The open-minded also know that the existence of highly troublesome elements doesn’t preclude the simultaneous presence of vast zones of goodness, humility and benevolence in our characters. They are implicitly fond of the distinction, formulated by early Christian thinkers, between ‘the sinner’ and ‘the sin’. Like St Augustine, they strive to ‘love the sinner but hate the sin’. They know that our right to charity, attention and friendship should not be irrevocably lost on the basis of our darker sides. While hoping it might be otherwise, the open-minded simply take it for granted that nice people constantly do and think not very nice things.
The open-minded person isn’t merely being sweet in calmly accepting this as a given, and therefore not judging harshly when news of misdeeds arises. They are committed to open-mindedness because they are operating with a picture of how people improve. They implicitly propose that the way we change is through warm forgiveness, not cold censure.
The closed-minded are also committed to improvement, but their philosophy of education involves humiliation and disapproval. Only if a person can be brought to hate themselves enough, they reason, can they be counted upon to start to want to change their ways.
The problem is not only that this fostering of self-contempt can be very cruel; it is also liable to be ineffective. Self-contempt tends to badly sap the will and renders us hopeless and incapable before its ravages. In the face of it, we may seek refuge in our vices to escape our violent dislike of ourselves and of our less admirable characteristics. By the angle of their lips and their moments of silence, the closed-minded act as proactive agents of a counter-productive loneliness. They create a world in which significant parts of ourselves must remain homeless and without a path to redemption.
The open-minded know that most people are already brim-full of self-criticism. We’re not in need of further, harder condemnation. Where we truly need help is in liking ourselves enough to dare to develop, given what we know of the sinister regions of our psyches. By their unshocked reception of the stranger elements of who we are, combined with supportive exhortations to betterment, the open-minded model for us the relationship we would ideally have with ourselves as we strive to encourage the nobler parts of our nature and overcome the weakest. It is easy to see why we should so badly want them as friends.
10
How Not to Be Boring
One of our great fears – which haunts us when we go into the world and socialise with others – is that we may be boring.
But the good news, and a fundamental truth too, is that no one is ever truly boring. They are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don’t dare (or know how) to communicate them to others.
That there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing is one of the great lessons of art. Many of the most satisfying art works don’t feature exalted or rare elements; they are about the ordinary looked at in a special way, with unusual sincerity and openness to unvarnished experience. Take, for example, some grasses painted by the Danish artist Christen Købke in a suburb of Copenhagen in 1837. Outwardly, the scene is unremarkable and could initially appear to be unpromising material for a painting, and yet – like any great artist – Købke knew how to interrogate his own perceptions in a fresh, unclouded, underivative manner and translate them accurately into his medium, weaving a small masterpiece out of the thread of everyday life.
Christen Købke, View of Dosseringen, Copenhagen, with Willows in the Foreground, c. 1837
Kobke elevates what at first looks like an unremarkable piece of landscape into a beautiful art work through close attention.
Just as there is no such thing as a boring riverbank, tree or dandelion, so too there can be no such thing as an inherently boring person. The human animal witnessed in its essence, with honesty and without artifice, is always interesting. When we call a person boring, we are just pointing to someone who has not had the courage or concentration to tell us what it is like to be them. By contrast, we invariably prove compelling when we succeed in saying how and what we truly desire, envy, regret, mourn and dream. Anyone who faithfully captures the real data on what it is like to exist is guaranteed to have material with which to captivate others. The interesting person isn’t someone to whom obviously and outwardly interesting things have happened – someone who has travelled the world, met important dignitaries or been present at large geo-political events. Nor is it someone who speaks in learned terms about the weighty themes of culture, history or science. They are someone who has grown into an attentive, self-aware listener and a reliably honest correspondent of the tremors of their own mind and heart, and who can thereby give us faithful accounts of the pathos, drama and strangeness of being alive.
What, then, are some of the elements that get in the way of us being as interesting as we in fact are?
First, and most crucially, we bore when we lose faith that it really could be our feelings that would stand the best chance of interesting others. Out of modesty, and habit, we push some of our most interesting perceptions to one side in order to follow respectable but dead conventions of what might impress. When we tell anecdotes, we throw the emphasis on the outward details – who was there, when we went, what the temperature was like – rather than maintaining our nerve to report on the layer of feelings beneath the facts; the moment of guilt, the sudden sexual attraction, the humiliating sulk, the career crisis, the strange euphoria at 3 a.m.
Our neglect of our native feelings isn’t just an oversight; it can be a deliberate strategy to keep our minds away from realisations that threaten our ideas of dignity and normality. We babble inconsequentially to the world because we lack the nerve to look more closely and unflinchingly within.
