Against Civility: A Feminist Perspective

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Against Civility: A Feminist Perspective

Linda M. G. Zerilli

Judging from the spate of essays, blogs, websites, and conferences devoted to the decline of civility in American society, it would appear that we fi nd ourselves in a dire crisis. Whether this crisis is real or imagined, there is little doubt that it has come to defi ne how we think about the whole problem of public life today. If public opinion surveys are to be believed, the majority of Americans (75 percent) now think that there is indeed a crisis and that it is unprecedented in scope. Joe Wilson’s infamous “You lie!” outburst in the middle of President Obama’s speech was just one more (albeit dramatic) example of our decline into rampant rudeness. For some critics, the cri-sis points to a kind of domestic version of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” in which all are talking (very loudly) but no one is listening. Indeed, the deafening cacophony of voices, say critics, is the increasingly unbearable price we pay for our otherwise commendable commitment to pluralism. Incivility , in short, is pluralism run amuck.

Rather than affi rm that there is a crisis, I want to ask how the very con-cept of civility is linked to particular normative conceptions of democratic politics. Before turning to the core of my argument, we do well to note that, historically speaking, rude and raucous behavior is hardly new in American political life. As Cornell Clayton has written, venerated political fi gures such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams , those “models” of ratio-nal political discourse, publicized outright lies and half-truths about their opponents, more or less dragging them through the proverbial journalistic mud. What is more, political arguments in those golden days of reason-able debate often enough ended in deadly duels and fi st-fi ghts. 1 “We should

4

1 Cornell Clayton, “Understanding the ‘Civility Crisis,’” Washington State Magazine (Winter 2010), http://wsm.wsu.edu/s/index.php?id=827#.Uhr73hYoqfQ .

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Linda M. G. Zerilli108

resist golden-ageism on the subject of civility and American democracy,” declares Fredrik Logevall . “The halcyon days of political geniality and decorum in the United States never existed, not in the early days of the republic and not in the two-plus centuries that followed.” 2 The point is not that nothing has changed; new forms of media, for example, have altered the ways in which extreme views can be publically voiced and the tone in which they are voiced. 3 The point is not to get entangled in nostalgia for a perfectly civil polity that never existed.

More importantly for my purposes, throughout American history, disen-franchised minorities such as women and African Americans have been regularly accused of incivility just by virtue of daring to show up in public and press their rights claims. What counts as proper political behavior can-not be grasped apart from critical questions regarding equal political access and voice in the democratic public realm. As Susan Bickford writes, “norms of ‘good’ (i.e., rational) political communication are not neutral, but tend to refl ect the communicative styles of already powerful groups.” 4 Those who hold power can express their views within the framework of existing institutions, but those who do not may lack the recognized channels for reg-istering their claims. American history is replete with examples of political women who were seen as trespassing the code of civility by trying to speak in public. “For instance,” observes Clayton :

when the reformer Fanny Wright became the fi rst woman to speak at Tammany Hall in 1836, she was shouted down by men who saw her very presence there as improper. Other groups seeking inclusion in American democracy – African Americans, labor organizers, Native Americans, and gay Americans, among others – have historically faced

2 Fredrik Logevall , “The Paradox of Civility,” in Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding , ed. Cornell W. Clayton and Richard Elgar ( Pullman : Washington State University Press , 2012 ), 5–12, 5 .

3 For accounts of the effect of media on public debate, see Diana C. Mutz , Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2006 ) ; Diana Mutz , “ Effects of ‘In-Your-Face’ Television Discourse on Perceptions of a Legitimate Opposition ,” American Political Science Review 101 , no. 4 ( 2007 ): 621–35 ; Sarah Sobieraj and Jeffrey Berry , “ From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News ,” Political Communication 28 , no. 1 ( 2011 ): 19–41 .

4 Susan Bickford , “ Emotion Talk and Political Judgment ,” Journal of Politics 73 , no. 4 ( 2011 ): 1025–37 , 1025. For a strong articulation of this problem in democratic society, see Iris Marion Young , Justice and the Politics of Difference ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 1990 ) .


Against Civility: A Feminist Perspective 109

similar dilemmas; either they could wait patiently for others to press their rights within the existing frameworks of “civil behavior” or they could seek democratic reform themselves by confronting and chal-lenging those frameworks. So while some forms of civil behavior may be essential to democratic deliberation, acts of “incivility” and contes-tation may also be an important part of broadening democracy and empowering excluded groups. 5

At what point, then, can we draw a line in the sand between incivility, on the one side, and civil disobedience, speaking back, or new citizenship claims, on the other?

I would argue that there is no such line, certainly not a historical one (i.e., before civility’s supposed demise), but only particular cases that need to be judged in historical context. Not only is what we deem uncivil deeply normative and thus dependent on changing social conventions but whether we call something uncivil will depend on how we evaluate behavior as part of a larger set of social or political goals.

Consider the well-known outburst by eleven students against Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine, in February 2010. Most responses to this event cited heckling and shouting down as totally unacceptable, uncivil behavior and as a violation of free speech . Writing for FrontPage Magazine , Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, direc-tor of Boston University’s Program in Publishing, framed the general politi-cal issue at stake in the campus event:

Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barrage [ sic ] with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service the notion of academic free speech , and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view. 6

Describing the “virulent anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Muslim students whose ideology on academic debate seems to be ‘free speech for me, but not for

5 Clayton, “Understanding the ‘Civility Crisis,’” 3. 6 Richard L. Cravatts, “When Free Speech Died,” FrontPage Magazine , February 22, 2010, http://

frontpagemag.com/2010/richard-l-cravatts/the-death-of-academic-discourse/ .



thee,’” Cravatts went on to denounce “the baleful whining of ideological bullies intent on suppressing the views of others,” as if all voices (Israeli ambassadors and twenty-year-old Muslim college students in post-9/11 America) were in fact equal and had an otherwise equal chance to be heard in the liberal marketplace of ideas. 7

It would be easy to see Cravatts’s interpretation as highly ideological, for David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine announces its perspective with the slogan “Inside Every Liberal Is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” But that would be to seriously underestimate the resonance that this and similar events fi nd among American citizens and members of the media.

In a 2012 video post, “Left Not All That Interested in Free Speech ,” Kevin Holtsberry reports the total disruption of a Wisconsin “Values Bus Tour event put on by the Heritage Foundation and Family Research Council ” by “a small group of what appeared to be pro-abortion and gay/lesbian protes-tors” holding “bullhorns equipped with sirens.” Apart from seeing leftists and homosexuals as indistinguishable, the author speaks for countless oth-ers when he describes “the hypocrisy of the left.”

