Civil discussion is at the core of EnCiv’s vision and mission. So it’s more than fair to ask what we mean by that phrase. At the very top of our website’s home page you’ll find a general answer: we believe that discussion is civil when it is “respectful,” “constructive” and “open and fair to all views.”
These may all seem like obvious dimensions of civility. But there’s more to them than meets the eye. A flood of books on civility have been published in the past few years, and we applaud their authors’ intentions. But too many equate civility with “politeness.” We think there’s much more to civility than that.
Take being “respectful,” for starters. It goes beyond avoiding offensive language and personal attacks. It even requires more than cultural sensitivity. What it ultimately demands is a belief that others are worth listening to—really listening to. Why? For two reasons: because they are fellow and sister human beings. And because they might, just might, have something to teach us.
Respecting others, then, opens the door to understanding and learning: about others, about ourselves, about public policy, and about the many ways these might be connected. Understanding—and all those forms of learning—are the hallmarks of “constructive” conversations. Those positive results set constructive conversations off from merely polite exchanges.
Like respect, openness and fairness ultimately derive from a commitment to others’ equal value as persons. Seeing others as valuable in themselves means that there can be no reason—aside from being disrespectful—to exclude another citizen from discussion or treat their views unfairly.
Civil discussion may be more demanding than simple politeness, then, but its payoffs are much bigger, too—both for us as individual citizens and for the democracy we all cherish.