It feels significant that most 5-year-olds are far less boring than most 45-year-olds. What makes these children gripping is not so much that they have more interesting feelings than anyone else (far from it), but that they are uncensored correspondents of these feelings. Their inexperience of the world means they are still instinctively loyal to themselves; they will candidly tell us what they really think about granny and their little brother, what their plans for reforming the planet are and what they believe everyone should do with their bogeys. We are rendered boring not by nature so much as by a fateful will – that begins its malevolent reign over us in adolescence – to appear normal.
Even when we are honest about our feelings, we may still prove boring because we don’t know them as well as we should, and so get stuck at the level of insisting on an emotion rather than explaining it. We’ll assert – with ever-greater emphasis – that a situation was ‘exciting’, ‘awful’ or ‘beautiful’ but not be able to provide those around us with any of the sort of related details and examples that would help them viscerally understand why. We can end up boring not so much because we don’t want to share our lives as because we don’t yet know them well enough to do so.
Fortunately, the gift of being interesting is neither exclusive nor reliant on exceptional talent; it requires only direction, honesty and focus. The person we call interesting is in essence someone alive to what we all deeply want from social intercourse: an uncensored glimpse of what the brief waking dream called life looks like through the eyes of another person and reassurance that we are not entirely alone with all that feels most bewildering, peculiar and intense within us.
11
How to Talk about Yourself
Polite people have it instilled in them from an early age that they should not talk too much about themselves. A few comments aside, they should – to prove appealing – always ask the other about their lives or stick to impersonal topics found in newspapers, lest they be accused of the heinous charge of self-absorption.
But this rule fails to distinguish between different ways of talking about oneself. There are, as well-mannered people sometimes forget, better and worse ways to share details of one’s life. It is not the amount that one talks that should determine th
e issue; only how one does so.
There is one particular way of discussing oneself that, however long it goes on for, never fails to win one friends, reassure audiences, comfort couples, bring solace to the single and buy one the goodwill of enemies: the confession of vulnerability and error. To hear that we have failed, that we are sad, that it was our fault, that our partners don’t seem to like us much, that we are lonely, that we have wished it might all be over – there is scarcely anything nicer anyone could learn.
This is often taken to signal a basic nastiness in human nature, but the truth is more poignant. We are not so much crowing when we hear of failure as deeply reassured – reassured to know that we aren’t humiliatingly alone with the appalling difficulties of being alive. It is all too easy to suspect that we have been uniquely cursed in the extent of our troubles, of which we seldom find evidence in the lives around us. The media offers us unending accounts of the financial and creative success of others, while our friends and acquaintances constantly pepper their conversations with ever-so subtle boasts about their and their children’s accomplishments.
By an ultimate irony, these self-promoters aren’t trying to alienate us. They are labouring under the touching but misguided impression that we will like them more for their success. They are applying to social life a model of a relationship between popularity and success that only applies in very selective contexts – perhaps when we seek to please our parents or need the help of successful people to advance our careers. But the rest of the time, as the boasters forget, we find success an enormous problem.
We put in so much effort to be perfect. But the irony is that it’s failure that charms, because others so need to hear external evidence of problems with which we are all too lonely: how un-normal our sex lives are; how misguided our careers are proving; how unsatisfactory our family can be; how worried we are pretty much all the time.
Revealing any of these wounds might, of course, place us in great danger. Others could laugh; social media could have a field day. That’s the point. We get close by revealing things that would, in the wrong hands, be capable of inflicting humiliation on us. Friendship is the dividend of gratitude that flows from an acknowledgement that one has offered something very valuable to someone by talking: not a fancy present, but something even more precious, the key to one’s self-esteem and dignity. It’s deeply poignant that we should expend so much effort on trying to look strong before the world, when it’s only ever the revelation of the somewhat embarrassing, sad, melancholy and anxious parts of us that is what makes us endearing to others, and transforms strangers into friends.
12
How Not to Rant
One of the risks of social life is that we will in the course of an evening or in the kitchen at a party end up trapped with a person of excessive conviction – or, to put it more colloquially, a bore. Bores can be found harbouring any manner of obsessions: they may be deeply concerned about grammar (and the ever-increasing misuse of the subjunctive) or believe that modern architecture has alienated us from ourselves; they may be horrified by the predatory nature of contemporary capitalism or disgusted by the whingeing of the environmental movement; they might hate feminism or see misogyny in every corner of life. Bores aren’t necessarily misguided (they may make some good points along the way), but our discomfort in their company arises from the intensity and relentlessness of their manner. We long for them to fall silent and give us the chance to run away.
Part of the reason why bores bore is that we sense they are not being entirely honest with us. They are certainly upset, but the real reasons why don’t seem on offer. We feel – in the midst of their explanations – that their intensity is drawing heat from a source beyond the argument as they define it. They may be emphasising a range of studiously impersonal political, economic or social factors, but we intuit that there must be a more personal story from which we, and their conscious selves, have been carefully shielded.
