The Case For Occasionally Being Mean (And How That’s Different From Being Cruel)

Allow me a small confession: It has been some time since I have truly enjoyed an essay in a literary magazine. There are too many essays, and vanishingly few good essayists. There seems to be real confusion about whether style can conceal a fundamental incuriosity, whether sufficiently inventive prose can paper over the refusal to think. (It can’t.) Even accomplished writers don’t seem to recognize what is interesting about their own thoughts and experiences. A good essay is not merely mental stenography. And what is more tedious than reading yet another essay that, after lengthy perseveration, locates one more reason for endorsing the conventional view? How often are you actually surprised by something you read—even by yet another hairsplitting “case against” something perfectly worthy or good? And when essayists are self-consciously short on ideas, which is more often than you might think, they will sometimes experiment with being a little bit mean. Like a kitten nipping at your heel, a mean and petty takedown is a good way for a writer to draw a few moments’ attention—never mind how much harder it is to be compelling while also being nice.

Another predictable device in the essayist’s self-exculpatory toolkit is to return to the beginning of the form, to blame poor Montaigne, pointing out that this genre is propaedeutic, an artful introductory exercise, not a means of definitive argument. But Montaigne was a subtle and imaginative thinker, a cautious skeptic, who truly tried to help us see old things afresh, to assemble a thoughtful compendium of things usually beneath the notice of philosophy—like smells, or thumbs.

Along those lines, one of Montaigne’s more important insights, commemorated and analyzed without pretension by political theorist Judith Shklar in Ordinary Vices, is his rejection of cruelty. For Shklar as for Montaigne, cruelty, despite its casual ubiquity, is simply the worst vice we can display. The “horror of cruelty,” Montaigne wrote in “On Conversation,” “impels me more to clemency than any model of clemency could draw me on.” It is not an argument, but perhaps Montaigne is indicating that cruelty is not subject to debate. Cruelty is something done by a human being to another creature—God or the gods could be cruel, but cruelty qua cruelty, Shklar argues, is a sin not against God but against humanity. A good theorist, she defines cruelty as the “willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear”—although I would add emotional pain to her definition. It is hard to think about cruelty because it is superfluous and superabundant, and to dwell too long on it is to be tempted by misanthropy. When confronted by cruelty, we can usually only flinch and look away. Genuine cruelty might in fact be “not thinking about it”—not thinking about being cruel, distancing yourself from yourself to do something indefensible; in this way, its misanthropy extends even to your own humanity.

Forgive me if that got a little bit heavy. This is not that kind of essay. I wanted to start with cruelty because I want to be clear that, although I think being nice is the best policy in most situations, I also think that a limited case exists for being mean. Being mean is not the same as being cruel, but, if unchecked, meanness can become cruelty. Indeed, one of the problems with the Internet is that it is the ideal medium for encouraging small-scale meanness to metastasize into outrageous cruelty. The difference between being mean and being cruel has to do with intention, scale, and intensity, and whereas cruelty might most dramatically show itself in the infliction of physical pain, meanness has only to do with the emotional kind. Being mean is always directed at another person. It is a way of telling the truth—truthfulness is a virtue for Aristotle, flanked by the excess of boastfulness and the deficiency of irony—that, through carelessness or minor wickedness, gives pain to someone else.

I do not think that being mean is a virtue, but it is related to the virtue by means of which we tell the truth. There are other ways of telling the truth. We can be circumspect or ironic—there is very often a nicer way to put something. Yet there are good reasons for sometimes being just a little bit mean. (No, I am not thinking about that gratuitously nasty and rebarbative character now dominating our public realm.) I think of being mean the way that the King of Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels talks about dangerous views: “For a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials.” That is to say, I think being nice is required for good politics, but being mean has definite social utility in private life—and it should stay there.

