Part two of dear white progressives: civility blues

Civility has earned the bad reputation it carries in a lot of left-progressive circles. Ideally, writes philosopher Amy Olberding, civility is a self-oriented directive: I should act civilly toward others. In reality, civility often operates as a moral cudgel, one that the powerful use to smack down complaints  (or just cries of fear, pain, and anger) from the less powerful. Can't you be less angry? If you said that gently, more people would probably listen to you. How do you expect them to respond if you yell at them?--or if you march, protest, write letters/editorials, point out racism, raise a ruckus, say no, etc.

Too often, civility is code for preserving the comfort zones of powerful people. Creating a more just or equitable world sometimes involves piercing that comfort bubble, which will feel uncivil and unpleasant for those who've grown up inside of it.

Why can't you be nicer? The answer is all too often that niceness hasn't worked. It's like that old protest song:

It's not nice to block the doorway
It's not nice to go to jail
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail.

After all, civility isn't the ultimate goal. Justice is. Freedom is. Equality is. Survival is.

Like tolerance, civility all too often becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end, a precondition for something bigger and better. Wendy Brown, in her excellent 2006 Regulating Aversion, notes how Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" vision of racial and economic equality gets subsumed into Rodney King's desperate "Can't we all just get along?" Or (as I've written about elsewhere), perhaps the two become fused: I have a dream . . . where we all just get along. It's understandable but narrow, a pitifully low bar for movements that seek to make the world better. When in conflict, justice/freedom/equality usually trump civility and tolerance.

That said, it's all too easy--especially, I think, for white progressives--to ride the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. The fact that civility can cudgel doesn't therefore bathe incivility in righteousness.

In her latest work, Olberding's makes some important, nuanced observations about the limits of rudeness and incivility. Her "20 Theses Regarding Civility" is awesome. I could do a series of posts simply explicating these theses (which would sorta ruin the rhetorical concision of the "X theses" form). Rudeness, too, she writes, can often be a cudgel of the powerful. Indeed, as President Trump demonstrates daily, incivility can often serve as the powerful folks' weapon of choice. "Where social dominance and shutting people up is concerned," she writes, "neither calls for civility nor demonstrations of incivility are a uniquely special evil. Both can be used as ways to cow others into submission."

She makes lots of other great points. Incivility isn't categorically braver than civility. Incivility can swamp meaning and nuance, isolating you from views that challenge your own. Civility can foster epistemic humility.

The most pertinent for my immediate purposes, though, is her second-to-last one: 

Civility and incivility are not just, or even mostly, choices that you make.  

Social interaction is too ubiquitous, complex, fast, and unrelenting for us to navigate it with conscious choices – the cognitive load would be crushing and impossible to shoulder.  Most of our morally salient civil or uncivil conduct emerges instead from habituation. And our habits are in turn influenced by the social atmospheres we inhabit.  This is why easy acceptance of scorn for civility and uncivil atmospheres is perilous.  If you’re not cultivating civil habits, your incivility will not be confined to those moments you self-consciously chose it.  You risk habituating to patterns of hurtful conduct that will hit a lot more targets than the ones you intend. 

The bolds are mine. Thinking of civility and incivility as habits of behavior, habits of communication, can make us more aware of how we mirror or resist certain rhetorical trends popular in online spaces.

More tomorrow,

 

JF