A Crisis of Civility?

Political Discourse and Its Discontents

Robert G. Boatright, Timothy J. Shaffer, Sarah Sobieraj, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, Robert G. Boatright, Timothy J. Shaffer, Sarah Sobieraj, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138484450
• eBook ISBN: 9781351051965
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The state of political discourse in the United States today has been a subject of concern for many Americans. Political incivility is not merely a problem for political elites; political conversations between American citizens have also become more difficult and tense. The 2016 presidential elections featured campaign rhetoric designed to inflame the general public. Yet the 2016 election was certainly not the only cause of incivility among citizens. There have been many instances in recent years where reasoned discourse in our universities and other public venues has been threatened.

This book was undertaken as a response to these problems. It presents and develops a more robust discussion of what civility is, why it matters, what factors might contribute to it, and what its consequences are for democratic life. The authors included here pursue three major questions: Is the state of American political discourse today really that bad, compared to prior eras; what lessons about civility can we draw from the 2016 election; and how have changes in technology such as the development of online news and other means of mediated communication changed the nature of our discourse?

This book seeks to develop a coherent, civil conversation between divergent contemporary perspectives in political science, communications, history, sociology, and philosophy. This multidisciplinary approach helps to reflect on challenges to civil discourse, define civility, and identify its consequences for democratic life in a digital age. In this accessible text, an all-star cast of contributors tills the earth in which future discussion on civility will be planted.

Part I

How Americans Think About Civility in Politics

1
Two Concepts of Civility

Anthony Simon Laden

What breaks when civility breaks down? That, of course, depends on what civility is and what it does. Unfortunately, there is not much in the way of scholarly or popular consensus on that question, and so it can be hard to tell whether those who express the most concern about the breakdown of civility are raising an alarm that is worth heeding, or merely decrying the passing of certain fashions, like men’s hats, that won’t ultimately be missed. In this chapter, I do some preparatory work toward answering these questions by trying to map two distinct concepts of civility. The first concept takes civility to be a set of manners, a form of politeness: civility involves not insulting those with whom you disagree, subjecting them to ad hominem arguments, or otherwise treating them rudely. According to this concept of civility, civility characterizes the surface features of certain kinds of public actions and pronouncements. It is concerned with how we act and speak. Call this the concept of civility as politeness. The second concept takes civility to be a form of engagement in a shared political activity characterized by a certain kind of openness and a disposition to cooperate. In particular, those who conceive of civility this way describe it as a civic virtue that shapes the nature of our interactions with one another, and to what degree those interactions involve genuine responsiveness to one another. According to this concept of civility, civility characterizes what we are doing when we act. Here, the difference between civil and uncivil actions (including forms of speech) involves what we do and not merely how we do it. Call this the concept of civility as responsiveness.

It turns out that treating civility in one of these ways rather than the other is not merely a matter of choosing how to define a term in one’s theoretical arsenal, or focusing on observable behavior vs. attitudes and subjective states. Instead, each concept of civility fits most comfortably within a rather different underlying picture of action and interaction. This means that one’s commitments elsewhere about the nature of agency and action, commitments that may be driven by one’s disciplinary approach or general theoretical outlook, are likely to drive how one treats civility. That our concepts of civility are situated in this way makes it both easier to talk past one another and harder to see either that this is what is going on or where the miscommunication lies. It can also lead us to take up positions that are inconsistent or don’t hold up well to reflective scrutiny. We might, for instance, take evidence of a breakdown in civility as politeness to signal consequences that would be the result of a breakdown of civility as responsiveness. We might try to respond to a breakdown in civility as responsiveness with the arsenal of techniques available to us from a conception of action that is more suited to thinking about civility as politeness. If we fail to notice what anchors our concepts of civility, it may also be harder to appreciate each of them fully or move between them, or understand disagreements we are having about what counts as civility and whether it is in short supply. We may fail to grasp how our different reactions to and solutions for the breakdown of civility respond to very different kinds of situations. By beginning to map these differences, then, I hope to contribute not only to our understanding of civility but also to our ability to talk about it productively.

