![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Contemporary debates about the virtue of civility oscillate between anxious calls for more of it in contemporary politics, as a panacea for all manner of religious-political conflict, and wholesale debunkings of civility talk, as an ideological fog intended to induce conformity to the terms of unjust social arrangements. I argue that this oscillation should come as no surprise, given the term's fraught theological and political associations in the history of modern ethical thought. This history left civility with an ambivalent legacy, one associated with democratic respect on the one hand, and hypocrisy and deception, on the other. Through a reading of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I try to rescue civility from this oscillation, by explicating it as an ancillary virtue: the part of justice that disposes citizens to confront unjust relationships in ways that leave open the possibility of relational repair. When explicated with due care and set in an interactive context of other virtues – including courage, prudence and toleration – civility can be distinguished from its semblance, niceness. This distinction helps us understand civility, properly understood, as neither a cure-all for democratic conflict nor an ideological device of conflict suppression, but rather as an ancillary, but important, excellence of character helping to sustain democratic relationships of mutual recognition.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay, I would like to thank Stephen Bush, Vincent Lloyd, and two anonymous reviewers for Political Theology. I would also like to thank David Decosimo, Karol Soltan, and Laurna Strikwerda for helpful conversations on the essay's main ideas.
Notes
1 “Civility, n,” Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed June 6, 2015. http://www.oed.com.
2 Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U. S. 184 (1964).
3 See Pearson and Porath, The Cost of Bad Behavior; and Hacala, Saving Civility; as well as Forni, Choosing Civility; and Forni, The Civility Solution.
4 A cohort of President's Fellows at the University of Maryland–Baltimore, for example, aspires to treat a norm of civility, understood as self-evident niceness, as authoritative for the purpose of governing social interactions: “Here, we define civility simply as ‘niceness to others’… we believe that ‘niceness’ may easily be understood by all parties affected… Civility is specifically mentioned in the University's mission statement; therefore the two terms may be used synonymously to represent the ideal norm for interpersonal interactions on the UMB campus.” In a statement marking the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the Chancellor of the University of California recently claimed that “free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin – the coin of open, democratic society” on the grounds that “courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas.” The University of Illinois Board of Trustees has similarly claimed that “we must continually reinforce our expectation of a university community that values civility as much as scholarship,” and the President's Council at Pennsylvania State University has asked those affiliated with the University to “consciously choose civility and to support those whose words and actions serve to promote respectful disagreement and thereby strengthen our community.” See, respectively: Aly et al., The Civility Discourse. Accessed June 15, 2015. https://www.umaryland.edu/islsi/presidents-initiatives/symposium-and-white-paper-project/white-papers/; Reclaim UC Collective, “From the Free Speech Movement to the Reign of Civility.” Accessed June 15, 2015. http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2014/09/from-free-speech-movement-to-reign-of.html; Wilson, “University of Illinois Board of Trustees Statement on Salaita Case,” The Academe Blog (August 22, 2014). Accessed June 15, 2015. http://academeblog.org/2014/08/22/university-of-illinois-board-of-trustees-statement-on-salaita-case/; and Members of the President's Council, “A Message from the Leadership of Penn State.” Accessed June 15, 215. http://news.psu.edu/story/325057/2014/09/05/message-leadership-penn-state.
5 For a discussion of this trend, see Carter, Civility, 3–19 and 38–54. At least one nonprofit organization, The Institute for Civility in Government, has set itself the task of tackling this problem; see Dahnke et al., Reclaiming Civility in the Public Square.
6 The epistemological dimensions of such challenges are much more culturally, politically and epistemologically complex than the paradigm case treated in the contemporary philosophical literature on the epistemology of disagreement, in which two expert knowers with access to the same body of evidence arrive at opposed views about an agreed-upon question. For a discussion, see Stout, Ethics After Babel, esp. chapters 1–4. For a discussion of civility in the face of such epistemological complexities, see Langerak, Civil Disagreement. I view the account of civility I offer below as complementary to Langerak's view of civility as a virtue relevant to maintaining personal integrity and democratic relationships amid ongoing disagreement; my emphasis in this essay on distinguishing civility from niceness and on civility's role in relational repair bring a similar view to bear on a different set of issues.
