On Being Nice Read online

  The good flirt isn’t making things up; they are not merely flattering or manipulating. They are offering us a view we very rarely get of ourselves as desirable. A few people, of course, have an excessive belief in their own attractiveness. But mostly we suffer gravely in the opposite direction. We generally learn – through a rich sequence of rebuffs and criticisms and via intelligent modesty that alerts us to our own shortcomings – to see ourselves as far from ideal. We know we’re in some ways not terribly lovable or exceptionally alluring. This picture of ourselves is not inaccurate but is not entirely true either.

  The good flirt carries out an important psychological mission: to restore balance to our view of ourselves. They remind us that, for all our failings of character and bodily liabilities, we are, in certain ways, properly appealing and, in a better situation than the one we find ourselves in, a truly interesting person to want to spend a night with. The flirt supplies an antidote to a characteristic sickness of maturity: an excessively negative view of ourselves. It is because we are so prone to self-hatred, so liable to forget how to appreciate ourselves properly, that we need more vigorously, and with fewer qualms, to engage in the important business of flirting with one another.

  The good flirt is doing crucially important social work, via a well-timed smirk, a coyly arched eyebrow, a quiet observation or an expectedly warm remark. They understand that being recognised as erotically appealing is a hugely beneficial and ethical need of the soul, because feeling desirable is key to rendering us more patient, more generous, more energetic and more content. It is a quiet tragedy that this widely consequential need should so often be expected to pass through the desperately narrow gate of sex.

  The good flirt wisely and liberally rebels against such a stricture. Their mission is to give erotic endorsement (and all the benefits this brings) a larger opportunity in life, liberating it from the tiny, difficult window of opportunity offered by an actual requirement to start to make love. The flirt knows how to broaden the circle of attractiveness, They know – in essence – how to love someone without needing to give more than they should ever realistically be expected to. The ideal flirt is a pioneer in a crucial democratic science: they are attempting to correctly identify attractiveness in a way that will serve the many rather than the few. We should not only be grateful to good flirts; we should try to become good flirts ourselves.

  7

  Why Kind People Always Lie

  Truly good people are always ready and even, at times, highly enthusiastic about telling lies. This sounds odd only because we are in the grip of a heroic but indiscriminate and delusional addiction to truth-telling.

  A lot of this can be blamed on the first president of the United States, George Washington. Legend recounts how, at the age of six, he was given a little axe as a present. He was so excited with the gift that he went straight into the garden and hacked down a beautiful cherry tree. His father was furious when he discovered the tree and asked George if he was responsible. The boy was said to have replied: ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie. It was I.’ The story is probably apocryphal, but it has stuck because it encapsulates an ideal to which we are intensely collectively committed: a devotion to the truth in spite of the cost it exacts on oneself. In this scenario, the liar is odious because they seek to evade a necessary and important truth for the sake of low personal gain.

  But good people do not lie for their own benefit. They aren’t protecting themselves and they aren’t disloyal to the facts out of mendacity: they tell lies because (paradoxical as it sounds at first) they love the truth intensely – and out of good will for the person they are deceiving.

  We are ready enough to admit to a role for lies in certain situations. You might be visiting an elderly aunt who prides herself on her talent for carrot cakes with vanilla icing. But her heyday is long gone. Now she muddles up the recipe and sometimes forgets how long the butter has been in the fridge. The result is pretty off-putting. But it’s deeply important for her to feel that she’s still able to please others. That’s why you lie.

  The lie isn’t produced to protect oneself. It is told out of loyalty to a bigger truth – that one loves the aunt – that would be threatened by full disclosure. As is so often the case, a great truth has to pass into the mind of another person via a smaller falsehood.

  What makes falsehoods so necessary is our proclivity for making unfortunate associations. It is, of course, entirely possible to love someone deeply and at the same time believe they are terrible at baking. But in our own minds, the rejection of our cakes tends to feel synonymous with the rejection of our being. We’re forcing any half-decent person to lie to us by the obtuseness of our thought processes. It is because the aunt is in the grip of a falsehood (‘if you don’t like my cake, you can’t like me’) that we will have to offer her a dose of untruth (‘I like your cake’) by which we can make sure that a bigger truth (‘I like you’) remains safe.

  The same principle applies in more tricky situations. Suppose a woman goes away to a conference. One night, after a lovely conversation in the bar, she gets carried away and slips into bed with an international colleague. They don’t make love but have a sweet time. They rub their lips together and entwine their legs. They will almost certainly never see one another again, it wasn’t an attempt to start a long-term relationship, and it meant very little. When the woman gets home, her partner asks how her evening was. She says she watched CNN and ordered a club sandwich in her room on her own.

