On Being Nice

This book, from the School of Life (of Alain de Botton's work), is a really nice little turquoise hardback filled with short readable chapters about the various aspects of how to conduct oneself nicely* - a quality that is, apparently, lacking in modern society. Humans are social creatures, geared towards friendship and cooperation within communities - a trait that all genuine clear thinking supports the endeavour of and which even alien visitors feel compelled to partake in.**

   However, 'niceness' is only partly derived from this intrinsic bio-psychological drive in people to seek belonging and reciprocity with other people, and partly derived from a string of complex historical normative legacies. Our current western model of niceness has, according to this book's first section, been shaped considerably by Christianity (which emphasised other-centred action but also dampens vividness of character and ambition), romanticism (which emphasised spontaneous individuality as more valuable than predictable boring normal niceness), capitalism (which depends on people more or less getting along so they can operate as amoral cogs in its ever-growing empire of profit) and eroticism (which sort of built on the romantic spontaneity to characterise niceness as unsexy). The second section of the book deals with kindness - the importance of charitability in how we react to things, the importance of being reasonably open about our shortcomings and vulnerabilities (neither be a strong man or a tragic hero), taking motivation in consideration, responding gracefully to suffering, and cracking the delicate and multifaceted art of politeness. The third section launches into how we can use niceness to improve our own social lives and enrich the lives of others in it: being clear about the value of friendship, not being weirdly over-friendly, overcoming our own and others' shyness, teasing appropriately and affectionately, telling white lies, flirting to boost self-esteem, being warm and open-minded, being able to talk about yourself honestly and endearingly (without burying weaknesses, or ranting, or being needlessly boring), and listening properly to others when talking to them. The final chapter presents us with a challenge - the ultimate test of one's social skills: maintaining an interaction with a young (old enough to speak, and walk off if you bore or annoy it) child whom you haven't met before.

   There are parts of this book that I feel don't adequately map out the actualities of how to be properly adaptably nice,*** but the groundwork definitely seems to be present, and it's laid out in a friendly readable manner which makes the whole a rewarding and life-affirming reminder of the importance of being nice.

* I would like to offer a disclaimer that I didn't really learn much from this book that I wasn't already more or less putting into practice; as a friendly but still fairly culturally-typical Englishperson I'm quite good at being nice - though this stems more from my aim to live in a constant mindset of Christlike love and empathy than from the abstract wishy-washy humanism of the School of Life and such. Whatever. The reason for my reading this then is 'research' - one of the main characters in a big writing project I'm working on the plans for at the moment is just very nice, and what I wanted from this book was a systematic well-phrased exposition of the contours and nuances of Being Nice with which to pepper some of her deeds and comments. To this end, the book served me very well. However I imagine it would also be quite effective as a rough manual to the practice for people who are much better at deriving practical information from books than they are at empathetically and genuinely engaging in interpersonal relations. Probably don't give it as a present to people who need it though. Ironically, that would be quite rude.

** Four links in one sentence! I'm on a mad'un!

*** I mean, as a radically inclusive left-wing Christian with little respect for the charades of the bourgois echelons of British culture that the liberal humanists who wrote this probably inhabit, this should be no surprise, but still, this is a decent overview. It's not like I'm going to bother to dissect all the small nuances where I thought it should have said more than it did or where it made assertions that actually seem questionable under scrutiny in different contextual light - mainly because I can't be arsed, but also because it would be a petty pedantic scrabbling against a book which overall I think laid out a good picture of what modern secular niceness is.

Status Anxiety

This book. the internationally bestselling guide to a vaguely-but-not-too-vaguely-defined conception of social angst about one's position and perception by acclaimed pseudo-philosopher* Alain de Botton,** is pretty good. I got it in a second-hand English bookshop in Amsterdam, of all places. My thoughts on this book are quite straightforward ("HA" thinks the discerning reader, wise to my promises of 'shortish posts', "here we go again, it's guaranteed to be an absurd thousand-or-two-word barely-structured mental drippages, one which I will not read" - yeh well shut up, discerning reader) but I really enjoy writing unplanned spurts of thoughtful text so I'm gonna have a bit more fun with this one.***

