“I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right.”
Let’s think about this in the context of the perpetual social media culture war.
You’re probably familiar with this. Some person who doesn’t like hostility and is uncomfortable about all these witch hunts says they just want to be kind and compassionate to people. And then some more aggressive warrior marches in, saying that person is just “nice”, while it’s more important to be good. They quote something about the worst masters under slavery were the one who treated their slaves “nicely” and smoothly perpetuated the institution, when obviously the only moral course when dealing with slavery was to be an annoying, mean, and stubborn as hell iconoclast who would tell the entire South that their economy needs to be torn down.
Nice, is short-term and short-range helpfulness and lack of hostility to the people you directly interact with.
Good, in their usage of this term, is doing what’s effective for their political cause. They say this good is better than that nice.
That’s nice vs good, and the latter has a point. Most of you readers probably flinch in regard to this, because you’ve seen a lot of pain and suffering done in the name of shouting down the nice people. You’ve seen a lot of idiots trample over functional groups in the name of being “good.” My sympathies to you. But it’s not that the “good” advocates are wrong, it’s that they don’t go far enough.
Really you could say that about every toxic social justice argument: they found a valid point, but never really committed to it. They took it only far enough to win an argument today, but they didn’t think about how it should inform everything they do, if they really seriously believed it.
The witch introduces us to a third concept on the same spectrum… Right.
How good is being good if you have chosen the wrong political cause? Then you’re just being an asshole, in service to a greater evil. (There are many such people who do that.) Or if your tactics are actually pretty bad and ineffectual. Before you can be Good you need to be Right, just to be sure your cause is actually good, and the anti-nice tactics you are using are actually accomplishing anything.
Because this, this arguing on tumblr? It may be “good” but it’s not right. You are not saving the world here. And the niche politics of fandom a troll may be advocating are ill-thought out and far removed from universal justice.
For instance, racial and gender equality will always be impossible without more economic equality. Which most on the left know and will pay lip service too. But actually fighting the economic order is damned hard. So most liberals… kind of throw their hands up in the air, vote for Democratic candidates, and get to complaining about toxic masculinity in last night’s Game of Thrones.
Their analysis and their praxis is flawed - no great sin, this is a difficult task - and so their ability to execute “good” actions is flawed. But culture war discourse discourages discussion of the greater goal or criticism of tactics, so you can’t work on being right. There is only trying to be good, harder and harder.
There is a place for nice. Sometimes being right is too hard, complicated, and horrifying to know the answer for. Then you might as well be kind to people because you don’t know what the fuck else you are doing.
There is a place for right. When being honest about your motives and how you should help the world.
The place for prioritizing good though… when you neither care about the people around you, or the real truth behind your actions… is heavily overstated to say the least. And the great middle mass of people concerned with being seen as “good” people, who are too harsh to be kind to the enemy but not harsh enough to examine themselves, who do the largest amount of damage in ideological crusades.
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