First, a warning: I’m writing this post fairly hastily, as I’m trying to pin down my thoughts before they disappear (one of the more frustrating aspects of middle age). As such, the following is long on sloppy-ish exploration, short on detailed analysis or answers. Anyway, please know this is an attempt to suss things out. I may wind up realizing it doesn’t hold up and that I was a total doofus — as I often do.
Second, some back-story: The genesis of this post was the decision, made jointly between my spouse and I, to purchase our first gun. We’ve never owned one before, but not out of some inculcated anti-gun bias. My parents owned a pair of shotguns (useful for when you need to blast a rattler). My husband’s parents owned a handgun. So the only thing preventing us from bringing a gun into our home has been our own inherent laziness, especially when it comes to bureaucratic procedures.
But after the post-Floyd 2020 riots, we decided it was time. Although we are rural/suburban enough to have rested somewhat easily during riot season, we also live close enough to a couple of big cities (both of which suffered major riot damage) to conclude it was foolhardy not to have a firearm available should we (God forbid) need it. And to be honest, we probably would have come to the same conclusion even absent the riots. The world can be a dangerous and unpredictable place, and so it makes sense to secure the means to protect yourself.
We’ve just started the process of looking at and learning about which weapon to purchase – a fact my husband shared with two of his closest friends during their recent meet-up for beer and burgers. My husband is very conservative. His friends are pretty lefty (Most of his friends are. Funny how that works.). They’ve known him for decades. We’ve attended their weddings, celebrated the birth of their kids. My husband’s been there for them during struggles with divorce and depression. They understand his goodness.
But the news my husband was even considering a gun set them off in a very weird way. They got angry and agitated, as if he’d just announced he was going to try heroin for shits and giggles. “Why?” they kept asking. “Why do you need a gun? What do you think you’re going to do with it?” So my spouse explained the obvious: he was getting a gun to protect his home and family. Then, he said something like:
“Look, if a violent mob showed up at your house, I’d show up with my gun to make sure they didn’t destroy it, or destroy you. And since you guys are my friends, I’d like to think you’d do the same for me.”
This was followed by a very awkward silence. Understandably, it’s a mite awkward when longtime friends are forced to admit that, if “shit got real”, they’d leave you stranded. But then after a minute they jumped back in with the “why’s” of it, demanding justification. A gun was “crazy”, they said. Its very possession was “dangerous”; its very presence in the face of a threat was just “asking for trouble.”
I see my husband’s conversation with his friends playing out, in transmuted form, in online reactions to the Rittenhouse case. Regardless of their opinion on the verdict, large numbers of people firmly believe that Rittenhouse “shouldn’t have been there.” Large numbers firmly believe that Rittenhouse “provoked” or “sowed chaos” – which in my opinion, completely contradicts the evidence.
Again, the flashpoint is the gun. When they say Rittenhouse “shouldn’t have been there”, what they really mean is he “shouldn’t have been there . . . with a gun” (And I believe this means any gun). Whether Rittenhouse actually threatened anyone with the gun is beside the point: they consider the bare existence of the gun the “provocation”. Which means that many of my fellow citizens think the mere signalling of one’s willingness to protect self, community, and property by force (deadly, if need be) is a very bad thing. An ugly thing. A not-nice thing.
Whence Came Nice? And Why Are We Beholden To It?
All this got me to thinking about the concept of “nice” – or actually, the peculiarly American version of “niceness”, the one my Russian father-in-law was complaining about before he passed. My father-in-law used to frequent a lot of right-wing websites, and I jokingly used to ask him when the next American civil war was going to erupt. His answer was always the same: “There won’t be a need for a civil war. Americans will freely give up their rights because Americans want to be nice, more than anything. The idea of not being nice scares the hell out of them.”