It’s a general truth, in no way humiliating, that our seemingly objective adult concerns often have their roots in incidents of personal vulnerability that unfolded long ago and that may be awkward to recover and discuss. Perhaps, when we were young, our father lost his job to a corporation that relocated their offices to southeast Asia: the pay-off was relatively generous but the shame intense for the family. Or perhaps we have been passed over for promotion many times by a young and conspicuously fashionable management team with an interest in contemporary design. Or maybe there was once a woman we liked very much, who was doing a PhD in gender studies on the work of Julia Kristeva and who showed signs of interest but then went off with a rival. These things upset us for a while. We may not like to remember these incidents, let alone tell new acquaintances about them at parties, yet they are still active within us and seek some way, however disguised, of expressing themselves. But all we know consciously is that capitalism is the most abusive and unsustainable economic system ever devised; that modern architecture has shamefully forgotten the nobility of the Classical tradition as embodied by the works of Bramante and Schinkel; and that feminists are out to systematically destroy the foundations of male earning power in advanced economies.
When we come across such ardent views, it isn’t that we want to hear less, it’s that we would ideally want to hear more, but in another direction: inwards, rather than further into socio-cultural and economic abstractions. We want to do this not from prurience but because social life is guided by a wish to encounter the reality of other people, which is here being arcanely denied. Our boredom is at base an impatient resentment at being held at bay from the genuine traumas of another’s life.
The bore is never just other people. It is – in given areas – also us. When we take a psychological audit of our intellectual ideas, we all stand to discover that some of our concerns owe their intensity to personal experiences that are hard to define and frightening to own up to.
This alerts us to how we might in the future respond to the speeches of the over-zealous. The task is not to engage head-on with the matter apparently at stake; it’s to gently try to shift the conversation away from its official target to its origins; sympathetically asking when the issue first emerged and what more personal associations might surround it.
Even if we never get there, the knowledge of the structure of the problem should make us careful not to engage people of excessive conviction in too many prolonged head-to-head arguments. There is no point trying to list why capitalism is not the worst system ever devised, why modern architecture has its high points and why feminism remains necessary. This would be to believe that the other’s rage was a kind of intellectual error that could be magically resolved with the help of one or two deft ideas. The kind conversationalist is more compassionately pessimistic. They accept that the roots of certain of our convictions lie deeply tangled in frightened, anxious parts of the psyche unlikely to be accessible outside psychotherapy.
We’re so aware that it could sound patronising to treat people as less self-aware than they believe themselves to be, we overlook that it may actually be generous to keep in mind the complicated role that denied personal wounds play in our ardent convictions. And we should hope that others will repay us the favour the next time we find ourselves delivering long and ever more intense speeches about the decline in handshaking, the colonisation of Ecuador or the corruption of the English language.
13
The Charm of Vulnerability
The desire to fit in is deeply ingrained in our nature. We are social creatures with a long evolutionary history that stressed the importance of not standing out in a group. The oddball would be the last to get their share of mammoth meat. We are the descendants of those who conformed – and got fed.
It is understandable if we become awkward, and very lonely, around our own oddities. We become reluctant to admit to anything very strange about ourselves. We police our admissions and strive to appear more usual than we really are. We might say we like football because it fee
ls difficult, as a man, to admit to much else. We feel constrained to order a whiskey at the bar because it would be very confusing to confess to one’s real desire: a glass of milk. Perhaps we are among the handful of adults who are interested in toy trains and have joined a society to find out more; maybe we find wearing an old-fashioned watch enhances the intensity of our love-making; perhaps on holiday we secretly like to visit local hydrochemical plants. Our oddities can be intensified when other aspects of our lives are taken into account. If we are a tax-specialist director of a law firm, it is especially awkward to announce an interest in socialism. If we are studying engineering, it can be tricky to reveal to fellow students that ideally we would like to be a puppet maker; if we are a flight attendant, our colleagues might take it badly if we discussed at any length our admiration for the novels of Benjamin Disraeli.
It is this background of secrecy that explains our delight when, finally, someone dares publicly to be a bit strange: when they say, for example, that they are sexually turned on by sports cars or the Russian president or are so phobic about germs they always open public bathroom doors with their feet; when they tell us – with no particular embarrassment – that they spent the weekend crying at how badly their careers have gone or are engaged in an online flirtation with someone almost twice their age on another continent.
It isn’t that we necessarily share these habits and interests. The delight such comments can provoke lies in the permission they give us to bring our own more curious sides to the fore. The confidence of the confessor encourages us to feel more at ease with our specific range of disavowed feelings. Via their simultaneous awareness of their oddity and their ease with it, they are establishing a possibility that we too could make use of around our quirks. In their courage to speak, they are operating with a more accurate and more consoling picture of human nature: one alive to the fact that – statistically speaking – we are all bizarre in quite a few respects. It is extremely normal to be rather abnormal.
On Being Nice Page 6