They so often pretend to defend free speech, dialog, [and] toler-ance . . . But here is a group hosting an event focused on getting peo-ple registered to vote, educating them on the issues and getting them engaged in the political process. Whether you agree with their policies or politics . . . this is about free speech and public engagement . . . So what does this group of angry leftists do? They basically use sirens and shouts to prevent the speakers from being heard. . . . We have entered an Orwellian world where views on issues from spending and defi -cits to abortion and marriage . . . are not . . . different perspectives to be debated and/or refuted but “hate speech ” that must be silenced . . . Keep this in mind next time the left tries to claim the moral high ground on free speech and tolerance. 8

Holtsberry’s assessment is quite typical of what you will fi nd under posts purporting to document uncivil behavior. If you search on Google for “shouting down,” for example, you will fi nd dozens of similar descriptions of uncivil behavior and the threat to free speech, the majority of which cite

7 Cravatts, “When Free Speech Died.” 8 Kevin Holtsberry, “Left Not All That Interested in Free Speech or Tolerance,” Red State , April

10, 2012, http://www.redstate.com/kevin_holtsberry/2012/04/10/left-not-all-that-interested-in-free-speech-or-tolerance/ .



Muslims, gays and lesbians, feminists, racial and ethnic minorities, and other historically disenfranchised groups as the main offenders. As Barbara Tomlinson reminds us, “Tropes of civility and contempt are deployed against feminist and antiracist arguments to protect the ideal of the liberal citizen-subject from critiques of group power.” 9 Be it the disrupted 2009 talk about illegal immigration by former U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo , the 2006 disruption of elected British Home Secretary John Reid by “Muslim welfare queen Abu Izzadean ,” or the “left-wing fascism” of Arab students shouting down Nonie Darwish at the University of New Mexico in 2012, 10 the description is almost always the same: we are told about a perfectly legit-imate attempt of an individual to voice an opinion and the vitriolic totalitar-ian tactics of protestors silencing free speech. There are exceptions (e.g., Tea Party members), but for the most part these protestors are marked as social deviants of one form or another.

Whether you interpret these protests as uncivil threats to fundamental political freedoms will depend on whether you think everyone is in fact situated equally in the marketplace of ideas. So tenacious is this idea of equality that even those who recognize gross disparities in social power feel compelled to excuse such protests by diminishing their effect. Thus Mark Levine , sympathetically describing the UC-Irvine event for the Huffi ngton Post , defends the students by reminding his readers that “the protests by the students were clearly aimed to disrupt his [Ambassador Oren’s ] speech, but it’s just as clear that they were not trying to scuttle it. Each outburst seems to have lasted under one minute, after which the student left voluntarily. In total, eleven out of 90 minutes were taken up by the protests. . . . There was also time for audience questions had he chosen to take them.” If forty rather than eleven students had interrupted the speech, then this would have clearly been a violation of Oren’s fundamental right, adds Levine. 11

My point here is not to question the value of free speech or to dismiss the problems associated with disruptive political tactics. It is to caution

9 Barbara Tomlinson , Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist ( Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press , 2010 ) , 791–2.

10 “Muslim Welfare Queen Throws Hissy Fit, Tries to Shout Down British Speaker,” Bare Naked Islam , April 7, 2013, http://www.barenakedislam.com/2013/04/07/muslim-welfare-queen-throws-hissy-fi t-tries-to-shout-down-british-speaker/ .

11 Mark Levine, “UC Students Shouting Down the Israeli Ambassador: Boneheaded? Perhaps . . . Illegal? Not So Fast,” Huffi ngton Post , February 23, 2010, http://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/mark-levine/uc-students-shouting-down_b_472187.html .



against an easy acceptance of the thesis that our current political crisis can be described as a loss of civility. Uncivil public behavior is symptomatic of a more general democratic defi cit of public space in which grievances can legitimately be raised and meaningfully addressed by fellow citizens and their elected representatives. If some citizens are more prone to shout, that may well be because those in power are not listening.

The so-called decline in civility needs to be understood in relation to another phenomenon, namely, the rise in citizen apathy. It would appear as though fewer and fewer people fi nd politics a meaningful endeavor, while those who do participate are prone to do so in ways that are aggressive and closed-minded. This uncivil participation refl ects the sense that more delib-erative modes of engaging in politics are ineffective. If citizen apathy and incivility are linked, as I believe they are, then we do well to ask whether the apparent decline in civility is not more a symptom than a cause of our cur-rent political predicament. Calls for improving public manners may well be a displacement of the real problem, namely, the growing disaffection of Americans with their government and the withdrawal of citizens from public life. The call for civility misunderstands what is at stake in this loss of the public and, as I argue in the following, leads us to construe the prob-lem more in ethical than political terms, that is, more as an intersubjective problem of how to treat other people than how to develop a shared concern for something in the world.

As we shall see, efforts to foster civility tend to focus on individual man-ners or proper modes of public reasoning (i.e., modes that exhibit respect for persons) and to bypass the problem of how to develop democratic asso-ciative relations among citizens. These relations, elaborated in the work of Hannah Arendt, involve more than the intersubjective relations among persons that are at issue in civility. Democratic relations involve citizens’ focus on and activity around a shared worldly object. Arendt describes how worldly objective interests bring people together in associative political activity:

Interests constitute, in the word’s most literal signifi cance, something which inter-est , which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addi-tion to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent. Since



this disclosure of the subject is an integral part of all, even the most ‘objective’ intercourse, the physical, worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether dif-ferent in-between which consists of words and deeds and owes its ori-gin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another. This second, subjective in-between is not tangible, since there are no tangible objects into which it could solidify; the process of acting and speaking can leave behind no such results and end products. But for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common. We call this reality the ‘web’ of human relationships. 12

In Arendt’s account of democratic politics, citizens are involved in prac-tices of tangible and intangible world building, which go beyond the real-ization of interests that are normally at the center of received instrumentalist or means–ends conceptions of politics. Arendt does not deny that interests motivate people to enter the political fray, but she insists that what comes of associative political activity exceeds the realization (or nonrealization) of any particular interests. The tangibility of worldly objects is crucial to the creation of an intangible worldly in-between, and both are necessary to what Arendt calls the common world. “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time,” writes Arendt. 13 Relates and separates: the common world “gathers us together and yet pre-vents us from falling over each other, so to speak.” 14 Politics needs and takes place within this in-between space. 15

To have a “common world” in Arendt’s sense is precisely not to share a worldview. On the contrary, this common world exists only where there is a plurality of worldviews. Our sense of what is common, “the same-ness of the object,” as Arendt puts it, can appear only when it is seen from different perspectives. “The end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in

12 Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1989 ), 182–3 . 13 Ibid ., 52. 14 Ibid . 15 I discuss this notion of Arendtian world building in Linda M. G. Zerilli , Feminism and the Abyss

of Freedom ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2005 ) .



only one perspective,” she writes. 16 Consequently, the loss of competing perspectives or views results not in a world that is shared but in a loss of what we have common. It is the absence of this common world or worldly in-between, and not proper etiquette or public reasoning, I shall argue, that gives rise to the malaise that goes under the name of the civility crisis in American life.