   It's deeply ironic that that should've been the last sentence of the only paragraph (asterisked sub-bits, thankfully, included) to have been autorecovered; I am actually now going to have entirely no fun with this blogpost, since my laptop just crashed unceremoniously and I lost about eight hundred words. Sucks. I'd done pretty interesting and wittily-written sections on the lack of diversity represented in de Botton's encouraging pages (despite drawing on economics, philosophy, history, art, literature, politics, psychology, and whatnot, probably (no joke) 95% of who he cites or references are either educated white men who lived in Europe between 1650 and 1950, or Ancient Bloody Greeks) and on the extensive overlaps status anxiety seems to have with politico-economic systems (which lended some interesting ammunition to the psychological-emotional elements in my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of capitalism). But these sections were lost, like tears in the oven, because for some reason even though Google Docs has an autosave feature powerful enough to actually bring a medium-to-large moth**** back to life and even Microsoft Word has an emergency unsaved-document auto-capture function if your computer crashes, but Blogger for some reason allowed me to blithely tap away hundreds of words without once thinking to itself that it should autosave. There is a 'Save' button on the post composition page, but who uses that!? (I did, just now, in sheer terror of my laptop and Blogger taking joint revenge against this lengthy complaint.) So anyway, rather than rewrite all this lost gold (it's shockingly hard to remember exactly what paragraphs you've just witnessed sucked into digital oblivion before your very eyes) I'm just gonna blast through a quick summary of the book and briefly state my largest thought-reaction to it.
   The book opens with a definition of status anxiety, which is essentially just when people worry about their place in the world relative to other people and feel sad about it when they perceive themselves to be doing worse than they'd like. The book is then split into two parts, firstly looking at five possible causes of status anxiety:

• Lovelessness: (general loneliness & lack of social acceptance)
• Snobbery: (overvaluing sociocultural status markers)
• Expectation: (holding unrealistic ones)
• Meritocracy: (personal failure is possible despite skills & hard work)
• Dependence: (we're inextricable from our socioeconomic contexts)

   No, I didn't summarise those in much detail, did I? Read the book if you're bothered. And then of course part two, looking at five possible solutions to status anxiety:

• Philosophy: (dissecting ideas to enlighten ourselves)
• Art: (engaging with culture to enlighten ourselves)
• Politics: (engaging with socioeconomic structures for change)
• Christianity: (warm fuzzy feelings of acceptance through church community, supporting an earnest vision of human equality through all their creation in God's image and thus any social factors affecting their 'status' are bunk in the eyes of the almighty and not something to get too bummed-out about)
• Bohemia: (hiding in a community of like-minded enlightened aesthetes, hippies, pot-smoking book-reading sandal-wearing meat-eschewing lefty scum. I'm joking but this chapter should be pretty self-explanatory if you grasp the basic definition of 'bohemian', which entails a flagrant disregard for social norms)

