The first requirement for being nice is to refrain from killing someone, and there we have a problem. But isn’t it possible that Americans murder each other at much higher rates than most other nationalities not because we are meaner but because we make it easier, through lax gun control? (There is no such thing as a drive-by stabbing.) If the world were polled on which country has friendly, open people, the United States, for all its faults, would be somewhere near the top – about 200 countries ahead of, say, France.
American politics is hardly at its worst level of incivility. Campaign character assassination dates back at least 200 years, though the technology didn’t exist then to spread the mud as far or as quickly. And for all its obnoxiousness, today’s unbridled partisanship may be an indication that the world is a safer place – less in need of papering over differences to meet a common threat. The stakes are smaller, so it’s easier to be disagreeable. At the height of the cold war, we couldn’t afford to spend time arguing over whether a former football player had killed his wife. The Cuban missile crisis would not have worked well on ““Crossfire.''
Nice should not be confused with happy. The old American way of life – all the way into the 1960s – was about tradition, hierarchy and authority. This structure left us a generally more secure and contented people, as Alan Ehrenhalt argues persuasively in ““The Lost City,’’ his first-rate evocation of Chicago in the 1950s. According to him, black Chicagoans – oppressed yet proud of their community – were mostly happier than they are today. But life was not necessarily ““nicer’’ then. Americans were more subject to the whims of others – bosses, teachers and parents. If the embrace of community could be comforting and stable, it could also be narrow and mean.
Forty years later, we may have become too nice. Grade inflation is ““nice’’; protecting incompetent teachers is ““nice’’; refusing to evict unruly tenants is ““nice.’’ Our endless emphasis on rights over responsibilities is niceness run amok. In my definition, ““nice’’ is good when it means warmth, fairness and lack of cynicism. ““Nice’’ is bad when it means indulgence, low standards and a lack of accountability. And too often ““nice’’ is simply a euphemism for weak or mediocre when it should be the bare minimum of civility we demand from everyone, moving man to movie star.
Dennis Rodman notwithstanding, the market still rewards niceness: Cal Ripken Jr. will always get more endorsements than Albert Belle. Recall that Newt Gingrich, despite a political philosophy with real appeal, was driven from the field by his bully-boy image. It remains essential to voters to think of their leaders as personable.
Other boosts in the cultural niceness index simply reflect changing social habits. Baby boomers aren’t intrinsically kinder people than their parents (they’re too self-referential for that), but they imbibe less, which decreases the number of nasty drunks roaming about. Meantime, the breakdown of father-knows-best authority has left boomers more indulgent toward their children, often to a fault.
In the workplace, bosses might feel as mean as ever, but they’re a little more afraid to act on that feeling. When a single sexual-harassment charge can end a career, supervisors have a strong incen- tive to wear their power more lightly. And while office temper tantrums (including Bill Clinton’s) will always be with us, the law is increasingly encouraging some compassion. Family and medical leave, which Clinton is touting heavily in the campaign, has changed the workplace. For more sustained improvement, what we need are more enlightened CEOs like Aaron Feuerstein of Malden, Mass., who kept all his employees on at full pay after his clothing mill burned down.
But it can take a tough man to make a tender public space. Rudy Giuliani is a harsh, unforgiving mayor of New York, yet his political success has been built on making the city a more pleasant place to live. New figures show crime down an astonishing 35 percent in three years; the secret has been to focus on little annoyances like squeegee men and illegal fireworks before they breed crime. Or consider the national movement to privatize state and local services. It’s mostly about saving money, but partly about making public employees accountable for being nice. After all, surly clerks, who can’t be fired under idiotic civil-service rules, are one reason for plummeting public confidence in government.
American institutions have a long way to go before they regain public confidence. The encouraging irony is that the worse our public life gets, the more determined many individuals become to find a private sphere of niceness. This is why so many Americans of all backgrounds, for instance, are convinced they are not racists. They may get angry at representatives of black groups or the white power structure or some other social irritant they see on TV, but they continue to make a point in their personal lives of treating people they meet with at least some respect. You don’t hear about those random acts of niceness – the ““thank you’’ on the bus, the ““excuse me’’ on the stairs. That’s because, for all the viciousness and incivility around us, they are still so common.
