Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (33 page)

Because Luke’s job description only includes janitorial-type activities, Schwartz notes that “it would have been reasonable to have simply explained to the father that he’d already cleaned the room, and perhaps to have brought in his supervisor to mediate if the father remained angry.” But Luke felt that he had a job beyond his custodial work, in alignment with the mission of the hospital—relieving suffering—which is what he accomplished for that father, and without an iota of medical training.

Empathy as a sort of moral cruise director

Luke’s split-second decision to tamp down his natural human defensiveness and show kindness to the grieving father took empathy—but empathy that went beyond mere feelings. A feeling alone doesn’t mean much, which is why I love psychologist Bruce D. Perry and journalist Maia Szalavitz’s expanded definition of empathy in
Born for Love
.

The essence of empathy is the ability to stand in another’s shoes, to feel what it’s like there and
to care about making it better if it hurts.
[The italics are mine.]

Their definition tag-teams empathy—standing in another’s shoes, feeling what they feel—with compassion: caring about making it better. This is empathy as more than a rush of feeling; it’s empathy as the start of an action plan.

Where I think Perry and Szalavitz are too limited is in how they modify “to care about making it better” with “if it hurts.” We can “make it better” whether people appear to be hurting or not. We all have daily issues, and when we’re having a shitburger of a day, having somebody go out of their way for us makes us feel better; it makes us feel like we matter, which is huge.

How to stop living in a strangerhood without calling a moving van

It’s especially important that we start treating strangers like they matter.

As I explained earlier in the book, the increase in rudeness we’re experiencing traces back to how we’re living so antithetically to millions of years of our evolved psychology, in societies too big for our brains—vast strangeropolises where some of us can go an entire day without seeing any (or many) people we know.

Going about life in a sea of strangers not only enables the rude but also causes us stress and anxiety—as well as hindering feelings of well-being, and maybe not just because of the surge in rudeness. Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, also an evolutionary psychologist, believes that our emotions, both positive and negative, are a signaling system for us, messaging us to give us a thumbs-up or thumbs-down about our participation in activities that, in the course of human evolution, would have conferred either an advantage or a detriment in mating or survival.

The fact that doing good for others has such a positive impact on our well-being suggests that we may be doing ourselves both social and psychological harm by living in strangerhoods instead of communities. In fact, Nesse contends that depression and other forms of psychological suffering may, in part, result from how we are now living in a vast, stranger-filled environment that runs so contrary to our nature, where we’re lacking in both social support and opportunities to be socially supportive.
⁵⁶

I’m not suggesting a massive change of address, some mandated restructuring of our spread-out society into countless gated five-street townlets. But it seems to make sense to change our thinking and behavior so we can once again get both the social and psychological benefits of living in a community. This takes recognizing that it isn’t natural for us to reach out to strangers—and then making a habit of doing it anyway.

Compassion is the opiate of the masses. (This is a good thing.)

When Karl Marx wrote “Religion … is the opiate of the masses,” he was putting down religion for providing bogus comfort, but he managed to acknowledge that religion, like opiates, can be soothing.
⁵⁷

Compassion also provides soothing, both on a personal level and, if enough people practice it, on a societal one. Remarkably, social psychologist David DeSteno has found that compassion has spillover—that feeling compassion for one person makes us far more likely to take action on behalf of another. Even more remarkably, although we don’t naturally concern ourselves with the welfare of strangers, it seems we can summon compassion for a stranger simply by rethinking whom we consider an outsider. Sometimes, we even do this rethinking unconsciously.

DeSteno and fellow social psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo did a study looking at how “synchronous movement” in people, such as doing the same march or dance steps at the same time, affects compassion. Referencing prior research, they explain that moving in sync with others seems to lead to an “increased sense of joint identity, or of being on the ‘same team.’” In their experiment, subjects were seated across a table from each other and told to tap their fingers to beats they heard in headphones they wore. For some tablemates, the same beats played simultaneously, causing them to tap at the same time. Other tablemates heard sequences that led each to tap at different times.

In the next part of the study, subjects then witnessed their tapping partner getting cheated on in a computer game and, as a result, unfairly being assigned a pile of tedious word problems to solve before he could go home. The subjects were told that they could help him if they wanted.

Synchrony, it turns out, made a big difference in who offered to help. Fifty percent of those subjects who tapped in synchrony asked to pitch in, whereas less than 20 percent of those tapping asynchronously did. On a questionnaire, the synchronous tappers reported feeling greater similarity with their partners and having greater compassion for them than the asynchronous tappers did for theirs.

This doesn’t mean we need to start mimicking finger-drumming strangers. In fact, DeSteno, in a videotaped talk for PopTech
⁵⁸
, noted that we shouldn’t assume there’s anything “magic” about finger tapping, per se. They’d gotten similar results with subjects wearing various colored wristbands who’d rated another subject’s behavior as more ethical when that person had the same color band they did. What’s important is the upshot. DeSteno explained in
The New York Times
that these findings suggest that “the compassion we feel for others is not solely a function of what befalls them: if our minds draw an association between a victim and ourselves—even a relatively trivial one—the compassion we feel for his or her suffering is amplified greatly.”

How to transform a stranger into a fellow human

DeSteno suggests drawing a compassion-increasing association between yourself and, say, some guy who lives down your block by thinking of that guy as a fan of the same local restaurant instead of a member of a different ethnicity. The problem is, when we encounter strangers, we’re often lacking in any sort of shared context that would allow us to quickly imagine a connection. This is why I think we need to look at all people, including strangers, as
co-humans
, related to us in how they surely love their dog, hate Microsoft Word, feel pain when they get cut, and prefer chocolate to broccoli.

