Why Nice Guys (Eventually) Win
I try to regularly hit the gym and lift weights and like to keep in shape; I enjoy building my body and challenging myself. Physically, I am seeking in middle age to be stronger, physically and otherwise, than I have ever been before. I also find the habits of body that come with regular exercise build better habits of mind, and this I find helps with managing stress, increasing energy, and so on. Exercise is good for you, and I like strength training. But in these spaces, I at times find a mindset that gives me pause. “Bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times.”
Of course, people tend to like, and gravitate toward, some variation of “the world would be better off if people more like me were in charge.” I think of the philosopher Plato, who in the Republic argued that an ideal society would be run by philosopher-kings with godlike power, or pioneering sociologist Auguste Comte who thought the ideal society would be run by a “sociological priesthood” coupled with captains of industry. These examples seem so comically self-serving that I use them as fodder in some of my courses (mostly to point out that brilliant people can be spectacularly self-deluded too, and everyone is at least a little wrong about a lot of things).
Self-serving bias aside, the idea of masculine strength and toughness being what saves or destroys a society is interesting. In what kinds of times does this rhetoric hold the most appeal? Precisely, I would guess, when fear is high and social cooperation is low, there is a temptation to assume that there is something wrong with “people” (meaning those different from us)—that they have become stupid or weak (as opposed to smart and strong, also presumably like us). Does strength refer to physical strength? Does strength have an opposite, and what does that opposite look like?
Part of this idea of “strong” means to be unafraid—unafraid to stand up for what is right, to defend oneself and others, and so on. But I am afraid of a lot of things. And so are you. Being afraid isn’t weak; at the most basic biological level, it’s being alive and wanting to stay that way. Like pain, fear is information about the world that guides you to pursue some behaviors and avoid others. Working out and anything else that’s challenging involves enduring physical discomfort, but pain is also your body warning you of its physical limits. If I don’t listen to my body, I will hurt myself, and in middle age I don’t heal as quickly as I used to, meaning I have to gauge the “right amount” of pain during exercise. Too little, and I’m not challenging myself. Too much, and I’m going to risk injury possibly not being able to work out at all for weeks.
As with pain, the trick with fear is to make sure that fears are proportional to the actual risk posed by some hazard (risk, by the way, is the actual measurable danger; a hazard is something potentially dangerous). I am afraid of alligators because if they are hungry, they may eat me. Fear keeps me from hanging out where hungry gators live, and I take that fear to be rational. But I also live in Northern Minnesota, where there are exactly zero native alligators, so spending a lot of time thinking about the threat posed to me by alligators is not rational.
The point is to be afraid of the right thing, at the right time, and for the right reasons—an idea sprinkled throughout ancient Greek and Roman philosophy (often viewed stereotypical “tough guys” of Western Antiquity despite the many ways they departed from that stereotype in practice). Aristotle, for example, argued in The Nicomachean Ethics that courage is a mean, an average, between extremes of cowardice and rashness. Cowards are too afraid of too many things, are afraid of the wrong things, or are afraid for the wrong reasons. Cowards may desert you in your time of need or fail to stand up to danger; but those who are rash, whose fear does not stop them from acting overly aggressively or impulsively, cause problems for themselves and others that are just as bad.
It’s not a question of being “strong” or “weak” but of knowing when to steel yourself and go charging in despite your fear, and when to hold back despite your impulses. People who are overly aggressive or impulsive—bullies—are rash, in Aristotle’s sense. Bullies might be that way out of “nurture” (trauma or abuse can mess with the ability to accurately assess the threat others pose) or “nature” (personality or psychological issues can slow or stop the development of a mature conscience and adequate sense of empathy). There is an important distinction between being a bully and standing up to one—being a bully is rashness and standing up to a bully is courage—and even those “tough guy” cultures had some clear and thoughtful ideas about the difference between the two.
