Civility
Stephen Carter is a fascinating thinker and writer, a legal scholar based at Yale, who has written on both legal and social issues. He studied history at Stanford University, and law at Yale Law School in 1979. He served as a law clerk, first for Judge Robinson III in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then for US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1980-81. He was appointed a Professor of Law at Yale Law School from 1982. However, he is equally – if not more widely – known for his non-fiction books. His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, was wonderful: published in 2002 it won numerous awards. It was followed by several other novels, including two, New England White and Palace Council, which together with the Emperor of Ocean Park, are all set in in a fictional New England town. He continues to publish both fiction and non-fiction.
In 1998 he published a book sometimes referred to as a self-help guide, sometimes as a reference work. Civility has an intriguing subtitle: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy. At The Aspen Institute that year, he explained he believed civility was disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are ‘awash instead in a sea of self-indulgence’. I found his talk, and the book, fascinating: now some 25 years later, I suspect I see it differently, not just because he wrote from an explicitly Christian perspective, (he claims that agreeing to his approach does not presuppose being Christian, or religious). But he makes it clear that being civil toward strangers, toward opponents, follows from an acknowledgment that every person is as much God’s creature as we are, and we owe it to others, even opponents, to treat them with respect, even awe. But he is saying more than this, that civility is a moral duty. 25 years later I find the Christian tone is less easy to accept.
His overall thesis is that basic good manners have become a casualty of our postmodern culture. He argues that civility is disintegrating because we have forgotten the obligations we owe to each other and are lost instead in a sea of self-indulgence. Neither liberals nor conservatives can help us much, Carter explains, because each political movement, in a different way, exemplifies what has become the principal value of modern America: that what matters most is not the needs or hopes of others, but simply getting what we want. Taking inspiration from the Abolitionist sermons of the nineteenth century, Carter proposes to rebuild our public and private lives around the fundamental rule that we must love our neighbours. He investigates many of the fundamental institutions of society and in the book he illustrates how each one of us must do more to promote the virtue of civility.
Civility is in three sections. The first part of is devoted to exploring the idea of “The Collapse of the Three-Legged Stool,” a reference to three legs supporting civility, the home, the school and the place of worship: “If all three institutions work together, mutually reinforcing the moral understandings that the others are teaching, then the children are likely to learn what they should. If any one of them fails—if even one of the legs should break—then the task is much harder, and perhaps impossible. The metaphorical stool topples”(p. 229)
The middle section of the book explores what he calls “Incivility’s Instruments.” Among these are demonizing opponents, not listening to others, fighting words , market language, the technologies of incivility (including the internet), and law. Looking back, American society seems even worse off now some two and a half decades later. The corrosive effects of America’s national political and economic environments make it harder to keep being civil. The final part, “Civilizing the Twenty-First Century,” is almost poignant, because it is clear that we have failed to follow his call for action: instead of increased civility in public life, we have two contending camps each accusing the other of being a mortal threat to society, each seeing itself as the only true defender of democracy.
Throughout the book he notes various ‘duties’ that civility requires us to observe, and it is a tough yet clear agenda. The first duty is that “Our duty to be civil towards others does not depend on whether we like them or not.” (page 35). It’s a comment that reminds me of the oft-cited idea of ‘blind justice’. He goes on to propose a second rule, that “Civility requires that we sacrifice for strangers, not just for the people we happen to know’ (page 58). Just four pages later he adds “Civility has two parts: generosity, even when it is costly, and trust, even when there is risk”. These comments become more pointed as we read on that “Civility creates not merely a negative duty not to do harm, but an affirmative duty to do good” (page 71). Now, even more focussed, he adds “Civility requires a commitment to live a common moral life, so we should try to follow the norms of the community if the norms are not actually immoral (page 87). The next rule, which he admits is a ‘hard one’, is “We must come into the presence of our fellow human beings with a sense of awe and gratitude” (page102).
He remains practical: “Civility assumes that we will disagree: it requires us not to mask our differences, but to resolve them respectfully’ (Page 132). He adds the obvious corollary: “Civility requires that we listen to others with knowledge of the possibility that they are right and we are wrong.” (page 139). Finally, in case we missed it, he notes “Civility requires resistance to the dominance of social life by the values of the marketplace. Thus the basic principles of civility – generosity and trust- should apply as fully in the market and in politics as in every other human endeavour” (page 173). He’s realistic, too “Civility allows criticism of others, and sometimes even requires it, but the criticism must always be civil” (page 217). After suggesting legislation be last resort to settle disputes, he adds “Teaching civility, by word and example, is an obligation of the family. The state must not interfere with the family’s effort to create a coherent moral universe for its children’ (page 230). It’s getting tricky and he adds “Civility values diversity, disagreement, and the possibility or resistance, and therefore the state must not use education to try to standardise our children” (page 242).
In 2012, Carter was interviewed in the Yale publication Reflections, on the topic of Civil Thoughts on Uncivil Times, fourteen years after the book first appeared. In this extract from the interview, he raises and sometimes reiterates some important points:
REFLECTIONS: Has the moral mood of the nation changed in recent decades?