Philosophy’s Contribution: Conceptual Optometry

The kind of conceptual excavation and clarification I propose in this chapter is one of the main contributions philosophy can offer both the social sciences and ordinary life. It is, however, not a practice that many non-philosophers either engage in or always understand. Philosophy, on this approach, is a form of conceptual optometry (or more precisely, lens-grinding). Just as an optometrist diagnoses which corrective lenses adjust your vision in ways that allow you to see certain things more clearly, philosophers examine and evaluate the concepts we use to make sense of the world, showing how they disclose certain things more clearly while possibly obscuring others. I take the value of this kind of work to be pragmatic in the following sense: like corrective lenses, the value of particular concepts is tied to what we want to use them for. Just as I may need one set of lenses for reading and another for seeing into the distance, we may find certain concepts better suited for certain kinds of investigations and others for others, in large part based on what they bring into relief. Moreover, if we are to use our concepts well, we also need to be aware of their limitations: what they obscure or make hard to appreciate.

Various concepts can work together and support one another when they compose what might be called a picture. This is not a matter of strict entailment or any other firm logical relation. A particular picture of some piece of the world can render certain features or details of that corner of the world significant and coherent. But pictures can, as Wittgenstein put it, “hold us captive” (Wittgenstein 1991, 48) because once we have adopted a given picture, it can be hard to change out just a single conceptual piece: the others with which it hangs together may provide a certain resistance to doing so or even prevent us seeing the possibility of doing so. The conceptual optometry that philosophy provides, then, comes through not only analyzing variants of a given concept but also laying out how these variants fit within different pictures and how those pictures might be helpful for certain kinds of projects while nevertheless obscuring details that might be of importance for other ones. My contention in what follows is that discussions of civility run into just this problem: those drawn to one concept of civility sometimes have trouble seeing the other concept as a viable alternative (either as viable or as a genuinely different alternative) because they fail to appreciate how it is situated within a very different picture, one that ties a concept of civility to a concept of action.

Very roughly, conceiving of civility as politeness fits easily within a picture that takes action to be essentially the making of choices. In contrast, civility as responsiveness fits within a picture that takes action to be the exercise of skills. The first picture is common in the empirical social sciences, whereas the second picture is more common in some areas of normative political philosophy and theory. It is thus perhaps not surprising that one finds civility treated as politeness more often in empirical fields and it treated as responsiveness in more normative ones. The two pictures are not, however, competitors in any direct sense. As with most such concepts and pictures, the pictures of action and their associated concepts of civility are conceptual outlooks on the world, each of which discloses certain of the world’s features and obscures others. Each thus makes certain forms of reflection and analysis easier and other ones harder. Thus, which picture we adopt should depend on what we are trying to do or understand.

Civility as Politeness

Even among those who go on to offer a different account, it is commonplace to acknowledge that at least one meaning of the term “civility” is a form of politeness or good manners, perhaps the manners that are called for in public, or in a public world of equal citizens (e.g., Bybee 2016; Calhoun 2000). So understood, civility provides us a code of conduct or “mode of behavioral management” (Bybee 2016, 7). For some theorists, however, politeness forms the essential core of civility. What is distinctive about such accounts is that they focus our attention on surface features of an action, rather than the motivation for the action or the nature of the action itself. This focus on surface features is suggested by the term “manners” (the ways we do things), and in the etymological link, often pointed out in these contexts, between “polite” and “polish”; politeness involves being polished: altering rough surfaces to make them smooth. On this concept of civility, incivility is entirely a matter of being rude: of insulting others, either directly, or by using inappropriate tones of voice (OR ALL CAPS AND LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!). It can be seen in the difference between yelling “You lie!” to a speaker who is still speaking, and waiting until the speaker has finished to say, “I respectfully submit that my esteemed colleague, the gentleman from Illinois, is in error.”

One attraction of this concept of civility is that it is easy to observe, count, and quantify. After all, it is precisely the surface features of action that are out in the open, easy to see. Knowing whether someone’s behavior is civil, on this conception, does not require us to interpret her motives or intentions or subjective attitudes. We don’t have to decide if she is sincere or well-meaning, or why she is being civil: whether it comes from a genuine commitment to the value of civility or a purely instrumental calculation that being civil will avoid certain costs she wishes not to bear.

