Apart from a short clip, I haven’t watched the new Kenyan “mockumentary” series The Samaritans. I’m intrigued by the idea of a show – a comedy! – tackling the aid world as its subject matter. And certainly there’s no shortage of material from which to cull story ideas.

But it makes me nervous. It’s like that knot in your gut that develops whenever Stephen Colbert, the master satirist, interviews a guest and you’re not sure that guest is really in on the joke. You get that uncomfortable twinge that you’re just sitting there watching someone be humiliated. It’s cringe-worthy stuff, and you want Colbert to hurry up and diffuse the tension with a joke that doesn’t belittle the person sitting next to him. He almost always gets there, but those few moments of watching another person struggle are excruciating.

More and more, it seems like we in the aid world are starting to go down this mocking path as a way to assert our authority. We’ve taken on a tone of ridicule, of snide condescension. We revel in creating 140-character zingers designed specifically for a retweet. We’re writing “takedown” pieces – essays with the sole purpose of provocatively undercutting another person’s assertions – rather than responses that express disagreement with respect and humility. It seems like we’re more concerned with getting our 15 minutes than with contributing to a substantive, productive debate in a sector where lives are actually, literally on the line.

Maybe part of the problem is that we’ve become accustomed to this tone in the political sphere. But it strikes me as especially bizarre that in a sector called “humanitarian aid” we’ve gotten so angry, so smug, and so mesmerized by schadenfreude that the “humanity” part seems like an ironic wink. We’re so quick to denounce each other’s work, research and ideas that it’s amazing we haven’t all been shamed into just quitting and finding work in a less high-pressure environment, like swimming with sharks or something.

Last year, one of the New Yorker’s most widely read articles was a beautifully written piece by Atul Gawande called “Slow Ideas.” Gawande, a surgeon working on a project to improve childbirth conditions, discussed why certain medical innovations seem to catch on so quickly and others, equally valid, take significantly longer. In contrast to the “high-tech solutions are the new black” era, Gawande’s findings stressed human interaction – people talking to people – as the key to progress.

One anecdote was especially poignant. Gawande spoke with a nurse in India who had undergone training with a health worker whose goal was to reinforce essential practices for birth attendants. Gawande asked the nurse about her experience with the health worker, who had reminded the nurse of simple things like washing her hands, taking vital signs properly, and cleaning surgical instruments before every use.

It’s reasonable to expect that this training could be perceived as patronizing or annoying – an outside health worker telling an already-trained nurse how to do her job. But it didn’t take the nurse very long to see improvements in her patients’ outcomes – reduction in bleeding after delivery, the ability to diagnose problems earlier, etc. Gawande asked the nurse why she decided to listen to the health worker who was sent to train her, when the health worker technically had fewer years’ experience than the nurse. Gawande writes:

All the nurse could think to say was “She was nice.”
“She was nice?”
“She smiled a lot.”
“That was it?”
“It wasn’t like talking to someone who was trying to find mistakes,” she said. “It was like talking to a friend.”

There it was: kindness. The nurse didn’t feel like she was being criticized or talked down to. She felt like they were on the same team, with the same goal of working to make childbirth a safer experience. It’s hard to imagine the nurse having the same reaction to a critique of her work if instead she’d been sent a memo outlining the ways in which her performance was inadequate or lazy. The mocking tone, in other words, probably would not have been a great motivator.

I think humor in the aid world can be a great thing (especially since earnestness doesn’t seem to get you very far these days). The work we do, in all its many iterations, is hard. We should absolutely be introspective and our own harshest critics. We fail a lot. We fall short. We have communications misfires and ad campaigns that aren’t always smart. And we need to be aware of the things we could be doing better.

But we are working on huge problems, and there’s no way we’re going to succeed if we keep lashing out at one another, creating divisions and sub-divisions and Sachs vs. Easterly smear clubs.

In the comments section of an AJAM article about The Samaritans and the rise of aid satire, Chris Dunford wrote something worth considering. He points to the inhumanity of mocking, and asks us to think of laymen who donate to charities:

“... They can only withdraw in humiliation, having learned only that they should stop giving to charity, lest they be exposed as ridiculous.

“Given the oft-repeated call for greater ‘development education’ to create a public more savvy about what works in development aid, mocking seems a disastrous strategy. Education through humiliation has never been a formula for successful behavior change. Rather it is a strategy for bolstering one’s own point of view on development as so superior that other points of view are ludicrous.”

Maybe The Samaritans is just what we need, and will serve as some kind of cathartic release for aid workers. Maybe all those blog posts that make fun of poorly executed good intentions are just keeping us honest. And maybe I should just lighten up and not care so much about the harsh, biting nature of The Internet.

But I truly worry about where we, as a community with so much potential, are headed. I hope, from time to time, we can pull a page from George Saunders and “err in the direction of kindness.”

Because wouldn’t it be kind of cool if something as simple and cost-effective as kindness could become the newest trend in development tools?