Death of civility

There is ample proof in the airwaves that the United States has turned into nothing more than an on-going episode of the Jerry Springer show.

Last week as I was glued on watching television, one of those little and idle indulgences I can easily afford now that all the children have left the house, three incidents of impolite and boorish behaviour stood out from the rest of the week’s TV menu.

It started Wednesday, September 9, when a South Carolina congressman shouted, “You lie,” at the President of the United States while the latter was delivering his speech before a joint session of Congress. Yes, the same forum where President Obama stressed the need for civility over acrimony during the national debate on his administration’s health care reform.

On Saturday, September 12, after being called for a foot fault by a line judge, defending U.S. Open Champion Serena Williams walked towards the line judge and, brandishing her racket and squeezing a tennis ball in her left hand, shouted, “I swear to God I’m gonna take this [bleeping] ball and shove it down your [bleeping] throat.”

Then during Sunday’s MTV Video Awards, September 13, hip-hop star Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for best video by a female artist. “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you. I’m gonna let you finish,” West barked after disrupting Taylor during her speech, “but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.”

Could this be the death of civility?

These unfortunate events serve to remind us that we need to reclaim the word “civility,” a word originally linked to the concept of “civilization” and had diminished its essence by the mid-20th century to a genteel term for nominal courtesy. But even at a dwindled level of significance, civility has become more than an older person’s personal rush of nostalgia.

Just log into the Internet, You Tube and Twitter and read comments of virtually any blog, political or whatever, and follow the grievances of Internet pundits and see how much of the public discourse has become polluted beyond all productive use. We will be amazed at how other people are predisposed to acting like Neanderthals whose idea of intelligent dialogue consists of hurling venom, trash and incendiary invectives at others. It is frightening how technology has allowed a virtual platform for these people to spew vicious comments and pander to ignorance, fear and irrationality for their own selfish interests.

In my own chat group, I have experienced being at the receiving end of ad hominem arguments and rude and vulgar outbursts that are neither relevant nor germane to the subject of the discourse. Here, civility is set aside in favour of camaraderie and fellowship so common with gangsters. Loyalty to the group defines positions and allegiances on certain issues. It is worse when the culpable person pretends to belong to this group by masquerading as a fellow school alumnus when he really is not, and makes the loudest noise during exchanges of conversations, perhaps to bolster his imagined ruses for membership. Worst of all, his closest friends who are officers in the group would remain in complicit silence even as this person finally owns up to his made-up claims.

When George Washington was a young man of 16, he became interested in the rules of conduct that guided gentlemen of his day. It was told that he located and copied as set of 110 “rules of activity” that had their origins at a Jesuit college in France in the late 17th century. What we do know now, these rules guided Washington’s private and public behaviour for the rest of his life.

Nobody in all perfection can possibly live up to all these 110 rules, but two at least are relevant to restoring civility.

#58 – Let your conversation be without malice or envy, for this is a sign of a tractable and commendable nature: and in all causes of passion admit reason to govern.

#65 – Speak not injurious words neither in jest nor earnest scoff at none although they give occasion.

If we can strive to master these two rules which George Washington always tried to follow in his entire life, there’s no doubt our conversations will always be genteel, civil and without acrimony.

There was of course a time when we are more tolerant of each other. Everyone agreed on certain basic assumptions of civic order, like it’s probably a bad idea to have people carrying guns to town hall meetings or football games, for example. That we might hold our tongue and wait until the speaker has finished before we heckle him. Or, as a mark of a true champion, we could accept defeat with grace. Or that we recognize the limits to being a polite guest and would not abuse this temporary privilege with the insolence of spreading personal venom against a full-pledged member, especially when the cover of pretence is about to be exposed.

The rules of engagement in fostering a truly civil society can be very simple if only we can put our hearts and minds into understanding what it really means to be “civil” in a civil society. We must recognize that democracy could be messy and opinions and passions in the democratic tumult of competing ideas and values are oftentimes threatening to our personal feelings and self-interest. Sometimes, this makes us feel uncomfortable. But there’s nothing wrong to feel hurt or crossed because often it is necessary for things to change.

In creating a civil society, people usually make intemperate or even critical remarks about neighbours, politicians and civic leaders, media darlings and sports and entertainment heroes – or simply do very impolite things, like staging protests. But those who join the fray and work for the common good while remaining polite are those that impress us. Oftentimes, it is the most radical people who are the most respectful, and as a result, they’re also the most effective at making good things happen.

University of Toronto professor of philosophy Mark Kingwell offers us a robust definition of civility: “Civility, as I interpret it, still allows ample room for giving offence and making politically unpopular or even dangerous claims. But these must be claims that are offered as part of an ongoing dialogue of justification – that is, open to further assessment by interlocutors. They must be claims, in short, and not simply abuse or insults.”

We obviously need more than politeness to create a civil society. Although etiquette is not a bad place to start, sometimes the rules of etiquette are simply another means to control people. Civility is much deeper and important. Civility points to the qualities necessary to create a better society, a thriving democratic civilization where everyone feels connected and engaged.

The Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858, a series of seven debates that focused on slavery, still remains a standard of civility. As Abraham Lincoln said during the debate, “In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.”

Sometimes, it is ironic that we get a clearer understanding of what we could be by looking backward in time rather than forward.

