At present there is a great deal of handwringing
about civility. On campus, students in screaming packs set upon
speakers or professors who have said things that the earnest young have
been taught to find offensive. Other students are encouraged by
university administrators to act as spies, handing in anonymous
denunciations of teachers whose words are felt to harm their
self-esteem. In the public sphere, certain politicians can be counted on
to set off Pavlovian reactions among the online
arrabbiati.
✓ The enraged believe that Hitler has returned to cumber the earth once
more, this time as a blond, and that the best response is to rush into
the streets, block traffic, march about dressed in simulacra of female
body parts, and denounce public servants during the soup course.
Partisan mobs send up chants calling for leaders in the opposite party
to be jailed. The expression “objective journalism” has begun to sound
quaint or naive in our ears. The republic is in danger; the social
fabric is fraying; the dark night of fascism is about to descend.
✓ Cynics, who still predominate in the media, see things differently.
Outrage is good for business. The merchants of wrath on social media,
only some of whom are Russian, generate clicks and raise funds.
Apparently there really are people so little in control of their
impulses that they can be induced by the injudicious tweeting of
buffoons to give out their credit card details to buffoons of the
opposite tendency. Supreme Court nominations are gamed on the basis of
which nominee is likeliest to generate the most intemperate outbursts,
raising funds for one side and losing votes for the other. It is the new
technology that has made us more uncivil.
✓ Others go deeper and explain the loss of civility as the result of
underlying social and cultural changes. The most compelling empirical
analysis of these changes was offered by the sociologist Charles Murray
in his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.
On the left Murray enjoys a reputation just below that of winged
Beelzebub, prince of demons, but those willing to peek into prohibited
books will find much illumination in Murray’s.
✓ Things have only gotten
worse since country singer Merle Haggard hymned the “Okie from Muskogee”
in 1969. The college dean is no longer respected. America is now
divided into two sociocultural camps, or rather suburbs: Fishtown and
Belmont. In Fishtown, people eat deep-fried cheesecake and drink beer,
join the army, believe intermittently in God, and are addicted to
opioids. In general they are depressed and broke. In Belmont, people eat
yakitori and drink Montrachet (the t is silent), consume
expensive forms of education and real estate, worship Angela Merkel, and
believe in diversity and implicit racism. In general they are anxious
and in debt. Fishtown and Belmont are sealed off from each other
socially and hate each other. Each town tries to use politics to force
its own preferences on the other. Hence the loss of civility.
Are we really less civil than we used to be, then? People of riper years tend to be laudatores temporis acti,
in Horace’s phrase, “praisers of time past,” and like to claim that
things were better when they were young. Sadly, that option is
foreclosed to my generation of oldies, who were young during the 1960s
and 70s. In fact, we are rather sniffy about the incivility of the
present. “Incivility?” we say, a senile quaver in our collective voice.
“Ha. In my day, young woman, bomb-throwers actually threw bombs!”
Historians, too, can always be counted on to dismiss the idea that
there is anything new, or worse than before, under the sun. That’s what
we historians do, and we are right. Yes, incivility is distressing and
makes constitutional government more difficult. No, it is not worse now,
not from a wider historical perspective.
✓ For most of European history, a
call for greater civility would have been slightly beside the point,
since Europeans were intent on killing one another in large numbers in
wars or murdering one another in the streets. The latter was an activity
particularly popular during the period I study, the Italian
Renaissance. Shakespeare was not making it up about the Montagues and
Capulets.
We historians also make short work of the technological and
sociological explanations for the present increase of incivility.
✓✓ Few of
us would accept that social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle
have made incivility significantly more intense than in earlier
societies. Before modern times, most political life took place in very
small cities (by modern standards), which were face-to-face societies.
The level of paranoia was generally much higher. The man you hated was
your neighbor, who had bad breath, and his client the grocer had
knowingly sold your wife moldy tomatoes while his cousin had done your
cousin out of a job. The personal may not have been the political, but
the political was definitely personal.
✓ Nor is the sociological explanation adequate. In most premodern
societies, the cultural gap between elites and non-elites was huge. It
began from the rather salient differences that the elites had enough to
eat, had more than one suit of clothing, and could read. In the grand
sweep of history, what was truly exceptional was the relative
homogeneity of social mores in the America of Tocqueville. The view that
modern Americans are more socially polarized than the vast majority of
our ancestors is just another case of historical shortsightedness.
.jpg)
Machiavelli—who was a wicked counselor of princes and a
second-rate historian, but a shrewd observer of humanity—had an
explanation for why people think things used to be better. History is
written for the victors, and writers who seek reward will celebrate the
winners’ deeds and conceal their infamy. Our passions are involved when
we observe the actions of our contemporaries because they affect us; not
so with actions in the past. The news makes us angry and fearful by
turns, while we view the past through a golden mist of memory. The great
men of the past are safely dead and do not threaten us. In fact, says
Machiavelli, human behavior is a constant, and there has always been
about the same amount of goodness and wickedness in the world. It may
well be that things are better now than in the past, but we can’t tell
that. In retrospect we can see that first the Assyrians had virtù,
then the Medes, then the Persians, then Rome. If we lived in one of
those empires on the rise and believed the past was better, we would be
wrong; if we lived in a time of decline and held the same opinion, we
would be right. But in the present, we can’t tell where we are in the
cycle. Machiavelli confesses that even he himself might be wrong in his
belief that he lived in a time of decline. Since he in fact lived in a
period when Europe was on the brink of dominating the rest of the world,
one has to concede his point.
Machiavelli makes the further point, however, that a healthy
skepticism about the present doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the past.
Some people might think that to claim all times are equally happy or
unhappy means there is nothing to be learned from the past. Machiavelli
disagrees. Even though roughly equal quanta of goodness and wickedness
have always been in the world, they have always been unevenly
distributed. Some peoples are better at some things than others, and for
longer periods of time. The Romans were good at domination, for
example, and they dominated for a long time. It’s worth studying the
causes of human excellence so we can try to replicate them and perhaps
improve our own lives and politics. . ."
READ MORE - It takes a while?
. . .or how about a video
Duration: 30:57
Posted: Sep 24, 2020
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
