It’s become common, even fashionable, to decry the state of civil discourse in the US. While we agree that it’s sunk to abysmal depths, at EnCiv we aspire to more than restoring calm, more than achieving social peace. We aspire to useful and ongoing conversations across society because, as my last post quoted world-renowned scholar John Dryzek and his colleagues as writing, “Deliberation is essential to democracy.”
Photo by Kylie_Jaxxon 
More than a decade ago—well in advance of our descent into un-civil war—I wrote a short essay* outlining a series of eight mutually reinforcing “limitations” I saw undermining the quality contemporary public discussion. If anything, these have grown more constraining since, narrowing the range and depth of public discussion even more. But even if things had turned out differently, there’d still be room for improvement. Good public discussion is both a “thing” and a value—a standard against which to judge ourselves. As such, we’ll never achieve it completely, any more than we can hope to perfectly realize other cherished values like freedom or justice. The need to improve civil discussion won’t go away once some semblance of civility returns. Civil discussion and the work it accomplishes are too important.
* See essay U-2, “Some Limitations of Current Democratic Discussion,” in Public Discussion as the Exploration and Development of Contrasting Conceptual Possibilities, First Edition, by Adolf G. Gundersen; Julius Stern, Editor. Parkersburg, WV: Interactivity Foundation, 2006. pp. 85-100.
