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I've been meaning to post some coherent thoughts on niceness for a while but I think I need to post some incoherent ones first to get my thoughts in order :)
So: I'm a "nice" person, in that I'm friendly, and polite, and non-threatening, and passive (and that's what I'm going to mean by "nice" in this post. I realise that's not the only definition). I used to feel rather smug about this, and wish other people were more like me(*). But the older I get the more I realise that not only is this "niceness" harmful to me (as I get all repressed and ignored) but it can also be harmful to those around me, and stems largely from entirely selfish motivations.
Disclaimers like whoa, I'm definitely just stream-of-consciousnessing here. And have a headache :)
EDIT: This is a bunch of thoughts about the flaws of niceness, mainly as it relates to me and my behaviour. Niceness has a lot of benefits too, I just didn't go into them. Also people make some good points in the comments.
I do not deal well with conflict. If I'm afraid, or angry, or embarrassed, my brain shuts down and I freak out, either I freeze and can't think of what to say, or I burst into tears, or say something really really stupid. Often all three.
Now I've been working on this and don't freak out as much as I used to, but the main coping technique I've developed over the past 3 decades or so is to be really good at avoiding conflict. If everyone likes me, and I never say or do anything aggressive or uncomfortable, and only ever ask for things in a passive indirect way, noone will ever get angry at me, or decide to pick on me, or whatever. This is accentuated by the way women are in general socialised to be "nice", and coming from a "nice" emotionally repressed, passive aggressive family.
And this works. But it means I end up keeping silent on things that upset me, and not disagreeing with people who I know won't take it well, and overall not getting what I want and being emotionally repressed. This led to Much Badness with my ex boyfriend taking advantage of my "niceness" and since then (1998! I am so old) I've been working towards expressing my anger with people, and overall saying what I think and what I want.
Now some of my primary values are honesty, truth, non-hypocrisy etc. I've always felt that if everyone is calm and logical and polite then it's much easier to get to the truth and avoid all the confusing emotional crap and intimidation that goes along with conflict and rudeness.
But, again around 1998, I started meeting guys(**) in unisfa who in a lot of ways had similar values to me, but felt that politeness meant lying about what you really feel, and that the best way to get to the truth was to avoid all the polite fictions and speak the honest unvarnished truth. (This is probably a gross misrepresentation of their ideals. It's just the impression I got ten years ago!)
Of course it doesn't work that way for me: once people start yelling at me, I can't think, so there's no way for me to express my opinion. But it occurred to me: what if they (or other people) couldn't express themselves as well in my sort of argument? What makes mine inherently better?
And as time's gone on I've seen a lot of examples of calm, "rational" people passive aggressively silencing their critics/opponents by insisting on a "polite" discourse which subtly favours their POV. One of the big ones is to act as if some horrible, hurtful, but "politely" expressed opinion deserves a calm rational, carefully cited refutation, and that anyone who gets angry about it is being rude, and that that rudeness is a much more serious offense. Once someone has been "rude" you can then throw your hands in the air and dismiss everyone who disagrees with you as aggressive and overemotional. And a lot of the time of course the definition of "rudeness" is applied inconsistently, and really means "anyone who tells me I am wrong, or gives the impression of having been made angry by my words".
Once you start limiting the boundaries of "acceptable" debate, it's not too hard to use it as an excuse for excluding people you don't like. It's also an excuse to derail a conversation by being a concern troll. One of the common arguments is "You shouldn't do anything that hurts other people's feelings" while completely ignoring (or glossing over) the fact that these "hurtful" actions are in self defense in response to earlier hurtful actions.
Passive aggression is still aggression, it's just sneakier and easier to deny.
Little white lies done for politeness's sake are still lies. If I'm "nice" to someone to their face but complain about them behind their back, that's actually not very "nice".
And if someone is treating someone else like crap in front of me, but I don't call them on it to avoid conflict? Then I am complicit. If I call them on it but am nice to them later? Well, I may still be being complicit (I'm still thinking about that one)
On the other hand, I do NOT like the free-for-all 4-chan-esque approach of everyone being as aggressive and offensive as they like. Not just because it doesn't suit me personally, but because, like overly narrow "politeness", it asymmetrically silences those with less power in the conversation and supports the status quo. Aggression has much more effect if you have more power behind it (ie you're big guy vs a little guy, or a man vs a woman, or a white person vs a black person, etc) and so I still think that too much of it is harmful.
