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If We Only Understood poem

This poem has been attributed to Kipling but the Kipling Society isn’t sure. It has been reprinted at various times, sometimes with the two halves in opposite order but the ordering below was used in the 1915 anthology “Poems of Dawn” which is the earliest source I could get my hands on (not to be confused with an 1890 book of similar title that doesn’t have this poem). It is now in the public domain.

I believe this poem could be taken as a longer version of a modern aphorism (popular in the computer field) called Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [human error]”. (Hanlon put it more bluntly as “stupidity” but that doesn’t have to be taken at its worst meaning.) As a plausible Hanlon predecessor, “If We Only Understood” doesn’t go as far back as Goethe’s “Werthers” but it’s a nice poem.

Twentieth-century psychologists experimented on people’s various inabilities to “judge all deeds by motives” and gave them names like “fundamental attribution error” and “correspondence bias”, but a lot depends on the experimental setup and personally I’d rather have Kipling than psychoanalysis any day.

Could we draw aside the curtains

That surround each other’s lives,

See the naked heart and spirit,

Know what spur the action gives—

Often we would find it better,

Purer than we judge we would;

We would love each other better

If we only understood.

Could we judge all deeds by motives,

See the good and bad within,

Often we would love the sinner

All the while we loathe the sin.

Could we know the powers working

To o’erthrow integrity,

We would judge each other’s errors

With more patient charity.

If we knew the cares and trials,

Knew the efforts all in vain,

And the bitter disappointments—

Understood the loss and gain—

Would the grim external roughness

Seem, I wonder, just the same?

Would we help where now we hinder?

Would we pity where we blame?

Ah, we judge each other harshly,

Knowing not life’s hidden force;

Knowing not the fount of action

Is less turbid at its source.

Seeing not amid the evil

All the golden grains of good,

Oh, we’d love each other better

If we only understood.

Chinese translations of this poem