#and i don't think courtesy is wholly devoid of moral significance

[anghraine]

It's interesting that Tumblr is so fixated on the critical importance of people being soft and nice, often arguing that this is more significant morally than any other quality. I think part of this is a reaction to preoccupation with looks or a vaguely cringe prioritization of intelligence, but it's still pretty strange to me.

I say "interesting" and not just "annoying" because ... a certain baseline of niceness is morally obligatory or you're being an asshole, sure. But that bar is not super high, IMO. And what I really find intriguing is the relative lack of conversation around the limits of niceness.

There's the calculated "niceness" of the Nice Guy(TM) whining about being friendzoned, but I'm only talking about the real deal—people who are nice either out of good nature or conscious effort. It's not that this is secretly bad or something. It is good! But I do think the extreme emphasis on it is pretty misguided.

The thing is, it is 100% possible to believe vile things and still be personally pleasant. Some people are just naturally personable or prize niceness as a cultural or individual value, and will be thoughtful and courteous to strangers while also convinced of the evils of [insert any number of minorities here]. I grew up in conservative rural communities in the United States and was brought up Mormon, so I am extremely familiar with the "nice if you can ignore the bigotry" phenomenon.

Being nice in a day-to-day way does not preclude being a pretty awful person in other ways, actively promoting systematic oppression, or just being inoffensive but fairly vacuous. People's intellectual thought processes and convictions do matter more than ~softness, IMO. And I have fairly severe anxiety and get privately very upset when people seem at all hostile IRL, which it's easy for me to read them as being (social anxiety+autism, yay!). Nevertheless, while I appreciate it when people are nice, I ultimately respect intellectual convictions far more.

Many of the people I love most have iffy manners or are charismatic in a ... very forceful way, but part of why we get on so well and I care about them so much has to do with their convictions, the thought processes that lead to those convictions, and how they apply thought, reasoning, and belief in general. It's not that I interrogate people about their convictions on meeting them, but ... if you're at all committed, they become apparent. And I've found that I'm very drawn to intense people who share my basic ideological beliefs and principles and are intellectually engaged with them, even if their manners are not particularly inviting.

In that sense, yeah, I do think intelligence matters more than niceness. Someone being nice tells me that the person is nice in at least this particular context, but very little about them as people. Many people are nice but bigots, or nice but privately abusive, or nice but vacuous, or nice but undependable, or whatever. It is more important to respect a friend, family member, or partner's fundamental character and lines of thought than to find people who are merely nice.