STEPHEN CARTER: “The late religious philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman coined the phrase “traffic society” to refer to a culture so steeped in generalized impersonal regulation that people are treated in effect like automobiles rather than human beings. That seems to me the direction in which we’re headed. It isn’t that any particular law or rule is particularly bad (although there are some clunkers out there), but that the sheer weight of rules displaces other goods. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Fifteen or twenty years ago, a college student in California decided to attend classes naked. When criticized, he insisted that he had the right to do it. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. The point his critics made was that whether or not he had the right, what he was doing was wrong. Nowadays, this sort of argument is quite difficult to make. Once a claim of right has been asserted, the asserter (often aided by the media) expects all critics to shut up. It is as though the establishment of legality ends questions of morality. A public conversation premised on that vacuous notion isn’t worthy of the name.”
“Edmund Burke, in an early essay, bemoaned the way that lawyers and theologians had divided up the world, so that nobody dared act without consulting both. Few people are very frightened any longer of the theologians. The lawyers of his day have morphed into the bureaucrats of ours; and the bureaucrats scare everybody. One predictable result of a heavy reliance on rules is a decreased reliance on moral suasion – and as the need for moral suasion declines, so does our ability to engage in moral argument. That is why, for example, critics of the Bush Administration’s adventure in Iraq, or the Obama Administration’s drone war, have found themselves forced to rely on shaky arguments about legality. In both cases, they should have been making arguments about morality. Alas, we no longer do public moral argument particularly well. If we don’t recover the skill, we will cease to be in any recognizable sense a moral people.”
REFLECTIONS: In Civility, you said it was your prayerful hope for America that “we build a society in which we act with, rather than talk about genuine respect for others.” Has civility lost ground since 1999? What conditions are needed for it to flourish?
CARTER: “In the book you mention, I define “civility” as the sum of the many sacrifices that we make for the sake of living our common life. Thus civility isn’t only good manners (although it is that) and it isn’t only how we think about and talk about others (although it is that, too). Civility resides, for example, in acts of charity, particularly when they are truly costly to us. Are we being more sacrificial? It is difficult to say. Acting through government isn’t sacrifice – it’s the use of coercion to require sacrifices from others. Coercion isn’t always bad, and there are things government must coerce – but we should be careful to separate acts of state from acts of charity.”
“The distinction matters. Consider for example the substantial literature suggesting that when individual income tax rates rise, so do charitable donations, because the benefit to the giver (the charitable deduction) is worth more at a higher marginal rate. If this is so, however, we must recognize the implicit failure of civility: People are giving money to charity because they are being paid to do it! (The older view, that only the giving of the rich and not the giving of the middle class is influenced by tax rates, seems not to have stood empirical testing.)”
REFLECTIONS: What sort of wisdom can faith traditions inject into turbulent times?
CARTER: “Our modern word wisdom comes from an Old High German word meaning, roughly, judicial precedent. The idea was that wisdom was the guidance that the experience of the past could offer to the present – and that the guidance of wisdom, absent exceptional circumstance, should be binding. I have never thought that we should somehow be ruled by the wisdom of the ancients. That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t consult it and, at times, defer to it. The ancients can be wrong, but so can we. Here it is useful to follow the example of Socrates in Plato’s Apology, and be as acutely sensitive to what we don’t know as to what we do. A lot of traditional teachings are, by our present lights, morally reprehensible, and have quite properly been rejected. But we shouldn’t turn this around and suppose that they must be morally reprehensible because they’re ancient. When a moral teaching has been held for generations, that at least suggests that a lot of people over the centuries have thought it might actually be true. That fact does not make a traditional answer true, but it does suggest that we should embrace a certain humility when deciding whether to reject what tradition teaches. On the other hand, many religionists are nowadays in retreat from their own traditions – or else cowering in bunkers, trying to protect what tatters of tradition they can from the strengthening cultural and legal assault”
REFLECTIONS: If American history can be characterized as a long debate between individualism and community, who’s winning?
CARTER: “If the question is about sex, individualism is winning. If the question is about just about anything else, community is winning. If you doubt this proposition, just consider where we feel comfortable regulating, and where we don’t. As more and more corners of life are regulated for the sake of the common good, the tricky question is who’s in charge. Come to think of it, the same question applies to sex. Odd how our culture seems most individualistic in the one sphere where the intellect is least involved in the taking of decisions.”
REFLECTIONS: There’s talk of a “narrative of decline” taking hold in this country. Is that overstated?
CARTER: “Oh, we’re in a decline. No question. Not because the economy is retrenching – that’ll work itself out eventually, and people will fight viciously over credit the way they now fight about blame – and not because American influence abroad is receding, either – although that, too, presents problems. No, the reason we’re in a decline is that we no longer are capable of being serious about public argument. Election campaigns have become opportunities for entertainment, each side declaring a jeremiad against the other, but mainly pointing to silly gaffes, and lying happily about what the opponent is up to. Supporters of this or that candidate, when pressed about why the campaigns are so vicious, will routinely answer that their side is just matching the other, doing what’s necessary to win. As a Christian, I find this response terrifying. Christianity seeks to build a morality of means that is every bit as important as the morality of ends, and often more so. And not just Christianity. The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn’t justify the means, and I think he was right. Our goals obviously matter, but so do our chosen strategies for attaining them. There is nothing admirable in doing whatever is necessary to win, because victory is not a virtue. (John Courtney Murray’s clever mot – “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” – is often quoted in response, but usually out of context.)”
“It’s not that politics wasn’t nasty before. In America, politics has always been nasty. But we used to spend a good deal less time on it than we do now. People paid attention for a few weeks and then went on with their actual lives. Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.”
“And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviours, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.”
Thirteen years later an interestingly hopeful final line, given the state of the US today!
