"The key objection to niceness amounts to the fact that it's not really a virtue. You can't rely upon it as the foundation for the duties required of friends, family members, or fellow citizens. A nice person won't fight for you; a nice person wouldn't even lie for you, unless there's something in it for him. A nice person wouldn't be a Good Samaritan, if it required genuine risk or an undue deployment of time and treasure. A nice person isn't animated by love or honor or God. Niceness, if you think about it, is the most selfish of virtues, one, as Tocqueville noticed, rooted in a deep indifference to the well-being of others. It's more selfish than open selfishness, because the latter accords people the respect of letting them know where you stand. I let you do — and even affirm — whatever you do, because I don't care what you do as long as it doesn't bother me. Niceness, as Allan Bloom noticed, is the quality connected with flatness of soul, with being unmoved by the relational imperatives grounded in love and death."
—Peter Augustine Lawler, Our Country Split Apart
p.s. My apologies for all the quotes lately—these posts are just my way of remembering particular passages. (I used to keep a journal for this purpose, but that was so very 20th century. Not that blogs are particularly avant-garde either.)
—Peter Augustine Lawler, Our Country Split Apart
p.s. My apologies for all the quotes lately—these posts are just my way of remembering particular passages. (I used to keep a journal for this purpose, but that was so very 20th century. Not that blogs are particularly avant-garde either.)
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