What is civility?
Civility is a disposition that one individual may have towards another or, increasing the scope, a mood that obtains in a given group of individuals or a society, when the following three criteria are met by both or all sides in a human relationship: individuals acknowledge the full humanity of both themselves and all others, recognize their interdependence, and desire to make common cause with them.
adapted from Adam McClellan, “Beyond Courtesy: Redefining Civility,” Civility, Leroy S. Rouner, ed. See bibliography.
One of my passions is helping people find common ground so they can interact in common cause for the greater good. This cause is pressing, as conflicts over difference play out on world stage and in our personal lives.
On the world stage, thousands of refugees are streaming into Europe from strife-torn Middle Eastern and African countries in search of a better life. We see the search for a better life throughout the world, including the United States, where racial injustice continues to haunt us. The Black Lives Matter movement has arisen in part over violence against and deaths of black boys and men due to police brutality. These examples of racism in our country play out against a history of injustice against all people of color. Women still suffer inequalities in the workplace, and women’s issues like sex trafficking are given relatively scant attention. Poverty abounds in a country of riches. Income and educational inequalities continue to be a problem.
The 2020 Presidential Primaries offer a platform to discuss these issues. Civility asks that candidates discuss them openly, evenly, and fairly, in civil language, tone, and demeanor.
That our United States President fails woefully on this count is a source of shame for those of us who understand the healing powers of civility, defined broadly as we do here. Those who follow him in blind partisanship are also culpable through denial and failure to examine the many facts that lead to truth. For facts, truth, and honesty are the strong threads of the civility cloth in which trust is carried.
I look forward to the time when I can rewrite these words with a story of victory for these foundational, moral values, when our civility cloth can wave as a flag that connects us all in full humanity, thriving interdependence, and common good. The 2020 election has the potential to make that dream possible.
Tension over difference abounds.
What role can each of us play, as individuals, in bringing civility to our personal and public lives?
Since civility is a personal action carried out in the arena of a person’s life, I suggest a set of good practices to guide public civil action and promote civility.
I build this set of practices from my life’s experiences (see Life Lessons in Civility elsewhere on this site). I am a Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Hawaii. My professional life has been devoted to reading and teaching literary texts, mostly American fiction. The best of these texts show the full humanity of characters’ lives unfolding on the pages before us. It is natural then, for me to turn to turn to the power of story as a way into civility.
I also taught the subject of writing and how it works to first-year undergraduates as well as to doctoral students, teasing out the dynamic relationships among writer-speaker, reader-listener, and the subject at hand in the production of a text. In Departments of English, this subject matter is called the study of Rhetoric, which was first described in the Western world by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle over two thousand years ago, and which tells us how long people have been struggling with civil communication.
As Director of a Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program for five years I became fascinated by the topic of how writing, and even reading, works differently in different disciplines and settings. I learned more about the implications of what we call genre, the form the writing takes, its demands on its audiences, and the purposes it serves. Through it all, I was studying the art of (civil) communication.
As I moved from back-to-back classes in American Writers, 1865-1912, and in Principles of Rhetoric, I used to think, “It’s all here”— the centrality of story with its human drama of characters, plot, setting, point of view, and theme in the literature classes— and the dynamics of writer-audience-topic in the complexity of writing well, whether introductory level or advanced. Yes, all here, realized in my life in beautiful Manoa Valley at the University of Hawaii, with its dynamic mix of ethnic groups.
On retirement I remember telling a colleague that I wanted to write a book that drew on my knowledge of written dynamics at work in literature and rhetoric. I imagined the book pointing toward peace.
I have come to understand “It’s all here” to mean civility, as it is realized in the relationship of writer, audience, and, more broadly, in the full humanity of us all. Adam McClellan’s definition of civility, given above, best explains the dynamics involved in the practice of civility. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a guideline present in all religions, is a way of actualizing your full humanity.
All of this is not to ignore the dynamics of my personal life that contributed to my understanding of human relationships, textual or not. I fold these understandings into my suggestions for good practice as well.
