At Arc Digital Julian Adorney argues for the creation of a virtuous cycle:
But for the past two decades, partisan hatred has been on the rise. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and political scientist Sam Abrams point to one cause: “rule changes and culture changes in Congress made it harder to maintain cross-party friendships.†With the decline of these friendships, civility in Washington has frayed.
In the Trump era, that hostile, partisan atmosphere describes the whole country. The lack of civility threatens to push us further away from a unified nation into two warring camps.
There is another way. Sometimes in a conflict, one party will offer the other an olive branch. Kindness, like hostility, is reciprocated. This can trigger a benevolent cycle, as one party de-escalates and apologizes, prompting the other party to do the same, until civility and goodwill are restored. But someone has to take the first step.
to oppose escalating incivility. Requite evil with good. I think that such a thing is only possible in a Kantian ethical system; it’s practically incomprehensible to instrumentalists.
IMO one of the factors in the rising political temperature is suburbanism. Civility is by definition the qualities or habits needed to live in a city. When most of the people live in the suburbs they may never have developed the skills necessary to be civil. They think it’s optional.
We don’t have the ethical system for it. More important are incentives – right now there are few incentives for civility or working across the aisle.
How does an anarchist work across the aisle with a Leninist? Or a New Atheist with an evangelical? A Burkean conservative with a Republican corporatist?
There are irreconcilable differences, as there have been since the colonial period. We had a brief period after 1945 in which the illusion of shared values was maintained and has since collapsed. What we’re seeing is a return to traditional American politics and traditional political violence.
Find a modus vivendi. Plato pointed it out in The Republic. A republican government requires that. If no accommodation is possible, neither is republican government.
The harmony achieved in Plato’s city was the result of eugenics, at least as regards the Guardians. Eugenics and a lie. The prole-dregs were imagined as being content with their non-elite lot. Recall that, in the end, justice in the city obtains when everyone is doing that which they are fit for. Not what he or she wants to do, or wants to try to do, but what he or she is fit do. Plato’s idea of harmony in the Republic is everyone knowing their place. His harmonious state is more akin to an hereditary aristocracy than a democratic republic.
If no accommodation is possible, neither is republican government.
That’s where we are. I know people get upset when they hear things like this but we are not a sustainable society, politically, economically or environmentally. We are seeing the early skirmishes among radicals which will determine what replaces it, and what comes out of that conflict is likely to be terrifying because these are forces that cannot coexist. The fascists couldn’t do so with socialists, the Marxist-Leninists couldn’t do so with anarchists and the corporatists have utterly destroyed traditional conservatism. Totalitarian systems do not tolerate dissent or resistance.
The ruling class is fully aware of this. They aren’t militarizing our police, enacting mass incarceration, repealing habeus corpus, authorizing indefinite detention of American citizens and deploying mass surveillance for the hell of it. They see a day in the near future when they can maintain control only through brutality.
“IMO one of the factors in the rising political temperature is suburbanism. Civility is by definition the qualities or habits needed to live in a city. When most of the people live in the suburbs they may never have developed the skills necessary to be civil.â€
WTF ??
We are being manipulated by political interests as never before, because new tech gives them access to target audiences. For instance, if a commentator uses the phrase ” legacy media” ,I know they’ve bookmarked Drudge. If a comment refers to “income inequality”, Huffington post. These are “for profit” websites, looking to increase their clicks, and then, revenue. Consider the source, and stop being played.
Respect people. Steve, you are a physician? God, do I respect that. I differ with you on the ability of Government to improve our lives, it has a limited role, necessary, but limited because all it knows is the past. Only free enterprise can create a herky-jerky path to the future, inventing things that may not work, or fail, or once in a million, create a computer chip out of silicon, ordinary sand, that sparks a revolution that improves all our lot. Medicine, if freed from the FDA and Litigious thieves, would, despite failures and setbacks, achieve miracles we could only dream about within ten years
Would the Soviets have had cause to decry a decline in individual civility, or would such a decline have been a natural outcome of a degenerate system?
I think they would have denounced civility as a bourgeois affectation. Something to the effect of “Under socialism there is no bourgeois civility only revolutionary truth.”
Ben,
Civility is necessary for a representative government which is why totalitarian regimes and ideologies, like the Soviets, lack it.
Civility occurs when violence is suppressed. When violence is allowed to happen without consequence, life and politics can quickly become a vicious lawless bloody struggle for dominance.
Another problem is too many people and factions have become convinced that they are always right, that their ideas are the only good ideas. Which means compromise is impossible because that means an admission of error and dissent cannot be tolerated because it is obviously not just wrong but stupid and/or evil. It’s hard to have a conversation when the reply to the question ‘Why?’ is ‘Bigot!’