Heck Of A Guy

You’re Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery

By Richard Stengel
June 2000; Simon & Schuster

This post contains concepts I could not offer in many forums, but, thankfully, the readers of this blog are wise, perceptive, and self-aware enough to grasp these subtle complexities of these ideas and extrapolate their implications. (And every one of those readers – and you know who you are – is also good looking. What are the odds of that?)

Anyway, …

Categorical Clarifications

Before extracting today’s diamond of insight from this particular literary kimberlite,¹ I find it necessary to point out the extraordinarily significant difference between two of categories used in this blog.

Madeleines, named after Proust’s bakery treat that triggered his memories in “Remembrance Of Things Past,” could be called, albeit with an unacceptable loss in ostentation, “Insights from a book or poem I’ve read, a movie I’ve seen, a song I’ve heard, … .” Today’s post belongs to the Madeleines category.

Recommendations are – well, … recommendations. Usually, they are the grown-up version of that portion of the template for book reports I learned in the fourth grade, “I enjoyed [name of book] and I think you would too.” Today’s post does not fall into the Recommendations category.

The best element of You’re Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery, in fact, is just that – its title. And, one can argue that the covers are interesting as well. The hard cover version is pictured at the top of this post while the front of the paperback edition is shown below. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the rationale behind the change.²

Otherwise, the book itself is the publishing industry’s analogue of the pretty funny Saturday Night Live skit transformed into an exceedingly lame full-length movie (see consider “The Coneheads”).

Perhaps I should clarify the category titles by splitting Recommendations into

1. Positive Recommendation: I liked this enough to think you might like it too (back to the fourth grade template)
2. Negative Recommendation: I read this crap so you won’t have to.

Meet Erving Goffman

One of the Stengel’s chief sources for You’re Too Kind is Erving Goffman, a sociologist who suggested in the 50’s that life is like a play in which we are all actors who write and present our lines to other actors who are busily portraying themselves.³ The attraction that leads us to participate in this metaphorical pageant is the capacity to cast ourselves in the role of our own choice in order to influence how others perceive us. Goffman’s “dramaturgical approach” stipulates, in tit for tat manner, that there a “tacit social agreement” obligates us to allow each person to also portray himself or herself however one chooses.

Consequently, every day, with the silent approval of everyone else, each of us practices any number of deceptions necessary for society to operate smoothly. The final axiom in Goffman’s system is that much of the script in this play calls for interactions, not just soliloquies, and, thus, everyone has a double role: “A defensive orientation toward saving his own face and a protective orientation toward saving the other’s face.” Many of the words and much of the behavior we exhibit in encounters, according to Goffman, is “an effort on everyone’s part to get through the occasion and all the unanticipated and unintentional events.” For example, we downplay the faults of others in our conversations with them. And, we expect the same treatment from them.

DrHGuy Spins Goffman

I have, I’m certain, failed to capture the complete concept, especially since I’m not only condensing Goffman’s theoretical system but I’m actually extrapolating it second-hand from a book by another author who is using Goffman’s ideas to make his own point, but this seems a useful way to think about certain connections between ourselves and others.

And – here’s a surprise – I see an extension of his hypothesis (i.e., I’ve stolen and twisted his ideas to support something I already believed). It seems to me that some folks use this implicit social contract in a way that exploits and subverts the premise. They publicly send out signals that they accept the social contract, creating a sense of obligation in those with whom they deal to play by the rules as well. The subversives then violate that contract by unilaterally denying independence to others participating in what should be a pact between equals. These folks are willing to play the game if and only if they are they are the sole authorities able to write, revise, and enforce the rules. In oversimplified form, the exchange transforms from

X: Hey, you’re not so bad.
Y: You’re not so bad either.

to

X: Hey, you’re not so bad.
Y: Maybe you’re right about me. But you suck.

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD), for example, exhibit extreme versions of this behavior, declaring, in effect, that if they feel hurt (and they feel hurt all the time), the reason must be that somebody and, not infrequently, everybody is doing something to hurt them.

Best Friend: Hey, you’re not so bad.
BPD: The only reason you would say that is because you feel guilty about making me feel miserable.

It’s All About The Children

Our children, however, may be the most expert exploiters of this system. In most cases, even if we’re dealing with colleagues, friends, and lovers, we’ll eventually exhaust our sense of duty and our supply of optimism if the other person in the interaction persists in using the social contract to double-cross us, and we will either retaliate or, more likely, simply avoid contact.

And perhaps our hope that offspring will eventually understand and embrace their responsibility to cut the other guy some slack isn’t infinite, but it is assuredly stratospheric, so any time we detect even the most ambiguous and miniscule of potential clues that one of the kids seems to be offering mutuality, parents, at least parents like me, are eager to engage, ignoring the historical data and easily calculable outcome. Have you ever seen those cartoons with Lucy promising this time she will hold the football for Charlie Brown’s kick without pulling it away at the last second?

If there is a teleological aspect to this phenomenon, perhaps it’s that this is a litmus test for maturity; whenever a child can routinely treat the parent with the reciprocity implicit in this social arrangement, the parent knows it’s safe to set the youngster loose on society.

It’s a thought. I could be wrong. Just ask my kids.

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1. Fun fact: To produce a one-caret diamond, 250 tons of ore must be mined and processed. A brief, well illustrated explanation of the processing methodology, which effectively de-romanticizes diamonds without resorting to sociological or political perspectives, can be found at American Museum of Natural History web site. I recommend reviewing this prior to purchasing gemstones – just to keep things in perspective. [↩]
2. The primary reason for letting you draw your own conclusions is that I can’t come up with one. [↩]
3. OK, Shakespeare might have had a similar “the world is a stage” notion first — by 400 years — but that hardly means it’s wrong. [↩]