Is Civility on the Decline or Rise in America?

Many people believe that we are in the midst of what Stephen L. Carter calls a civility crisis. Judith Rodin, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, calls it a nuclear explosion of incivility. Newspapers and magazines publish articles with titles like Civility in Politics: Going, Going, Gone and Whatever Happened to Good Manners? And even public opinion polls report that between half and three-quarters of the public believes that incivility is a serious social problem. People think of a wide variety of virtues when they speak of civility and of a correspondingly broad assortment of sins when they refer to incivility. Civility typically connotes courtesy, respectability, self-control; regard for others a willingness to conduct oneself according to socially approved rules even when one would like to do otherwise (Davidson, p.10-29).

For many it means treating one's antagonists with a modicum of respect (even if one abhors them). Incivility connotes discourtesy, conduct that betrays little regard for the feelings of others, indifference to widely accepted norms of behavior. More concretely, it means saying shit or fuck loudly on a crowded bus, or calling one's antagonist in a debate a nitwit or a fool, or raising a middle finger to signify your displeasure with a driver who pulls into the parking space you wanted. Talk about civility would prompt only boredom if it meant simply that it is better to be polite than to be rude. But the contentions center on disagreements about just what constitutes rudeness, and the claims of some people that the country faces more than routine disagreements over standards of behavior. The debate becomes still more divisive when some claim that the country faces a civility crisis that is the culmination of a broad social deterioration traceable to the 1960s. ...