  She lies because she knows her partner well and can predict how he would respond to the truth. He would be wounded to the core, would be convinced that his wife didn’t love him and would probably conclude that divorce was the only option.

  But this assessment of the truth would not be accurate. In reality, it is entirely possible to love someone deeply but go to bed with another person every so often. And yet, kind people understand the entrenched and socially endorsed associations between infidelity and callousness. For almost all of us, the news ‘I spent a night with a colleague from the Singapore office’ (which is true) has to end up meaning ‘I don’t love you anymore’ (which is not true). So we have to say ‘I didn’t sleep with anyone’ (which is untrue) in the name of securing the greater idea: ‘I still love you’ (which is overwhelmingly true).

  However much they love the truth, good people have an even greater commitment to something else: being kind towards others. They grasp (and make allowances for) the ease with which a truth can produce unhelpful convictions in the minds of others and are therefore not over-committed to accuracy at every turn. Their loyalty is reserved for something they take to be far more important than literal narration: the sanity and well-being of their audiences. Telling the truth, they understand, isn’t a matter of the sentence-by-sentence veracity of one’s words; it’s a matter of ensuring that, after one has spoken, the other person can be left with an accurate picture of reality.

  This concern for the well-being of others explains why kind people only ever lie when there is little chance of their untruths being detected. They know that a lie that gets unearthed will cause proper and unjustifiable trouble, leading the other person to a second and even more radically false conclusion: not only that ‘you don’t love me’ (first untruth) but also that ‘you lied to me because you don’t love me’ (a second, even greater, untruth).

  It can feel condescending to hear the logic of the good liar spelled out. But that’s only because we don’t like to acknowledge the fragility of our own minds. We may believe we are heroically ready to embrace the truth, however painful. We may insist that others should tell us everything, whatever they do. But we thereby discount our own powerful tendencies to emotional indigestion. It’s why we should not only occasionally tell untruths, but actively hope that, from time to time, others will lie to us – and quietly hope that we will never find out that they have.

  8

  How to Be a Good Listener

  Being a good listener is one of the most important an
d enchanting life skills anyone can have. Yet few of us know how to do it; not because we are evil, but because no one has taught us how and – on a related point – few have listened sufficiently well to us. So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others, but reluctant to hear them. Friendship degenerates into a socialised egoism.

  As with most things, the answer lies in education. Our civilisation is full of useful books on how to speak – Cicero’s Orator and Aristotle’s Rhetoric were two of the greatest from the ancient world – but sadly no one has ever written a book called The Listener. There is a range of things that the good listener is doing that makes it so pleasant to spend time in their company.

  Without necessarily realising it, we are often propelled into conversation by something that feels both urgent and somehow undefined. We’re bothered at work; we’re toying with more ambitious career moves; we’re not sure if so and so is right for us; a relationship is in difficulties; we’re fretting about something or feeling a bit low about life in general (without being able to put a finger on exactly what’s wrong); or perhaps we’re very excited and enthusiastic about something – though the reasons for our passion are tricky to pin down.

  At heart, all these are issues in search of elucidation. The good listener knows that we’d ideally move – via conversation with another person – from a confused and agitated state of mind to one that was more focused and serene. Together, we would work out what was really at stake. But, in reality, this tends not to happen because there isn’t enough awareness of the desire for clarification within conversation; there aren’t enough good listeners. People tend to assert rather than analyse. They restate in many different ways the fact that they are worried, excited, sad or hopeful. And their interlocutor listens, but doesn’t assist them to discover more.

  Good listeners fight against this with a range of conversational gambits. They hover as the other speaks; they offer remarks of support; they make gentle, positive gestures: a sigh of sympathy, a nod of encouragement, a strategic ‘hmm’ of interest. All the time they are egging the other to go deeper into issues. They love saying: ‘tell me more about …’; ‘I was fascinated when you said …’; ‘why did that happen, do you think?’, or ‘how did you feel about that?’

  The good listener takes it for granted that they will encounter vagueness in the conversation of others. But they don’t condemn, rush or become impatient, because they see vagueness as a universal and highly significant trouble of the mind that it is the task of a true friend to help with. The good listener never forgets how hard – and how important – it is to know our own minds. Often, we’re in the vicinity of something, but we can’t quite close in on what’s really bothering or exciting us. The good listener knows we benefit hugely from encouragement to elaborate, to go into greater detail, to push a little further. We need someone who, rather than launching forth, will simply say two rare magic words: ‘Go on …’.

  You mention a sibling and they want to know a bit more. What was the relationship like in childhood? How has it changed over time? They are curious where our concerns and excitements come from. They ask thing like: why did that particularly bother you? Why was that such a big thing for you? They keep our histories in mind, they might refer back to something we said before, and we feel they’re building up a deeper base of engagement.

