Liberalism’s disease: Civility above justice

Introduction

Civility is upheld widely as a virtue that is vital to maintaining social order in liberal societies, although appeals to civility sometimes are imposed at the expense of other virtues that are more vital to the human condition, not least social justice. Few of us would wish to coexist with others in a continued state of incivility, and my aim is not to dismiss the instrumental value of civility to communication in everyday life. Rather, this essay explores the problem of using appeals to civility to silence communication and expression about fundamental questions of justice. Civility is prized in earnest by some, because it is seen as an ideal means to resolve our differences and possibly create just outcomes. For others, civility is invoked cynically and wielded as a weapon to limit, silence or otherwise control the free expression of the weak. And such idealism and cynicism may indeed coexist among different interlocutors in a dispute. Although civility is unquestionably useful, there are compelling reasons to assume that when calls for civility are used to impose the asymmetrical regulation of communication, the likelihood of unjust outcomes is increased significantly. This condition is symptomatic of a more general defect of liberalism with which I am concerned below.

Liberalism historically has appealed to moral sentiments of justice and equality, which is not to say that it has delivered on its promises. And liberalism’s greatest pathology seems to lie in an article of faith, namely, a belief against all evidence to the contrary, that the ends of social justice are most effectively pursued through means of a shared commitment to certain formal procedures for negotiating our differences, however incommensurate these differences may be. One illustration of such a belief is that we all are equally able to avail ourselves of the promise of ‘equality of opportunity’. Profession of that belief hides many sins while it serves to pacify those who might otherwise rise up and call into question rules of survival, not to speak of success, that are rigged against them. Another illustration, which is of special concern below, is the belief that civility in the manner in which we look to resolve our differences and express political dissent is the most likely means of ensuring just outcomes.

Numerous theorists and politicians have argued that the health of civil society is premised on the civility of political discourse (Eberly, 2000; Kingwell, 1995; Schmidt, 2000). Typical of critical opinion about incivility in the media are the comments of Benjamin Barber (1999) about talk radio: ‘Talk radio is loudly public without being in the least civil, though it is seductively entertaining’ (p. 40). Civility is based on norms and ideals that are practised widely in political communication, sometimes demanding vigilant awareness of one’s environment, combined with heroic self-discipline, as in the case of civil disobedience. Practitioners of civil disobedience aim to bring shame to perpetrators of injustice, typically under circumstances of highly asymmetrical power relations, and they also must have the wisdom and sensitivity to recognize and not be incited to violence by agents provocateurs. Overall, civility is valued in political discourse because it aims to limit the tensions that often already exist between political opponents, and its absence is a familiar and widespread contemporary lament.

Although there is no denying that civil discourse can, under some circumstances, make for simpler and felicitous resolutions of differences, civility also can be used as a blunt instrument to discipline and silence the weak, a manifestation of what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive tolerance’. In Marcuse’s estimation of the American liberal idea of tolerance, he wrote, ‘Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, the protection of dissent’ (Marcuse, 1969: 117). What is most challenging about such a view is that once we destabilize the binary of good-civility versus bad-incivility, we must contend with a much more elusive set of demons. If we are willing to accept the contentious premise that observing conventional norms of civility can be bad for us, then are we stuck in a quicksand of relativism, where it does not matter if fundamental differences are resolved through tempered discourse rather than through angry, if not violent, opposition?

We cannot afford to dispense altogether with the ideal of civility, but we should recognize, as Benjamin DeMott aptly observes, that ‘they who define the issues win the debate’. DeMott goes on to describe the discourse of civility-in-decline as a discourse used mostly to lament ‘bottom-dog manners rather than top-dog morals’. DeMott (1996) correctly points out that the so-called civility problem generally is not raised as a question of fairness, justice or decency. To the victor goes the spoils, including the power and legitimacy to triumphantly write the dominant historical narrative, and to cast the victor as cultivated and civil, writes Walter Benjamin. But, Benjamin (1968) argues, triumph and cultivation cannot be contemplated by the historical materialist without horror:

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. (p. 256)

Dispelling any belief that civility and barbarism are mutually exclusive, George Steiner (1979) writes, ‘We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning’ (p. 15).