7 See Stout, Blessed Are the Organized.
8 Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 7.
9 The renowned Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) broad-based democratic organizer Ernesto Cortés has long described his work in terms of this metaphor. See Cortés, “Reweaving the Social Fabric,” 12–14; as well as the discussions of his work throughout Stout, Blessed Are the Organized. On the history of the IAF, see also Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, chapters 1 and 2.
10 King's example is important in this context, given contemporary efforts in popular culture to recast his theology of nonviolent resistance as a kind of niceness. Cornel West, in a characteristically apt neologism, calls this the Santaclausification of King. For accounts of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that rescues its author from Santaclausification by emphasizing his prophetic theology, see West, The Radical King; and also Shulman, American Prophecy, 89–130.
11 Linda Zerilli, for instance, has written “Against Civility” with the anti-democratic implications of generalized niceness I have mentioned in mind. Nevertheless, she concedes in her conclusion that in staking out a position against it, she is not defending generalized incivility, but rather calling attention to ways in which prevailing understandings of civility fail to capture the ways in which agonistic dimensions of the great democratic reform movements helped transform democracy in desirable ways. See Zerilli, “Against Civility,” 107–131. My approach in this essay is to try to do justice, from the outset, to both the considerations that motivate Zerilli's suspicion and those that motivate her concession.
12 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,” 7–8.
13 Herdt, Putting On Virtue.
14 Ibid., ix.
15 Ibid., 283–305. For a highly nuanced analysis of Rousseau's various and evolving understandings of the relationship between nature and grace, see Meyers, Abandoned To Ourselves.
16 Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England, 7–13. Some recent histories of dueling do stress the trial-by-combat thesis, however, e.g. LaVaque-Manty, The Playing Fields of Eton, 52ff. The classic source for arguments that civility and polite manners emerged as ways of sublimating violence is Elias, The Civilizing Process, which focuses heavily on the case of France's transition from feudal monarchy to modern absolutism. A recent effort in cultural sociology to apply Elias’ approach beyond the French context is Davetian, Civility.
17 Becker, Civility and Society in Western Europe 1300–1600, xvi–xvii.
18 Ibid., 11 and 35.
19 Peltonen, The Duel in Early-Modern England, 5.
20 Ibid., 5–6.
21 Ibid., 298ff. On Mandeville's significance for later accounts of hypocrisy in Anglophone political thought, see Runciman, Political Hypocrisy, 45–73.
22 See Herdt, Putting on Virtue, chapters 9 and 10.
23 Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 8–28.
24 Ibid.
25 On how Rousseau's antagonism toward the polite manners of salon culture endeared him to aspiring intellectuals operating in more proto-democratic milieus, see Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, 35–36. As Rousseau progressively alienated himself from various benefactors (including his native Geneva) and incurred the censor's discipline, he would later deviate from his naming practice. For a discussion, see Kelly, Rousseau as Author.
26 Herdt, Putting On Virtue, 4–5.
27 Bear in mind that hypocrisy, as a manifestation of counterfeit virtue, applies here to a vice that disposes one to deceive others. This need not rule out, under certain circumstances, a deceptive act being consistent with, or even required by, justice. For a discussion, see Decosimo, “Just Lies”, 661–697.
28 Lebron, The Color of Our Shame, 21. This kind of shame resembles what Martha Nussbaum calls “aspirational shame,” a kind of shame that is tied to attachment to our political ideals and democratic structures of accountability-holding, unlike forms of shame that serve antidemocratic ends such as scapegoating and stigmatization. See Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 211–216.
29 On vehement passions in democratic politics, see Stout, Blessed Are the Organized. Stout's account draws in part upon Fisher, The Vehement Passions.
30 On the problems collective self-deception poses for democratic politics in particular, See Williams, “Truth, Politics, and Self-Deception,” 603–617.
31 Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 4.
32 For the suggestion to organize my explication of civility in this way, and for many points throughout this section, I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for Political Theology.
