The Meaning of Nice

The Meaning of Nice

INTRODUCTION

So you’re writing a book,” a neighbor said. “What’s it about?”

“Nice,”

Neece, the city in France?”

“No, not Neece. Nice, as in ice. You know: pleasant, courteous, considerate, kind—that sort of thing. I’m exploring what makes people nice.”

“But aren’t you the wrong person to write about that?” she ventured.

“Are you saying I’m not nice?” I bristled.

“No, no,” she said hastily. “It’s just that you’re from New York.”

There it is: that old cliché about New Yorkers. We’re rude, impatient, way too busy— and cynical—to bother being nice.As for so-called “nice” people, they’re too sweet, too accommodating to survive—much less thrive—in New York. And it’s not just New Yorkers who have a stereotypic view. “I don’t know how it is here in America,” a friend visiting from London mused, “but in England, describing someone as nice suggests they’re, well . . . rather bland.”

As much as we say we value being nice, secretly we think my English friend may be right. We desperately want others to be nice to us, but we have reservations about anyone who seems too nice. We end up marrying the nice guy (or gal), but it’s the naughty one whose kisses we remember long past high school.

“Isn’t calling people nice damning them with faint praise?”another friend suggested. “A tacit admission that you can’t come up with anything more interesting to say about them?”

To this way of thinking, nice is safe, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road. It reminds me of a TV interview I once saw, following a screening of director Peter Bogdanovich’s film What’s Up, Doc? The movie was a screwball comedy with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal—megastars at the time— but when the screening ended, instead of applauding, the audience hissed. Bogdanovich was stunned. “What’s to hiss?” he said. “That’s like hissing ice cream.”In the collective unconscious, nice is vanilla ice cream.Or is it? Dismissing nice as bland and unexciting may be as wrongheaded as assuming that all New Yorkers are rude.Is it fair to reject out of hand a quality that is, on the face of it, so unassailable? Why do we squirm when talk turns to positive attributes? With all that’s wrong in the world, shouldn’t we be celebrating humanity’s more admirable traits? Clearly, I thought, it’s time to look deeper and give nice a chance.And so I set out to examine nice through the lenses of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and religion, with input from etiquette mavens, pop culture, and common sense. As the piles of research rose on my office floor, nice acquired more— and sometimes surprising— meanings.

From THE MEANING OF NICE by Joan Duncan Oliver. Published by arrangement with Berkley, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Joan Duncan Oliver, 2012.