In the section Living The Civil Life, I summarize five practices to help you live a life of civility. Research shows your chances of embodying them increase if you assume an attitude of positivity, if you can slow down the pace of your life, avoid hurrying and eschew impatience, and if you keep a journal as you progress through the processes. Writing down insights helps you internalize and remember them.
My primary emphasis is experiential. I offer good practices, an approach that focuses on the experiences of your daily life, now and in the past.
On the world stage, thousands of refugees are streaming into Europe from strife-torn Middle Eastern and African countries in search of a better life. We see the search for a better life throughout the world, including the United States, where racial injustice continues to haunt us. The Black Lives Matter movement has arisen in part over violence against and deaths of black boys and men due to police brutality. These examples of racism in our country play out against a history of injustice against all people of color. Women still suffer inequalities in the workplace, and women’s issues like sex trafficking are given relatively scant attention. Poverty abounds in a country of riches. Income and educational inequalities continue to be a problem.
The 2020 Presidential Primaries offer a platform to discuss these issues. Civility asks that candidates discuss them openly, evenly, and fairly, in civil language, tone, and demeanor.
That our United States President fails woefully on this count is a source of shame for those of us who understand the healing powers of civility, defined broadly as we do here. Those who follow him in blind partisanship are also culpable through denial and failure to examine the many facts that lead to truth. For facts, truth, and honesty are the strong threads of the civility cloth in which trust is carried.
I look forward to the time when I can rewrite these words with a story of victory for these foundational, moral values, when our civility cloth can wave as a flag that connects us all in full humanity, thriving interdependence, and common good. The 2020 election has the potential to make that dream possible.
Tension over difference abounds.
What role can each of us play, as individuals, in bringing civility to our personal and public lives?
Since civility is a personal action carried out in the arena of a person’s life, I suggest a set of good practices to guide public civil action and promote civility.
I build this set of practices from my life’s experiences (see Life Lessons in Civility elsewhere on this site). I am a Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Hawaii. My professional life has been devoted to reading and teaching literary texts, mostly American fiction. The best of these texts show the full humanity of characters’ lives unfolding on the pages before us. It is natural then, for me to turn to turn to the power of story as a way into civility.
I also taught the subject of writing and how it works to first-year undergraduates as well as to doctoral students, teasing out the dynamic relationships among writer-speaker, reader-listener, and the subject at hand in the production of a text. In Departments of English, this subject matter is called the study of Rhetoric, which was first described in the Western world by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle over two thousand years ago, and which tells us how long people have been struggling with civil communication.
As Director of a Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program for five years I became fascinated by the topic of how writing, and even reading, works differently in different disciplines and settings. I learned more about the implications of what we call genre, the form the writing takes, its demands on its audiences, and the purposes it serves. Through it all, I was studying the art of (civil) communication.
As I moved from back-to-back classes in American Writers, 1865-1912, and in Principles of Rhetoric, I used to think, “It’s all here”— the centrality of story with its human drama of characters, plot, setting, point of view, and theme in the literature classes— and the dynamics of writer-audience-topic in the complexity of writing well, whether introductory level or advanced. Yes, all here, realized in my life in beautiful Manoa Valley at the University of Hawaii, with its dynamic mix of ethnic groups.
On retirement I remember telling a colleague that I wanted to write a book that drew on my knowledge of written dynamics at work in literature and rhetoric. I imagined the book pointing toward peace.
I have come to understand “It’s all here” to mean civility, as it is realized in the relationship of writer, audience, and, more broadly, in the full humanity of us all. Adam McClellan’s definition of civility, given above, best explains the dynamics involved in the practice of civility. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a guideline present in all religions, is a way of actualizing your full humanity.
All of this is not to ignore the dynamics of my personal life that contributed to my understanding of human relationships, textual or not. I fold these understandings into my suggestions for good practice as well.
In the section Living The Civil Life, I summarize five practices to help you live a life of civility. Research shows your chances of embodying them increase if you assume an attitude of positivity, if you can slow down the pace of your life, avoid hurrying and eschew impatience, and if you keep a journal as you progress through the processes. Writing down insights helps you internalize and remember them.
My primary emphasis is experiential. I offer good practices, an approach that focuses on the experiences of your daily life, now and in the past.