On Being Nice Read online

  Yet the Polite person knows that we take a lot of ourselves into our jobs and need to find respect and a form of love from them as much as we need the cash. So they will be conscious of an additional need to contribute smiles and a pleasant word or two to the person stamping their passport or changing the bedclothes in the hotel. These people are doing their jobs for the money, of course, but payment never invalidates an emotional hunger for a sense of having been useful and appreciated by another person, however brief and functional the encounter may seem.

  Grand vs. Small Gestures

  The Frank person is often very kind, but in a big way. They are interested in enormous acts of generosity and kindness towards major sections of humanity: perhaps the rescue of the whole continent of Africa or a plan to give every child in the country an equally good start in life. But a consequence of their enthusiasm can be a certain impatience with smaller moves and gestures, which they may view as a distraction from the larger causes. There is no point, they may feel, spending time and money sending people flowers, writing notes after a dinner or remembering birthdays, when a fundamental transformation of the human condition is at hand.

  The Polite person also passionately cares about spreading kindness, love and goodness on a mass scale, but they are cautious about the chances of doing so on any realistic time horizon. Yet their belief that you probably can’t improve things for a huge number of people in the coming decades makes them feel that it is still worthwhile trying to make a modest improvement in the lives of the few humans you have direct contact with here and now. They may never be able to transform another person’s prospects entirely or rescue the species from its agonies, but they can smile and stop for five minutes to chat to a neighbour about the weather. Their modesty around what is possible makes them acutely sensitive to the worth of the little things that can be done before today is over.

  Self-Certainty vs. Self-Doubt

  The Frank person has a high degree of confidence in their ability to judge quickly and for the long term what is right and wrong about a given situation. They feel they can tell who has behaved well or badly or what the appropriate course of action should be around a dilemma. This is what gives them the confidence to get angry with what strikes them as rank stupidity, or to blow up bridges with people they’ve become vexed with, or to state a disagreement emphatically and to call another person stupid, monstrous or a liar to their face. Once they have said something, they know they can’t take it back but they don’t really want to. Part of their frankness is based on the notion that they can understand at speed the merits of any situation, the character of others and the true nature of their own commitments.

  The Polite person is less certain on all these fronts. They are conscious that what they feel strongly about today might not be what they end up thinking next week. They recognise that ideas that sound strange or misguided to them can be attempts to state – in garbled forms – concepts that are genuinely important to other people and that they themselves may come around to with time. They see their own minds as having great capacities for error and as being subject to imperceptible moods that will mislead them – and so are keen not to make statements that can’t be taken back or to make enemies of people they might decide are worthy of respect down the line.

  The Polite person will be drawn to deploying softening, tentative language and holding back on criticism wherever possible. They will suggest that an idea might not be quite right. They will say that a project is attractive, but that it could be interesting to look at alternatives as well. They will consider that an intellectual opponent may well have a point. They aren’t just lying or dodging tough decisions. Their behaviour is symptomatic of a nuanced and intelligent belief that few ideas are totally without merit, no proposals are 100 per cent wrong, and almost no one is entirely foolish. They work with a conception of the world in which good and bad are deviously entangled and in which bits of the truth are always showing up in unfamiliar guises in unexpected people. Their politeness is a logical, careful response to the complexity they identify in themselves and in the world.

  Both the Frank and the Polite person have important lessons to teach us. But it may be that at this point in history, it is the distinctive wisdom of the Polite person that is most ripe for rediscovery and articulation – and that may have the most effective power to take the edge off some of the more brutal and counter-productive consequences of our reigning Frank ideology.

  III.

  Charm

  1

  What Is the Purpose of Friendship?

  Friendship should be one of the high points of existence, yet it’s also the most routinely disappointing reality.

  Too often, you’re at supper at someone’s house; there’s an impressive spread and the hosts have evidently gone to a lot of trouble. But the conversation is meandering and devoid of real interest. It flits from an over-long description of the failings of the inflight service on a particular airline to a strangely heated discussion about the tax code. The intentions of the hosts are hugely touching, but (as so often) we go home wondering what on earth the whole performance was about.

  The key to the problem of friendship is found in an odd-sounding place: a lack of a sense of purpose. Our attempts at friendship tend to go adrift, because we collectively resist the task of developing a clear picture of what friendship is really for.

  The problem is that we are often uncomfortable with the idea of friendship having any declared purpose, because we associate purpose with the least attractive and most cynical motives. Yet purpose doesn’t have to ruin friendship. In fact, the more we define what a friendship might be for, the more we can focus in on what we should be doing with every person in our lives – or indeed the more we can helpfully conclude that we shouldn’t be with someone at all.