I guess, in short: do not mistake "niceness" for moral superiority.
And that's the end of my incoherent ramble :)
Some links (many of these grew from discussions of racism, but I've seen the same techniques in everything from shipping wars to my grandma bullying my mum about who pays for dinner)
(*)A lot of people assume my "nice" demeanor indicates a humble spirit, but apart from a few typical geek issues with self esteem I am egotistical as heck :D
(**)And again we hit the different ways men and women are socialised. Obviously it's not always that simple, my dad is a lot like me for example. But I think the female dominatedness of fanfic fandom is one reason the whole "tone" thing can get really out of hand.
So: I'm a "nice" person, in that I'm friendly, and polite, and non-threatening, and passive (and that's what I'm going to mean by "nice" in this post. I realise that's not the only definition). I used to feel rather smug about this, and wish other people were more like me(*). But the older I get the more I realise that not only is this "niceness" harmful to me (as I get all repressed and ignored) but it can also be harmful to those around me, and stems largely from entirely selfish motivations.
Disclaimers like whoa, I'm definitely just stream-of-consciousnessing here. And have a headache :)
EDIT: This is a bunch of thoughts about the flaws of niceness, mainly as it relates to me and my behaviour. Niceness has a lot of benefits too, I just didn't go into them. Also people make some good points in the comments.
I do not deal well with conflict. If I'm afraid, or angry, or embarrassed, my brain shuts down and I freak out, either I freeze and can't think of what to say, or I burst into tears, or say something really really stupid. Often all three.
Now I've been working on this and don't freak out as much as I used to, but the main coping technique I've developed over the past 3 decades or so is to be really good at avoiding conflict. If everyone likes me, and I never say or do anything aggressive or uncomfortable, and only ever ask for things in a passive indirect way, noone will ever get angry at me, or decide to pick on me, or whatever. This is accentuated by the way women are in general socialised to be "nice", and coming from a "nice" emotionally repressed, passive aggressive family.
And this works. But it means I end up keeping silent on things that upset me, and not disagreeing with people who I know won't take it well, and overall not getting what I want and being emotionally repressed. This led to Much Badness with my ex boyfriend taking advantage of my "niceness" and since then (1998! I am so old) I've been working towards expressing my anger with people, and overall saying what I think and what I want.
Now some of my primary values are honesty, truth, non-hypocrisy etc. I've always felt that if everyone is calm and logical and polite then it's much easier to get to the truth and avoid all the confusing emotional crap and intimidation that goes along with conflict and rudeness.
But, again around 1998, I started meeting guys(**) in unisfa who in a lot of ways had similar values to me, but felt that politeness meant lying about what you really feel, and that the best way to get to the truth was to avoid all the polite fictions and speak the honest unvarnished truth. (This is probably a gross misrepresentation of their ideals. It's just the impression I got ten years ago!)
Of course it doesn't work that way for me: once people start yelling at me, I can't think, so there's no way for me to express my opinion. But it occurred to me: what if they (or other people) couldn't express themselves as well in my sort of argument? What makes mine inherently better?
And as time's gone on I've seen a lot of examples of calm, "rational" people passive aggressively silencing their critics/opponents by insisting on a "polite" discourse which subtly favours their POV. One of the big ones is to act as if some horrible, hurtful, but "politely" expressed opinion deserves a calm rational, carefully cited refutation, and that anyone who gets angry about it is being rude, and that that rudeness is a much more serious offense. Once someone has been "rude" you can then throw your hands in the air and dismiss everyone who disagrees with you as aggressive and overemotional. And a lot of the time of course the definition of "rudeness" is applied inconsistently, and really means "anyone who tells me I am wrong, or gives the impression of having been made angry by my words".
Once you start limiting the boundaries of "acceptable" debate, it's not too hard to use it as an excuse for excluding people you don't like. It's also an excuse to derail a conversation by being a concern troll. One of the common arguments is "You shouldn't do anything that hurts other people's feelings" while completely ignoring (or glossing over) the fact that these "hurtful" actions are in self defense in response to earlier hurtful actions.
Passive aggression is still aggression, it's just sneakier and easier to deny.
Little white lies done for politeness's sake are still lies. If I'm "nice" to someone to their face but complain about them behind their back, that's actually not very "nice".