33 Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, 83–84.
34 On the contrast between caring and inert concern, see Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 12 and 289; as well as Stout, “The Spirit of Democracy and the Rhetoric of Excess,” 4–5.
35 Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, 84. Frankfurt's account of caring as engaging the agent holistically and in guiding the will in this way is similar in certain respects of Robert Merrihew Adams’ account of “being for” as a component of virtue, which he distinguishes from motivationally inert evaluations: “… being for x must involve dispositions to favor x in action, desire, emotion, or feeling. In that broad sense it must engage the will.” Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 17.
36 See Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 3–61 and passim.
37 Pettit, Just Freedom, xxvi. Pettit employs the eyeball test to gauge a specific dimension of political justice; I am employing it in a somewhat more generalized sense.
38 The text is commonly referred to as “The White Ministers’ Good Friday Statement,” but one of the eight signatories was a Rabbi, Milton L. Grafman. See Bass, “The White Ministers’ Good Friday Statement,” in Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 235–236.
39 King, “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” 299.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 299–300.
42 Ibid., 296–297.
43 It cannot therefore be the case, as Mark Kingwell argues, that “civility is… a basic civic virtue” that imposes constraints on possible accounts of justice that can emerge from democratic conversation. See his A Civil Tongue, 26. Kingwell argues that civility, along with associated conversational graces like tact, can supply enough determinate content to structure egalitarian relationships of conversation, the outcome of which can be understood as an account of justice. On my view, Kingwell gets it precisely backward: it is a substantive democratic account of justice, one that rules out certain kinds of relationships and distributes conversational standing in certain ways, that civility seeks to maintain and repair. Civility is not basic; justice is.
44 King, “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” 290.
45 Ibid., 295.
46 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for Political Theology for their suggestion to specify civil actions through reference to these aspects of a moral agent's circumstances.
47 King, “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” 293–294.
48 On King's relationship to the natural law tradition, see Lloyd, Black Natural Law, chapter 4.
49 This is in contrast to theories of civility that enjoin citizens to employ a commons stock reasons that all citizens are justified in accepting, rather than making the effort to engage different perspectives on their own terms. In the parlance of contemporary political philosophy, King here is an example of a ‘convergence’, as distinct from a ‘consensus’, account of public justification. See Gaus and Vallier, “The Roles of Religious Conviction” 51–76.
50 King, “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” 302.
51 Ibid., 298.
52 Ibid.
53 This expression is Cornel West's.
54 Such transformation would also presumably require the tempering of excessive desires for these goods; I thank an anonymous reviewer for Political Theology for this insight.
55 On the ways in which democratic organizing can temper the vehement passions into effective anger, see Stout, Blessed Are the Organized.
56 King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 292.
57 Ibid., 293.
58 Ibid., 296.
59 On the difference between tolerance and indifference, and tolerance as a virtuous response to loss in democracies and alternative to exit, see Bowlin, “Democracy, Tolerance, Aquinas,” 278–299.
60 My thoughts on this issue are indebted to Ernesto Cortés’ keynote address at the March 2015 Princeton University Conference on Religion and Power, “The Virtue of Cunning,” and to subsequent conversations about the address with David Decosimo and George Kateb.
61 On the importance of judgment in public argument in the context of civil-rights-era challenges to racial injustice, see Allen, Talking to Strangers, esp. 152ff.
62 There are many different kinds of conflict that can emerge in democratic political life, and a corresponding variety of rituals and practices of relational repair. For an excellent discussion of the differences, see Farneth, Agon and Reconciliation.
63 See Snarr, All You That Labor; Stout, Blessed Are the Organized; Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy; Coles, Beyond Gated Politics; Glaude, Democracy in Black; and Day, Unfinished Business.
64 See Gregory, “Christianity and the Rise of the Democratic State,” 101; and O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 22.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ian Ward
Ian Ward's research and teaching lie at the intersections of political theory and the academic study of religion. His articles have appeared in the journals Polity and The Good Society, and he is writing a book entitled Radical Democratic Ethics: Relationships, Goods and Powers in Twenty-First Century Democracy. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.