The possibility of kindness

 

Mulah needs a quarter. She only has a dollar bill.

“Hello, sorry, excuse me, would you happen to have change for a dollar?”

The determined-looking man in a wool coat and no hat, his ears turning red, stops, looks blankly, as though the words had been slowed down by the cold and were just getting to him. “What? Oh, sure, maybe.” He takes a hand from the pocket of his old-fashioned long coat, pulls it open like a curtain and shoves his hand into the pocket of his pants. A handful of change emerges. With his other hand he picks four quarters and hands them to Mulah in exchange for the bill. Shoving it all in his pocket, with a rapid half smile, he moves on, not stopping for the thank you that Mulah nonetheless earnestly utters.

What happened? This is an example of excess value. Or is it? For Mulah the four quarters were with more than the dollar. Pressed, she would have given the whole dollar for one quarter and with little regret. The fine for not putting a quarter in the meter is several dollars. But let that go. She was not making an equal exchange. She was buying quarters. But what about the man in the coat? Was he buying a dollar bill? No he was not. He gave a dollar; he received a dollar. Was it then an equal exchange? It was not that either. There’s no point in an equal exchange. No one stops you on the street to say “do you have a dollar bill I can exchange for this dollar bill?” Not even on a warm summer day. Oh, we can think of reasons why someone might ask for such an exchange—to get a conversation started, to confuse a person long enough to steal his wallet, to get a bill the coke machine will stop spitting back—but these scenarios make the same point as Mulah’s four quarters. The money becomes a physical object in this exchange, not a bill of exchange, like a word becoming a word stripped of semantic energy. In each case the one person is buying an object, but the other is not selling. The other is trading. It’s not an economic exchange for the party giving his dollar bill for Mulah’s. It’s not an economic exchange because the gentleman in the wool coat gets nothing for the exchange. From his point of view the exchange is neutral. It is without point. So why do it at all? It makes no economic sense. You can’t set up a store whose business is the turn over of money for the same amount of money. You may get customers on their way to the laundromat but you won’t make profits. From the point of view of the man in the wool coat, there was cost—he had to stop, spend time and effort to fulfill the terms of the encounter. It wasn’t a much cost, but it was nonzero. You can say he bought himself the satisfaction of doing a good deed or the pinch of peace in avoiding being sneered at. I don’t think either of these accounts for his action.

He was being kind.

A world of significance emerges from this, if you’ll accept it.