Justice as fairness

Recent studies show that even among dogs and monkeys, aversion to unfair treatment is a natural or an evolved behaviour. So, it is not only human beings who have a sense of fair play, this fact which has intrigued many scientists: the query on whether our dislike for unfairness is a product of evolution or the result of the cultural influence of large institutions like religion, government, schools or our society in general.

Inspired by studies on human cooperation by the Swiss economist Ernst Fehr who found that people inherently reject unfairness, a researcher from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, designed an experiment for brown capuchin monkeys. Pairs of capuchins were placed next to each other and trained to exchange with human handlers a small granite rock within 60 seconds to receive a reward, in most cases, a piece of cucumber.

Partners of capuchins who made the swap either received the same reward (a cucumber slice), or a better reward (a grape, a more desirable food). The response to the unequal treatment astonished the researchers. Capuchins which saw unfair treatment and failed to benefit from it often refused to conduct future swaps with human researchers, would not eat the cucumbers, and in some cases, hurled food rewards at the researchers.

The findings were significant as they confirmed that not only did capuchins expect fair treatment, but that the human desire for equity may have an evolutionary basis.

Fehr, who has published his research on the economics of human equity, cooperation and altruism, was not surprised by the research findings. He observed: “The new finding that even monkeys reject unequal pay is very important. I think, because it suggests that this is a very deeply rooted behaviour that we observe among humans.”

In a similar study involving dogs, researchers found that dogs also understand fairness and get jealous or resentful when other dogs get a better deal.

A researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments with dogs who knew how to respond to the command “give the paw,” or shake. The dogs were normally happy to repeatedly give the paw, whether they got a reward or not.

But the dogs changed their behaviour when they saw other dogs being rewarded with a piece of food while they received nothing. The unrewarded dogs eventually stopped cooperating, just like the capuchin monkeys in the earlier experiment.

Both findings did not come as a surprise to Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University and a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre. According to Waal, dogs and monkeys live in cooperative societies so they would also have some sense of fairness.

Within most of us lies a strong sense of fairness, plus a powerful desire for justice. We wish someone driving over the limit be pulled over and get a ticket. Most Americans understand the need for health reform and wish the U.S. health care system to treat the rich and poor equally well. We want the thief or the murderer to be caught. But the reality is, oftentimes this doesn’t happen. We learn to accept the world’s petty cruelties and let such injustices slide, while others reel with contempt for such unfairness and burn with it from within.

Fairness and justice may be one of the earliest abstract ideas we have encountered as young children. These may not be uniquely human concepts anymore as recent studies about dogs and monkeys would show. For it seems that the universe has a sense of fairness; it is just a shame that it is often violated.

At first sight, the concepts of justice and fairness seem identical. But the legal philosopher John Rawls would caution us that this impression is a mistaken one. To Rawls, the fundamental idea in the concept of justice is fairness which is misleadingly expressed by the idea of the social contract by utilitarian philosophers like Hume and Mill.

According to Rawls, justice as fairness, a phrase he used to refer to his distinctive theory of justice, consists of two principles. The first principle is that each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with similar liberty for others. It is not surprising that this may sound like the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The second principle, which Rawls called the fair equality of opportunity, asserts that justice should not benefit those with advantageous social contingencies, and inequality may only be justified if it is to the advantage of those who are less well-off.

One of Wal-Mart’s core principles is fairness. But when you look at the huge income gap that exists between “associates,” as employees are called in Wal-Mart, and their bosses, it appears that Wal-Mart doesn’t put its money where its mouth is.

For instance, in 2008 Wal-Mart paid its former president and chief executive officer (CEO) a total compensation of over $31 million. Break it down into a wage and you’ll arrive at more than $15,000.00 per hour or about $253.00 per minute.

Meanwhile, the average Wal-Mart employee in Canada made a little over $14,000.00 during the same year. This means that an “associate” took 12 months to earn what the Wal-Mart CEO pocketed in less than 57 minutes.

CEOs will probably always make more than workers, and maybe they should, but should they make 2,229 times more than the people who make their wealth possible?

Is it fair that the investment wizards at Wall Street should receive hefty bonuses when their decisions contributed to the U.S. financial meltdown? Or is it fair that ordinary workers at General Motors, Chrysler and other manufacturing companies should lose their jobs and pension benefits whereas their bosses could just as happily walk through the sunset with their golden parachutes?

If human beings have an innate sense of fairness, why is it that the world has so much abundance of unfairness everywhere?

John Rawls has pointed out that the stability of any society depends upon the extent its members feel they are being treated justly. When some of society’s members feel they are not being treated equally, the grounds have been laid for social unrest, disturbances, and strife. The members of a community, Rawls holds, depend on each other, and they will maintain social unity only to the extent that their institutions are just.

Thus, in the above examples where individuals are treated unequally on the basis of characteristics that are arbitrary and irrelevant, e.g., associates or bosses, or investment gurus or factory workers, their fundamental human dignity is violated. Only when human beings are treated equally will they have the same dignity, and by virtue of this dignity, they deserve to be treated as equals.

We must therefore ask ourselves whether our actions treat all persons equally. Justice is a manifestation of our mutual recognition of each other’s dignity, and that if we acknowledge the need to live together in an interdependent relationship, then we must treat each other as equals.

The Golden Rule, or in a similar vein, Rawls’ first principle of justice as fairness, is almost an inviolable social rule. It is all about balanced fairness. Sometimes the thought of being considered unfair by other people can be a very powerful motivator because this often impels us to be kind and fair for fear that others may see us breaking the Golden Rule.