More to the point, physical strength has never been less useful. Labor today is typically supplemented—or substituted—by machines that are far stronger and more efficient than our bodies could be. When I was a mechanic, I learned to get the winch or the crane or the forklift instead of struggling with something that might injure me or others. I learned how to apply heat or get a hammer or other “smart” ways to loosen stuck bolts and fasteners rather than using brute force (especially after I pullled a 7/8 inch wrench right into my forehead one day and knocked myself unconscious). Most jobs don’t actually require much strength-based labor anymore; service-based jobs look for speed, efficiency, and social skills, whereas the growing number of desk jobs in an “information economy” have no use for physical strength. We hurt more from sitting or standing still, not from moving too much. Even in a narrower militaristic sense, a world in which long-range projectile weapons are standard in combat means strong bodies don’t matter nearly as much as technology and cunning. Though there are obvious benefits to continuing strength training for military personnel, anyone can in theory pull a trigger or push a button. Physical strength may have its indirect benefits to an individual, unless you’re a professional athlete or something, the benefits of a people or society upholding being physically “strong” as a virtue are minimal.
Maybe you are afraid that our current society cannot last for whatever reason. I am not sure that this is a rational fear. As someone who has studied society for more than two decades in various capacities, and has participated in it twice as long, I don’t think it’s possible to predict the future with much certainty. Because the actions people take, or fail to take, shape that future. Social collapse can obviously be accelerated, or arrested, by human effort; if enough people worry enough about social collapse and withdraw instead of using that energy to solve present social problems, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems to me the more courageous thing to do is work to keep such a collapse from happening at all.
But even in this far-fetched world where the technologies we currently depend on suddenly become useless, being physically strong has never been as useful as the slogan suggests. Human beings have historically lived most of our time on earth in small groups, maybe 150 or so individuals. We were, and are, not the fastest or the strongest critters around by any definition—consider the speed, stealth, and bite force of any of the Big Cats, or the physical strength of bears or gorillas, for comparison. Physically the strongest individual human is far weaker than the predators we competed with. Instead, our two greatest assets are our capacities to think abstractly—to reason—and to feel a sense of connection and obligation to other humans in our group—sympathy and empathy. These are far from perfect, but they allow people to develop ever more sophisticated tools, and to work together to solve complex problems, and the ability to do these things is why we survive as a species at all.
Even if civilization collapsed, we would still have to develop tools and work together if we wanted to continue to exist. Being strong or aggressive might be more useful in a lawless collapse in the short-term because it might allow one to exercise power over others and secure resources for themselves. However, the strongest or smartest person is quickly outclassed by even a few average-strength or average-intelligence people, who might have even more incentive to work together if said person is being a bully—hoarding resources or manipulating or dominating others. Again, the people who are best equipped to cooperate do better in the long-term, because bullies don’t have the skills to competently meet all their own needs (no one knows how to do everything); and they tend to create too many enemies, who gang up on them and oust them from power or otherwise ruin their day. Unfortunately, this may not occur before they have inflicted a lot of suffering on others.
Richard Dawkins basically makes the argument in his often-misunderstood book The Selfish Gene, that callous, aggressive people will occasionally thrive in a social species like humans and will be able to pass on their callous, aggressive genes, but if this kind of behavior becomes too widespread, the community will collapse and everyone loses (because people will lose the ability to trust which, again, is a hallmark survival value for human beings). There are narcissists and sociopaths and grifters in our society (I talked about this in my last blog entry too), and sometimes they rise to positions of power or prestige (probably by exploiting existing fear or mistrust), but they never make up more than a couple percentage points. We are fortunate in the U.S., as in many other democratic republics, to have a system of checks and balances in our political system that tends be able to rein in even the worst that human nature can offer. Despite that, bullies can do a lot of damage; though incidentally my time spent studying my fellow human beings strongly suggests to me that it is not the callous, aggressive individual who does the most damage, but the self-righteous mob, acting with the certainty that they alone are “good” and everyone else is “evil.”
Which brings me to a definition of “strong” that works. If by “strong” one means the ability and desire to cooperate, whether hunting and gathering, holding the line in a shield-and-spear military formation against an equally well-organized enemy, or keeping a complex institution viable through effective interaction within and without, it is thoughtful cooperation that makes us strong—the hallmark of reason and of sympathy. And it is efforts to sabotage or undermine cooperation that make us weaker, whether carried out by bullies who try to intimidate us into falling in line, liars who wish to gain by our disadvantage, or cowards who would push it all to fall apart rather than having to invest themselves in improving things (perhaps starting with themselves). When we listen to these voices, we become weaker in all the ways that matter. So, if we are in bad times, it’s time to become strong enough to work together. Because in the long run, nice guys—the people capable of working together—win.
Image source: wikimedia commons Greek Phalanx
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greek_Phalanx.jpg
