Incivility is distasteful, sometimes disgusting, and occasionally downright offensive, but does it do real harm? —More than you might think: both to all of us as individual citizens and to what used to be called “the body politic” as well. Even worse, these negative effects aren’t just additive; they tend to reinforce one another. In this blog I look up close at the individual effects of incivility, in the next two at its social and interactive effects.
Diverging opinions are inescapable in any democracy. And it’s understandable that political conversation can rile people up. But passion that turns into aggression or simply causes others to check out is another thing. When that happens, even the uncivil lose.
Incivility is, first and foremost, a denial of the respect owed to a fellow citizen as an equal. One might even call incivility “indiscriminate discrimination”—discrimination that uses only the slightest difference in background, party affiliation, or policy stance as an excuse for writing others off or a personal attack.
Less obviously, incivility harms those guilty of it as much as, if not more, than those who find themselves its victims. To see how, try this experiment on yourself. First, think of a political question or concern you care deeply about—jobs, abortion, climate change, immigration, the national debt, or education—then answer these questions:
- Have I considered all dimensions of the question?
- Have I thought about the many interests, emotions, and values that enter into my concern about it?
- Have I explored a range of possible responses to those interests, emotions, and values?
- Have I explored and weighed the most important consequences of those responses?
If you think about it, for citizens in a democracy, school is never out. To begin with, the political landscape is always changing—and so are we. Nor is that all: even if both the world and our “inner” selves were entirely static, some sort of learning would be required to discover and then defend our “true” self-interest, our most basic social commitments, and how these fit together.
In the end, then, knowing “where to stand” is not as simple as it’s made out to be. It requires shifting our feet as we grow and adjusting to a changing world. Such shifting and sorting might even be called the citizen’s most basic duty because unless it takes place, there can be no careful consideration of alternative courses of action—something tantamount to irresponsibility. By shrinking our options and closing off alternatives, incivility makes discharging that duty and acting responsibly, both for oneself and others, that much harder.
Incivility, then, is a denial of two values that are the very core of citizenship: equal respect and individual responsibility. Not surprisingly, incivility’s assault on citizenship has system-level implications, as we’ll see in my next blog. AA
* Adapted from Let’s Talk Politics: Restoring Civility Through Exploratory Discussion, by Adolf G. Gundersen & Suzanne Goodney Lea, Chapter 1.