The Political Problem with Civility

Civility is typically understood as both a certain way of caring for oneself and caring for others. Manners are understood as regard for others that begins with having the proper regard for oneself. Linking self-governance (restraint, self-control, etc.) with learning how to comport oneself with equals in public life, Patrick Deneen suggests that we look back to the Greeks.

We can understand why “politeness” and “civility” are so closely connected to the ancient conception of politics. Manners – those expressions of civility and politeness – is a basic form of training in citizenship. By enacting a considerateness for others – even where this may not be actually our initial reaction – we become habituated into the practice of being other-regarding. Far from being punctilious and effected, manners are actually those earliest forms of training in civic life, the attendant “formalities ” that make civic life more than simply a contrivance for self-interested individuals. They are also a kind of training in self-governance: for instance, table manners exist not to increase our capacity to consume more faster [ sic ], but to slow us down, to allow us to ingest slowly, to reduce our consumption and at the same time to encourage the arts of conversation and compan-ionship as the primary way we experience our most basic instinctual consumption (courtship customs, of course, afforded the same train-ing in matters sexual). 17

16 Arendt, Human Condition , 57–8. 17 Patrick J. Deneen, “Civility and Democracy,” Front Porch Republic , March 2, 2011, http://www.

frontporchrepublic.com/2011/03/civility-and-democracy/ . For an interesting account of the Roman example, especially as it is articulated in the work of Cicero, see Joy Connolly , The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2007 ) . In contrast with Deneen, Connolly critically addresses the issues of exclusion, especially of women, in her discussion of Cicero’s understanding of decorum as crucial to public life.



The kind of self-fashioning that supports public displays of civility links the ancient understanding of care for the self with care for others. If it is diffi cult to argue “against civility,” that is largely because civility is typically understood not only as the ability to exercise self-control but also as the inclusive public gesture par excellence. Edward Shils, former distinguished service professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, captures the essence of this link between civility and the common good when he writes: “Civility as a feature of civil society considers others as fellow-citizens of equal dignity in their rights and obligations as members of civil society; it means regarding other persons, including one’s adversaries, as members of the same inclusive col-lectivity, i.e., as members of the same society.” 18 Civility, Shils argues, is a moral obligation and is crucial for sustaining a sense of shared interests and reducing confl ict in a pluralistic and competitive society such as the United States.

Civility in the sense of courtesy mollifi es or ameliorates the strain which accompanies the risks, the dangers of prospective loss and the injuries of the real losses of an economically, politically and intellec-tually competitive society in which some persons are bound to lose. Courtesy makes life a bit more pleasant; it is easier to bear than harsh-ness. Softly spoken, respectful speech is more pleasing to listen to than harsh, contemptuous speech. Civility in manners holds anger and resentment in check; it has a calming, pacifying effect on the senti-ments. It might make for less excitability. Civil manners are aestheti-cally pleasing and morally right. 19

As Barbara Tomlinson parses this passage, Shils’s advocacy of writing and speaking in a calm voice is part of a larger strategy to defuse the claims of those individuals and groups who fi nd themselves the losers in America’s market society. The ideals advanced by Shils, she writes, “ask those who argue for social justice to set aside their concerns to meet a standard of the common good that simply does not include them.” 20 Focused on civility, the question of power tends to disappear. What is more, says Tomlinson, what counts as speaking in an agitated or angry voice is always fi ltered through

18 Quoted in Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect , 824. 19 Ibid . 20 Ibid ., 840–1.



conventional (raced, classed, and gendered) social assumptions about how certain individuals ought to speak. “We are habituated to value certain kinds of emotions expressed in certain ways by certain kinds of people, and to denigrate, suspect, or avoid expressions that don’t fi t those parameters,” writes Bickford . 21 By comparison with a man, a woman who raises questions about a particular departmental policy that discriminates on the basis of sex/gender, for example, will more than likely be heard as “bitter” or “angry.” A black man who protests being overlooked for a promotion will be seen as a “complainer” who “has a chip on his shoulder.” Feminists publically demanding equal pay for equal work will be seen as “strident.” These are standard examples, to be sure, but that does not make them any less true. The point is that it is not simply what is said, or even the tone of voice in which it is said, but who is speaking and to whom.

The idea of civility has always relied on a highly homogenous concep-tion of the public, a conception in which mostly white, mostly male citizens found themselves in an unsurprising agreement about the fundamental moral and political values of American liberal democracy. In periods when this consensus was threatened by the claims of outsiders, such as women and racial or ethnic minorities, the charge of incivility was a way of masking and managing disruptive demands to inclusion in the public realm. For example, “many in the southern United States perceived the civil rights movement as being uncivil because the activities of marching and chant-ing were not the normal avenues for political expression, especially not for African Americans,” writes Thomas Christiano . 22 The accusation of incivil-ity, in other words, has been a familiar means for denying the political (and thus common) quality of those claims and making them sound instead as if they were “merely subjective” outbursts of one sort or another.

I have already suggested that accusations of incivility have been used to deny disenfranchised people of their rightful claim to participation in the public realm. But the demand for civility can produce a similarly sti-fl ing effect on rights claims at the very moment when it is heeded. Not only the charge of incivility but also the practice of civility itself has often-times worked to mask relations of power in a veneer of politeness, however

21 Bickford, “Emotion Talk,” 1031. 22 Thomas Christiano , “What Is Civility and How Does It Relate to Core Democratic Values?” in

Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding , ed. Cornell W. Clayton and Richard Elgar ( Pullman : Washington State University Press , 2012 ), 108–118, 116 .



sincere. As William H. Chafe has argued, in his study of the civil rights movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, civility has been crucial to an idealized conception of race relations. Describing the key elements of what he calls the “[white] progressive mystique,” Chafe lists the belief that “confl ict is inherently bad, that disagreement means personal dislike, and that consensus offers the only way to preserve a genteel and civilized way of life.” 23 Alternative ideas were welcomed, to be sure. But on the condi-tion that they were presented in a way that did not arouse confl ict. Added to this was a deep paternalism toward blacks, which was underwritten by the notion that taking care of those who are less fortunate was a moral obligation.