The virtue of civility in political discourse

Calls for civility in political discourse can be deceptive, because regardless of the good intentions of those who obey the norms of civility, those who call for them may be attempting to dull the sharp edges of dissent. Reflecting on the Bush administration’s call for civility from those who opposed his decision to invade Iraq, Paul Krugman (2003) wrote, ‘All this fuss about civility, then, is an attempt to bully critics into unilaterally disarming – into being demure and respectful of the president’. Not surprisingly, and not without good reasons, such a view can be assailed as cynical, the implication being that only cynics would question the appeal to reason that would seem to be the aim of political civility. In writing about what are the essential virtues of the good man, Aristotle included temperance and continence, both of which are related to self-discipline and the control of impulses to seek bodily pleasures, self-indulgence and passions (anger, lust, etc.), and he advocated that moderation should be sought in all affairs (Aristotle, 1925: 72–78, 159–183). Arguably, these virtues are of lesser importance than others that Aristotle presents, including courage, a view taken by US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas in a pre-9/11 speech he gave on 13 February 2000. Thomas treated civility as a lesser virtue in comparison with courage, and he urged newly inaugurated President Bush not to take the more conciliatory approach that initially had been promised and that was widely thought befitting of a President who had barely eked out a victory amid a national election crisis and widespread suspicion of election fraud (Bush, 2000; Milbank and Broder, 2004). Drawing inspiration from conservative intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, Thomas advised the President not to allow the ‘caring virtues’, such as civility to take priority over the ‘vigorous virtues’, such as courage. Echoing Himmelfarb by lamenting that ‘the vigorous virtues have been supplanted by the caring ones’ (Thomas (2001) implored the President to govern boldly by asserting that ‘civility cannot be the governing principle of citizenship or leadership’. ² No friend of political dissent, with its connotations of incivility, when it was mobilized against a President he supported, Thomas treated civility as if it were a burden that should be discarded in favour of brute force when it is expedient to do so. Thus, we can see how, as has been the case in earlier times, civility has indeed been treated as a lesser virtue, and perhaps rightly so. However, if the ‘vigorous virtue’ of courage should be held above civility, then an equally compelling case exists for similarly elevating the virtue of justice, the vigour and necessity of which certainly are equal to, if not greater than, that of courage. It is hard to imagine how Clarence Thomas, who spends some of his time (however questionably) serving as a justice on the highest court in the land, could argue to the contrary.

The modern European history of the idea of civility coincides with the emergence of the distinction between private bourgeois and public citoyen. The Civilizing Process, by Norbert Elias, widely considered to be the most detailed historical account of the Western idea of civility, offers a valuable glimpse into how the good life came to have a much different emphasis for the Moderns than it did for the Ancients. In particular, Elias draws our attention to the ways in which an emphasis on civility becomes a distinguishing feature in the formation of the upper classes and of the state in early modern Europe. These distinctions can be seen readily in the treatment Elias gives to the uses of violence. As Elias (2000) observes, the modern state makes possible the ‘free competitive struggle’ over the means of production and consumption ‘largely without the threat of physical violence’ (p. 303). Like Max Weber, Elias views the possibility of civility in terms of the capacity of the state to impose order, when deemed necessary, through the use of violence. Weber (1946) famously noted that, in the modern world, ‘the state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (p. 78). In this sense, we can see how and why states find the need to distinguish just from unjust uses of violence, which is evident when a government publicly claims to its own citizens and to international leaders that a war it has declared is ‘just’. Of course, in order to maintain legitimacy, it is incumbent on the state to be sparing in its use of force against its own citizens, using it when it seems vital to preserve order in the face of an extreme threat, or to ‘send a message’, so to speak, but not so often as to expose a regime’s brute capacities to open and frequent scrutiny, dissent and possible overthrow. Rather, the ability to deploy violence judiciously, or at least to not have a state’s perpetual reliance on violence remain a constant and obvious threat to public welfare, can be accomplished to a significant extent by the rhetoric of civility. In its efforts to maintain order, the state must naturalize its potential to use violence so that its power is ‘taken for granted’ rather than draw attention in a more openly contestable manner (Elias, 2000: 311).

