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Just
Be Nice
Now
that New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has instructed
his citizenry to give up their notoriously rude ways, the concept
of civility has apparently become safe for national debate. A professor
at the Law School has been on the case for some time.
May
1998
by Stephen L. Carter '79JD
Stephen
L. Carter '79JD is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law
at the Yale Law School. This article is adapted from Civility:
Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, ©
1998 by Stephen L. Carter, and reprinted by arrangement with Basic
Books, a division of Perseus Books, LLC.
When
I was a child, attending grade school in Washington, D.C., we took
classroom time to study manners.
Not only the magic words we have already discussed ("please"
and "thank you") but more complicated etiquette
questions, like how to answer the telephone ("Carter residence,
Stephen
speaking") and how to set the table (we were quizzed on whether
knife blades point in or out). And somehow nobody -- no children,
no parents -- objected to what nowadays would surely be viewed as
indoctrination.
Today instruction of
this sort is so rare that when a school tries to teach manners to
children, it makes news. So when the magazine U.S.
News & World Report ran a story in 1996 about the decline
of civility, it opened with what it must have considered the man-bites-dog
vignette -- an account of a classroom where young people were taught
to be polite. Ironically, this newsworthy curriculum evidently teaches
a good deal less about etiquette than we learned back at Margaret
M. Amidon Elementary School in the sixties, but that is still a
good deal more than children learn in most places. Deportment classes
are long gone. Now and then the schools teach some norms of conduct,
but almost always about sex, and never the most important ones: Do not engage in harassment and Always use a condom seem to be the outer limits of their moral capacity. The idea that
sex, as a unique human activity, might require a unique morality,
different from the general moral rules against physical harm to
others and harm to the self, is not one that public schools are
prepared to entertain.
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My
parents would have trusted my school to punish me appropriately.
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Respect for rules of
conduct has been lost in the deafening and essentially empty rights-talk
of our age. Following a rule of good manners may mean doing something
you do not want to do, and the weird rhetoric of our self-indulgent
age resists the idea that we have such things as obligations to
others. We suffer from what James
Q. Wilson has described as the elevation of self-expression
over self-control. So when a black student at a Connecticut high
school was disciplined in 1996 for wearing pants that drooped (exposing
his underwear), not only did he claim a right to wear what he liked,
but some community leaders hinted at racism, on the theory that
many young African American males dress this way. (The fact that
the style is copied from prison garb, which lacks a belt, evidently
makes no impression on these particular defenders of the race.)
When
I was a child, had my school sought to discipline me, my parents
would have assumed the school had good reason.
And they probably would have punished me further at home. Unlike
many of today's parents, they would not have begun by challenging
the teacher or principal who thought I had done wrong. To the student
of civility, the relevant difference between that era and the present
is the collapse of trust, particularly trust in strangers and in
institutions. My parents would have trusted the school's judgment -- and
thus trusted the school to punish me appropriately -- but trust of
that kind has largely dissolved. Trust (along with generosity) is
at the heart of civility. But cynicism has replaced the healthier
emotion of trust. Cynicism is the enemy of civility: It suggests
a deep distrust of the motives of our fellow passengers, a distrust
that ruins any project that rests, as civility does, on trusting
others even when there is risk. And so, because we no longer trust
each other, we place our trust in the vague and conversation-stifling
language of "rights" instead.
Consider again the boy
with the droopy pants. To talk about wearing a particular set of
clothes as a "right" is demeaning to the bloody struggles
for such basic rights as the vote and an unsegregated education.
But the illusion that all desires are rights continues its insidious
spread. At about the same time, a fired waitress at a restaurant
not far from Yale, where I teach, announced a "right"
to pierce her face with as many studs and rings as she wishes. And,
not long ago, a television program featured an interview with a
woman who insisted on the "right" to be as fat as she likes. Rights that are purchased at relatively low cost stand
a fair chance of being abused, simply because there is no history
behind them, and thus little pressure to use them responsibly --
in short, because nobody knows why the right exists. But even a
right that possesses a grimly instructive history -- a right like
freedom of speech -- may fall subject to abuse when we forget where
it came from.
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Nowadays
the tradition of barbed wit has given way to a witless barbarism.
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This proposition helps
explain Cohen
v. California, a 1971 decision in which the Supreme Court
overturned the conviction of a young man who wore on his jacket
the benign legend F _ _ _ THE DRAFT. The case arose as the public
language grew vulgar. The 19th and early 20th centuries offered
a tradition of public insults that were witty, pointed, occasionally
cruel, but not obscene or particularly offensive. Politicians and
other public figures competed to demonstrate their cleverness in
repartee. (One of my favorites is Benjamin Disraeli's
explanation of the difference between a misfortune and a calamity:
"If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune.
