“Civility” is the buzzword of the day. Is it a necessary
requirement for free and open discussion or a subterfuge? The spark that
ignited the current civility debate was when a tenured professor at the
University of Illinois had his appointment withdrawn by the president over his
vocal criticism of Israel’s recent actions. Several other university presidents
have joined the chorus calling for civil discourse and courtesy among all sides
of an argument. In his article, Civility is for suckers: Campus hypocrisy and
the “polite behavior” lie, Salon’s David Palumbo-Liu does a good job of arguing
that calls for civility are actually the elite’s way of tamping down descent.
It is, after all, only their definition
of civility that counts.
It seems to me that the call for “civility” also moves the
notion of debate into the realm of false equivalencies, where all sides of an
argument are considered of equal value. Global warming is a perfect example.
Even though the debate among scientists as to whether human activity is
responsible for global warming was settled years ago, the American media has
consistently given global warming deniers a platform to air their clearly unscientific,
corporate-backed theories. So, does civility mean that we must seriously engage
arguments that the earth is hollow or that the Holocaust didn’t happen? How can
we even define reality if all beliefs are given equal weight?
And then there’s the
question of what to do when civil debate accomplishes nothing and action is
required. Our revolutionary forefathers clearly reached a point where they
decided negotiating with the British was useless and it was time to fight for
their rights. From the British perspective, however, the colonial rabble were
clearly being uncivil about the whole thing. I doubt that you will find any
American history books arguing that the revolutionaries should have been more conciliatory
and open to debate. Would the leaders of the Civil Rights movement of the
fifties and sixties have accomplished anything by sitting around a table calmly
discussing their grievances with a bunch of white supremacists?
It’s clear that the current calls for civility are really
elite code for, “Don’t rock the boat.” Real change is messy and disruptive and
might delay my tee time.