  There are at least five things we might be trying to do with the people we meet:

  i: Networking

  Networking is an unfairly maligned idea. We are small, fragile creatures in a vast world. Our individual capacities are insufficient to realise the demands of our imaginations. Therefore, we need collaborators: accomplices who can align their abilities and energies with ours. This idea of friendship was given a lot of space in Classical literature. Take The Argonauts, the legendary Ancient Greek tale that traced how a heroic captain called Jason networked in order to assemble a band of friends to sail on the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece. Later, the same idea emerged when Jesus networked to put together a band of 12 disciples with whom he could spread one or two world-changing ideas about forgiveness and compassion. Rather than diminish our own efforts as we hand out our business cards, such prestigious examples can show how elevated and ambitious networking friendships could ideally be.

  ii: Reassurance

  The human condition is full of terror. We are always on the verge of disgrace, danger and disappointment. And yet such are the rules of polite conduct that we are permanently in danger of imagining that we are the only ones to be as crazy as we know we are. We badly need friends because, with the people we know only superficially, there are few confessions of sexual compulsion, regret, rage and confusion. They refuse to admit that they too are going slightly out of their minds. The reassuring friend gives us access to a very necessary and accurate sense of their own humiliations and follies; an insight with which we can begin to judge ourselves and our sad and compulsive sides more compassionately.

  iii: Fun

  Despite talk of hedonism and immediate gratification, life gives us constant lessons in the need to be serious. We have to guard our dignity, avoid looking like a fool and pass as a mature adult. The pressure becomes onerous, and in the end even dangerous.

  That is why we constantly need access to people we can trust enough to be silly with. They might spend most of their time training to be a neurosurgeon or advising medium-sized companies about their tax liabilities, but when we are together, we can be therapeutically daft. We can put on accents, share lewd fantasies or doodl
e on the newspaper, adding a huge nose and a missing front tooth to the president, or giving the fashion model distended ears and masses of curly hair. The fun friend solves the problem of shame around important but unprestigious sides of our selves.

  iv: Clarifying our Minds

  To a surprising degree, it is very hard to think on our own. The mind is skittish and squeamish. As a result, many issues lie confused within us. We feel angry but are not sure why. Something is wrong with our job but we can’t pin it down. The thinking friend holds us to the task. They ask gentle but probing questions that act as a mirror that assists us with the task of knowing ourselves.

  v: Holding on to the Past

  A number of friends have nothing to say to who we are now, but we keep seeing them, get a little bored in their company – yet are not wrong to retain them in our lives. Perhaps we knew them from school or university, or we once spent a very significant holiday with them 20 years ago, or we became friendly when our children were at kindergarten together. They embody a past version of ourselves from which we’re now distant and yet to which we remain loyal. They help us to understand where we have come from and what once mattered. They aren’t relevant to who we are today, but not all of our identity is entirely contemporary – as our continued commitment to them attests.

  One side effect of seeking more precision about what we’re trying to do with our social lives is that we might conclude that, in many cases, we are spending time with people for no truly identifiable reason. These proto-friends share none of our professional ambitions or interests; they aren’t reassuring and may in fact be secretly excited by the possibility of our failure; we can’t be cathartically silly around them; they aren’t interested in furthering either our or their path to self-knowledge, and they aren’t connected with important phases of our lives. They are simply in our orbit as a result of an unhappy accident that we have been too sentimental to correct.

  We should dare to be a little ruthless. Culling acquaintances isn’t a sign that we have lost belief in friendship. It is evidence that we are becoming clearer and more demanding about what a friendship could be. In the best way, the price of knowing what friendship is for may be a few more evenings in our own company.

  2

  The Problem of Over-Friendliness

  There is a particularly poignant way to be a social disaster: through over-friendliness, a pattern of behaviour driven by the very best of motives that ends up feeling as irritating as outright rudeness.

  We meet the over-friendly at the office, laughing at the jokes of the senior management; behind the desk at the hotel, wishing Sir or Madam a highly enjoyable stay; and across the table on a first date, lavishly endorsing their would-be partner’s every opinion about recent books and films.

  The over-friendly are guilty of three large errors:

  · First, they believe they must agree on everything. If the other says the world is going to the dogs, they immediately nod in consent. If, a second later, there is a prediction of a utopian technological future, they will agree just as much. When we say something clever, they are thrilled. When we say something daft, they like it no less. Their ritual approval may seem attentive. In truth, it’s a version of not listening at all.

  · Second, their praise is ill-targeted. Plenty of nice things are being said, but they are not the ones we happen to value. They claim to love our umbrella, our credit card is from their favourite bank, our chairs are deeply beautiful, we apparently have a nice way of holding our fork … but none of this counts for us if it isn’t connected up with our own sense of meaning and achievement. Everyone loves being praised, but to be praised inaccurately is its own kind of insult.