Surrounding all these motifs has been a pervasive commitment to civility as the value that should govern all relationships between peo-ple. Civility is the cornerstone of the progressive mystique, signifying courtesy, concerns about an associate’s family, children, and health, a personal grace that smoothes contact with strangers and obscures con-fl ict with foes. Civility is what white progressivism was all about – a way of dealing with people and problems that made good manners more important that substantial action. Signifi cantly, civility encompassed all of the other themes of the progressive mystique – abhorrence of personal confl ict, courtesy towards new ideas, and a generosity towards those less fortunate than oneself. 24

Civility “can make people less likely to perceive actual injustice and oppression,” notes Bickford . 25 Diana Tietjens Meyers has likewise argued that manners and niceness can blind people to unjust power right before their eyes and that “rancorous emotional attitudes and outlaw emotions” can instead facilitate “heterodox moral perception”:

My conjecture is that, when people have become hypersensitive, paranoid, angry, or bitter as a result of being subjected to a devastat-ing injustice (or series of injustices) or to disabling systemic oppres-sion, they become preternaturally sensitive to unjust practices and oppressive conditions . . . [which] increases the likelihood that such

23 William H. Chafe , Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1981 ), 7 .

24 Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights , 8. 25 Bickford, “Emotion Talk,” 1032.



individuals will discern patterns of harm where nicer, milder types see only disconnected incidents or notice nothing the least untoward. 26

Insisting that citizens develop and maintain a spirit of generosity toward other citizens and their views, then, can have the unexpected consequence of silencing the very views toward which one is supposed to be open. And expressing the unorthodox emotions that are received as uncivil may well indicate a greater receptivity to genuine problems in the public world.

Another way of putting the concern raised in different ways by Chafe, Bickford, and Meyers is that civility puts care for the other before what Arendt called “care for the world.” It may well have been the case that many individual white liberals who were morally opposed to segregation felt genuine concern for the black individuals with whom they came into contact. But apart from diffusing the dreaded sense of confl ict named by Chafe, such care for the other often remained at a level of intersubjective ethical action, which does not necessarily translate into action in concert, action with others, to change something in the world (e.g., the material structure and practices of racism as they are [re]constituted daily through housing policies, lending practices, hiring policies, etc.). The point is not to dismiss care for the other, any more than it is to dismiss the care for the self that Deneen emphasized as its basis. It is rather to insist that these forms of care are no substitute for, and can in certain cases hinder (as Chafe shows), the associative politics that relates citizens in their care for the world. Ella Myers explains:

Democratic care for the world is not simply an extension or expan-sion of caring for oneself or caring for another. . . . Those practices of care, while valuable, may impede action in concert that aims to shape worldly conditions because they either direct people’s focus inward as they “work” on themselves or, alternatively, turn toward answering the immediate needs of vulnerable Others. Neither activity, however wor-thy, can be counted on to encourage coordinated action by citizens who aim to affect an aspect of public life. 27

26 Diana Tietjens Meyers , “Emotion and Heterodox Moral Perception,” in Feminists Rethink the Self , ed. Diana T. Meyers ( Boulder, CO : Westview Press , 1997 ), 197–218, 209 . Discussed also in Bickford, “Emotion Talk,” 1032.

27 Ella Myers , Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2013 ), 89 .



Consider the politics of hunger. A person who cares about the existence of hunger might pursue the strategy of care for the self and change her diet to bring it in line with more sustainable modes of food production. Or she might focus her care on someone who is hungry and attend to the needs of this other by working in a local soup kitchen. But neither of these strategies necessarily translates into the kind of political mobilization that brings “into view the collective conditions, including worldly practices, out of which hunger is born,” writes Myers. 28 These include “inequitable international trade policies, patterns of uncompensated resource extraction in develop-ing countries, agricultural subsidies, wasteful consumption,” among other things. 29 Such practices could be contested through associative democratic action “such as campaigning for debt relief in developing countries, pro-moting new microfi nancing initiatives, organizing on behalf of domestic food programs or subsidy reform, and many others [such forms of action in concert].” 30 Rather than being motivated by intrasubjective care for the self and intersubjective care for the other, democratic citizens need to refocus their energies on care for the world.

Rethinking Civility as a Political Concept

Although most of the thinkers cited thus far tend to talk about civility in terms of proper manners and etiquette, there is an important strand in dem-ocratic theory that at once appropriates and departs from this understand-ing by incorporating ideals of civility into normative theories of political deliberation. As advanced by neo-Kantians such as John Rawls and J ü rgen Habermas , this strand of political thinking puts forward an ideal of demo-cratic discussion and deliberation, writes Christiano:

in which each person listens to the proposals and arguments of others and considers them on their merits and then responds with counterar-guments and counterproposals with arguments to defend them. When disagreement becomes intractable and decisions must be made, differ-ent persons propose compromises and arguments for them. There are negotiations and further proposed compromises and arguments. At

28 Ibid ., 109. 29 Ibid . 30 Ibid .



some point, enough people accept some particular compromise and decide accordingly. 31

Indeed, if we think about democracy as based on recognition of “the unforced force of the better argument,” to quote Habermas, we can see how uncivil behavior may indicate a failure of adherence to deliberative demo-cratic norms. 32 Such behavior may well make sense, deliberative democrats concede, if one is denied, as women and racial or ethnic minorities have been, one’s status as a speaker of political claims, but that does not make it right according to those same norms. Deliberative democrats also recog-nize that the ideal of discussion they describe is just that – an ideal. To focus on civility per se, they admit, distracts us from what is really at stake in the incivility that characterizes episodes in American politics, namely, a failure to “see each other as equal citizens deserving of respect.” 33 Here, incivility is more a “symptom” than a cause of “other problems such as polarization, extremism, and enclave group thinking,” concludes Christiano . 34