A widely held conviction in western political thought, from John Locke to the present, is that government has a duty to ensure that a civil society be grounded upon mutual recognition of rights of personhood and property. In his Second Treatise on government, published in 1690, Locke (1924) offers his explanation of why members of civil society unite to form a government, the chief reason being the protection of property interests (p. 180). More than 300 years later, Locke’s view is echoed in legal scholar Stephen Carter’s influential book, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. In espousing a view of civility that highlights the primacy of property, Carter (1998) refers to theft as an uncivil act towards which he holds a ‘visceral’ dislike (p. 56). Of course, it is reasonable to not want one’s property to be removed from one’s possession, but Carter demonstrates no recognition that the conditions through which property was accumulated may have been grossly unjust. Carter’s view of theft and property damage as indicators of incivility seems to hinge on more easily prosecuted petty crimes that are disproportionately committed by members of lower socio-economic strata, rather than focus on corporate crime and high-level government corruption, including (and especially) on those occasions when the latter depends directly on the use or threat of violence. And so Carter’s view offers no insight into the incivility and violence that underlies the decades-long neoliberal collusion between national governments and transnational elites to redistribute and concentrate massive amounts of wealth into the hands of the very rich. The Wall Street bankers, hedge fund managers and finance industry deregulators who were responsible for the 2008 global financial crisis that destroyed families, communities and lives in many countries, and who have not only escaped prosecution but profited from the bailouts, seem acceptably genteel and civil by Carter’s standards. They speak calmly, dine finely and lawyer up with the best to construct a civil discourse that pre-empts any challenge from someone ostensibly in authority who would be daring enough to prosecute them for heinous felonies.

In contrast to Carter, Elias holds no comparably simplistic, moralistic and myopic conception of civility. Elias offers a perspective that is more compatible with Marx’s account of the primitive accumulation of property, particularly in their respective views regarding the use of physical violence (Elias, 2000: 214–220, 235–236; Marx, 1976: 873–940). In volume 1 of Capital, Marx traces the history of capital from the violent expropriation of land through the rise of the industrial capitalist. For Marx (1976), the history of primitive accumulation is a history of barbarism, not civility ³ (p. 962). Out of that barbarism comes the process of the naturalization of unequal social relations that is described by Elias as ‘the civilizing process’. Acceptance and transmission of such standards lend elegance to the order of things, by joining us all in an implied contract about our lot in life.

Civility versus justice: Which is the greater virtue?

Giving primacy to the virtue of civil communication above that of social justice is a useful strategy for silencing dissent. Shortly before his assassination, reacting against appeals to non-violence and calls for tempering the language of protest to be less threatening, Malcolm X said,

If you speak in an angry way about what has happened to our people and what is happening to our people, what does he call it? Emotionalism. Pick up on that … You’re supposed to watch your diction … You’re supposed to be respectable and responsible when you holler against what they are doing to you. ⁶ (Quoted in Macedo, 1994: 74–75)

Challenging what he considered the neutralizing effects of non-violent civil disobedience, Malcolm X describes here what has long been recognized as a steep barrier that is often put before dissenters who voice their claims angrily, if not violently, namely, the disproportionate ability of the powerful to define the terms of civil discourse and to question the civility of the weak, thereby discrediting the validity of the latter’s message. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill (1974) recognizes this problem, which he characterizes as the disingenuous righteous indignation by the powerful against the weak:

There is an unfair advantage for the powerful in defining ‘intemperate speech’. Those so accused have to go to great lengths to gain acceptability and may fail anyway because the judges are the ones being challenged. Conversely, the judges have full rein over how bitterly they can assault the challengers without consequence to themselves and their views. (p. 117)

In attempting to challenge those who, for various reasons, might dismiss civility for being less vital than other virtues, Mark Kingwell argues for the primacy of civility. Kingwell (1995) argues that civility is necessary to democratic politics, not because it can or should produce agreement or consensus, but because it increases the likelihood of understanding. ‘Civility is, in short, the basis of a truly civil society that pursues its collective goals only by allowing individuals and groups to pursue theirs’ (p. 230). Kingwell’s perspective on civility arises from a liberal political theory in which the concept of right takes precedence over the concept of the good. Liberalism in general stresses the importance of the individual’s right to select from competing conceptions of what constitutes a good life, whereas communitarian theory asks us to settle on a consensus about the good life. One philosophy builds a conception of justice on the founding assumption that we can and should have rules in place that enable individuals and groups with very different values, interests and agendas to tolerate, if not respect, one another’s differences, whereas the other sees this as impossible and/or undesirable, since not all conceptions of the good life are necessarily equally defensible on moral grounds. Like many liberal critics of communitarianism, Kingwell (1995) projects palpable fear, based on historical precedent, that communitarianism can lead to ‘a turning inward that can be viciously exclusive, even genocidal’ (p. 42). In advancing a liberal conception of justice, Kingwell expresses faith in civility as a political virtue that is foundational to his conception of right-above-good. He sees civility as both ‘the governing value’ of political conversation ‘and one of the principles justified within that talk’ (Kingwell, 1995: 230).

Kingwell not only draws a contrast between the political philosophies of liberalism and communitarianism but also argues for a distinction within liberalism by distancing his own theory from the Kantian tradition. In Kingwell’s assessment of Kant as well as Habermas, he concludes that a rigid commitment to rational discourse may lead to incivility, the consequences of which could impede the goals of effective civic engagement. Therefore, for Kingwell (1995), a necessary corrective to Habermasian ‘discourse ethics’ is ‘civil discourse ethics’ (p. 203, emphasis added). What this means in practice is that participants in deliberative talk should willingly restrain themselves from acting on certain inclinations to express themselves in ways that might damage the potential for fruitful outcomes. In keeping with such a standard, Kingwell’s ideal interlocutors would refrain from always giving into impulses to say what is on their minds. Whereas Habermas advocates an ideal speech situation in which the force of the better argument is the value that should trump all others in discursive engagement, Kingwell (1995) argues that sometimes such force is sought through brutal honesty – speaking one’s mind at any cost – which can backfire and actually impede effective dialogue. ‘When understood as an orientation proper to citizenship, civility’s two sides are self-restraint and tact’ (p. 197 emphasis in original). Kingwell’s liberal conception of ‘tact’ requires parties to keep a ‘safe distance’ and allows each other to pursue respective interests without in turn blocking one another. To articulate this, Kingwell re-tells Schopenhauer’s parable about porcupines who need to huddle together for warmth in cold weather, but who find that their quills are a painful impediment to getting very close. The result is that they draw back to a ‘proper distance’ that enables them to share warmth without poking one another. ‘Such a reading of our porcupines’ civility’, Kingwell (1995) argues, ‘is the priority of right revisited, but now in communicative and interpretive terms that make the central liberal thesis more compelling than ever – and more responsive to the contextualizing challenges of liberalism’s recent critics’ ⁷ (p. 229).