Assessing civility as politeness may not even require us to evaluate the substance of the claims someone is making: calling someone a liar is rude, it might be claimed, regardless of whether it is an accurate statement. Yelling truths at someone who is insisting on falsehoods is just as impolite as yelling falsehoods at someone who is insisting on truth. This concept of civility thus has a certain value for those trying to do quantitative work on civility, and those who hold that scholarly objectivity requires being neutral on the sorts of controversial questions that are most likely to incite incivility.

Civility, so conceived, clearly matters to the quality of our public interactions. Regardless of whether incivility understood as rudeness plays a causal role in gridlock and governmental dysfunction, it coarsens public life and makes daily public interactions more stressful and less pleasant. When politicians resort to insulting each other or referring to their opponents by demeaning nicknames, it can be argued, they undermine the dignity and seriousness of politics. Such behavior may feed on itself and ultimately make violence more prevalent. If this form of incivility is on the rise, it is important to figure out why and what to do about it. And it can be plausibly argued that what we do and should care about in our public discussions is just this outer surface of politeness: perhaps it is or should be more important to each of us that strangers with whom we disagree follow basic rules of civil behavior than that they genuinely respect and value us. The importance of rules and social norms is that they work for, as Kant said, a “race of devils” (Kant 1991, 112), not that they convert us into sages or angels.

Finally, understanding demands for civility as demands for a certain form of politeness makes sense of a certain line of criticism of such calls. While politeness can take the rough edges off of social interaction and thus make it easier, requirements of politeness can also serve to exclude members of certain groups from full participation in social life by setting out elaborate codes of conduct to which only some people are privy or by ruling out of court certain kinds of challenges to the status quo based purely on their manner of delivery. It is a common criticism of protests, social movements, and various forms of extra-electoral direct political action that the activists who engage in them are not playing by the rules or following the norms of proper behavior. Those who insist on the “civil” in “civil disobedience” are often responding to such charges. Since what counts as polished behavior and speech in a given society will be contingent and often determined by a dominant or ruling group or class, this can turn demands for civility into a means of safe-guarding privilege. Appreciating this dynamic and the downsides of calls for civility may be easier insofar as we are treating civility as politeness.

Civility as Responsiveness

As with civility as politeness, there are a number of different theories of civility that fit under the concept of civility as responsiveness (e.g., Kingwell 1995; Rawls 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1998). We can uncover some of its essential features by looking at John Rawls’s remarks about what he calls the “duty of civility” and its connection to certain ideals of citizenship and democratic legitimacy. Rawls claims that

the ideal of citizenship imposes a moral, not a legal, duty—the duty of civility—to be able to explain to one another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of public reason. This duty also involves a willingness to listen to others and a fair-mindedness in deciding when accommodations to their views should reasonably be made.

(Rawls 1996, 217)

Elsewhere, Rawls describes the disposition to honor the duty of civility as “one of the cooperative virtues of political life” (Rawls 2001, 117). He goes on to say that

the duty of public civility goes with the idea that the political discussion of constitutional essentials should aim at free agreement reached on the basis of shared political values, and that the same holds for other questions bordering on those essentials, especially when they become divisive. In the way that a just war aims at a just peace and thus restricts the use of those means of warfare that make achieving a just peace more difficult, so, when we aim for free agreement in political discussion, we are to use arguments and appeal to reasons that others are able to accept.

(Rawls 2001, 117–18)

Though some of Rawls’s characterization here is tied to his specific ideas of political liberalism and public reason, it shares with several other versions of civility as responsiveness the following three features: (1) the basic idea that civility is a cooperative virtue of political life, and that it involves both (2) the willingness to listen to others and (3) a fair-mindedness in considering their views and when one should adjust one’s own position in response to theirs (Kingwell 1995; Gutmann and Thompson 1998). Civility in this second sense is manifested when we engage in genuine dialogue with our fellow citizens, when we make room for their voices to be heard, and make an effort to understand and appreciate what they say. Arguably, the attraction of genuine bipartisanship and government by a “team of rivals” lies here. Civility as responsiveness involves striving to hear those with whom we live together as reasonable, even...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: A Crisis of Civility?
• Part I How Americans Think About Civility in Politics
• Part II Instances of Civility and Incivility in Contemporary American Political Discourse
• Part III Learning From the Past
• Index