However deliberative democrats recognize that civility is not a prescribed set of universal behaviors that must be followed regardless of social context and social position, they nevertheless remain bound to the ideal of civility as necessary to sustaining that other ideal of citizens engaged in respectful deliberation with each other on matters of common concern. Writing on the topic of civility, Joshua Cohen reminds us of Rawls’s claim “that we need to respect a ‘duty to civility.’” 35 In accordance with political liberalism, this duty “is not about politeness and etiquette,” writes Cohen, as it is in much of the popular literature on civility and as conservatives would have it. 36 Rather, it “is about politics” – more precisely, about “how we ought to argue with others on basic political and constitutional questions. In particu-lar, the duty of civility requires two things of us,” Cohen explains:

First, that we be prepared to explain to others why the laws that we sup-port can be supported by values and principles that those other people

31 Christiano, “What Is Civility,” 113. 32 J ü rgen Habermas , Between Facts and Norms ( Malden, MA : MIT Press , 1996 ), 306 . 33 Christiano, “What Is Civility,” 118. 34 Ibid ., 118. 35 Joshua Cohen , “Refl ections on Civility,” in Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable

Understanding , ed. Cornell W. Clayton and Richard Elgar ( Pullman : Washington State University Press , 2012 ), 119–123, 119 .

36 Ibid .



can endorse: by public values and principles that lie on common ground – say, values of liberty, equality, and the general welfare.

Second, that we listen to others and be open to accommodating their views. 37

In Cohen’s Rawlsian view, then, civility as a political duty means making public arguments in terms that others can accept, regardless of their own comprehensive (moral and religious) values. Thus, one can argue publi-cally against abortion or gay marriage, for example, but not in terms that make reference to the law or will of God, the Creator. I will explain the reasons for this restriction on public reason shortly.

There is something intuitively appealing about deliberative democratic approaches to the question of civility, for they foreground what appear to be the necessary conditions of democratic politics (e.g., mutual respect). They recognize that sometimes groups have violated norms of civility in order to claim their rightful place in democratic polities; they see that perfect reci-procity in public debate remains an ideal, at best; and they remind us that societies characterized by widespread value pluralism, societies in which individuals hold equally rational but incommensurable comprehensive doctrines (Rawls), are in need of ground rules for public debate. From the perspective of most democratic political theorists, this idea of self-restraint seems quite sensible.

However appealing the deliberative democratic approach may be, it tends to reduce what I have described as a democratic defi cit to what Jeffrey Goldfarb calls a “deliberation defi cit .” 38 I agree with Goldfarb that what we lack is not necessarily information but rather a meaningful critical prac-tice for processing the information we have. Nevertheless, to cast our cur-rent crisis as a failure of proper deliberation, and to argue that this failure results from a failure to respect the duty to civility, is to misunderstand what is at stake for the groups who stand most often accused of being uncivil, namely, the sense of frustration with the limited possibilities for political action in the modern world. The deliberative approach keeps us tethered to the fundamental idea that civility, understood in terms of adherence to the norms of public reason, is the intersubjective condition of democratic

37 Ibid ., 120. 38 Jeffrey Goldfarb , Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society ( Cambridge :

Cambridge University Press , 1998 ), 3 .



politics. But what if the duty to civility (aka public reason) restricts the kind of public debate that is fundamental for the associative politics that I have argued to be crucial to addressing the underlying issues that have spawned our so-called civility crisis?

Motivating Rawls’s rewriting of a matter of mere manners to respect for a code of political conduct is his conception of liberal-democratic society as exhibiting a “reasonable pluralism .” Since we live in a society character-ized by the empirical “fact of a plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines,” as Rawls famously writes, it is simply not rea-sonable for any one “community” (that is, people who share a “compre-hensive doctrine”) to declare publically that their beliefs are true. 39 For this “is a claim that all equally could make; it is also a claim that cannot be made good by anyone to citizens generally. So, when we make such claims others, who are themselves reasonable, must count us as unreasonable. And indeed we are, as we want to use state power, the collective power of equal citizens, to prevent the rest from affi rming their not unreasonable views.” 40

39 John Rawls , Political Liberalism ( New York : Columbia University Press , 1993 ), xvii . The relin-quishment of truth as the standard of correctness for political judgments is based on Rawls’s very specifi c reinterpretation of the modern descriptive fact of value pluralism . Because people who deliberate about moral and political questions emphasize different aspects of questions and employ different methods, they will come to different and often irreconcilable answers. Reason does not lead, as it does for comprehensive liberals in his view, to a conception of the truth as One.

40 Ibid ., 61. That all could make an equal claim to the truth of their beliefs sets out what Rawls calls “the burdens of judgment .” These include, as Thomas McCarthy summarizes, the “diffi culties in assessing evidence and diffi culties in weighing it, indeterminacy of concepts and confl icts of interpretation, experiential and normative divergencies, the diversity of values and varia-tions in selecting and ordering them.” See Thomas McCarthy , “ Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue ,” Ethics 105 ( 1994 ): 44–63 , 58. For Rawls’s discussion of the burdens of judgment, see Political Liberalism , 56–7. According to Rawls, what counts as a public reason must be restricted to the reasonable because citizens “cannot reach agreement or even approach mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable com-prehensive doctrines.” See John Rawls , “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 131–80 ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 1999 ) , 132. Thus, he asserts, a “political community ,” conceived of as a “political society united in affi rming the same comprehensive doctrine,” is unrealistic and undesirable ( Political Liberalism , xvii, 146). Claiming that it is a “general fact . . . that a continuing shared understand-ing on one comprehensive religious, philosophical or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power” (37), Rawls concludes that the possibility of a political community “is excluded by the fact of reasonable pluralism together with the rejection of the oppressive use of the state power to overcome it” (146).