To critics who would argue that such a concept of civility serves to mask honest interaction, Kingwell (1995) asserts that ‘Civil speech may leave many true and sincere things unsaid. It will not, as a result, be itself deceitful’ (p. 224). In keeping with a centuries-old tradition of liberal theory, Kingwell prizes the ideal of tolerance as the basis upon which we should live among people with whom we have moral differences. Of course, to tolerate does not mean to respect, much less accommodate, the reason being that respect sets too high and exacting a standard in highly diverse societies. Instead, Kingwell (1995) advocates that political interlocutors simply aim to treat one another ‘as if they were worthy of respect and understanding, keeping their private thoughts to themselves’ (p. 247). But even the pretense of respect is not easily within the reach of pluralistic societies. Writing at a time when the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements were in full swing, Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr and Herbert Marcuse saw the potential for hypocrisy in calls for tolerance and civility that were levelled by authorities against political activists in the name of pluralist notions of tolerance. Wolff (1965) describes American politics as ‘a plateau with steep cliffs on all sides’, where legitimate (acceptable) alternatives rest comfortably, while ‘in the deep valley all around lie the outsiders, the fringe groups which are scorned as “extremist.” The most important battle waged by any group in American politics is the struggle to climb onto the plateau’ (p. 45). Wolff also uses another metaphor to describe this struggle, where government can be seen as the referee among competing interests and where some interests are struggling to gain legitimacy. In the course of such a struggle, representatives of interests that are neglected or discouraged may seek attention in ways that established and powerful interests consider uncivil:

It is as though an umpire were to come upon a baseball game in progress between big boys and little boys, in which the big boys cheated, broke the rules, claimed hits that were outs, and made the little boys accept the injustice by brute force. If the umpire undertakes to ‘regulate’ the game by simply enforcing the ‘rules’ actually being practiced, he does not thereby make the game a fair one. Indeed, he may actually make matters worse, because if the little boys get up their courage, band together, and decide to fight it out, the umpire will accuse them of breaking the rules and throw his weight against them! Precisely the same sort of thing happens in pluralist politics. (Wolff, 1965: 47–48)

With unabashed clarity, contemporary neoliberal regimes no longer seek legitimacy as referees or neutral brokers in disputes between those who possess vast wealth and those who do not, between those who can make or break political careers and those who cannot. A striking illustration of this in media policy was when the chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Michael Powell, referred to media industrialists as the FCC’s ‘clients’, in contrast to the mass outpouring by citizens who opposed their policy agendas (Koerner, 2001: 42). No sense of fair play there, but rather a referee who, with the utmost civility and little sense of justice, threw his weight behind the team he favoured, and from whom he has profited handsomely since he left government for work in the private sector.

Not surprisingly, Kingwell (1995) anticipates this objection: ‘There are good reasons that civility has been viewed with distrust by the disenfranchised … Talk can be a sham, a shadow play that distracts us from those who rob us blind’ (p. 48). He also acknowledges that ‘the ability to speak civilly will not be evenly distributed throughout a society, and that poses its own problems’ (Kingwell, 1995: 239). Consequently, he asks whether it is possible to take ‘the structures of civility, apparently so deeply bound up with deference and restraint and aristocratic privilege’, and put them to ‘the service of justice in a society of democratic interests?’ (Kingwell, 1995: 240). He notes that ‘etiquette and manners’ vary across social classes, and he asserts that they ‘are not, in themselves, the natural property of any particular class’, citing the codes of expression that members of teenage street gangs use to communicate among themselves. Based on this observation, Kingwell suggests that there is parity between expression within street gangs and within corporate board rooms:

The central point here is that etiquette and manners are not, in themselves, the natural property of any particular class. They are in fact morally and politically neutral properties, employed by all classes, in their different ways, to reinforce exclusions.

Moreover, he argues, ‘Seeing this ought to be enough to defeat the dismissive objections of those who feel equality threatened by structures of negotiating difference, including those of civility as I have been discussing it’ (Kingwell, 1995: 242). For Kingwell, the argument from inequality is not compelling. Case closed. Anyone who doubts the belief that there is rough equality between the opportunities available to gang members on the economic fringes of society and corporate executives who occupy society’s commanding heights seems to be guilty of cynicism by Kingwell’s argument. It is here that Kingwell’s liberal basis for optimism and hope falls apart.

