Civility is a core American virtue woven into the fabric of our society. Across races, religions, and the wealth distribution, politeness, manners, and civility are encouraged, taught and rewarded. Young children, teenagers, and adults are expected to behave with a certain level of civility lest they face harmful consequences in the form of social isolation and ostracization.
As someone born and raised in the South I have been brought up to behave politely and maintain proper manners, so I know firsthand that civility, politeness, and good manners–terms I use interchangeably–have numerous positive impacts. Specifically, civility creates social cohesion.
Civility acts as a toolkit of norms, behaviors, and phrases that we can pull from to communicate goodwill and kindness, especially to those we don’t know well. While the simple act of waving at a stranger might not add much to our lives, we often do it anyway— out of respect for social norms and a desire to maintain a sense of connection.
This might reduce social cohesion and even spur feelings of tension between two people or the community. Civility builds social cohesion by encouraging individuals to be less authentic; you mask your indifference or disdain in a given situation to act in a way that appeases others with the hope that, in the end, there will be a stronger sense of community.
The temporary mask that civility forces on us as a tradeoff for a stronger community is not necessarily a bad thing. One could argue that it produces a more pleasant society than if everyone were to act in a way that aligned with how they felt, and that, for that reason, the tradeoff is worth it.
However, there are situations where prioritizing civility happens to be particularly harmful. Namely, when political movements are criticized for not being “civil” enough.
Historically and presently, rhetoric used to describe student protests on college campuses characterizes young activists as irrational, violent, and uncivil. Powerful figures (in government, media, and university administration) in opposition to these activists use this characterization to undermine the causes that these students advocate for.
They frame students as “unreasonable” and “violent” and then claim that because the students fit these criteria, their opinions must also be unreasonable, dismissible, and even dangerous.
To examine this situation further, I want to present a scenario that will hopefully illuminate the danger of rhetoric like the kind detailed above. Imagine that a child interrupts a conversation between his father and another adult. Likely, the father will reprimand the child and discourage him from interrupting conversations, as it’s a rude thing to do. Interruptions tend to be rude and, thus, are often discouraged.
Now, imagine that the child interrupts a conversation between his father and another adult again. The only difference in this case is that the child interrupts his father’s conversation because he is choking on a small object and can’t breathe. In this scenario, any reasonable person would desperately want the child to interrupt the conversation in whatever way possible, even if it meant scratching or kicking to get his father’s attention.
We can take away from this second case that there are situations where the importance of civility ceases to exist. In situations where what is at stake is non-trivial, civility becomes far less important to us. The more serious the issue, the less we care about civility, which is why, when life is at stake, we don’t consider civility remotely important.
So, when activists on college campuses or elsewhere are advocating on behalf of Palestinian victims of genocide, African American victims of racial violence, or addressing any of the many other atrocities currently happening in our world— and powerful figures respond by critiquing the civility of that activism, they are not defending an American virtue. They are demonstrating that politeness means more to them than human life.
Civility can bring about greater social cohesion and bridge gaps between strangers. However, when civility is weaponized by powerful institutional leaders to invalidate the appeals of the people, it becomes a silencing and minimizing weapon that diverts attention from the real issues at stake.
Just like we would not want a child to mask the “authenticity” of the fact that he is choking, we don’t want the American public to sugarcoat or suppress their dissatisfaction with the government. The role of public institutions is to represent, protect, and support the public, and when we allow the leaders of those institutions to dismiss public dissatisfaction in the name of incivility, we are enabling poor leadership.
Regardless of our attitudes towards certain issues, we cannot allow, as a society, institutional leaders to invalidate activism because it undermines the power of the public to demand change from their institutions.