In her explanation of Rawls’s irreducibly political understanding of civility, feminist philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum writes: “the political liberal begins from the fact of reasonable disagreements in society, and the existence of a reasonable plurality of comprehensive doc-trines [(religious, philosophical, and moral)] about the good.” 41 Famously set out in Rawls’s Political Liberalism , this plurality of reasonable but incom-mensurable comprehensive doctrines becomes the basis for an “overlap-ping consensus” on a “freestanding” political conception that “does not contain any particular metaphysical or epistemological doctrine, and can be rendered compatible with the major ones that citizens may hold.” 42 This freestanding political conception requires endorsement of its values (e.g., the equality of all citizens) as political values, not as metaphysical values or comprehensive liberal values. Political liberalism , as Rawls himself puts it, simply “does without the concept of truth.” Reasonableness is the “standard of correctness,” and the objectivity of political judgments is characterized without reference to truth. 43

In place of claims to the truth of one’s comprehensive view, Rawls pro-poses a “method of avoidance .” When all is said and done, the “duty to

41 Martha Nussbaum , “ Political Objectivity ,” New Literary History 32 ( 2001 ): 883–906 , 109. Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, writes Rawls, “have three main features”: One is that a reasonable doctrine is an exercise of theoretical reason: it covers the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and coher-ent manner. It organizes and characterizes recognized values so that they are compatible with one another and express and intelligible view of the world. Each doctrine will do this in ways that distinguish it from other doctrines, for example, giving certain values a particular primacy or weight. In singling out which values to count as especially signifi cant and how to balance them when they confl ict, a reasonable comprehensive doctrine is also an exercise of practical reason . . . Finally, a third feature is that while a reasonable comprehensive view is not necessar-ily fi xed and unchanging, it normally belongs to, or draws upon, a tradition of thought and doc-trine. Although stable over time, and not subject to sudden and unexplained changes, it tends to evolve slowly in light of what, from its point, of view, it sees as good and suffi cient reasons. ( Political Liberalism , 59)

42 Nussbaum, “Political Objectivity,” 891. As Rawls puts it, “All those who affi rm the political con-ception start from within their own comprehensive view and draw on the religious, philosophi-cal, and moral grounds it provides” ( Political Liberalism , 147). Rawls asserts that the principles of justice that are to form the agreed basis of social cooperation must be capable of being affi rmed from within any reasonable comprehensive doctrine and therefore cannot rely on any one of them. This is the sense in which Rawls describes political liberalism as a “self-standing” doc-trine and as a “political” and not comprehensive doctrine. Political liberalism proposes that citi-zens agree to view “one another as free and equal in a system of cooperation over generations,” “to offer one another fair terms of social cooperation,” and to act accordingly.

43 Rawls , Political Liberalism , 127.



civility” comes down to this: what we do not say or claim. 44 As Nussbaum explains, this method excludes most of what comprehensive liberals (e.g., John Stuart Mill ) take for granted, including public affi rmations of the kinds of claims to truth that are expressed in founding political documents. To get a better sense of what kinds of claims are to be avoided, consider what Nussbaum immediately excludes: out is the comprehensive liberal’s reference to the idea of truth, such as that made by Mill about the role of public disagreement in promoting truth in Chapter 2 of On Liberty . 45 Out as well is “the conception of self-evident truth used in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.” 46 Thus, the famous phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident” ought, on Nussbaum’s view, to be rejected. Likewise, the Indian constitution contains “offensive” words, for it moves from the non-objectionable idea of inalienable rights (“We believe that it is the inalien-able right of the Indian people . . .”) to sneak in a reference to God – which Nussbaum blames on Gandhi – (“We hold it to be crime against man and God . . .”). Words such as “God” and any claims about self-evidence

44 In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” Rawls takes great pains to answer critics who claim that political liberalism suffers from a democratic defi cit called public reason. Here he states explicitly:

It is imperative to realize that the idea of public reason does not apply to all politi-cal discussions of fundamental questions, but only to discussions of those questions in what I refer to as the public political forum. This forum may be divided into three parts: the discourse of judges in their decisions, and especially of judges of a supreme court; the discourse of government offi cials, especially chief executives and legislators; and, fi nally, the discourse of candidates for public offi ce and their campaign managers, especially in their public oratory, party platforms, and political statements. (133–4)

“Political liberalism , then, does not try to fi x public reason once and for all in the form of one favored political conception of justice” (ibid., 142), writes Rawls. In this spirit, Rawls grants that there is such a thing as a “background culture,” where the rules of public reason do not apply in any case; that nonpublic reasons made there and elsewhere can be made good in terms of public reason at a later date (the “proviso” exception) (152); that “there are many lib-eralisms . . . and therefore many forms of public reason”(141); that indeed “new variations [of public reason] may be proposed from time to time” (142), including ones that do not prioritize justice as fairness (141); and that this is important, “otherwise the claims of groups or interests arising from social change might be repressed and fail to gain their appropriate voice” (142). In fact, by the end of the essay it appears that the only criterion that is unassailable as far as political liberalism and public reason are concerned is “the criterion of reciprocity” (141, 173). This leads a rather exasperated Rawls to declare, “I do not know how to prove that public rea-son is not too restrictive, or whether its forms are properly described. I suspect that it cannot be done” (179).

45 Nussbaum, “Political Objectivity,” 897. 46 Ibid ., 887.



ought to be rejected, argues Nussbaum. 47 Although it is not clear how this rejection, pragmatically speaking, should proceed, Nussbaum is certain that offensive “truth” words could be rejected with no loss of political mean-ing: “Consider my epigraph from India: remove the reference to God, and don’t we have enough here to ground a political order? Aren’t inalienable rights all we need, without the epistemology of self-evidence?” 48

Echoing Rawls, Nussbaum characterizes all of this as a “method of avoid-ance ”: we want to avoid using offensive words, that is, truth words that belong to any particular comprehensive doctrine. 49 But what would such avoidance actually mean? And at what point does it become the avoidance of making judgments, not to mention avoidance of politics, tout court? I agree with Nussbaum when she writes, “the test of our liberalism lies not in the way we deal with views we like, but in the way we deal with what makes us uncomfortable or even angry.” 50 But dealing with views that are not our own is different from the method of avoidance that constitutes the duty of civility advocated by political liberalism. Dissent is meaningless if being reasonable means either keeping your deeply dissenting views to yourself or articulating them in the terms of the duty of civility and thus public reason, which amounts to the same thing.

I have argued elsewhere that it is hard if not impossible to understand how the most fundamental shifts in moral conscience and political consensus, such as the end of slavery and the enfranchisement of African Americans and women, could have taken place if the people involved in those strug-gles had practiced political liberalism’s duty of civility, aka method of avoid-ance, and played by its rules of public reason. 51 The problem is not, as many

47 “By contrast to the confi dent eighteenth-century American text [the Declaration], the Indian constitution exhibits Rawlsian restraint in its opening statement, speaking only on inalienable rights and refraining from saying where they come from or how they are grounded. . . . In the fi nal sentence, however, a reference to God comes back in. (It is as if Nehru wrote the fi rst bit and Gandhi the second),” writes Nussbaum (ibid., 896).