An example might be useful. I once sat next to a dean at an important, and very long, university meeting. During a dilatory and tiresome jeremiad from one of my colleagues, he stretched luxuriously, and, as he did, his pants rode up, revealing colorful socks which, in unmistakable block letters, read “THIS MEETING SUCKS.” A few of us saw it and, awkwardly, started chuckling. He was right: That meeting did suck, and everyone knew it. Was it the kindest or most courageous way of dealing with this situation? Did my colleague’s tediousness not deserve some gentle rebuke? Almost certainly. And the dean’s way of providing one was certainly truthful. Yet to be mean is to be slightly ignoble; definitionally, the virtues are nobility itself. You diminish yourself in service to such candor.

There is no doubt that Plato’s Socrates is relentlessly annoying, even unlikable—as much as anything else, this must be why he suffered the fate he did—but there is at least one instance in which Socrates is not only ironic with his interlocutor but also a little bit mean. There are few true villains in Plato. And there’s something almost touching in the way some Platonic bad boys—a Thrasymachus or a Phaedrus—come around after a sufficiently long association with Socrates.

But if anyone is a Platonic villain, it is the obstreperous and recalcitrant Callicles, a defender of tyrannical hedonism in Plato’s Gorgias. Callicles’s hedonism deserves to be refuted, or at least revealed for what it really is, but as the dialogue draws to a close, Socrates seems repeatedly to come up short. Eventually Socrates forces Callicles to admit that a consistent view of pleasure as the sole highest good seems to mean that some of the most unsavory aspects of biological life are actually contenders for the best life for a human being. It is a bit uncomfortable to read. But by humiliating the cocksure Callicles—in a way that is mean but not cruel—Socrates makes him, and the other characters present, face up to the implications of his own argument. We might think less of Socrates for his broaching of this impropriety, but the very way that it stands out as a bit uncomfortable is something like the point of being mean. It is a forgivable misdemeanor, useful for coping with a world filled with outrageous lies, crimes against the truth, and so much human folly that it can make the perfectly sane feel as if they are going mad.

Another exemplar of salutary meanness is Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bennet’s epigrammatic wit cuts everyone down to size. Even its most frequent target, the risible Mrs. Bennet, at one point wishes that her husband had been at the Netherfield Ball so that he could have taken Mr. Darcy down a peg with “one of [his] set-downs.” Mr. Bennet is interesting because he fails precisely where Jane Austen flourishes. While she is capable of a certain genteel irony, being able to gently mock while maintaining distance and affection, Mr. Bennet, a clever man buffeted by absurdity, cannot help being so direct. And if eventually his daughter Elizabeth understands that there is something lacking in his character, we nevertheless appreciate him when the pompous Mr. Collins comes to call.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about being mean is its dramatization of a reciprocal dynamic in which the belittling of others belittles the one who does so. Yet this is precisely why meanness can foster intimacy in social situations. Pulling a new acquaintance aside to comment on someone else’s stupidity or viciousness not only shows that you share a perception of what is really going on; it also exposes your own shortcomings and pettiness. By revealing that you are not a boy scout, you demonstrate to your acquaintance that, paradoxically, you can be trusted. If hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, meanness is the compliment virtue pays to vice. In congratulating yourselves for not falling victim to the vice or ignorance of someone else, you are at the same time making it clear to your confidant that you are no saint. Company loves minor wickedness.

There is, besides, a sort of phony professional niceness that is intolerable and in fact different from actually being nice. Being nice means trying to give social pleasure. It is as different from the politesse of professional obligation as a genuine virtue is from unthinking conventionality. Indeed, that is the difference. Being mean is not seething, cynical, or ironic resentment. It is not hatred or cruelty. It is honesty for imperfect people in an imperfect world. If we cannot say what we think, we may start to hate speaking altogether. Can we admit that when we succumb to misology and lose all taste for opposing what we find false or repugnant, misanthropy will not be long in coming? If we are going to be virtuous lovers of humankind in an imperfect human world, then sometimes we should be able to call things as we see them. In this limited way, being mean not only can foster intimacy, but also protect us from despising humanity out of fidelity to truths we cannot speak.