On Being Nice
After a life-time of being nice, of compromising dignity in order to keep the peace, of smiling at selfish people, of meeting mediocrity halfway, I can officially announce that I’m no longer a member of the fraternity. It’s been a long time coming.
My edification began in college when I met the first non-criminal who taught me the rudiments of not being nice. But this process required years of crossing crucial barriers, like a family history of appeasement, a personal desire to please others, a lack of respectable examples, etc. Aside from not having killed, assaulted or robbed anybody, what made this friend different is that he gave structure to the prickly side of my nature. He forced me to admit what I had always suspected: that ‘being nice’ gave the vulgar the upper hand.
So, why not be blunt, this modern day Socrates taught me. If the cocky CEO is bold enough to impose his charts and graphs, why not become his sparing partner- however briefly? Why should a hostess’s shrill voice drown out all others? If anything, being nice allows bad music (and bad thought) to fill the air; it also enables what C.S. Lewis called ‘the new evil’ to have sway.
What is this new evil? For one thing, it’s nice. This is not to say that all nice people are evil (or even insincere); but like the soldiers of today’s asymmetrical wars, the new evil lurks among us, smooth-shaven and tattooed. This new kind of bully, sometimes posing as a victim, does not yell or wear army fatigues. On the contrary, he and she are quite fashionable and toil in air-conditioned offices, barely speaking above a whisper, unless they’re reading aloud their poetry. But just like the old evil, they calculate that you don’t have the nerve to go as low as they do and still keep the smiles on everyone’s face.
It’s sometimes called professionalism, and so the smiles are always there, for allegiance is now directly tied to one’s prosperity. Even the traditional middle-men, the church and the state, have been fitted to the new arrangement. The brilliance here is that morality is distilled into pure self-interest, while maintaining the illusion that the old institutions (like kinship) are still vital. Industry does this by usurping the family’s authority while, at the same time, appropriating its essence as a defining metaphor. Today workers no longer need to unite; they’ve become family.
But self-interest, being near-sighted, can be easily manipulated. So, the new evil can be found not just among those with the means of production, but among those who toil with the means of communication. Both centralized and dispersed, both inside the elite and out, journalism is a power without responsibility, protecting its sources while using facts to the benefit of its latest patron. Whether in education, the arts, government and commerce, a comfortable servility has placed our beautiful bluntness in a precarious position. It’s rendered impossible a reasonably fair pubic, and it’s handed the cultivated individual his eviction notice.
Here, however, the sweet science of boxing helps us, for the art of bluntness, like a left hook, is effective for being unexpected. It sees cocky self-talk, professional bragging, and polished outrage the way a boxer sees a lowered chin. And just like the struck fighter, who is either lying on the canvas or just plain mad, the formerly nice bully is reminded that there are other interests in the room beside hers. He and she are reminded that clarity (not happiness) should be our highest social purpose.
Those who disagree do so because they thrive in murky waters, like lungfish or algae. They don’t want us to know that niceness is a cheap substitute for kindness. The first, as we’ve seen, is a shortcut; it’s the Will walking Intellect on a leash, like a dog. But the second requires humility and is free of all calculation. True kindness requires no tax write-off, no publicity, no award, no ‘paying it forward’ or ‘coming and going around’. Kindness gives what is needed; niceness gives what it wants.
Therefore, one must have almost Spartan discipline in order to not be nice. Like a Catholic in 17th Century Massachusetts, you’re bound to lose friends and relatives. But what did Northern niceness do to prevent the Civil War? What did European niceness do to deter Hitler? Yet here we Americans (and Westerners) are again, trapped in our comfortable homes, confronting a strange Confederate-Bolshevik nightmare at home and the old evil abroad. The cruel irony is that all that education, all that marching, all that niceness has left us with a vocabulary too barren to offer a civil way out.