TIME EUROPE
July 24, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 4
In Praise of Flattery
How the rampant sucking up to the famous has undermined the language of private praise
By RICHARD STENGEL
perfect, gentle reader. I won't begin this essay with a tribute to your wisdom because a person of your obvious accomplishments would surely be immune to such puffery. Someone with as much self-assurance and discernment as you would want not soft soap but unvarnished candor.
Nothing personal, dear reader, but I doubt it.
In fact, the higher your self-esteem, the more susceptible you are to flattery. Confident folks regard the praise directed at them as shrewd judgment rather than sucking up. But perhaps, selfless reader, you feel you're not getting the buttering up you deserve. And it's no wonder, for the type of flattery that has reached dangerous, epidemic proportions today is the absurd adulation and reflexive lionization of movie stars and celebrities. There is a massive grade inflation of such public praise, a kind of halo effect around celebrity that results in a society-wide giving of praise where praise is not due.
The result is that such public flattery has debased and cheapened the currency of private praise. We've become warier, more ironic about praise in general. No one wants to seem like a smarmy suck-up. No one wants to appear too earnest. The language of superlatives has become worn out and phony. If Mike Ovitz is a visionary, what does that make Charles Darwin? If Donald Trump is charismatic, what does that make Martin Luther King? If every flavor-of-the-month actress is brilliant, what do you tell your seven-year-old daughter when she comes home with an 88 on her spelling test?
Flattery has never been a very flattering idea. Satan was nothing less than the Arch Flatterer, according to Milton. Dante put flatterers in the eighth ring of hell, right beside tyrants and murderers. In societies that were hierarchical, like those in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, flattery was considered perilous because it was a means of upsetting the divinely ordained social order. If you brown-nosed the King into making you a lord, you were unfairly fiddling with the status quo.
But flattery began even before Eden. Chimpanzees groom each other all day long as a strategic means of advancement. Such petting — the root of the word flattery comes from the French for stroking or caressing — is nonverbal flattery. You can even make the case that it's evolutionarily adaptive behavior. The ancient Egyptians flattered themselves that they could outwit death. (The Pollyannaish credos of so many self-help movements are the modern echo of this.) The ancient Greeks believed the greatest danger to the democracy they invented was demagoguery, the flattering of the people — a device Bill Clinton always exploits when he's in hot water. (On the day the House opened its impeachment inquiry, Clinton said, "I trust the American people. They almost always get it right." And they believed him because it was a pleasing fiction.)
But the blossoming of the individual during the Renaissance changed the nature of flattery. When people began to think of themselves not as serfs or cogs but as unique individuals, flattery became more personal. You no longer flattered the office but the person who held it. Once social mobility became a good, flattery lost its moral stigma and became just another tool of social advancement.
The American Puritans rejected frilly Old World flattery for something more direct. Ben Franklin's practical advice never to contradict anyone and to ingratiate yourself through little favors ("A flatterer never seems absurd," says Poor Richard's Almanac, "the flatter'd always takes his word") eventually gave birth to Dale Carnegie, whose recipe for How to Win Friends and Influence People was to make them feel important by flattering them sincerely. (Carnegie knew that once you can fake sincerity, there is nothing holding you back.)
But Carnegie was more than just the quintessential American salesman. His life and work signaled a change in the American persona. For Carnegie was both a cause and a symptom of the shift away from the significance of "character" in the American makeup to the importance of "personality," the transformation from the rough-hewn individualism of the frontier to the "have-a-nice-day" perkiness that is the signature of the service economy. Sociologist David Riesman once described this as the transition from "the invisible hand to the glad hand." Hey, great to meet ya!
This shift in character ultimately robbed flattery of much of its moral sting. Our internal compass has become fuzzy. The modern individual, as everyone from Rousseau to Christopher Lasch has suggested, is obsessively concerned with how others see him. "The savage lives within himself," wrote Rousseau. "The social man only knows how to live in the opinion of others." While flattery is no longer a sin, it's become even more effective because we have fewer resources for figuring out just how darn smart and good looking we really are.
Today there is far too much undeserving public praise. I'm talking about the proliferation of cheesy TV award shows for just about every form of entertainment. The omnipresence of worshipful stories about celebrities in every form of media. The very pervasiveness of such pandering undermines the authenticity of private praise. It would be sad if the language of personal appreciation were to become as phony and cliché d as so much public flattery. The solution is that we must embrace flattery to redeem praise. Small flatteries are part of the mortar that holds society together. It is one of the little, daily rituals that keep civil society civil.
It is the tactical omissions of everyday life that make society possible. Out of both compassion and convenience, we almost never contest other people's depictions of themselves. Is that a form of flattery? I think it is. Is it harmful? I don't think so. As the great student of manners Lord Chesterfield once said, if some men and women want to think of themselves as a little brighter, a little more attractive than they actually are, what is the harm? And if telling them so makes them so, so much the better.
John Stuart Mill said the golden rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is the essence of utilitarianism. It's really just a mutually rewarding exchange, which is all that flattery is. I flatter you; you say thank you; we both feel better about ourselves. It's a transaction in which both parties come out ahead.
The ancient Romans had a phrase, laudando praecipere, to teach by praising. It is one of the foundations of civilization. We teach the values we esteem by reinforcing them in our children and each other. "More people are flattered into virtue," wrote the English novelist Robert Smith Surtees, "than bullied out of vice." And if we sometimes use excessive or exaggerated praise to encourage someone, that is not a crime.
Ultimately, I think there is not an overabundance of praise in our society but a dearth of it. Not the absurd and shallow praise of movie stars and professional celebrities, but deserved praise. Sometimes you must even praise the giving of praise to make sure that it is given where it is due. Given the choice of living in a world without praise or one with too much, I would unhesitatingly choose the latter.
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July 24, 2000
COVER
One Is 100
Famous and beloved for her entire adult life, the Queen Mother notches up a century on August 4 — and the celebrations are already in full swing
EUROPE
Crackdown
Moscow's powerful oligarchs feel the heat as Vladimir Putin's tax police and prosecutors continue to make life uncomfortable for Russia's big business
The Hit List
Russia's ruble rousers
Q & A
Berezovsky speaks
The Tax Break Man
By squeezing through sweeping reforms, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has stolen a march on his critics
BUSINESS
Third Generation Gap
Lower-than-expected bidding for mobile licenses is bad news for governments but good news for consumers
Names in Waiting
The trial is over — now judgment day looms for Lloyd's and investors
HEALTH
The New Science of Alzheimer's
Racing against time — and one another — researchers close in on the aging brain's most heartbreaking disorder
SOCIETY
The French Disease
In France, a best seller exposes a nationwide problem of emotional abuse in the workplace
THE ARTS
In Praise of Flattery
How the rampant sucking up to the famous has undermined the language of private praise
You Look Marvelous!
Tips for kissing up
Irony Is Dead. Long Live Irony (on the Web)
The snide tradition of disrespecting media and movie stars is thriving on delightfully sardonic sites
DEPARTMENTS
Essay
Olympic Monitor
World Watch
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