   Each of these ten chapters (each varying massively in length and number of pictures) is well-written, topically relevant, and explains well how each them may cause or solve to some degree our burdens of status anxiety. Overall, it's a very easily-readable and warmly enlightening book, one which, as the rest of Alain de Botton's work, goes a long way to demystifying (if not de-pretentiousnessifying) elements of intellectualism, in a goodwilled attempt to help people understand themselves and their lives better, and so have better ones. And this book fulfils that function pretty well. It's educational in an engaging, pleasant, and cheers-you-up kind of way, the details of complex thinkers' works brought to life in application to common problems. I'd absolutely recommend anyone read this.
   But for one complaint I have with it (and not just it, all of Alain de Botton's work that I've read or watched-on-YouTube so far) - it completely guts Christianity, guts it like a fish that Alain's not going to eat anyway because it upsets his stomach but he found it lying on the beach and he's always wanted to gut a fish out of a curious itching for the performance of minor masculine tasks. I was surprised he did a chapter about it at all, but having read the chapter, it may as well have been a chapter in which he similarly gutted the fishes of Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism; or just not done any fish-gutting and written a straight-up chapter about 'supportive communities gathered around more-or-less transcendental ideals' (admittedly, he did write a chapter about this too, the Bohemia one).***** What I mean by all of this, is in his discussion of religion, he detaches it from the part that means anything substantive at all - theology, and the possible truth thereof. Like, philosophy and art and politics are all excellent and diverse fields in which one can explore one's place in the world and find and create and actively work for meaning in multifarious ways; and bohemian lifestyles are the perfect space in which to do that. But religions are not in this same category, they're not a 'pick-and-choose-until-you-find-what-you-like' type of deal: religions make objective claims about what the universe is, what we are, what life is, what God is (if one's inluded), and what this implies about how we should think and act. Alain's discussion of how God making humanity in God's image renders us absolutely equal is pretty sound, and here an excellent blow to any attempt to manipulate social status in any way other than the egalitarianism supported by Christianity. Likewise, I can't disagree that church is an excellent form of community support and encouragement - it is, of course it is, it's designed for that purpose, humans are designed for that purpose. But the whole chapter on Christianity focuses on these two aspects: which is fairenough in a sense, because they form a wholesome case for how Christianity can be a solution to status anxiety. But while true, it's shortsighted, it's mischaracterisation; Christianity is more than that, it's not a field like art or politics or philosophy where nothing is fixed and argument or experiment drives development forever, nor a lifestyle like bohemia where anything goes in a liberal cooperative inclusive sense: Christianity proposes objective truths about the world that demand an answer. Objective truths stretching far beyond our being made-in-God's-image or being suited-for-community-for-which-the-church-is-the-archetype; truths that ultimately lead to, yes, a complete eradication of status anxiety, if only through a complete rebirth of creation in Jesus, and I'm not gonna explain the whole of it because there's a load of books on Christian theology that I've written posts about before and you can access the list of these through the labels boxes on the right, and also I've over-run my intended wordcount again, and I'm terrified my laptop might crash a third time.
   Isaac Stovell.
   Out.

* Just kidding, Alain, if you're reading this - I love School of Life: and while there are occasionally certain issues I feel you don't explore with enough critically nuanced vim and/or vinegar, I can easily look past this in realising that making such compromises is regrettably a necessary part writing books and short animated videos with the aim of popularising discussion of Big Ideas - an endeavour which I wholeheartedly support . Also there are a fair few of your views which I disagree with (especially strongly on theology - hey Alain, if you made it past that last sentence why not read the rest of this post?) but for the most part you seem to be on the same page as me so hey, whatevs, let's go for an erudite conversation over toasted sandwiches and herbal tea sometime. Or something.

** Also author of The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists, Art as Therapy, Cats Are Basically People Too Penélope Damn Your Non-Inclusive Allergies, and the Waterstones'-holiday-bargain-table-second-best-selling autobiographical My Quite Nice Life as a Pretend French Intellectual.
(sorry Alain sorry sorry sorry read previous asterisk!!!!1)

*** There are several blog-writing gimmicks that I just get a huge kick out of using: the pointless asides relegated to asterisked paragraphs (one of which this entire bit will be), totally-unnecessarily-long-hyphenated-construction-of-a-concept-that-could-just-be-explained-normally, the well-chosen random (but pleasant!) link for a random phrase (oh yeh now that was a well-chosen link - just to point out that the previous usage of the word 'that' was also a hyperlink, something that shouldn't normally warrant pointing out, but I've italicised it to help the sentence flow and the link's default boldness on a skinnier font might be harder to spot; also I wanted an excuse to embark upon a tortuous run-on sentence inside parentheses, which was the next on my list of gimmicks), the self-deprecating reflexive addresses to an enthusiastic audience that largely (I've seen my own blog's viewing statistics - hrmph) doesn't exist, and finally the self-indulgent meta-commentary, of which this entire bit has also been a part.

**** I promised I was going to have no more fun with the remainder of this post: hence why I purposefully wrote this but, knowing full well that it was a lie, and that dead moths can only remain as such until their consumption or decomposition. It's a harrowing and bleak thought. Especially since I quite like moths.

***** I shit you not, my laptop literally just crashed again. Fortunately I'm deeply paranoid now about the whole charade of blogwriting, and have been mashing the 'Save' button every few sentences. Perhaps the great Alain de Botton is more powerful than we had previously conceived, and is using his populist powers of pseudo-philosophy (SEE FIRST ASTERISK) to junk up my computer cos he can sense I'm respectfully disagreeing with him on the point of his neglect of theology in discussing religion? Or many he's angry that I keep insulting-him-but-not-really? Or maybe it's upsetting him how many metaphorical fish I've gutted? Hm.