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Who owns civility?
Unorthodoxy
Patrick J. Deneen
In the wake of the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona, a chorus of voices - mainly, if not exclusively on the political Left - arose in denunciation of the decline of "civility" in contemporary political life. Somewhat incredibly, some of the more prominent voices on the political Right - such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin - denounced these calls for civility. There were efforts - often successful, in fact - to point out that the Left was just as likely to be uncivil in its words and deeds. Still, it's a disturbing spectacle to see so-called conservatives defending incivility - it was Edmund Burke, after all - the founder of modern conservatism - who lamented the decline of chivalry in Revolutionary France. Still, in the main, there was at least a moment of circumspection and even conversation about the role of civility in our political lives, though that moment seems largely to have passed with little more than cosmetic efforts to be less offensive (where they existed at all).
For all the the lamentation about the rise of incivility in our culture today, there was little understanding of the deeper sources of modern incivility - indeed, the connection between incivility and liberalism itself. Civility requires a certain set of preconditions and even deeper prevailing norms about the nature of political life itself. Modern liberalism has systematically sought to disassemble those conditions, and those prevailing norms. Complaints about the decline of civility are thus more than a little disingenuous.
One should expect little deep thought about such a matter as "civility" in contemporary political and social life, but there seem to me to be fewer more important questions facing our society today. Yet, the fact is, for all the hew and cry about the dearth of civility in our lives and times, as a culture we are actually more deeply opposed to civility than might even be suspected by its passing proponents. Modern - especially liberal - society is designed largely to undermine civility. Rather than lament its dearth, we should understand more fundamentally the deeper systemic causes of its decline.
Completely absent in the passing fury over the decline of civility was even a momentary reflection on the etymological origin of the word. Like the related word "polite," civility can be traced back to an ancient word for "city" - cives in Latin, polis in Greek. This is hardly an incidental or irrelevant relationship. The ancients understood that there was an intimate relationship between life in the city and the activity of civilization. The city was not fundamentally understood (as in its liberal conception) as a vehicle of mutual convenience aimed at the pursuit of maximum individual self-fulfillment. Rather, the city was the necessary sphere in which humans became fully human, in which the higher parts of their natures were cultivated through practice and habituation to become self-governing and, with the limits of our inescapable self-ness, to be oriented toward a concern for the common good. The ancients understood that such an orientation required a life-long and concerted effort to combat the human propensity toward self-centeredness, and that it could only be effected in relatively small societies in which the distance between my immediate good and the good of the community was not too vast. Politics, and political life, was thus a kind of schooling in self-governance and common weal, with the aim of political life being the cultivation of citizens, not the encouragement of individual and self-defined goods.
In this context we can understand why "politeness" and "civility" are so closely connected to the ancient conception of politics. Manners - those expressions of civility and politeness - is a basic form of training in citizenship. By enacting a considerateness for others - even where this may not be actually our initial reaction - we become habituated into the practice of being other-regarding. Far from being punctilious and effected, manners are actually those earliest forms of training in civic life, the attendant "formalities" that make civic life more than simply a contrivance for self-interested individuals. They are also a kind of training in self-governance: for instance, table manners exist not to increase our capacity to consume more faster, but to slow us down, to allow us to ingest slowly, to reduce our consumption and at the same time to encourage the arts of conversation and companionship as the primary way we experience our most basic instinctual consumption (courtship customs, of course, afforded the same training in matters sexual).
First Hobbes and then Locke rejected this conception of politics as too confining for individuals. Instead (Locke particularly) commended a conception of politics as an arrangement of mutual convenience that was organized to allow for the individual pursuit of happiness. The cultivation of manners was rendered secondary to the training of people to become useful and productive members of society ("industrious and rational"), better to increase material growth and power that would in turn offer more opportunities for human liberation from natural constraints. Liberty became defined not as "self-government under laws self-imposed," but as the greatest possible absence of restraint. Manners necessarily faded in importance - instead, liberal society favors "authenticity" and "self-expression" those watch-words of our individualism that excuse all manners of public and private offense.
