The Decline of Civility

There's no doubt that civility in our public discourse has declined, that there's more hostility, more vituperation, greater polarization than at any time within living memory.

In his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that though there've been raw, rude and raucous periods in the past, especially during elections, in our own day,

... something new is happening: the sense that the other side is less than fully human, that its supporters are not part of the same moral community as us, that somehow their sensibilities are alien and threatening, as if they were not the opposition within the political arena, but the enemy, full stop.

What has brought this about? Sacks offers "four independent but mutually aggravating causes."

First, he avers, is "the deepening individualism of Western societies since the 1960s." When a country has been at relative peace for an extended period of time the sense of togetherness and unity tends to atrophy. Combine this diminishing sense of unity with an increasing sense of individual autonomy and people will often feel less need to be polite to each other.

Second, is "the phenomenon of the internet which has changed the nature of communication and the way we acquire our information about the world." Internet websites, coupled, I might add with cable television, have transformed broadcast news into a "narrowcasting" of news targeted at audiences with specific interests and political ideologies.

This encourages us to listen only to points of view that are compatible with our own and which reinforce our beliefs, and reinforcement tends to push us toward political and/or religious extremes.

Third, this new media has what has been called a disinhibiting effect. Just as motorists are often emboldened to be more rude and abusive when ensconced in the security of their vehicle, the new social media tends to bring out the worst in people who feel secure behind their screens.

This is the result, Sacks claims, of five features of social media:

• It's anonymous. No one has to give their true name or reveal their identity or address.
• It's invisible. No one sees the people they're insulting and they don't see you.
• The communication often isn't done in real time. There's a time gap between you typing out your message and the other party reading it.
• It's unregulated. There are few, if any, rules.
• Finally, it's not face to face. There's something about being face to face with someone that tends to mitigate rudeness and enhance courtesy.

Sacks writes at length about the fourth factor contributing to our contemporary incivility, but it can perhaps be summed up by saying that our modern mobility has weakened our sense of community. Many people who read this scarcely know the people who live more than two houses removed from theirs. Many people who read this have probably lived at multiple addresses since leaving high school or college and many of them no longer live in the community in which they grew up.

When we have no roots in a community, when we don't know the people with whom we interact, we find it easier to be discourteous to them. When we have a deep attachment to a community, on the other hand, we feel a bond, almost a kinship, with those with whom we share that community and its values.

And this leads back to what Sacks says in the first quote above. We've become so fragmented as a society that we frequently don't share the same values as others. We may speak the same language, but our worldviews are so divergent that we have trouble communicating. We are almost alien to each other.

The more different people are from each other the more difficult it is to feel a connection with them and the easier it is to feel, and express, animosity toward them when frictions arise.

In closing, I'd like to add two additional causes to the four to which Sacks attributes what we might call our current crisis of civility:

First, people often express opinions that they hold fervently but inchoately. That is, they may have strong opinions and voice them, but when challenged to defend them they find themselves at a loss. The inability to defend one's views when challenged is embarrassing and frustrating and it's easier to just smother one's critic in a fog of contumely, which is what a lot of people choose to do.

Second, and this perhaps lies at the root of most of what was said above, many people, having abandoned the Judeo-Christian worldview and its ethic of loving one's neighbor and living by the Golden Rule, often no longer feel they have a duty to treat others as persons loved by God and deserving of being treated with dignity.

Of course, people who claim to adhere to the Judeo-Christian worldview can be just as offensive as anyone else, but when they are they betray the commandment to love their neighbor. When a secular individual acts uncivilly he's betraying nothing. For the secular man there's no moral imperative to be civil, kind, tolerant or compassionate.

The secular man/woman is morally autonomous, and that's a problem for any society that wishes to maintain a modicum of decency.