What did he mean, exactly (how I wish he was still alive so I could find out)? Modern American niceness is kind of like how Justice Stewart famously described obscenity: you know it when you see it (and as I’ll discuss below, more than anything, niceness demands to be seen). I don’t think “nice” should be confused with “moral”. Donating your time volunteering, extending personal help to the vulnerable, speaking out to defend someone unfairly maligned – these stem from goodness, not niceness. And yet for many of us, those who volunteer, help and defend – those who are deeply moral, in other words – don’t necessarily qualify as “nice”. My father-in-law, for example, was hands-down the best man I ever met. His goodness ran crazy deep. And yet most people didn’t describe him as “nice.” Most people described him as “a real character” – an assessment that wasn’t always charitable.
You might define “niceness” as simply manners and decorum – an adherence to polite norms such as waiting your turn to speak and not cutting ahead in line. But it goes deeper than that. There’s a cultural anxiety rooted in niceness that has a lot to say about our transition from the 19th to the 21st century. And the writer Susan Cain explored that transition, quite beautifully, in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.
The Rise of the “Mighty Likeable Fellow”
I highly recommend Quiet as a read – especially if you’re a fellow introvert. Cain lays the groundwork for the book by discussing how Americans came to prize extroversion over introversion via urbanization and industrialization. She describes our change from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality – or as I’d put it, from Goodness to Niceness.
Summing up the thinking of the historian Warren Susman, Cain writes:
In the [19th Century] Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.
But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer,” Susman famously wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.”
Urbanization was a major driving force behind the shift. 19th-Century Americans lived in farming communities and small towns, among families that had been there for generations. Your reputation was formed by your presence at church, your dealings with your relatives and neighbors. I suppose it could have been stifling (in fact, for certain types it must have felt suffocating) but the advantage was that you were a known quantity. Your universe was so small, people couldn’t help but observe your actions, and through your actions they came to know you pretty authentically.
But then, Cain writes, as the 19th Century gave way to the 20th, “a perfect storm of big business, urbanization and mass immigration blew the population into the cities”, and into the soul-shaking void of anonymity:
Americans found themselves working no longer with neighbors but with strangers. “Citizens” morphed into “employees,” facing the question of how to make a good impression on people to whom they had no civic or family ties. “The reasons why one man gained a promotion or one woman suffered a social snub,” writes the historian Roland Marchand, “had become less explicable on grounds of long-standing favoritism or old family feuds. In the increasingly anonymous business and social relationships of the age, one might suspect that anything – including a first impression – had made the crucial difference.
There’s that word, “impression.” A 19th-Century Joe didn’t worry about “seeming nice” to his neighbor – he didn’t have to, since he was the one who rounded up his neighbor’s sheep when they escaped, returned them, and then helped his neighbor mend the point in the fence where they pushed through. There was no question his actions made him a good guy, not only in the eyes of the neighbor, but the whole damn town.
But lacking those interactions, lacking those ties of community, geography and blood, how do you verify your goodness? How do you convince your prospective boss, your new landlord, or the cute girl you just met on the train – none of whom know you from Adam – of your basic decency? By LARP-ing goodness. By being “nice.” Or, as a 1920s self-help guide put it, by trying “in every way to have a ready command of the manners which make people think ‘he’s a mighty likeable fellow.’” And since, as 20th-Century urbanites, we now had a few more disposable dollars to spare, Madison Avenue seized the opportunity to exploit our new anxiety and make us paranoid over our niceness. So paranoid, in fact, that we’d willingly shell out our hard-earned bucks for anything that promised to secure and cement our nicey-nice status:
The new personality-driven ads cast consumers as performers with stage fright from which only the advertiser’s product might rescue them. These ads focused obsessively on the hostile glare of the public spotlight. “ALL AROUND YOU PEOPLE ARE JUDGING YOU SILENTLY,” warned a 1922 ad for Woodbury’s soap. “CRITICAL EYES ARE SIZING YOU UP RIGHT NOW,” advised the Williams Shaving Cream company.
So What’s Nice, Already? And Why Does It Matter?