  It is fatally easy to say vague things: we simply mention that something is lovely or terrible, nice or annoying. But we don’t really explore why we feel this way. The good listener has a productive, friendly suspicion of some of our own first statements and is after the deeper attitudes that are lurking in the background. They take things we say like ‘I’m fed up with my job’ or ‘My partner and I are having a lot of rows …’ and help us to concentrate on what it really is about the job we don’t like or what the rows might be about deep down.

  They’re bringing to listening an ambition to clear up underlying issues. They don’t just see conversation as the swapping of anecdotes. They are reconnecting the chat you’re having over pizza with the philosophical ambitions of Socrates, whose dialogues were records of his attempts to help his fellow Athenians understand and examine their own underlying ideas and values.

  A key move of the good listener is not always to follow every byway or sub-plot that the speaker introduces, for they may be getting lost and further from their own point than they would themselves wish. The good listener is helpfully suspicious, knowing that their purpose is to focus the fundamental themes of the speaker, rather than veering off with them into every side road. They are always looking to take the speaker back to their last reasonable point – saying, ‘Yes, yes, but you were saying just a moment ago …’. Or, ‘So, ultimately, what do you think it was about …’ The good listener (paradoxically) is a skilled interrupter. But they don’t (as most people do) interrupt to intrude their own ideas; they interrupt to help the other person get back to their original, more sincere, yet elusive concerns.

  The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. They know how insane we all are. That’s why others can feel comfortable being heard by them. They give the impression they recognise and accept our follies; they don’t flinch when we mention a particular desire. They reassure us they’re not going to shred our dignity. A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed or obsessed we are. Saying one feels like a failure or a pervert could mean being dropped.

  The good listener signals early and clearly that they don’t see us in these terms. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled by. It is only too easy to end up experiencing ourselves as strangely cursed and exceptionally deviant or uniquely incapable. But the good listener makes their own strategic confessions, so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal human being – that is, very muddled and radically imperfect. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover or a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

  When we are in the company of people who listen well, we experience a very powerful pleasure, but too often we don’t realise what this person is doing that is so nice. By paying strategic attention to our feelings of satisfaction, we can learn to magnify them and offer them to others, who will notice, heal – and repay the favour in turn. Listening deserves discovery as one of the keys to a good society.

  9

  How to Be Open-Minded

  One of the distinctive features of social life is that most of the people we meet seem quite normal. They often appear reasonably responsible and logical, harbour little self-hatred or compulsion, and strike us as cheerful and more or less content with their partners and their lives.

  This can feel hugely and horribly at odds with what we know of life from our own minds. Beyond a certain age, once we have lived a little inside ourselves, we tend to become acquainted with a range of deeply alarming and regrettable sides to our characters: we recognise the extent of our confusion, compulsion, sexual waywardness, disloyalty, meanness, insecurity and peculiarity.

  This gap between the knowledge we have of ourselves and the public evidence of the nature of others can end up feeling intensely bewildering and painful. We may wonder why we may have ended up quite so strange, our lives so difficult, our characters so crooked.

  Our sense of isolation is never greater than when we run into the armies, widely distributed through society, of the closed-minded. Full of broadly benevolent intention, these types nevertheless keep a close eye on any signs of the more regrettable aspects of human nature and are ready to censor their appearance from the first. We learn to recognise their disapproval and to keep our shadow sides especially private in their vicinity – which protects our reputations, but increases our unde
rlying sense of freakish isolation.

  By contrast, there are those rare individuals who seem able to take most of what we are for granted from the first – and whom we gratefully honour with the term ‘open-minded’. Without particular surprise or fuss, they assume from the first that being human is a messy and impure business and that any person they come across is likely to contain a host of less than ideal dimensions and at points be really quite close to madness. They know, simply on the basis of your membership of the human race, that you have thought and done a range of wild, unethical and sometimes lamentable things. They don’t know the details, but they correctly assume the broad shape of the issue. They calmly accept the gap between how a person appears and what they are probably like in private. For them, a person who seems normal is just someone they don’t yet know very well.

  The open-minded are unafraid of what is inside the human soul for two reasons: first, because they are confident that there is in almost everyone a huge and secure gap between feelings and actions. They understand that most of what we fantasise about will never be played out in reality and therefore doesn’t pose an active threat either to ourselves or to the social order. We may spend a lot of time entertaining what we’ll say to our enemies, how we’ll give up on everything and everyone (and the world will be sorry), and crafting lurid sexual scenarios contrary to every civilised dictate. But, as the open-minded know, fantasising is not a prelude to action: it’s an alternative to it. So our odder thoughts can be looked at, discussed and sometimes laughed over – in the secure knowledge that they will eventually be put back safely in the box. What’s more, such examination won’t aggravate them; it will help to contain and neuter them.