Some say the problem in today’s political world is the lack of civility. Others say the problem is civility itself, or the pretense of it (and use of it as a bludgeon), when what is called for is outrage.
It seems to me that there is no universal “civility.” Civility is a matter of fitting in and accommodating oneself to a larger civic body, a larger civitas.
The problem today is that there are different (potential) civic bodies, and our actions contribute to the formation, strengthening, or transgression of one or another of them. The civic sphere is not predetermined once and for all, and its rules of engagement are always negotiable.
It’s easy to be civil with your own in-group. The trick is to go beyond it and experience life outside of that in-group. Humans are not customarily very good at that, both when it comes to other human collectivities and — perhaps especially — when it comes to the broader not-just-human world. It is in that “outside” where one can find a new civility, but only through trial and error, negotiation, and the learning of a new respect for those one is not accustomed to fitting in with.
The task today is to create a new civic body, a multicolored, multicapabled, and multispecied one that can carry us beyond the blinders and limits of the ones our (more popular) politicians are dredging up from the past. That’ll take courage, experimentation, and humility.
But articulating the principles for getting along today — in our national and global spheres — is a good place to start. And then working them into a body politic that is capable of neutralizing those whose mission is to destroy the possibility of any new civility.
In the end, we have to choose our allegiances and our civilities.
blood and soil
https://jacobitemag.com/2018/07/19/linkola-montana/
DMF’s response, although insightful, isn’t very helpful. Yes, the reason for incivility is largely due to the failure of economics. But saying that people just want to be left alone, and so does the environment, doesn’t really get us very far.
I would say that the lack of civility is a reflection of the fact that both sides of politics have run out of ideas. This is seen nowhere more clearly than in the UK, where Corbyn really hasn’t offered a viable option to May’s Brexit strategy.
This lack of new insight could be blamed on academics who have failed to analyze the societal problems arising in time, and have failed to provide a new ways forward. Perhaps one of the best books predicting this demise was David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World. Although I disagree with Korten’s premise that part of the solution is to get rid of stock & commodity exchanges, he was perhaps the closest to recognizing the implications of free trade liberalization.
In my mind if we are to get to civility, I agree with Adrian, we need to essentially act like Quakers, or as Schumacher suggested in Small is Beautiful, networks capable of communicating effectively.
The problem is that even if this social capital/infrastructure is developed it will do nothing without the hard work of visioning and making those visions coherent and accessible. The work of Elise Boulding was vital in this respect.
From my perspective I think we need to address 3 key factors, what I call negative externalities, which are not accounted for adequately in our current political-economic paradigm. These key principles are the problem of Pollution, the problem of social in equality, and finally the problem of power domination.
The failure of policy makers to adequately address these three problems I would argue are the reason that civility has been eroded and politics has been reduced to ideological degradation of the other.
The problem is clearly not in the presence of politeness or lack of it, usually it is a mock politeness, which in my opinion is much worse than undisguised facts.