Political theorist Teresa Bejan started from the perspective that civility is a sham when she wrote her 2017 book on the topic. In her TED talk, she discusses what she learned while researching her book. Does civility heal society, or does it make our problems worse?
You see, the thing about disagreement is that there is a reason that "disagreeable" is a synonym for "unpleasant."
In this talk, Teresa Bejan talks about her change in thought about civility during the course of writing her 2017 book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration, and draws from history to discuss her newly informed perspective on civility. Bejan is an Associate Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford.
She notes that because talk of civility is so frequently insincere, she started her book with the perspective that "Civility is bull sh**", but that during the course of her research, she came to distinguish civility from something that she calls "mere civility". In her newly informed perspective, civility is precious and vital for a tolerant society. However, she says that most of the time when people talk about civility, it's not really a call for civility, but a strategy of disengagement. The main point of the talk seems to be to encourage actual civility while simultaneously discouraging insincere rhetoric on the topic.
The page for the TED talk is here: Is civility a sham?, and you can also listen to it in this youtube video.
In the beginning of her talk, Bejan establishes the relevance of the topic by talking about the problem of disagreement. She points out that it is naturally offensive when people disagree with each other over fundamental issues - things like religion, politics or identity. This is because it feels like an insult to have someone disagree with you over vitally important topics. She points out that his unpleasant aspect of disagreement is exactly when civility is important. It is through civility that disagreement becomes tolerable, so that we can live our lives in "un-murderous" but diverse societies.
After establishing that civility is indeed virtuous and relevant, she goes on to talk about the first recorded crisis of civility, describing the printing press as the world's first "Twitter" and Martin Luther as the world's first troll, when he took advantage of the recently invented printing press to call out the Pope and the Catholic church as anti-Christian.
From this foundation, she moves on to discuss a common historical practice of weaponizing talk about civility, by accusing adversaries of incivility. The church responded to Martin Luther with its own insults like "heretic" and "protestant", and eventually, the church's calls for civility became pretexts for persecution. She says that the same strategy repeats itself throughout history, all the way through the civil rights era in modern America and beyond.
if you're talking about civility as a way to avoid an argument, to isolate yourself in the more agreeable company of the like-minded who already agree with you, if you find yourself never actually speaking to anyone who really, truly, fundamentally disagrees with you, well, you're doing civility wrong.
Finally, she points out that the same crisis of civility that launched the reformation gave birth to tolerant places like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, with tolerance as a value eventually spreading through the modern world. She says this is because of something that she calls, "mere civility", which she defines as "speaking your mind, but to your opponents face, not behind her back." and says that "the point of mere civility is to allow us to disagree, to disagree fundamentally, but to do so without denying or destroying the possibility of a common life tomorrow with the people that we think are standing in our way today."
I highly recommend taking the 14 minutes to listen to her talk or read the transcript. It is entertaining and also informative. For another TED talk with a slightly different take on civility, you may also enjoy Steven Petrow: 3 ways to practice civility. It came across my RSS feed this week, and I would also have written about that one, but I could not find a youtube embed, so I found Bejan's talk instead (and I'm glad I did!).
Thank you for your time and attention.
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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
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