48 Ibid ., 901–2. 49 Ibid ., 897. To sustain the possibility of an overlapping consensus in the face of reasonable plu-

ralism, it might be thought that its defenders must deny that political liberalism is simply true, severely hampering their ability to defend it. To cope with this, Rawls developed a particular stance of avoidance, which he called “the method of avoidance .” See John Rawls , Collected Papers , ed. Samuel Freeman ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 1999 ), 395 .

50 Nussbaum, “Political Objectivity,” 903. 51 The rules governing public reason are consistent with the more general strategy of political lib-

eralism , which, says Rawls, “removes from the political agenda the most divisive issues, serious contention about which must undermine the basis of social cooperation” ( Political Liberalism ,



of Rawls’s critics assume, that such reason attempts to regulate all spheres for public debate – Rawls is clear that it does not. The problem is rather that this duty to civility anticipates what kinds of statements might offend in ways that neglect (1) how context infl uences how words and deeds are received, and (2) how even offensive words and deeds, especially when accompanied by what Meyers called “outlaw emotions,” may well have a valuable world-building effect in Arendt’s sense.

To accommodate oneself to this “method of avoidance” and refrain from declaring, say, “the equality of human beings is true” can seem “pretty thin gruel for someone who cares about equality,” admits Nussbaum.

For of course I do believe that men and women are truly metaphysi-cally equal, and that the equality of black and white is a fact, and so on. That is a deep part of the comprehensive moral conception that I would defend. Why, then, when it comes to political purposes, should we refrain from saying that these are facts. . .? Why shouldn’t we say that this political judgment is grounded on deep facts about what human beings are? Isn’t it cowardly to make such concessions to sexist and racist doctrines? 52

Not for a political liberal. What may look like cowardliness to a compre-hensive liberal is for the political liberal an expression of equal respect for persons. Nussbaum explains:

I believe that the equality of male and female is a metaphysical fact, but if someone’s religion says otherwise, I believe this view should be respected, provided that this person is prepared to sign on to (and genuinely, not just grudgingly, affi rm) the political doctrine that men and women are fully equal as citizens – with all that follows from that, including fully fair equality of opportunity, guarantees of

157). Rawls realizes that, by both excluding from debate the issues that truly divide citizens and severely limiting the terms of debate for those issues they are allowed to discuss, he has a prob-lem explaining genuine social and political change. He has a problem, for example, explain-ing how slavery came to be abolished, or rather how the abolition of slavery could have been justifi ed at the time in terms of political liberalism, rather than being accepted under the aegis of “pluralism.” He has a problem explaining how either the civil rights movement could have happened if its participants had embraced political liberalism and kept within the bounds of “public reason” or women’s liberation could have taken place if women had recognized the lack of an overlapping consensus on women’s rights. I discuss this problem in Linda M. G. Zerilli , “ Value Pluralism and the Problem of Judgment: Farewell to Public Reason ,” Political Theory 40 , no. 1 ( 2012 ): 6–32 .

52 Nussbaum, “Political Objectivity,” 901.



nondiscrimination even in private employment, equal access to the basic goods of life, and so forth. 53

Why must the affi rmation of political equality be endorsed “genuinely, not just grudgingly,” and what precisely is the difference between these two modes of affi rmation? Well, as Nussbaum observes, to sign on to politi-cal equality genuinely means you affi rm it “as reasonable basis for politi-cal life,” whereas to sign on to it grudgingly means you affi rm it as a mere modus vivendi. 54 Why should we care if someone signs on in the manner of a modus vivendi, as long as he or she signs on? For the political liberal, a modus vivendi is too thin a basis on which to support the principle of equality, for it makes agreement about political principles dependent not on a moral conception that centers on principles of justice but on self-inter-est. 55 If affi rming the equality of men and women suits my purposes at this moment – say, when I can get federal money if I practice a little gendered affi rmative action – I go with it. If the money dries up and all of a sudden I fear having to pay maternity leaves, I fi re the women and hire men.

Although I agree that a modus vivendi is not the best way to think about what holds a liberal-democratic (or any other political) society together, I am puzzled by Nussbaum’s insistence that the affi rmation of gender equality as the reasonable basis for political life be given sincerely and not grudgingly. I am puzzled by it because it seems to demand the kind of fundamental con-viction that Nussbaum herself holds but that is by defi nition excluded by the other demand we have been discussing, namely, that the duty to civility requires that no one publically claim the truth or rightness of his or her political principles. Nussbaum would of course respond that the genuine affi rmation she demands here has nothing to do with holding the principle of equality to be true – for that would violate the interdiction we have been discussing – but only to affi rm it as reasonable. This affi rmation, as Rawls argues, is parasitic on the comprehensive doctrine that any given individual may hold. 56 But it is hard to grasp what the sincere or “genuine” affi rmation

53 Ibid . 54 Ibid ., 902. 55 Rawls, Political Liberalism , 147. 56 According to Rawls, an overlapping consensus is different from a modus vivendi. “An overlap-

ping consensus is . . . not merely a consensus on accepting certain authorities, or on complying with certain institutional arrangements, founded on a convergence of self- or group interests. All those who affi rm the political conception start from within their own comprehensive view and draw on the religious, philosophical, and moral grounds it provides. The fact that people



of gender equality can mean for someone who thinks, in accordance with his or her comprehensive doctrine, that men and women are not in any way equal. I can easily imagine why such a person might behave in accordance with the equality principle in those spheres of life where not to do so is to risk public sanction. But that is not good enough for Nussbaum, because it falls under the modus vivendi concept of political society and risks exposing the fact that the state is involved in the very coercion that political liberals so wish to disavow. I can also imagine how someone who does not believe that men and women are equal might come to believe otherwise, but that would require a far more robust form of public debate and democracy than the political liberal’s notion of public reason and judgment allows.

At this point it is worth noting that what animates political liberalism’s duty of civility is not simply respect for plural viewpoints but also a deep fear of what Rawls calls “doctrinal confl ict with no prospect of resolu-tion.” 57 Indeed, within political liberalism, value pluralism is always already encoded, not as the source of a potentially rich practice of public life (as it is, for example, in the work of Hannah Arendt ), but as the irreducible origin of all destructive political confl ict and as the reason to carefully restrict the parameters of discourse in public life. Rawls explicitly casts his theory of political liberalism in opposition to citizens who, he says, harbor “a zeal to embody the whole truth in politics.” 58 The kind of doctrinal confl ict he has in mind is clearly religious and unequivocally modeled on the religious wars of the sixteenth century. In his view, the Reformation introduced a kind of truth claim that still haunts and raises the most relevant political problems for liberal democracy.