All it takes to get in the habit of treating people as co-humans is
making it a habit
—daily or, better yet, throughout the day. This means not only resolving to make things better for people but actively looking for those to do that for—both strangers and people you know—and spreading warmth and goodwill. This might just mean noticing a guy who comes into a place looking lost and flashing him a friendly smile or complimenting a woman on her pretty hair. (Her hair doesn’t have to be gorgeous; it just needs to look attractive enough that she’d believe you if you said something nice about it.)

To take this up a notch, when you’re about to get in your car and you see that your meter still has twenty minutes on it, scan the street for a driver who appears to be searching for a space and wave him over. You’re not only making his day easier but also transforming yourself and him from two strangers into two humans acting connected to each other. And, very likely, by positively changing how he feels about his day and, in some small way, about people in general, you motivate him to pay it forward—and so on and so on—transforming the strangerhood into more of a neighborhood.

Taking this a step further, some kindness that would be a minor and unremarkable gesture when done for a friend can have an enormously powerful effect when done for a stranger. An LA-dwelling friend, originally from Boulder, Colorado, was visiting there with her girlfriend, when they came upon an older woman, probably in her early seventies, on a street-side bench, fanning herself from the heat, looking very not-from-Boulder. In a hardcore New York accent, she asked them where she could get a Diet Coke. My friend gave her detailed directions, and she and her girlfriend continued on their way. They had only gone a few steps when her girlfriend blurted out, “I’m going to go buy her one.”

Dumbstruck, my friend said, “You don’t have to do that.”

“She’s old, and she seems tired,” her girlfriend said, and they walked to the nearest place with drinks—a bar—got a can of Diet Coke (which the bartender gave them, free, though they didn’t reveal their mission), and brought it back.

“Here you go,” her girlfriend said, handing it to the woman.

“OH, MY GOD!” the woman said, nearly screaming. “You’re kidding me! Good God!”

For a second, my friend thought she was angry.

“GOD BLESS YOU! I can’t believe you did that!” The woman went on and on.

My friend later told me, “I try to be a nice person, but I gave the woman just what she’d asked for, and my girlfriend thought, ‘That woman looks hot, and she’s old, and she clearly isn’t from Boulder. How could I make her day easier?’”

“I’m honestly too shy to naturally do what she did,” my friend added, “but I think I should get over that. It was such a small thing—it took literally five minutes—and I’ve actually never seen a woman more happy in a moment. It totally turned her world around.”

WAYS YOU CAN MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE FOR YOUR CO-HUMANS (AND, IN TURN, FOR YOURSELF)

Do random acts of
judicious
kindness.

Sometimes, we engage in knee-jerk goodness—goodness that ultimately isn’t so good. An act that, on the surface, seems kind, generous, and helpful may actually be none of these.

For years, I sneered at the term “putting your dog to sleep” as a nefarious euphemism that helped people feel better about killing a dog that had become inconvenient for them. If you value life and love your dog, keeping him or her on the planet as long as possible seems like the right thing to do. It did to me—until the vet told me that my darling fifteen-year-old Yorkie, Lucy, was in kidney failure.

We weren’t at the end yet, he reassured me. He gave me meds and instructions on caring for her, but I came home in tears and called my friend Debbie. She started to cry, too, and then told me what she’d learned in putting her beloved elderly bichon, Marley, to sleep a few months before. It took her three times going to the shelter to go through with it. That third and final time, when she saw what a peaceful process it actually turned out to be, how they really do just fall into a deep sleep as they’re going out, she realized that she’d been wrong to hang on to Marley for as long as she did and that she’d done it for her benefit and not Marley’s. By telling me this, she helped me understand that being
judiciously good
means recognizing that keeping your dog alive when he or she no longer has a very good quality of life is prolonging suffering, not prolonging life.

About a month later, one awful morning when I saw that Lucy was struggling to keep her furry little butt up, this meant that I was prepared to do the right thing, right away. A few hours later, when the vet opened, I rushed her there, and as I held her, petted her, and cooed to her, he gave her an injection, and she closed her eyes and floated away. I still miss her terribly and completely, down to her tiny little musty wet doggy smell, which now only faintly lingers in some of her sweaters, but I take solace in realizing that I gave her both a good life—the best I possibly could—and a “good death.”

Engineering professor Barbara Oakley studies the area of psychology that this sad situation with Lucy could have fallen into, altruism gone wrong: attempts intended to help that instead result in unanticipated harm—for the recipient, for the helper, or sometimes for both.

For instance, we may tell ourselves that we’re doing good when saying yes to someone’s request for help feels better at that moment than saying no. Oakley, in a paper on “pathological altruism” for the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, gives the example of a brother trying to overcome an addiction to painkillers. “When he goes through withdrawal, you get more painkillers to help him feel better, and you cover for him when his work supervisor calls. You genuinely want to help your brother, but the reality is that you are enabling his addiction.” Paradoxically, being
judiciously kind
would mean letting him suffer for days, allowing him to hate you for it, and being there to hold his hand and mop his brow.

We don’t give much thought to the potential negative effects of helping upon the person offering the help, but we sometimes do kind deeds at too great an expense to ourselves. Unhealthy giving is even painted as a virtue—“Give till it hurts!”—but bailing somebody out should be considered a bust if you’re going beyond your means in time or money or jeopardizing your job, your health, or your continued ownership of your house.

Oakley notes that we are especially blind to the ill effects of over-giving when whatever we’re doing allows us to feel particularly good, virtuous, and benevolent. To keep from harming ourselves or others when we’re supposed to be helping, Oakley emphasizes the importance of checking our motives when we believe we’re doing good. “People don’t realize how narcissistic a lot of ‘helping’ can be,” she told me. “It’s all too easy for empathy and good deeds to really be about our self-image or making
ourselves
happy or comfortable.”