The pernicious culture of nice

Nice is destroying civil society in America.

I’m not talking about kindness. Nor am I talking about courtesy. No, nice is another beast altogether, a pernicious and corrosive counterfeit that has gotten its nose into our social tent and needs to be shooed out into the sandstorm.

How, you might ask, could nice be so bad? It’s so…nice.

I’m not a curmudgeon. I believe in being kind – being warm-hearted,, considerate, humane and sympathetic – and think that the world suffers greatly from too little kindness. Kindness benefits the world twice: because it arises from love and concern for others it benefits those who are kind as well as those who are on the receiving end of kind acts.

I’m also a fan of courtesy, nice’s better-bred cousin. Courtesy is the behavioral expression of tolerance and a necessary social lubricant. Without it our social interactions with others who are different than ourselves are fractious and unpleasant. Courtesy is far short of kindness, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is.

I first discovered my dislike of nice while driving. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have driven behind people who are nice. Nice enough to stop in the middle of the street to let someone turn left in front of her. Nice enough to stop for jaywalkers. But it’s not just in traffic, it’s everywhere.

The defining characteristic of nice is indulgence. Nice only cares about its host, not the object of the niceness and not those around him. As a result, as a society we end up with two groups of people: those who are nice and those who have been indulged in , and even rewarded for, their bad behavior. The rest of us put up with the often unpleasant and dangerous results and run the risk of being excoriated for not being nice when we insist that others behave lawfully and correctly.

So remember, if you really care about yourself, other people and society in general, don’t be nice.