Civility is perhaps well-suited as a means to airbrush a portrait of homogeneity and harmony among incommensurables, but it is hard to see how extremes of heterogeneity, especially divisions along class lines, can be resolved by such delusion. And, to the extent that the weight of state power is thrown on the side of wealthy elites, it is difficult to read the motives underlying calls for civility as anything but pernicious. Claus Offe makes a strong case for why we should pay closer attention to the hidden incivility – or rather barbarism – behind the ‘culpable omissions’ of states. For Offe, barbarity comes in a variety of forms, and one of growing significance today is ‘the revocation of obligations of a civilizational social contract once in existence and the subsequent relapse into a “state of nature”’. He argues that ‘state-sponsored breakdowns of civility’ manifest themselves in ‘the erosion of “life-world” categories on a micro level – such as every day morality, style, respect and decency, moral sensitivity, internalized discipline, and social restraints’ ⁸ (Offe, 1996: 364–365). Offe does not take issue with widespread concerns about over-dependence on ‘someone else’ (or something else, like the welfare state), which he agrees can undermine individual and group autonomy and initiative, and this point reflects his ambivalence overall towards ‘the contradictions of the welfare state’. ⁹ (Offe, 1996: 374–375). What we are left with, then, is not so much a vision of a clear path towards democracy, but rather a clearer understanding of contradictions within the discourse of civility.

Conclusion

To appeal only to civility as an ideal for public life is to neglect the fact that there is a dialectic of civility that corresponds with other, more fundamental clashes of our time. Short of the evidence that so many say is needed to establish that the varied and problematic types of speech discussed above are harmful, such speech may at least be understood as symptomatic of more fundamental social ills of inequality, injustice, domination and subordination. It makes good sense that we should be sceptical towards the belief that tempering speech will yield more than cosmetic changes to underlying conditions of injustice. Attacks on social ills at the level of expression seem to pose a woefully inadequate challenge to underlying injustice, but it is not hard to see why such distractions persist, especially as the preferred liberal alternatives to arguably uncivil expressions of resistance and rebellion that now occur with increasing frequency.

The idea of civility derives a great deal of its power not only from the distance that is often set between it and the use of violence but also from the fact that the potential to deploy violence is sometimes seen as necessary for maintaining civility. Moreover, the language of civility is essential to preserving the legitimacy of a given set of relations of domination and subordination. In this sense, civility is sometimes the velvet glove that sheaths an iron fist of repression. At this point, it is not difficult to imagine a range of objections that might be raised in defence of the good name of civility. But the point is not to claim that all appeals to civility are inherently fraudulent and valueless or that we can afford to dispense with the instrumental usefulness of civility altogether. Rather, it is to say that the idea of civility deserves no greater protection from criticism than any other term that is vital to democratic theory and practice. More importantly, we should unequivocally recognize civility as a lesser virtue than justice, and we should recognize in the process that the former can be and often is used to impede the fulfilment of the latter. When civility is understood clearly to be but a means to other ends, presumably just ones, its work is reasonable and worthwhile.

With the rise of neoliberal social policies, we have been witness to a simultaneous ratcheting up of social pain alongside the imposition of more rigorous standards to control and neutralize the time, place and manner in which citizens are permitted to cry out in response. Again, the point is not to dismiss the idea of civility out of hand, but we ought to hold out for a reflexive political economy of civility, one that has the capacity to not only recognize the potential of civility as a vital means of public reason but also enable us to recognize in unfiltered ways how civility is used as a means of legitimating domination and silencing the weak. As with any vital concept, the theory and practice of civility constitute a dialectical process. A vital challenge in the discourse on civility is to be able to recognize when civility represses and when it might liberate.