Civility is the practice of maintaining civic good relations, where civic good relations are those relations that make society 'work' in some sense. (The old Aristotelian name for them would be civic friendships.) Society is a way in which we live together, and civic good relations are those relations among the people in society which make living together possible and viable, either because they are pleasant, or because they are useful, or because they are good for us. In this sense you can have civic good relations with people you don't really like at all; in such cases you simply recognize that, whatever problems you have with them, you have to live with them to achieve certain good things, and you act accordingly.
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All the mechanisms of democratic politics depend for their success on reliable venues for rhetorical communication; good rhetorical communication will often require argument. But you can have a pretty successful democratic politics based less on argument than on human sympathy, and one finds in fact in democratic politics that resolution of serious disputes is very often resolved not by argument but by compromise or by mutual sympathy or by a live-and-let-live approach. We should certainly be thankful for that; otherwise our societies would have failed long ago.Of course it's election season again, and there have been a few uncomfortable culture-war flare-ups already. I'd lament the intensity of the polarization, but I'm actually not convinced that we're anywhere near a high-tide of civic division. On the other hand, social networks do give us new modes of engagement, and it's not clear that the old practices that sustain a civil society transfer easily to the highly performative world of social media.
UPDATE: Read the good comment.
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Regarding social media and the old practices that sustain a civil society:
I just read Samuel R. Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which consists of two long, marvelous, related essays, and he drops a great concept into the second. (The main subject of the essays is irrelevant to this discussion, but just to get it out there, they're about his experiences as a gay man cruising the very busy Times Square adult theaters before they were all shut down in the late '90s.)
Anyway, Delany differentiates between "contact" and "networking." Contact is bumping into somebody relatively randomly — a person in line with you at the supermarket, a lady on the street, another dude in an adult movie theater. It's obviously not totally random, because people have reasons for being places, but it's much more so than networking (though he is careful to caution against thinking of them as diametrical opposites).
Networking is when you encounter people because you are specifically in a situation to encounter those people. So, obviously: Networking events. Writers' conferences. And though he doesn't get into this (as the essays were written before it came along), I would craigslist casual encounters are the networking to the adult movie theater's contact.
His argument is essentially that a city suffers when it reduces opportunities for contact, because at its best contact offers more diverse encounters — specifically, greater interclass interaction. I have gone on too long (sorry) so I won't expand on that, but it's a convincing argument.
My thought is that one effect of the internet has generally been to privilege networking (McLuhan would say the synonymity here is no coincidence) over contact. For one, your social partners are restricted to people who can afford to use the internet regularly. And for two, you have tremendous control over the people you communicate with. Which is not a very new concept, the idea that the internet is tribalizing us, but Delany, as he often does, put it in terms that made me feel like I had a much better grasp on the actual problem.
"your social partners are restricted to people who can afford to use the internet regularly"
This is a pretty huge point, and I think one that stands over the next thing I'm going to say...
Obvious to say that Facebook and Twitter move us in the direction of networking, right? The clumsy days before social search meant that you'd find a lot of stuff you weren't exactly looking for on the way to what you wanted, and that would provide a kind of contact.
It seems like my internet equivalent to "wandering" is just clicking around on blogrolls, or impulsively following some writer on Twitter for a few days to see if they turn you on to anything interesting. Are there practices to cultivate here? Are algorithms trying to take over the process for us? (Can I phrase a question pithily enough to make an Atlantic cover story out of it?)
Anyways, thanks for writing this up.
Hey, you're welcome, and thanks for the link in the post.
Yeah, I would say Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the rest very much move us in the direction of networking. And what Delany suggests is a crucial problem with networking, is the power imbalance that necessarily accompanies it. That is to say: You go to a writers' conference, and there are a handful of people there with power, and way, way more people there trying to get something out of that handful.
Whereas contact, because it's more serendipitous, can often involve the coming-together of two people who happen to be able to help each other out, and that's easier to facilitate because there isn't a crowd of others wanting the same thing. I'm still trying to work out how this plays out in social media, but my instinct is that there's something there.
"The clumsy days before social search meant that you'd find a lot of stuff you weren't exactly looking for on the way to what you wanted, and that would provide a kind of contact." Yes, sometimes I worry that the internet is a little too good at helping us find exactly what we want. There's something wonderful about encountering people and ideas we weren't looking for, because it forces us to interact with something other, something different, something unexpected that might challenge us or fascinate us, or at least show us that not everybody in the world is exactly like us.
I'm sometimes not very good at remembering this, but I don't want to get out of the habit of conversing with people who don't share my views on things, and practicing civility in conversing with them.
I went to a fantastic lecture given by R.R. Reno on religion and public debate, and he put it very well: "We shouldn't underestimate the positive contribution of controversy in public life. Controversy can be painful, but also enlivening, and it's ennobling to be involved in public debates that draw upon the fullness of our beliefs." He reminded us of Aristotle's vision of civic friendship, which requires agreement about ends. And whether we are liberals or conservatives, he said, we should all be able to agree that the end of politics is human flourishing, even if we have very different ideas about what constitutes human flourishing. Then that's where the compromise that Brandon Watson mentions comes in.
Hopefully Reno's full lecture will be available online sometime soon: http://www.templetonhonorscollege.com/media-center Well worth a listen.
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