, and that energy depends not on what it’s assigned to, but how that assignment is done. Not the content of value matters as much as the selection—a hard lesson to learn for people who can’t let go of a good thing. Before it’s not that any longer and is ruining them.

Kindness and Good Judgement

Selection needs critical reason, and good judgement needs kindness at heart—otherwise there’s no balance, fairness, and sane appreciation for what’s gained. We all know that pure, unadulterated enjoyment is what we want, but that can be had from heroin. Not a good idea. And if willfulness becomes an end-in-itself, what is it, after all, directed towards?

Fierce willfulness can be one or the other, or a mixture of the two: Good or evil. Heroic or sociopathic. And if it’s heroic, a kind heart steadies the will at the center, otherwise there is no judging good consequence.

Good Consequences

Perhaps I’ve come to value the photo I’ve displayed more than the one that went missing, because, as I approach my elder years, it seems as if—for all the conflict I suffered through younger years—the consequences of my life are good. I have the kind attitude to thank for that. After all, the two photos were taken only weeks apart. It wasn’t as if, during my youth, I was all aggression.  

Fishing at its best inspires anglers, and if the inspiration is fresh and pure, I believe it involves the natural world, not social or formal media alone. It’s not merely the petty competitiveness that print and pictures may engender that is at issue; it’s their remove from the primary source of things that concerns me.

Experience in Nature

Words, images, and audio need to be compensated for by experience in nature. My words are no exception. They may offer good ideas, but you’ll never come upon better ideas than those the wild infuses with meaning. Consider that nature is the primary source of all that humankind creates, and such a notion as that of ideas the wild infuses with meaning, that notion might begin to make sense as pointing to the source of power. When I was teenaged and getting published, it would have been utterly impossible to write without reading outdoor magazines, but nothing else cast what I learned into a nourishing mix better than the wet, soppy mess of Stony Brook, the Princeton Day School Ponds, and Tree Stumps Pond. A few examples of what nature made of me.

Nourishment is never clean and pure in the obvious sense. It’s what you use a napkin for. But who among us hasn’t felt that exquisite release from stress, tension, and hard determination that results from such effort, when the spirit from deeper within has overtaken the ego and makes everything effortless? It’s effortless because it’s all come together.

What is the Natural World Like?

Let me pose a naïve question: What is the natural world? Is it all fire and ferocity, like the nuclear furnace of the sun? Or is it contained under a blue sky, as if blue is the color of mercy, while the redness of the sun at dawn is the color of love and power that must sustain any form of being, though the unification of disparate nourishments that sustenance implies is a redress of that power, because power for its own sake has no direction, no purpose, no fulfillment—ultimately no power, nothing. Like a bass fought until it bellies up. What’s the point of such a struggle?

Does the struggle of animal life in the natural world have an end, or is it random chaos? I believe nature has a soul in the chest of man, but nothing else is a more ruthless power against him than nature—if that soul goes awry. Power is what human life is all about; if it’s not chosen wisely, the planet’s temperature will get too close to that of its progenitor. Might be good for the sunblock industry, but sooner or later, the plastic of the container would melt.

In the middle between and containing of kindness and aggression, a stable composure faces the world with a sensible directness.

Opposites Resolved

Both types of facial expressions shot at Twin Pines are of equal importance. I think the world revolves as if East turns into West, which turns back into East, as the only way a stable truth stands alone. For example, an attitude exists neither kind nor aggressive, which is one of composure as if the other two attitudes are contained in it. It’s hard to believe, when you contemplate the photo of me at age 16, but a friend of mine once chastised me when I was two years older. “Bruce! Contain yourself!” he said.  

I’ll never know for an absolute certainty if the two photographs are of the same bass, but I remember—clear as day—thinking, as I fished a corner, that the Twin Pines Pond has to be too small, shallow, and barren to hold more than one that size. We caught very few, Bates and I, besides the big one. I doubt more than a dozen legal-sized bass occupied it. (We did release them all.)

Every time I walked in to go fish for them, I gave my respects to a rusting World War II propellor plane, abandoned there among tall grasses as if to invite my ritual of contemplating it. Not the fascism we as a nation fought over, but the feat of engineering that contributed to our triumph. I contemplated that.

I still honor the lost photograph of me with an aggressive look, but as I’ve grown older and regard our national politics as I hoped when younger I never would, I feel better that it was lost, instead of the one I still have. Now is a time for kindness. The redress is needed as we seek a new direction.