I spent the last post describing the benefits of incivility. It helps get people involved in political causes, helps rally like-minded people together, and it may help get crucial messages across when more civil methods are being ignored.
Although I do strongly believe in civility, I’m not convinced that it’s always appropriate, all the time.
But I do have one major quarrel with arguments for incivility. Too often, such arguments are framed as an either/or, as if we must make a once-and-for-all choice between either Team Civility or Team Incivility. As if, just because civility doesn’t always work, it must never work, and should thus be completely thrown out.
That’s silly! Civility is a tool to use, not a team to join.
And it’s a far more challenging tool than incivility.
I come across the “team” mentality frequently. “Civility has never been the sole mechanism of true progress,” writes Sarah Butler in a blog post. “It is instead loud voices, strong convictions, and unyielding insistence on justice that has always brought us further along as a nation.“
An even more strident blog post, by Unitarian Universalist Rev. Amy Shaw, takes the “team” mentality to another level. In “Stop Being So Damn Nice,” Shaw argues that we who care about social justice are at war and can no longer afford to be civil:
If we are not willing to join with communities of color, with LGBTQ+ people, with handicapped people, if we are not willing to get into the trenches right now, if we are not willing to fight fire with fire and fight evil with every weapon at our disposal, to fight evil with every dirty trick and underhanded blow and sneak attack we know, if we are not willing to put down our pearls and pick up a God damn stick, than [sic] we are going to lose.
And some of us are going to die.
Shaw’s post is full of “us” and “them” language. Reading it, I can empathize with the rage she’s channeling—in the Trump era, it does feel as though many vulnerable groups are under attack. But I disagree with her implication that civility is somehow a betrayal of our cause.
Her post seems to categorize all conservatives as one monolithic, evil entity—“they” want us dead, “they” torture children, and “they” murder our youth. Any attempt at compassion for any conservative, about any issue, seems to equal complicity with all these atrocities. If you join Team Civility and reach out to the other side, you might as well be one of them!
(As a humor piece from The Onion puts it: “‘We Can Have Differences Of Opinion And Still Respect Each Other,’ Says Betrayer Of The One True Cause.”)
I’m a member of a UU church, and I’m disturbed to hear a minister write in such a dehumanizing way about the other side.
And I disagree with the reasoning behind these posts. Civility may not have been our sole mechanism of progress, but it has been one mechanism. The success of nonviolent movements such as those led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King is a testament to civility’s power. Strong convictions have their place—and so do empathy and compassion for the “other.”
There doesn’t need to be an either/or between civility work and activism. I make a point of doing both. They complement each other.
And within activism, there also doesn’t need to be an either/or between civil and uncivil methods of action.
Civility is a skill we can choose to use, or not. It depends on the situation. I can sit down for a thoughtful conversation with a Trump supporter one evening, trying to understand her mentality and bridge the gap between my worldview and hers, and then spend the next evening campaigning with all my might to oust Trump in 2020.
When I was co-leading Reach Out Wisconsin, we leaders were practicing civility at our forums while also attending protests outside of it. Those protests were far less civil. They were full of vitriol against the other side. We shouted slogans; we carried sarcastic signs; we smuggled sleeping bags into the state Capitol when security guards barred protesters from bringing them in. We chose which times to be more civil and which to be less.
Civility is a practice, like meditation or jogging. Exercising our “civility muscles” is good for both ourselves and our democracy as a whole. Civility groups help us build these muscles, teaching us to listen compassionately and patiently. The more we develop these skills, the more readily we can bring them back into the real world. We’ll continue advocating for our chosen causes, but in a way that’s better informed, more hopeful about humanity, and more skilled.
We don’t have to use the “muscles” of civility once we’ve developed them. But developing them gives us an option we wouldn’t otherwise have had. If we never practice civility, we don’t have it at our disposal as a tool.
Isn’t it better to be uncivil because you’ve decided to, rather than because you simply lack the skills to be civil in the first place?
Civility isn’t necessarily appropriate for all situations, as I wrote in the last post. But neither is incivility. Which tool to use in a given situation is hopefully a choice.
