Civility and its Discontents: Part One
This is the first in what will be an ongoing weekly series on civility. Thank you for reading, and if you feel so moved, please share — and perhaps, subscribe!
We are, as a nation, in a dark and angry mood. Though the president-elect calls repeatedly for getting along, many (if not most) of the record 80 million who voted for him are either suspicious or outright contemptuous of his plea to stop treating fellow Americans as enemies. The some 73 million who voted for the incumbent are, if we are to believe the polls and the streets and the fulminations on social media, equally embittered and fearful. Biden voters are bewildered that so many voted for this president whom they consider an existential threat; Trump voters are furious at what they see as a tsunami of lies about this leader whom they admire so deeply. Gun sales have skyrocketed; serious people fret about civil war.
To put it simply, to plead for civility in November 2020 is to fail to read the room. Civility is seen as antiquated, a horse-and-buggy compared to the gleaming new Tesla that is contempt for the other side. Civility is weak-kneed complicity with injustice, while angry confrontation is proof of one’s commitment to truth. It’s fashionable to claim that there’s no point in being civil with people who do not inhabit the same moral universe; as one friend put it, it’s like speaking Tagalog to someone who only understands Finnish. There are no common roots on which to build an understanding.
Part of making the case for civility in this particularly uncivil time is clearing up some misconceptions about what civility is and isn’t. Google will tell you of the origin of the word (the Latin civitas), but we don’t need an etymology lesson to think about the ways in which the idea is consistently misrepresented. The chief misunderstanding is a simple one: many people presume civility revolves around avoiding conflict. They imagine civility involves a thousand artful ways to change the subject so that the worst among us go unchallenged and injustice is allowed to continue to thrive. The critics of civility hear Joe Biden quote Abraham Lincoln’s plea that we must be friends rather than enemies, and they assume that that means we must gloss over all our differences for the sake of a false unity.
Civility isn’t your grandmother declaring that politics is off limits at the Thanksgiving table. It isn’t avoiding conflict. It’s about finding ways to have conflict without contempt; it’s about finding ways to disagree while still sharing the same space. The word “city” comes from the same root as civility (I said I wasn’t going to talk about etymology, but hang on); civility is the awareness that we must find a way to live together. Civility starts with an assumption: it assumes we can never truly separate from one another, that walls will never work. If we cannot separate, civility asks, how do we live together without killing each other?
In 21st century America, the critics of civility pounce on the first assumption. “But we can live without each other! Watch me unfriend all the Trump supporters in my life! Watch me move to a secure enclave of the like-minded! Watch me no longer speak to my own parents, whom I have lost to Fox News! Behold, I have found a new family and a new people, and I have built a veritable wall between myself and those whom I find unacceptable!” That’s a position as soaked in privilege as it is in self-deception. Whoever you supported, at least 70-odd million of your fellow Americans voted for the other guy, and they aren’t all far away. There are simply too many for you to cut off. (Fun fact: it looks likely that once California processes all its ballots, Donald Trump will have gotten more votes in the Golden State than he did in Texas or Florida or anywhere else. California may have gone overwhelmingly for Biden, but there’s nothing close to unanimity. Unless you’re very rich, you’ve got nowhere to hide from those who don’t share your worldview.)
Having decided that we cannot cut each other off with any reasonable success, civility asks that we find the most effective ways to engage with those with whom we disagree. Civility is deeply practical; it always asks what tactics are going to work best to advance the causes near and dear to us. It is deeply skeptical that hostility and estrangement can function to change hearts and minds. The evidence is overwhelming that people “double down” when lectured, hectored, or called names. “Why should I be civil to racists?” the left asks – to which the answer is, “How is being uncivil working out for you and the people you most want to help?” Civility asks you to play the long game of social change while being realistic about the facts on the ground. There is simply no evidence to support the contention that outrage and contempt produce a healthier result than polite engagement. Yelling at people who put children in cages does not, it turns out, result in children being released from cages.
Fine, you say. Will be being civil to the people who put children in cages set them free any faster? It’s a good question to which the answer is almost certainly “yes.” That’s a whopping claim, and one that I’ll try to defend in subsequent installments in this series on civility. For now, though, a family story:
Many years ago, one of my cousins and his wife fell into a very strict fundamentalist church. We are not a religious family, but every once in a while, someone stumbles into what might be called An Unseemly Enthusiasm. One night, perhaps 30 years ago, this cousin – who had left the reality-based community -- placed a series of phone calls. He spoke to his parents, his siblings, and our grandmother, the family matriarch. He told everyone that his pastor had declared that the End Times were at hand, and that within the next two days, all believing Christians would be “raptured” while those who did not acknowledge Jesus would face terrible tribulations. My cousin had called to say goodbye, as well as to issue a final plea for conversion so that his loved ones would be able to escape what he described dreadful fate.
His sister, his brother, his mother, his father, and his grandmother listened. They all told him the same thing: “We don’t believe you, but we love you.”
My grandmother added something else. “This isn’t going to happen,” she said; “it’s utter nonsense. But when it doesn’t happen, and you and your wife and your children are all still here on the earth, we will not tease you. We will not make this into an ongoing joke at your expense. So, when it turns out there is no Rapture, we want you to know no one will laugh at you when you come for Thanksgiving.”
To be fair, there were some snickers, but not to my cousin’s face. The Rapture didn’t happen; the pastor quickly announced a mistake in the calculations, and a new date for the end of the world. My cousin stuck it out in that church a while longer, but eventually left fundamentalism entirely, returning to the gentle and generous agnosticism of his family. He was reconciled to us because he came to his senses – but he only came to those senses because he knew that no matter how absurd his views, he and his wife and his children would never be mocked or thrown away. We didn’t indulge his eschatological absurdities, but we didn’t ridicule them either. We said, instead, “we’re still here for you.”
That’s one window into what civility can look like. Next week, I’ll take a deeper dive into what it means to practice civic engagement in this fierce, fragile and frightened age.