And if anyone pulled him out, that would be a calamity.") Nowadays
the tradition of barbed wit has given way to a witless barbarism,
our lazier conversational habit of reaching for the first bit of
profanity that comes to mind. The restraint and forethought that
are necessary to be clever, even in insult, are what a sacrificial
civility demands. When we are lazy about our words, we tell those
at whom our vulgarity is directed that they are so far beneath us
that they are not worth the effort of stopping to think how best
to insult them; we prefer, animal-like, to make the first sound
that comes to mind.
In Cohen v. California, the justices were unfortunately correct that what the dissenters
called "Cohen's absurd and immature antic" was protected
by the freedom of speech. But it is important to add that when the
framers of the Constitution envisioned the rough-and-tumble world of public argument, they almost
certainly imagined heated disagreements against a background of
broadly shared values; certainly that was the model offered by John
Locke, by then a kind of political folk hero. It is unlikely
that the framers imagined a world in which I might feel (morally)
free to say the first thing that came into my head. I do think Cohen was rightly decided, but the danger deserves emphasis: When offensiveness
becomes a constitutional right, it is a right without any tradition
behind it, and consequently we have no norms to govern its use.
Consider once more the
fired waitress. I do not deny that the piercing of one's body conveys,
in many cultures, information of great significance. But in America,
we have no tradition to serve as guide. No elder stands behind our
young to say, "Folks have fought and died for your right to
pierce your face, so do it right"; no community exists that
can model for a young person the responsible use of the "right";
for the right, even if called self-expression, comes from no source
other than desire. If we fail to distinguish desire from right,
we will not understand that rights are sensible and wise only within
particular contexts that give them meaning. The Constitution protects
a variety of rights, but our moral norms provide the discipline
in their exercise. Sometimes what the moral norm of civility demands
is that we restrain our self-expression for the sake of our community.
That is why Isaac Peebles in the nineteenth century thought it wrong
for people to sing during a train ride; and why it is wrong to race
our cars through the streets, stereos cranked high enough to be
sure that everyone we pass has the opportunity to enjoy the music
we happen to like; and why it was wrong for Cohen to wear his jacket;
and why it is wrong for racists to burn crosses (another harmful
act of self-expression that the courts have protected under the
First
Amendment). And it is why a waitress who encounters the dining
public every day in her work must consider the interest of that
public as she mulls the proper form of self-expression.
Consequently,
our celebration of Howard
Stern, Don
Imus, and other heroes of "shock radio" might be evidence of a certain loss of
moral focus. The
proposition that all speech must be protected should not be confused
with the very different proposition that all speech must be celebrated.
When radio station WABC in New York dismissed a popular talk show
host, Bob
Grant, who refused to stop making racist remarks on the air,
some of his colleagues complained that he was being censored. Lost
in the brouhaha was the simple fact that Grant's comments and conduct
were reprehensible, and that his abuse of our precious freedoms
was nothing to be celebrated.
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How
we treat one another is what civility is about.
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The point is not that
we should rule the offensive illegal, which is why the courts are
correct to strike down efforts to regulate speech that some people
do not like, and even most speech that hurts; the advantages of
yielding to the government so much power over what we say have never
been shown to outweigh the dangers. Yet we should recognize the
terrible damage that free speech can do if people are unwilling
to adhere to the basic precept of civility, that we must sometimes
rein in our own impulses -- including our impulses to speak hurtful
words -- for the sake of those who are making the democratic journey
with us. The Proverb tells us, "Death and life are in the power
of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21). The implication is that the
choice of how to use the tongue, for good or for evil, is ours.
Words
are magic. We
conjure with them. We send messages, we paint images. With words
we report the news, profess undying love,
and preserve our religious traditions. Words at their best are the
tools of morality, of progress, of hope. But words at their worst
can wound. And wounds fester. Consequently, the way we use words
matters. This explains why many traditional rules of etiquette,
from Erasmus's
handbook in the sixteenth century to the explosion of guides to
good manners during the Victorian era, were designed to govern how
words -- those marvelous, dangerous words -- should be used. Even
the controversial limits on sexual harassment and "hate
speech" that have sprouted in our era, limits that often
carry the force of law, are really just more rules of civility,
more efforts, in a morally bereft age, to encourage us to discipline
our desires.
My point is not to tell
us how to speak. My point is to argue that how we speak is simply
one point on a continuum of right and wrong ways to treat one another.
And how we treat one another is what civility is about. 
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