  · Third, their friendliness is remorselessly upbeat. They point out how well we look, how impressive our job sounds, how perfect our family life seems. They want to make us feel good, but they dangerously raise the cost of revealing any of the lonelier, darker, more melancholic aspects of our characters.

  By contrast, the less ardently friendly and therefore properly pleasing person will keep three things closely in mind:

  · First, that disagreement isn’t necessarily terrible – it may be exhilarating to be contradicted when we don’t feel that our dignity is at stake and we are learning something valuable at the hands of a combative interlocutor.

  · Second, that people only want to be complimented on things they are actively proud of. The value of the currency of praise depends on it not being spent too freely. The truly pleasing person knows they must pass over many things in discreet silence; when they eventually do bestow a blessing, their words have a proper resonance.

  · Third, that we are cheered up not so much by people who say cheery things, as by people who appear to understand us. This usually means people who sympathise with our sorrows and show a willingness to travel with us to the anxious, hesitant or confused parts of our psyches.

  What enables the pleasing person to please is their capacity to hold on in social encounters, even with rather intimidating and alien-seeming people, to an intimate knowledge of what satisfies them. They instinctively use their own experience as a base for thinking about the needs of others. By contrast, the over-friendly person allows themselves to forget their own likes and dislikes, under the pressure of an excessive humility that suggests to them that anyone impressive could not possibly share in the principles that drive their own psychology.

  At the core of the pleasing person’s charm is a metaphysical insight: that other people cannot, deep down, be very ‘other’. Therefore, in core ways, what one knows about oneself will be the master key to understanding and getting along with strangers – not in every case, but enough of the time to make the difference.

  Over-friendliness is not just a feature of one-to-one encounters; it is an entrenched flaw within modern consumer society more generally. This explains why the airline exuberantly wishes us a perfect day upon landing in a new city; why the waiter hopes we’ll have a truly wonderful time eating the first course; and why the attendant in a clothes shop pulls such a large smile along with their suggestion that we try on a new pair of trousers.

  Here, too, the cause of an asphyxiating friendliness is a sudden modesty and loss of confidence around using oneself as a guide to the temperament and needs of a stranger. Companies become over-impressed by the apparent ‘otherness’ of their clients and thereby overlook how many aspects of their own selves are being trampled upon in a service context. They sidestep the knowledge that just after landing back home after a trip abroad, we may feel horrified at the thought of our responsibilities in the family; or that moods of introversion and sadness can accompany us even inside a clothes boutique. They behave as if they were cheerful Martians encountering broken, complex humans for the very first time.

  The fault of the excessively over-friendly person can often be traced back to a touching modesty. They are guilty of nothing more than a loss of confidence in the validity of their own experiences as a guide to the pleasure of others. The failure of the over-friendly types teaches us that in order to succeed at pleasing anyone, we must first accept the risk that we might displease them through a candid expression of our being. Successful charm relies on an initial secure sense that we could survive social failure. Rehearsing how it would in the end be OK to make a hash of seducing someone is perhaps the best way to seduce them properly and confidently. We must reconcile ourselves to the risk of not making friends to stand any chance of actually making any.

  3

  How to Overcome Shyness

  Because shyness can grip us in such powerful ways, it is tempting to think of it as an immutable part of our emotional make-up, with roots that extend far into our personality and perhaps biology that we could never extirpate. But in truth, shyness is based on a set of ideas about the world that are eminently amenable to change through a process of reason because they are founded on some touchingly malleable errors of thought.

  Shyness is rooted in a distinctive way of interpreting str
angers. The shy aren’t awkward around everyone; they are tongue-tied around those who seem most unlike them on the basis of a range of surface markers: of age, class, tastes, habits, beliefs, backgrounds or religions. With no unkindness meant, we could define shyness as a form of ‘provincialism’ of the mind; an over-attachment to the incidentals of one’s own life and experience that unfairly casts others into the role of daunting, unfathomable, unknowable foreigners.

  On contact with a person from another world or ‘province’, the shy allow their minds to be dominated by a forbidding aura of difference. They may (silently and awkwardly) say to themselves that there is nothing to be done or said because the other is famous while they belong to the province of the obscure; or because the other is very old while their province is that of 20-somethings; or because the other is very clever while their province is that of the nonintellectual; or because the other is from the land of very beautiful girls while they hail from the province of average-looking boys. This is why there can be no grounds to laugh, to hazard a playful remark or to feel at ease. The shy person doesn’t intend to be unpleasant or unfriendly. They simply experience all otherness as an insurmountable barrier to making their own goodwill and personality apparent.

  We can imagine that, in the history of humanity, shyness was always the first response. The people over the hill would have triggered the feeling because they were farmers while you were fishermen, or they spoke with a lilt in their vowels while your diction was monotone and flat.