A mannered society thus relies less on laws as the way we enforce social norms: a polite society needs fewer policies and police. A liberal society inevitably has more of the latter, less of the former. Ironically, a liberal society will come to rely on the enforcement mechanisms of the State as replacements of practices of civility. As Aristotle noted, the lawsuit will replace civic friendship as a prevailing norm. Politics itself will come to be understood - in the famous words of Harold Laswell - "who gets what, when, and how." For the ancients, the emphasis was on the the "who"; for moderns, the emphasis is on "gets."
To hear contemporary liberals lament the decline of "civility" is thus more than a little galling. Modern liberals are the heirs of a longstanding effort to liberate people from the "little platoons" that tempered individual self-expression. Hearing their decrying of contemporary "incivility" is a bit like the man who, after insisting on his wife dress as revealingly as possible, gets upset that other men are leering at her. By that same token, "conservative" defenses of "incivility" are even more aggravating, perhaps even more than the well-publicized "conservative" re-introduction of polystyrene coffee cups in the House cafeterias.
Civility is indeed a lost art of our time, but not because of talk radio or growing partisanship. These are symptoms of a deeper disease. Until we frankly diagnose our condition, we remain a patient whose diseases continue to metastasize, all the while complaining that what really bothers us is a hang-nail.
By Patrick J. Deneen |
March 2, 2011; 9:44 AM ET
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Unorthodoxy
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Posted by: Mary_Cunningham | March 8, 2011 7:38 AM
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One man's protest is another man's incivility.
Posted by: areyousaying | March 6, 2011 7:46 AM
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EDBYRONADAMS
True enough. My point was to say that it is not liberalism per se that has "destroyed civility." Neither being "liberal" nor "conservative" is a requirement for being egotistical or uncivil. The answer to "who owns civility?" then is, absolutely no one.
Posted by: Sara121 | March 5, 2011 4:02 PM
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The Muslim version of being "uncivil":
The Muslim Conquest of India - 11th to 18th century
■"The likely death toll is somewhere between 2 million and 80 million. The geometric mean of those two limits is 12.7 million. "
and the 19 million killed in the Mideast Slave Trade 7C-19C by Muslims.
and more recently
1a) 179 killed in Mumbai/Bombay, 290 injured
1b) Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and Theo Van Gogh
2) 9/11, 3000 mostly US citizens, 1000’s injured
3) The 24/7 Sunni-Shiite centuries-old blood feud currently being carried out in Iraq, US Troops killed in action, 3,483 and 925 in non combt roles.
99,901 – 109,143 Iraqi civilians killed as of 3/3/2011/, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ and
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pd
4) Kenya- In Nairobi, about 212 people were killed and an estimated 4000 injured; in Dar es Salaam, the attack killed at least 11 and wounded 85.[2]
5) Bali-in 2002-killing 202 people, 164 of whom were foreign nationals, and 38 Indonesian citizens. A further 209 people were injured.
6) Bali in 2005- Twenty people were killed, and 129 people were injured by three bombers who killed themselves in the attacks.
7) Spain in 2004- killing 191 people and wounding 2,050.
8. UK in 2005- The bombings killed 52 commuters and the four radical Islamic suicide bombers, injured 700.
9) The execution of an eloping couple in Afghanistan on 04/15/2009 by the Taliban.
10) - Afghanistan: US troops 1,141 killed in action, 242 killed in non-combat situations as of 03/03/2011. Over 40,000 Afghan civilians killed due to the dark-age, koranic-driven Taliban acts of horror
11) The killing of 13 citizen soldiers at Ft. Hood by a follower of the koran.
12) 38 Russian citizens killed on March 29, 2010 by Muslim women suicide bombers.
