How Civility Works

How Civility Works by Keith J Bybee, 69 pages

The past few decades have seen recurrent, and entirely ineffective, calls for a restored sense of civility, but few have thought to ask what civility really is.  Keith Bybee attempts to briefly sketch an answer to that question, charting the changes from chivalry to gentility to courtesy and, finally, to civility, this last codifying the bourgeois separation of public and private.  He then addresses some of the major challenges civility faces in the modern era, concentrating less on the difficulties directly created by cultural diversity than on the objection that civility must inevitably mean insincere hypocrisy, as well as concerns over the role that any accepted standard of manners can play in enforcing social stratification.

Bybee's argument for civility is entirely utilitarian.  On the one hand, civility generally provides for the greatest rhetorical effectiveness.  On the other, civility allows for peaceable interaction between people with differing, or even conflicting, beliefs.  Overall, Bybee seems to view civility as a form of virtue signalling, which lends itself to a great deal of hand-wringing over whether the virtue is real or feigned.  This same possibility of hypocrisy leads him to a certain ambivalence towards the claim that the practice of civility teaches the virtue of civility - an odd problem, as there is no virtue, not even sincerity, which cannot be simulated.

What he omits - and the omission is glaring - is a view of civility that considers the human person as possessed of a certain irreducible value entirely independent of the quality of their virtue or beliefs, and as such entitled to a basic level of respect.  This results in his argument for civility failing even on the practical level on which it is founded - if the only purpose of civility is that it works to my advantage, I am free to abandon it as soon as it is ceases to do so.  Far from recognizing this as a problem, Bybee embraces it, reducing the realm of manners to another ideological battlefield, entirely depriving civility of its power and purpose.