In Defence of Nice

[rowyn]

"You're so nice
You're not good you're not bad you're just nice
I'm not good I'm not bad I'm just right
I'm the witch
You're the world."
-- the Witch, from the musical "Into the Woods"

This stanza comes while the giant's wife is on a rampage through the town in "Into the Woods". She is hunting for Jack, who killed her husband. The witch wants to give Jack to her so she'll leave the rest of them alone. The townspeople refuse.

It's a powerful stanza, made more powerful by being delivered by the very talented Bernadette Peters. I first heard it in 1991; it is the first time I clearly remember hearing niceness disparaged.

"Nice" is not "doing the right thing". "Nice" is being pleasant and agreeable toward the people who are around you. Sacrificing your neighbor to the giantess is not nice, even if he did respond to her husband's threat to kill him by robbing her house and killing her husband.

On the other hand, is it the right thing to do, either?

Since then, decrying "niceness" has felt like a thinkpiece staple. Nice is getting along with people even when they're wrong. Nice is caving to peer pressure. Nice lacks self-confidence. Nice is for children. "Nice guys" aren't nice at all, they're entitled and manipulative. Nice is weak. "Nice", as a label, is an insult.

Nice is feminine-coded.

"Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice".

I aspire to kindness. "Kind" is not the same as "nice". Kindness is warmth, friendship, and compassion. Nice is pleasant and agreeable. Nice is Kindness's maligned younger cousin, accused of superficiality and fakery. Kindness can be cruel, but niceness never can.

I have long regarded this as an important distinction. When I talk about my aspirations, I am careful to say "kind" and not "nice". But as I get older, the distinction feels increasingly like splitting hairs.

The truth is, I don't think it is a kindness to tell a young artist "it's too hard to make a living in art, you're not that good and probably never will be, just focus on getting a regular job instead." It is not kindness to give unsolicited criticism to an author of their work, no matter how weak it is or how much I dislike it. Perhaps the former would be happier if they had a steady job and no dreams. Perhaps the latter would write better books with my advice.

Perhaps it's not my call to make.

I write fantasy novels and I can spin a million hypotheticals where the "right thing" is cruel or harsh or alienating. But in my actual life, interacting with actual people, I am hard pressed to think of a time where a situation was improved because someone decided to be mean. It's happened, I'm sure. I just don't remember it.

I do remember that one woman I worked with as a teaching assistant, who told me that all my co-workers hated me and wanted me to stop talking to them because I was clueless and rude, but they wouldn't tell me so because it wasn't "nice".

I am sure she thought she was doing the right thing.

I have many regrets in my life, but "I was too nice" has never been one of them. This is no doubt in part because niceness has never come easily to me. I don't mean to deride anyone who feels that they need to be less nice because people take advantage of them. I'm not going to say you're wrong if you think you have to take a stand against evil even if that means being unkind to some people doing the wrong thing. You do what you have to do. 

I just think I'm done with making fun of niceness. Being pleasant and agreeable is hard work, too, and it makes the lives of the people around one a little bit better. I'm not going to sneer at that as "merely nice". The pleasant, agreeable, nice people of the world are not the ones making it a worse place to live. Quite the opposite, really.

Comments

[wyste]

The place that I find people arguing most strongly against niceness is in protest movements, because very seldom are protest movements nice. They're generally angry and inconvenient, and told that if they were just discussing things indoors at a reasonable volume, everyone would like them better. I'm not really an angry protest movement person.

I admit, I've had some snide things to say about niceness myself, and you're right that it is feminine-coded. This is a thoughtful one. The world does need peacemakers. What I find distressing is arguments between peacemakers and the confrontational about whether one should be a peacemaker or confrontational, as if we should all do the same thing - as if they aren't complimentary parts of a group.

[tuftears]

There is definitely nothing wrong with being nice.

About that "one woman"... I'd definitely take that with a big grain of salt. She could have been projecting-- maybe she fears that's what people think about *her*, but she doesn't want it to be true so she tells other people that's what people think about *them*.

You're definitely the opposite of "clueless and rude"!

[rowyn]

Yeah. I don't want to tell protesters not to protest, but the "being nice will just destroy everything forever" sentiment seems a little lacking in nuance. :/

[wyste]

Likewise the 'why can't you just stop being angry' sentiment. I keep rolling back around to the loyal opposition and engaging in good faith. One thing Obama was good at was engaging white people in good faith - he genuinely liked them.

Myself, I'm trying to figure out how to respond to fellow liberals with 'not my President' sentiments. I think it's corrosive, but I don't really want to call people corrosive. >.>

[rowyn]

Awww. ♥ And, yeah, I hardly ever think of her any more.

[rowyn]

I like "loyal opposition", yes. It's a good way to put it.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I always thought 'you have to be cruel to be kind' was bullshit that cruel people said to try to make themselves feel better.

Then again, in general I'd rather have absolute definitions of words and situations in which the generally positive words were not the appropriate thing to do. So for example, I'll go with D+D and say 'good' means 'helping others' and if there's a situation where someone should not be helped, that's a situation where being good is a bad idea.

I haven't run into the 'decrying nice' phenomenon, really, aside from the 'nice guys' meme where the point is 'you're not really being nice, you're being manipulative' not 'being nice is bad'.

(And I'm suspicious of that meme, even, but I'm not going to go into that now.)

Kind and nice are synonyms as far as I can tell without any real difference in meaning except for alternate definitions (eg, 'nice' can also be used to describe something inanimate).

[3rdragon]

One place where I do think that unsolicted critique of an author's work can be warranted is if the work is problematic in some way -- reinforces harmful stereotypes, etc. There I feel like it's the job of people with privilege to call out other people with privilege when they're being hurtful. But I wouldn't call that "nice" (and won't pretend that that critique would be fun to get), I'd call it "being responsible" or something along those lines.

[rowyn]

To be clear: I have no problem with people using a public forum (their own blog, Twitter, Amazon reviews, Goodreads, etc.) to criticize a published author's work.

I am less convinced of the value of going to the author's blog or tracking down the author's email address so that one can be sure to tell them directly what a hash one thinks they made of X, Y and Z. It's more justified if they made a hash out of their book in a way that harms people, granted, but I still don't feel like that kind of confrontation with the author is ether productive or responsible. If one needs to signal that "this is unacceptable", any public forum will do; it needn't be the author's doorstep. If one hopes to get the author to stop doing it, well, direct and uninvited confrontation is at least as likely to make the double down on their mistakes as it is to convince them they made one. :|

[rowyn]

Your first paragraph is particularly apt. :D

I looked up the definitions of "nice" and "kind", and I can see why nice gets more maligned: it's "pleasant and agreeable" vs "compassionate and warm". So there's more of a sense that "nice" is something you fake to get along and "kind" is sincere. But, yeah, it's hair-splitting. It's not like you can tell them apart from the outside. -_-