My golden rule — it’s nice to be nice

People often lament that society is more selfish, less considerate now than in previous times. Despite what my kids think, I was not actually around for enough of the preceding centuries to make the comparison. Bad behaviour is not new to humanity and I’m going to posit that changes, apparently for the worse, are not a sign of imminent societal collapse, but of transition.

Fiction though it be, Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster was set in a depressingly claustrophobic world. In the 1960s poor Nora couldn’t even dye her hair without people wondering at the morality of it. And she dyed it brown, not purple. Hers was a world where every move was noticed and judged, fear was the ruling force and shame the wages of free will. People behaved because they were afraid not to. It’s not that they were necessarily nicer, kinder or more considerate, they just lived in mortal fear of what other people would think.

Kindness is the most important force and it is born of empathy, of being able to stand in someone else’s shoes. Although adhering to a strict set of mores might deliver a side order of apparent kindness, it’s not real empathy, it’s doing things because of how they reflect on you as opposed to how they make others feel. The converse is feeling bad after some class of transgression: are you genuinely sorry or just afraid of getting busted?

So I’m going to argue that we’re not on the road to moral oblivion. We’re in a moment of moral confusion in the absence of the fear factor. But empathy is a skill we can all learn and you see examples of it all around every day. It’s nice to be nice, but it’s nicer to be nice because you’re being nice rather than because you’re afraid someone will think you’re not nice. Right?