This week, I’ve been traveling to a medical meeting outside the country. The “Spine Arthroplasty Society” is being held in Montreal, Quebec. The city is beautiful and decidedly French. It’s so French they have a law requiring all outdoor signs be in French, and if they catch you with an outdoor sign in English, you get fined. By the language police. I’m not making this up! But what has struck me is that if you don’t speak the language of a country, you are at the mercy of the locals. You have to trust total strangers to be kind to you. And in my experience, they usually are very kind indeed. Why?

Why on earth are people ever kind to strangers? I raise this question because it is counter-intuitive to the law of the jungle. Sure, you can find some rotten folks who commit all kinds of fraud and abuse to unsuspecting travelers, but that is the exception. While the law of the jungle says it should be the rule. Where does this good behavior, this charity to strangers, come from? Is it societal evolution, or a moral law? I propose a simple explanation: it feels good to do good. This is why we support charities. It makes no sense economically, but we give all the same.

And here’s what the kindness of strangers has taught me today: we are designed to do good. Sure, we all make choices, and often do the wrong thing, but that’s not how we were designed. People are capable of enormous evil, but those people are never happy. They are out of step with their purpose. What you see when you look at the design of the universe is an eerie similarity in how things appear. Ocean waves look like the waves of wind on a wheat field. The wheat and the sea share a common Designer. We too are designed on purpose, and to deny it is to deny kindness to strangers.