Civility is now countercultural
Timothy P. Carney
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Old-fashioned morality is not popular these days, and few old virtues are more reviled than “civility.”
That makes it nearly an act of civil disobedience — at least a counterculture act — for Alexandra Hudson to publish her new book The Soul of Civility.
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Civility is different from and far bigger than politeness. “Civility is a disposition,” Hudson writes, “a way of seeing others as beings endowed with dignity and inherently valuable.”
Hudson makes the case that our culture lacks civility, and certainly that plenty of us lack the habits of civility. But it’s worse than that. It’s not merely that we fail to or forget to be civil or lack practice in civility. As a culture we actively reject civility. We treat it as a bad thing — as another hoary old tether that impedes our autonomy, preserves harmful structures of oppression, and keeps us from the truth.
Against Civility was a book published last year, written by an academic who claimed that calls for civility were inevitably filled with “hidden racism.”
“The idea and practice of civility has always been wielded to silence dissent, repress political participation, and justify violence upon people of color,” the book argues.
When #resistance protesters, plenty of whom reveled in being “nasty women,” raided restaurants to hound out Trump administration officials trying to dine with their families, this was cheered in many corners. “Demands for ‘civility’ are almost always aimed at shutting down free speech,” was one claim.
“’Civility’ and ‘respect’ are social norms that have been created and enforced by dominant (white) society in order to disempower and silence marginalized voices who seek to challenge the status quo in pursuit of equity,“ wrote one white male academic.
Now some of these enemies of civility are actually attacking what Hudson would call “politeness,” but surely the foundation of civility as Hudson defines it — that the people we meet are inherently valuable and endowed with dignity and deserve it — is rejected by elite morality.
“You have to earn respect,” or “you have to earn my respect,” is a very common saying, both in the real world and on social media. The premise here is that humans, by default, don’t deserve respect. This is deeply uncivil, but it justifies treating others poorly, and so it’s popular.
Throughout our media today you will see the conviction that we humans are not good.
Some of our most prominent commentators see humans as essentially a burden.
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As Hudson points out throughout the book, civility, as a disposition, requires us to respect both others and ourselves. A culture that sees humans as a curse is a culture where civility, including self-respect, is out of fashion.
In a Wall Street Journal review of the book, Meghan Cox Gurdon sounded a hopeful note about the Soul of Civility: “It is not too much to imagine that each reader, buoyed by Ms. Hudson’s earnest persuasion and the arguments and aphorisms of those she cites, will come away from the book wanting to behave — and to be — a great deal better.”