And if someone is treating someone else like crap in front of me, but I don't call them on it to avoid conflict? Then I am complicit. If I call them on it but am nice to them later? Well, I may still be being complicit (I'm still thinking about that one)
On the other hand, I do NOT like the free-for-all 4-chan-esque approach of everyone being as aggressive and offensive as they like. Not just because it doesn't suit me personally, but because, like overly narrow "politeness", it asymmetrically silences those with less power in the conversation and supports the status quo. Aggression has much more effect if you have more power behind it (ie you're big guy vs a little guy, or a man vs a woman, or a white person vs a black person, etc) and so I still think that too much of it is harmful.
I guess, in short: do not mistake "niceness" for moral superiority.
And that's the end of my incoherent ramble :)
Some links (many of these grew from discussions of racism, but I've seen the same techniques in everything from shipping wars to my grandma bullying my mum about who pays for dinner)
- The five geek fallacies EVERY GEEK NEEDS TO READ THIS.
- No More Mr. Nice Guy how "nice guys" actually aren't that nice
- How to Not Sound Racist (if you don't listen very hard) 5 techniques white people use to mask their racism, I found it very compelling.
- cofax7: links, and some meta on rhetoric "Anger is often a more effective tactic than courtesy in getting people to challenge their assumptions"
- I am not the moderator About "nice" white people coming into discussions of racism and thinking they can be the "objective voice of reason".
- Why can't we all be nice in which I rant about the "tone" argument, has more links at the bottom
(*)A lot of people assume my "nice" demeanor indicates a humble spirit, but apart from a few typical geek issues with self esteem I am egotistical as heck :D
(**)And again we hit the different ways men and women are socialised. Obviously it's not always that simple, my dad is a lot like me for example. But I think the female dominatedness of fanfic fandom is one reason the whole "tone" thing can get really out of hand.
no subject
It does feel a bit like you're conflating politeness (certain standards for the form of one's behaviour) with political correctness (adhering absolutely to certain ideologies and silencing those who speak out against them). Politeness seems to me like something which should be defended rather than criticised.
It also seems to me that your definition of "niceness" is quite independent from conflict avoidance and worrying about what others think - which are what I think some of your problems with niceness stem from. These are also two traits I certainly don't have, if only because I'm completely oblivious to what other people think of me. (Similarly I think the big reason that the geek social fallacies haven't affected me is that I don't like other people enough to have the kinds of friendship groups that suffer from geek social fallacies. My natural response to cliquey groups of friends is to run like hell.)
no subject
I don't see that I'm conflating politeness and PCness in this post (I can't see that anything I've said is related to PCness apart from my last paragraph, which is talking about a specific type of situation without PCness or politeness) But as it happens I do see "PC" language as part of politeness: it's a set of general rules used to avoid hurting people's feelings, and like any sort of politeness it's pretty good most of the time but can be too rigid if you apply it dogmatically or place following the "rules" above actual decent behaviour.
The post ended up just being a criticism of niceness/politeness without mentioning it's upsides, mainly because I see those as fairly obvious (to me :)) and couldn't be bothered. But yes, politeness (including careful use of language) does definitely have it's place, and most of the time is the best approach, all things being equal. But there are times when politeness has to be secondary to other more important considerations, and most importantly you shouldn't look at an argument and assume that the more "polite" party is in the right or morally superior. (Not saying you're doing that, but some people do)
I think behaviour matching my definition of "niceness" often follows from conflict avoidance and worrying about what others think, but does not necessarily imply it. Some people really are just naturally passive, friendly etc, or make the choice to be that way for other reasons. I'm just criticising people like me who tend to be nice out of selfishness and then act all morally superior about it.
no subject
no subject
Hmm. You know, I think that may be another one of those socialised gender things again, at least to some extent. Maybe.
no subject
It might be socialised gender, or it might just be me being unusually misanthropic.
no subject
"Right": factually correct about the topic at hand
"Moral high ground": I feel I have been more moral/ethical than my opponent by my own personal standards, which include acknowledging when someone else is correct and you have been incorrect
Public perception has nothing to do with it, apart from the fact that now that I think about it I also value making sure other people understand my POV. They don't have to agree with it, just acknowledge it and see where I'm coming from. Once my POV is understood, I feel I have a grasp of the facts, and I'm comfortable that my behaviour has been ethical, I'm quite happy with an arguments conclusion, regardless of whether or not I "win".
(And in case this isn't clear: I'm not saying my way of arguing is always better than being competitive, it has it's own flaws, I'm just describing it)