“Embarrassing.” “Ugly.” “Disgusting.” “Painful to watch.” These are just a sampling of responses from those who tuned into the presidential debate this past Tuesday night. Upon reflection, unfortunately, none of us should be shocked inasmuch as societally our civility toward each other has been devolving for decades. I fancifully thought that my generation was the last one raised to respect others; to be courteous and polite, but both of the participants in Tuesday’s mud fight are my contemporaries. Still, if my mother or father had witnessed me say some of things our presidential candidates did, my backside would still be resonating from their collective corrective response.
Civility simply means to conduct oneself in a civilized manner. Unfortunately, it seems to be viewed today as irrelevant.
Our country was founded on the premise that individuals should be given complete liberty from totalitarian oppression. However, such liberty was not meant to negate our individual responsibilities, foremost being that we all should aspire to decency and to believe in and practice civility toward one another. As citizens of this great nation, we should admire and practice ethical behavior because it is the standard and the foundation upon which our individual freedoms are based. For our democratic government to endure, respect for one another is the rigid standard of morality that must be applied to all our lives; and if, periodically, we fail, as surely we all do, we must adjust our lives, not our standard nor our foundation of civility. Alas, we seemed to have lost our way.
Most think of civility as simply having good manners and being polite. But this understanding is too simplistic. The concept of civility goes much deeper. Its elements can be compared to a three-legged stool.
The first leg of the stool is that civility involves a demonstration of respect for others. In 1859, Mount Vernon, the plantation home of the first President of the United States, George Washington, was acquired by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union. They purchased the mansion and a portion of the estate’s acreage from Washington’s great-nephew, John A. Washington, Jr., rescuing it from a state of disrepair and neglect and preserving the home and contents for posterity.
When inventorying the many items included in the home, a school notebook entitled “Forms of Writing” was discovered. The notebook was dated from 1745, when George Washington was fourteen years old and attending school in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Inside of the notebook, in Washington’s own hand, were written 110 “Rules of Civility in Conversation Amongst Men.” Historical research has shown that young George most likely copied them from a 1644 English translation of an even older French work.
It is remarkable that most of these rules still have great relevance in our modern world as a model for how to establish a personal code of conduct that will guide and serve you well throughout your life. The fact that such discourse is absent from today’s formal school curriculum speaks volumes about why our societal foundation seems so weak and decaying.
His first rule was: “Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect for those who are present.” The first leg of civility is to have and show respect for others. Simple everyday examples of this would be younger people offering their seat on a bus to their elders or, in a group discussion, allowing a person to express their feelings without interruption.
Civility is the common language for communicating respect for one another. The importance, in other words, is in the symbolism of the gesture more than the outcome of the behavior. Irrespective of whether the other person on the bus is physically capable of standing for the duration of the journey, offering your seat is a way communicating respect towards them. Likewise, allowing another to speak their piece, even when you disagree with their position, also expresses your distinction between respect for another versus disagreement with their position.
The second leg of the civility stool relates to public behavior in the sense that it governs relations between people who may not know each other. It is the fact that civility requires us to show respect for people we do not know that invests it with a strong moral quality. Consideration shown to friends and family is a result of our affection and is reinforced by our continuing interaction with them. Civility toward strangers, however, requires that we behave in certain ways toward people who mean nothing to us, and who we will likely not encounter again. The moral quality of this leg is that it is non-specific. Our feeling of empathy and our sense of obligation is societal rather than personal.
The third leg of civility is self-regulation or sacrifice. We hold back in our pursuit of our own immediate self-interest for the sake of harmonious relations with strangers. Simply put, this leg of civility involves doing the right thing. The corollary of personal freedom is personal obligation. You get what you give…once you go into a public place you have to accept a reasonable level of public protocol.
The approval of others has to be earned. We feel shame-faced when we receive praise or honor that we know is undeserved or unwarranted. As George Washington noted in the last of his 110 rules of civility: “Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscious.”
These three legs which comprise the civility stool—respect, relations with strangers, and self-regulation or sacrifice—together lead us to a definition of what we should all embrace as the necessary and required foundation of a civilized society. Civility is behavior in public which demonstrates respect for others and which entails curtailing one’s own immediate self-interest when appropriate. Defined in this way, civility is clearly a demanding public virtue. Based upon the performance this past Tuesday night by both of the men seeking to lead this nation for the next four years, it is a virtue absent from both. (Portions excerpted from article Why Civility Matters by Nicole Billante and Peter Saunders – Center for Independent Studies – Australia 2002)
Who then is free? The one who wisely is lord of themselves, who neither poverty, death or captivity terrify, who is strong to resist his appetites and shun honors, and is complete in themselves smooth and round like a globe. – Horace
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
William “Bill” Bacque