A response to The Harper Review’s winter 2023 proposition, “Civility is outdated.”
Dear editors,
Originating with the Latin cives, meaning citizen, the word “civil” stands somewhere between an adjective and a noun. It describes both the action of a proper citizen and the action of a citizen aspiring to properness. It does not admit of relativism. Similar to the Greek antitheos, a word meaning “divine” or “god-like” and Achilles’ most common epithet in the Iliad, “civil” invites comparison with an ideal in a way that descriptors like “fast” or “old” do not. The civil person is civil because he fulfills all of his duties as a citizen, where the fast person is fast by virtue of being faster than most.
When I used to misbehave at the dinner table, my Lutheran grandmother would turn in her seat and hiss at me, “Be respectful!” If this failed, she tried, “Be decent!” and then, with venom, “Be civil!” The injunction was for me to acknowledge my citizenship as a member of a civilized nation which criminalized things like homicide and fraud. Did she and I not have a set of basic moral agreements that could forestall my behavior?
It was an appeal she made when all our other lines of communication had broken down; the next step, I knew, was physical force. Something like this ladder of escalation exists in all of our minds. Should our social mores fail, there exists a single remaining safety—a thin blue line—to hold us back from anarchy. If everyone reasons backwards from this knowledge, we can live peacefully with one another and engage in decent, even respectful, dinner conversation.
But what would it mean for our obligations to one another if the citizen was no longer a commanding figure in our moral imagination? What if the city was no longer a model of unity and strength, but the Zoom background for a million data scientists and middle managers working from home?
As our connection to physical space degrades, the threat of the thin blue line seems increasingly toothless. After all, the line doesn’t bound our access to information, our social universe, or our money. Many of the crimes which the state has taken pride in enforcing for the previous century, from indecency to fraud, are in the process of total overhauls in order to maintain relevance. Why mug a man when you could empty his bank account from your home? Why attack someone when you could get them fired with a tweet?
Without the city, we lose the citizen. Without the citizen, we lack the regulative ideal needed for civility. And this may be a blessing. We should be able to build our moral obligations to each other from the ground up, rather than them being imposed from the top down. In other words, our identity as citizens should be irrelevant to our ethical behavior. Already, humanity’s most interesting projects—artificial intelligence, gene editing, even space travel—have raised huge moral questions which completely sidestep the role of the state. Those moral questions that deal with political issues, such as gun rights or abortion, have become stale, repetitive, and nasty.
To call someone a good citizen is already an insult. The sooner we abandon civility the better. It can only mean a headstart on building new moral infrastructure, better suited to our evolving moral world.
Realistically,
Benjamin Samuels