For the Sake of Argument

Civil discourse isn’t just about polite conversation. It’s a vital ingredient to better public policy and public leadership. And vital to the Kennedy School’s focus on public engagement.

By Nora Delaney

Illustrations by Christian Northeast

Spring 2019

“Be civil.”

“Show some civility.”

These appeals are familiar to many of us. From Twitter to the The New York Times, the word “civility” has made a conspicuous appearance in recent years, becoming something of a lightning rod. A New York Times Magazine piece, “When is ‘civility’ a duty, and when is it a trap?” ran in the fall, a month after an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled, “The left and the right cry out for civility, but maybe that’s asking for too much.” Outside the United States as well, from Brazil to Britain, public discourse has become more rancorous.

But what is “civil discourse” anyway?

With a number of different meanings, "civility" can be a tricky word to pin down. And calls for civility in politics have been met by fears that these appeals give harmful views a free pass. April Holm, an associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi, wrote in the Washington Post recently, “Calls for moderation and civility, combined with denouncing both sides as too extreme, are common in moments of moral and political crisis. But they are not apolitical. They take the focus away from injustice and put it instead on the behavior of those protesting it. This allows critics to adopt a moral high ground as the civil, reasonable ones without ever publicly taking sides in the debate.”

However, detached civility-as-politeness is not the same thing as the civility that drives principled debate and civil discourse. “It’s important to distinguish between two senses of civility," Archon Fung, the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, has written. "The first is a superficial kind of civility—being nice, refraining from insults or ad-hominem kinds of argument. The second is a deeper, more important (and older, for what that’s worth) sense of civility that is about behaving in ways that are necessary for cooperative projects such as schools and democratic societies to work well. This deeper sense of civility comes from the Latin civilitas—relating to citizens. Civility in this sense is behavior that is important for good citizenship.”

And good citizenship is perhaps especially important at this time of widening ideological divides and growing political polarization.

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