What is new about this clash [of values] is that it introduces into peo-ple’s conceptions of their good a transcendental element not admitting of compromise. This element forces either mortal confl ict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion, or equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought . . . Political liberalism starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent confl ict. 59

affi rm the same political conception on those grounds does not make their affi rming it any less religious, philosophical, or moral, as the case may be, since the grounds sincerely held deter-mine the nature of the affi rmation” ( Political Liberalism , 147–8).

57 Ibid ., xxx. 58 Ibid ., 247. 59 Ibid ., xxvi.



The problem, in other words, is orthodoxy. The “transcendental ele-ment” of which Rawls speaks is revelation , the belief in God as the origin of all knowledge. Revelation cannot be interrogated or defeated by reason, as Leo Strauss has argued, precisely because it is based not on knowledge claims that could be so questioned but on faith. 60 Whether it is felicitous for democratic thinkers to model strident or divisive political claims and judgments on this particular understanding of religious belief is a question. For now I want to suggest that the helplessness of reason in the face of tran-scendental claims to truth is the problem that haunts political liberalism and generates its conception of the duty to civility in terms of a method of avoidance.

Rawls’s account of the central problem facing modern Western democ-racies echoes Max Weber’s famous claim that “ultimate values” cannot be adjudicated by social science, philosophy, or any other exercise of human reason, for they are fundamentally groundless. Every claim to absolute truth and knowledge rests not on evident premises but on faith. Science itself cannot provide a justifi cation of its own value. Like Rawls, Weber too thought that all genuine confl ict and devotion to causes has its roots in reli-gious faith. Although Rawls implicitly accepts Weber’s account of the eter-nal “battle between the gods of the different systems and values,” he does not go as far as Weber in rejecting the very possibility of gaining evident knowledge of values. 61 Rather, Rawls merely excludes claims to such knowl-edge from the political realm. This leads to the curious situation in which political liberals would put us, and that Weber so presciently described, namely, the tendency of modernity to manage acrimonious value confl icts by restricting their public expression. “The fate of our age, with its charac-teristic rationalization and above all disenchantment of the world, is that the ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life, either

60 Strauss addressed the problem of orthodoxy in the specifi c context of German debates in Jewish theology and the Jewish question. In his book on Spinoza, Strauss was led to conclude that the argument for reason did not defeat revelation , contrary to what Spinoza claimed, since claims about revelation never depended on claims to knowledge. Orthodoxy did not rely on knowing things such as the occurrence of miracles but was based, rather, on belief in such things. What is more, Spinoza’s defense of reason against orthodoxy, Strauss held, “rests itself on an unevident decision, on an act of the will, just as faith does.” Leo Strauss , Spinoza’s Critique of Religion ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1997 ), 29.

61 Max Weber , “The Vocation of Science,” in The Essential Weber , ed. Sam Whimster ( New York : Routledge , 2004 ) , 270–287, 281.



into the transcendental realm or mystical life or into the brotherhood of immediate personal relationships between individuals,” writes Weber. 62

It can seem as if the problem facing us today is not the withdrawal of which Weber speaks but the proliferation of value differences escalated into a war of opinions in which, once again, all are talking but no one is listen-ing. And there is something compelling about the point that to make public arguments in the manner of claims to truth tends to incite others to do the same, resulting in the zero-sum acrimonious exchanges that characterize the so-called crisis of civility. However accurate these insights may be, I would suggest that a greater risk is posed by political liberalism’s very spe-cifi c interpretation of the duty to civility than may at fi rst seem apparent. This risk is the deep attenuation of occasions for engaging in associative politics, politics “focused on inciting citizens’ collective care for worldly things,” as Myers puts it. 63 As I have argued elsewhere, there is no way to know in advance of any concrete act of speaking whether my words will be taken as signs of disrespect for another citizen’s comprehensive views or as an invitation to join me in collective care for worldly things. 64 Focused as political liberals are on “remov[ing] from the political agenda the most divisive issues, serious contention about which must undermine the basis of social cooperation,” as Rawls puts his method of avoidance , their focus is not on fostering associative politics around worldly things but on stabilizing the intersubjective relations of mutual respect among citizens by means of this method. 65 Once again, we need to ask whether it is not rather world-building activities in Arendt’s sense that have a better chance of attenuating the destructive clash of worldviews than any such duty to civility.

Conclusion

Although the title of my chapter is polemical, the point has not been to defend incivility or to contest the worry about a lack of civility tout court.

62 Ibid ., 287. In contrast with Rawls, whose work attempts to secure social order by further reduc-ing the role that competing values play in the public realm, Weber was deeply ambivalent about what this withdrawal of values from the public realm meant for the whole range of human voca-tions, including the vocation of politics and that of science.

63 Myers, Worldly Ethics , 11. 64 See Zerilli, “Value Pluralism.” 65 Rawls, Political Liberalism , 157.



Rather, it has been to illuminate that which accounts of the crisis of civility tend to occlude: the creation of new publics and claims. Simply put, these accounts mostly miss the ways in which what has been taken by dominant groups to be uncivil behavior has been crucial to enlarging the democratic public sphere.

The problem with the duty to civility as it is specifi cally formulated in political liberalism is not that it sets out explicit rules about what can and cannot be said. I agree with Rawls when he claims that public reason was never meant to be restrictive in the way his critics accuse. But I question the idea, implicit in his understanding of civility, that we can know what the effects of our speech will be prior to actual acts of speaking. Uncertainty about how our words will be taken up by others enables incivility to be at times not a world-destructive activity, as it tends to be portrayed in political liberalism, but a democratic world-building practice.

To stake out a position “against civility,” then, is simply to reclaim the possibility that doing so can function in democratically productive ways that are more fertile than any notion of civility based either on manners in the traditional sense described earlier or on political liberalism’s method of avoidance. The histories of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement show that uncivil speech and action can enlarge citizens’ sense of both what counts as a common matter and who counts as a political speaker. To act and speak in uncivil ways is always to risk unsettling what Rawls takes to be an “overlapping consensus” about basic political prin-ciples. More than that, it is to risk being rebuffed by one’s fellow citizens, treated as rude, out of order, and as having nothing politically to say. But that is a risk that has been well worth taking.


Against Civility: A Feminist Perspective

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