13) The May 28, 2010 attack on a Islamic religious minority in Pakistan, which have left 98 dead,
14) Lockerbie is known internationally as the site where, on 21 December 1988, the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 crashed as a result of a terrorist bomb. In the United Kingdom the event is referred to as the Lockerbie disaster, the Lockerbie bombing, or simply Lockerbie. Eleven townspeople were killed in Sherwood Crescent, where the plane's wings and fuel tanks plummeted in a fiery explosion, destroying several houses and leaving a huge crater, with debris causing damage to a number of buildings nearby. The 270 fatalities (259 on the plane, 11 in Lockerbie) were citizens of 21 nations.
15) Followed by the daily suicide and/or roadside and/or mosque bombings every day in the terror world of Islam.
16) Bombs sent from Yemen by followers of the koran which fortunately were discovered before the bombs were detonated.
17) The killing of 58 Christians in a Catholic church in one of the latest acts of horror and terror in Iraq.
18) Moscow airport suicide bombing: 35 dead, 130 injured. January 25, 2011.
Posted by: YEAL9 | March 5, 2011 2:45 PM
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Oh yes, we must cogitate upon the word rather than just learn to disagree without being disagreeable.
Posted by: mammyyel | March 5, 2011 12:03 PM
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"Civility in liberalism comes from people respecting others' rights to express individualism just as they expect their own expressions of individualism to be respected."
"Civil disobedience" is actually uncivil, sine it imposes activists will upon others without the mediation of the legislative process. Certainly, there have been times when such incivility was justified but many liberals have taken those times as justification for acts that are simply group egoism. For example, I am reminded of a group that objected to the logging practices of Pacific Lumber that staged a sit in at their offices and handcuffed themselves inside heavy tubes so they could not be moved.
There is also the quite common practice of shouting down the speech of someone invited to a college campus because they object to the views expressed.
Posted by: edbyronadams | March 5, 2011 10:25 AM
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You lost me here:
"Civility requires a certain set of preconditions and even deeper prevailing norms about the nature of political life itself. Modern liberalism has systematically sought to disassemble those conditions..."
Excuse me? 18th and 19th century political liberalism said that while there needed to be rule of the majority, that did not give people the right to trample on the rights of the minority. Modern liberalism supports ideas like human rights, free and fair elections, free trade, tolerance, and not vilifying and demonizing people simply for being different. Yet there is a very vocal chunk of social, religious conservatives who do just that, because they feel like their status and place in society is threatened.
It seems like the type of civility whose loss you are lamenting is the kind that comes from people who are supposed to know their place in the hierarchy of society. Civility in liberalism comes from people respecting others' rights to express individualism just as they expect their own expressions of individualism to be respected.
Posted by: Sara121 | March 4, 2011 7:50 PM
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The political basis for incivility was codified in "Rules for Radicals" a handbook for those who know they are correct and embrace the ends justifying the means argument entirely.
BTW, I believe its hue and cry.
Posted by: edbyronadams | March 4, 2011 5:54 PM
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Elegant article but IMHO wrong. When I first studied politics we used to say American politicians were civil to eachother whilst Labour and Conservatives pols really hated their opposites, and it was true: House of Commons politics was extremely confrontational. But the background to the confrontation was a sharp decline in the global importance of UK Plc., along with a similar decline in British living standards.
http://ebookee.org/The-Great-Stagnation-How-America-Ate-All-The-Low-Hanging-Fruit-of-Modern-History-Got-Sick-and-Will-Eventually-_1081877.html
(You can download). Tyler Cowen's brief book illustrates (sadly) in the 30 years post 1980 most Americans (more than most--90%) have experienced what their British counterparts went through after they won--they won!--WWII. There has been a decline in real living standards in the US& it doesn't look like it will get much better soon.
IMHO this is what accounts for the lack of civility today in the American Congress. The British eventually adjusted and that is why we have a coalition and some decency (civility?)amongst pols (Gordon Brown notwithstanding, of course).