Good motives, misdirected

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Afternoon Session of the October 1987 Conference.

I've read a few things recently about how "niceness" isn't really a Christlike virtue. True love is a virtue, these arguments say, or deep kindness, but being "nice" is simply trying to make social life go smoothly or encourage people to like us.

Very well; I see the point. If we define "nice" as merely getting along for the sake of getting along, without love and goodness behind it, then I can see it is insufficient. Maybe "kindness" is a better word for that reason. And probably I often do go too far to the "nice" side; being passive or cowardly; quietly letting something go that would be better challenged, just because I want to "get along."

But I also think it's easy to go too far; to disregard even kindness altogether, in favor of our righteous certainty. I fear that I might blithely jump to thinking, "Well, since I'm right, it's much better for me to be forthright about it—and if it comes across as rude—well, too bad—it's for everyone else's own good!" I see that I ought not to be cringing and cowardly, wanting to be liked at the expense of obeying God's law. "Right" in God's eyes is obviously better than "well-liked." But it seems so awfully easy to assume I'm in the right when I'm really just as prideful (or perhaps as wrong) as the person I'm arguing with. What's to stop me from making a virtue of unkindness; from embracing complacency and calling it candor?

I've certainly felt this difficulty in arguments with my teenagers; even in cases where I KNOW my side is "right" from the perspective of experience, authority, scriptural precedent, or whatever else—I can still tell deep-down that contention never brings any long-term good. And when I examine my own feelings later, more often than not, I have to admit it was not pure, disinterested righteousness I was feeling—but stubbornness tangled up with its own form of pride and unrighteous dominion.

Elder Faust counsels:

Let us not become so intense in our zeal to do good by winning arguments or by our pure intention in disputing doctrine that we go beyond good sense and manners, thereby promoting contention, or say and do imprudent things, invoke cynicism, or ridicule with flippancy. In this manner, our good motives become so misdirected that we lose friends and, even more serious, we come under the influence of the devil. I recently heard in a special place, “Your criticism may be worse than the conduct you are trying to correct.”