Nice is performative. Nice is not goodness, but nice is very, very good for your employer and for the companies and institutions who need to sell you things (and I’m not just talking about material goods). Friendly smiles are Nice – they signal you are affable and non-confrontational (Nice is feminine that way). Nice follows rules. Nice avoids bringing up the thing that might make higher-ups or co-workers uncomfortable. And when the thing must be brought up, when a report or reservation must be expressed, Nice does so respectfully, on the Boss’s own terms.
Nice is docile and, as long as he’s getting paid and comfortably cocooned with video games, entertainment, and decent take-out, unlikely to complain. And if someone else complains? Another co-worker, say? Nice either ignores it or calls the co-worker out, because hey: Nice wants a promotion to management class.
In other words, Nice is everything that makes a person a good wage slave and a good consumer. And slowly but steadily, from the late 19th Century onwards, the ethos of Nice has permeated beyond the confines of our work lives and into our politics. Which is why we’re at the point – and I’m just thinking out loud, here – where the idea of carrying a firearm to defend property and people from attack by hordes of the unhinged is being met with so much repugnance by so many. Arming, protecting and defending is Not Nice, because the Boss promised to take care of our safety – didn’t you read the company handbook? Arming, protecting and defending is Not Nice, because it’s not your department and therefore nun’ya business.
It’s as if, on some level, we’re less a nation with millions of citizens than a giant conglomerate with millions of cowed employees, all willing to play Nice in exchange for the security of that next paycheck – or at least the illusion of the security. After all, most of us in this metaphor are what you call “at-will” employees, subject to termination by our employer for any reason or no reason at all.
Do I think all the foregoing, this Tyranny of Nice, fully explains the reaction of our lefty friends to the very idea of our gun ownership? No – not at all, there’s a lot more to it than that. But I do think it plays a part. And so it amuses me to no end to trace the idea of Nice to the very industrial-capitalist system our lefty friends claim to loathe.
Great article! I’m glad to see more critical Substacks that are from a female perspective.
Recently I realized that “warmth” should be championed instead of being “nice” or “kind”. The meaning of warmth is hard to explain (when I complimented a taxi driver in Italy by saying she was warm, she thought for a second I was talking about physical temperature, so I explained to her that in English “warm” meant “like, a friendly attitude”) and being warm isn’t for everyone- and that’s fine. To me unlike being “nice”, which is about obeying the status quo and walking on eggshells to make sure absolutely no one around has their sensibilities offended, being warm is about caring about the people around you in your day-to-day-life (not just caring about people as an abstract concept) and learning how to balance healthy skepticism with being open towards people from all walks of life. And warmth isn’t something you can fake or perform via virtue signaling about politics or charity, it’s something you even have or you don’t. See also the Buddhism concept of “metta”, which is roughly translated to English as “loving-kindness” but it’s meaning can not be more different than when someone wags your finger at you and scolds at you to “be kind”.
"Nice" means ostentatious willingness to share the attitudes and opinions of the group. In addition to being the face of the 21st century wage slave, it doubtless has deep roots in the necessity of group cohesion for survival. This seems to live on in unbroken tradition in Sweden, and it doubtless contributes to "Minnesota Nice," which most people will tell you is less than skin-deep. It probably reflects a particularly onerous feudalism, as opposed to the stout independence of the ideal Anglo-American yeoman.
With respect to defending yourself in riots, nice people believe that the rioters are justified and that you should just try to avoid confrontation. You are just a temporary inhabitant of stolen land. You must trust government to protect you ("when seconds count, the police are just minutes away"), and if they don't, you are just unlucky, government can't always do everything. Just as a "few" people may die from the Covid vaccines, but it is not nice to question their validity. You just may be "unlucky."
I haven't made the leap to buying a gun for self-defense. I took a concealed carry class, which convinced me that it would take substantial training and practice to make the weapon effective in my hands.
If you and your husband are in Minnesota and would like conservative conversation, check out the John Adams Society.