“Civility”

I peeked into one of the recent long angry threads just long enough to notice a back-and-forth about calls for a return to civility, and the appropriateness thereof. Obviously, of course, context is everything; there rather obviously are some circumstances where a call to civility is a reasonable thing to do. (As an instructor in a college classroom, for instance.) In the context of most heated political discussions, through, such calls seem like a bad idea, for two reasons. Assuming good faith,* it’s just a poor strategy for actually producing more civility in the world. Presumably, the uncivil person is that way for a reason, and scolding them doesn’t make that reason go away, and is as likely to make them angrier than not. A wiser approach, which I aspire to but don’t always succeed in following, is to just be the civility you want to see in the world. If someone is making arguments you deem worthy of engagement, reply to the substance, as if they were making their point civilly. Perhaps this will interpellate them into civility, perhaps it won’t, but that’s largely beyond your control anyway, so don’t fixate on it. If the lack of civility on the part of your interlocutor bothers you to such a degree that you can’t manage to follow this strategy, you probably shouldn’t engage. (Or, if you do engage, recognize that you’ve effectively removed yourself from the role of civility advocate.)

The origin on this conversation, of course, is the video of angry Yale students confronting Christakis. My own first reaction to that video is to very ardently wish the students were being more civil. The reason for this reaction obviously isn’t an ideological, abstract commitment to civility, but instead because I can more easily place myself in Christakis’s position, which is an unpleasant thing to contemplate. But that’s not a good reason to double down on that gut reaction, reaching for a set of arguments about the proper bounds of civil discourse to adorn and bolster it as something more than an identity-driven gut reaction. There are some very good reasons to resist the temptation to double down on that reaction, one of which is that I simply have no idea what it’s like to be part of an institution and a community that is simultaneously and constantly openly sending both the message that you’re a valued member of the community and belong here, and (usually less openly and directly) that you’re not, and you don’t. The less capacity for empathy I have, the less it makes sense for me to sit in judgement of the proper ratio of civility to anger in the response.

*This assumption is probably not warranted in many, if not most, cases. The public call for civility in discourse usually strikes me as an act of image-maintenance; seeking rhetorical advantage from such a call, such as demonstrating to third parties how reasonable you are. It’s usually performative; an act of public identity maintenance.