Nice and Good

I don’t ever remember thinking that I wanted to be good though now that I have arrived at seventy-six years of age I tend to think of myself as being good. A good person. I suppose that I had earlier considered that being good was either an unconscious given—I was raised to be a good person—and therefore I was good; or relatedly, I was raised to be good without ever having cause to wonder what good might mean. Good was what they told me I was to be but they never came any closer to defining what that might entail. Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Nice and the Good presents me with an occasion to do so now.
            As in Shakespearean comedies, at this novel’s end all except Theo and Casie become coupled and marry. I think each in the relationship has gone from nice to good. Teen-aged Pierce and Barbara end their virginities and espouse their love for each other and end their self-absorptions. Paula has reconciled with Richard and will return to their marriage, John Ducane will wed Mary Clothier, Ewan Fivey takes off to Australia with Judy McGrath and Jessica has followed after a retreating Willy and the reader is led to believe that they, too, will marry, or at least become a committed couple. Octavian and Kate have settled into their comfortable married arrangement; and Theo Gray has considered returning to the monastery in India which he had earlier left in disgrace and where he believed himself somehow to have failed in his commitment. Theo’s earlier residency there had seemed to him an attempt to leave his past utterly behind [him] and to leave a renewed life, but there he had found himself experiencing “the relentless egoism which he now saw had not suffered an iota of diminution from his gesture of giving up the world.” Theo considers that he might return and attempt again to join the brotherhood. These final relationships and Theo’s hope result from a waning of egotism on the part of each, and this waning allows each to see and hear the other. I think they each become good.
            Theo’s acknowledged failure might offer some insight into the character of the nice and the good. What apparently had led to Theo’s failure was his inability or unwillingness to act without the authority of ego. Perhaps his conscious decision to be good obviated his attempt to achieve being good. It might be that the wish to achieve some moral state blocks the accomplishment of it. Ego gets in the way. John Ducane, a consummate egotist, seems to reach some sense of this insight in an epiphanic moment. Pierce, in an adolescent pique at Barbara’s rejection of him, had foolishly swum into Gunnar’s Cave despite the danger of high tide closing the mouth of the cave, flooding it and thereby drowning him. Ducane swims into the cave to rescue Pierce where he “vaguely imagined that he would easily be able to find Pierce and would use his authority to make the boy come out.” But once Ducane enters the cave “everything seemed different . . . He felt removed from reality,” and like Alice falling through the looking-glass, Ducane plummets into another world. In the absolute darkness of the cave and confronted with the real possibility of his death, Ducane comes to some understanding of how he had in his daily life and relationships functioned under the directing influences of his egotism. In the cave he thinks “[I]f I ever get out of here I will be no man’s judge. Nothing is worth doing except to kill the little rat, not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, see. To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters. All power is sin and all law is frailty. Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation, not law.” Ducane has come to understand that his positions in the world were founded based on his egotism. He had considered, “How instinctively I assume that what everyone needs is help from me.” But his opinion of himself as ‘good’ had been a false conception: he had been merely nice, a surface appearance exhibiting agreeable and concerned behaviors but really an exhibition of ego. In fact, it is questionable if he had, indeed, helped anyone. His behavior is self-aggrandizing but leads ultimately to unhappiness for others because narcissistic egotism cannot address conflict between people. Another character, Willy Kost, who had survived Dachau, says, “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.” To be nice must be exhausting. In the novel, Ducane comes to understand that the greatest evil is “the self-justifying ruthless selfishness of quite ordinary people.” 
            Perhaps love can only exist in the absence of egotism. Love is the good and maybe that is as good a definition of each as I can understand. “Love,” Iris Murdoch writes, “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than ourself is real.” I think I have learned something akin to that from D.W. Winnicott. Love and hate occur when I can acknowledge that the other exists outside of my creation. For Murdoch the difficulty in being good arises from out tendency to egotism; for Winnicott the process effected through transitional objects.
            I don’t believe I have the capability to act outside the demands of ego. There is a form of healthy necessity in narcissistic egoism; each of us needs to take care of ourselves. At some point we all leave the breast and must learn to fend for ourselves out there. For some, I know, there has been no breast and they grow up having learned to do whatever is necessary to protect the self. Sometimes this results in unhappy consequences. But selfless ego is neither good nor nice. It is a blank face. Theo’s decision to return to the monastery would allow him “to keep company with the enlightenment of others, and [there] he might regain at least the untampered innocence of a well-guarded child.” If Theo could not give up ego, then he might at least live in the environment of those who had achieved such renunciation and there he might be happy. There, he might enjoy not the blank face of love but an acceptance of himself that would allow him to consider that “perhaps he would die after all in that green valley.” Perhaps in the presence of those who have given up egotism Theo would have nothing against which to compete or that he might judge. And perhaps an acceptance of ego would make possible the good to exist.