When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.     —Samuel Johnson

When I was much younger, I associated civility with a lovely British accent and a nice cup of Earl Gray tea . The truly civilized would never swill instant tea from jelly jars or pinch their vowels. They would extend their pinky fingers ever so gracefully as they held their bone china teacups. They would make polite conversation using the finest Queen’s English. Never any elbows on the table, never an impertinent question or laspse into lewd gossip. Once upon a time, I defined civility largely through television and movies that took me far from my middle class, midwestern life into the drawing rooms and rose gardens of the rich and royal.

Civility comes from the Latin civilis: relating to a citizen, relating to public life, befitting a citizen; popular, affable, courteous. The very soul of civility is founded in citizenship–our responsibilities to and treatment of others. Broadcast journalist and television anchor Ted Koppel wrote:

Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail ­ as you surely will ­ adjust your lives, not the standards.

Historically, civility embraced a set of standards, a moral code. Anyone who didn’t live up to these standards understood that it was the individual–not the standards or code–who failed. Aspiring to be civil was a higher calling, one we collectively embraced as a necessity if we were to maintain and improve our society. Contrary to how I defined civility as a child, it has much less to do with social or economic status and everything to do with ethical and moral behavior. As Koppel wrote, civility in its stripped down form is really about decency.

After the most recent presidential debate, I lost count of the number of social media posts and news stories in which writers grieved and raged over the spectacle of two presidential candidates rhetorically ripping each other apart. As with all such presidential debates, the moderator, the candidates, and the audience were given the rules of engagement. But these were quickly and summarily dismissed.

Caught in a vortex of angry noise, I felt myself being pulled further and further into the darkness. Within minutes, I turned off the television. I couldn’t hear what either candidate was saying anyway, so I stood to gain nothing by suffering through an hour of incivility.

Although many argue that this recent debate revealed a new degree of incivility, most agree that this display was really nothing new. We’ve become accustomed to people talking over others. We’ve come to regard personal attacks as acceptable. The end really does justify the means which have become less and less civil with each passing decade. Tragically, civility seems to have gone the way of high tea. If you want a civility fix, you might want to watch a hour or two of Downton Abbey. That’s about as good as it gets, I’m afraid.

In his book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up, James Hoggan writes:

The most pressing environmental problem we face today is not climate change. Rather it is pollution in the public square, where a smog of adversarial rhetoric, propaganda and polarization stifles discussion and debate, creating resistance to change and thwarting our ability to solve our collective problems.

I think Hoggan is right about our most serious environmental issue: our public square is polluted. It stinks to high heaven. If we devoted a tenth of the time, talk, and energy to this issue as we do to climate change, civility might gain a foothold. But perhaps, as author Michael Austin contends, this is difficult, if not impossible. He argues that [w]e treat others badly not because we don’t understand how people should be treated but because we don’t really consider them people.

It’s easy to be disrepectful to those we see solely as opponents–not fellow human beings. Politics is rife with this type of incivility. So is social media. We feel justified in promoting ourselves and our agendas by canceling our opponents. After all, these opponents really aren’t people–at least not people we care about, not people who will obstensibly stand by us, care for us, perhaps even love us. And so, fueled by righteous anger and strong conviction, we rarely give civility a second thought. And herein lies the problem: we don’t just relegate civility to the back burner; we don’t give it any burner at all.

In his book, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America’s Civic Tradition, Anybody, Michael Austin writes:

Anybody who spends any time at all talking about things like civility, civic friendship, and the quality of our political discourse had better be prepared to talk about Nazis. Call it the ‘argumentum ad nazium,’ or the ‘dicto simplicihitler,’ but people seem compelled to let it be known that they have no intention of trying to make friends with Nazis. This is often asserted as a decisive blow. ‘Don’t talk to me about civility. I don’t talk nicely to Nazis; I punch them in the face.’ …

Most people who want to carve out a ‘Nazi exemption’ to the requirements of basic human decency – or any exemption based on a proposition-testing outlier instead of lived experience – are not really trying to to decide what to do in the unlikely event that they run into someone doing ‘sieg heil’ salutes in the checkout line. They want to create an exempt category and populate it with anybody they can force into the definition. This phenomenon happens across the political spectrum.

Austin’s assertion that most of us want a Nazi exemption hits too close to home. Most of us prize a category that exempts us from being civil because, of course, we don’t talk nicely to Nazis. It’s our moral and ethical responsibility to punch them in the face. We’re all too eager to make Nazis of any and all opponents. For who can be civil when the barbarians are at the gate? Why should we listen to and entertain the ideas of jack-booted thugs? Why should we show an ounce of civility to such brutes? We eagerly make exemptions that allow us to hate in the name of righteousness, for we can see our foe’s sins so clearly. So much for acknowledging and removing the planks from our own eyes.

When we can justify incivility through this exemption–or by any means at all–there remains little hope of return to kindness and decency (Samuel Johnson). Don’t get me wrong. Most of us love to hate a bad guy or girl and take solace in the moral ease of drawing a definitive line in the sand, one that clearly separates good from bad. Life is so much better when we stand with the good guys in solidarity against a common enemy. It’s such a rush to feel the type of moral clarity that eclipses any inclination to understand or any compulsion to empathize with an enemy. And when we give into this rush of certainty, we often can’t find our way to kindness and decency. Our new moral GPS may reroute us towards destinations that are neither humane nor civil.

It is true that some may argue the case for genuine Nazis in our midst. That is, some may insist that there are those so despicable that we must exempt ourselves from civility if we are to face and defeat them. They’re hateful, so we must be just–if not more–hateful if we are to restore goodness to our land. In short, we must be incivil if we are to restore civility. Although historically there have always been a few individuals who were genuinely evil through and through, there have been–and continue to be–many more who aren’t.

Catholic writer and theologian Peter Kreeft advises that we should [b]e egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas. That is, while we must treat others as we would like to be treated, we should look critically at their ideas. It goes without saying that some ideas are clearly superior to others. These ideas are often the foundations of systems that affect our lives and livelihoods. We must consider them critically and carefully. If we find them weak or harmful, we should agressively expose and counter them. We can, as Kreeft insists, be elitists regarding ideas. This, however, is a far cry from being elitists regarding human beings. When we can’t make this distinction, we often fail to be civil. We attack and destroy individuals as if they are no more than the sum of their ideas. If their ideas are worth nothing, then they, too, are worth nothing.

For years, I’ve watched incivility creep into classrooms. Nothing on the scale of the recent presidential debate, mind you, but notable nonetheless. I heard students turn to a peer who’d just gotten her hair cut and say, “Why did you cut your hair? You looked better before.” As I lectured or modeled new skills, I watched students roll their eyes so dramatically that I thought they’d be blind for life. As a professional development provider, I cringed as colleagues literally turned their backs to me as I presented. On many days, the level of civility in my educational environment was a 2 or 3 on a scale of 10. On one particularly painful occasion during a public speaking class, I had to tell an entire class of seniors that working on homework, looking out the window, or secretly texting while one of their peers was speaking was impolite. I had to explain that their failure to make any eye contact with and sincerely listen to the speaker was genuinely rude. They were shocked, and many failed to understand my concern.

I would like to believe that something or someone might return us to civility. Not the type of civility that Mahatma Gandhi identifies as the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good. This is a tall order, I know. But our failure to address this growing problem and to begin a course of healing is unacceptable. We can–and must–do better.