Editorial

I grew up in a home of many mottos. So many homespun mottos, sayings, aphorisms, and rhymes that I sometimes thought I was being parented off of a set of 3 x 5 index cards. One of my mother’s favorite sayings was “Better to be polite than to be right” or, in its abbreviated version, “Being polite is always right.” Today many commentators believe we are facing a “civility deficit” and that that deficit stands in the way of solving important public problems of the kind taken up by Stewart Motha in his contribution to this issue of LCH. Who can be against civility when it is eviscerated daily on cable TV and when we witness the most vile and random destruction of human life in the name of one or another political cause? It is very tempting to focus our energies on restoring civility as a primary political task.

My own sense is that this is a misuse of political energy. My mother to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not always better to be polite than to be right, and breaches of civility do not always threaten democratic dialogue. Civility is not a virtue in and of itself. It is a secondary and contingent virtue whose value ultimately depends on other things. Moreover, all too often we hear the call for civility made with no reference to the background conditions that bring forth breaches of civility. We ignore cases where injustice not lack of civility is the problem that needs to be addressed and act as if civility uniformly was aligned with justice and advanced the cause of human dignity.

Listening to our era’s civility advocates I am reminded of Herbert Marcuse’s critique of what he called “Repressive Tolerance.” Marcuse argued that tolerance was not a primary political virtue, and that we should not extend tolerance to “policies conditions, and modes of behavior which…are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.” Marcuse warned that the call for tolerance masked background conditions that gave it a particular political tilt, and he opposed tolerance of that which is “radically evil” (like racial segregation) even if that came at a cost to “the cohesion of the whole.” Marcuse’s warning and admonition stand as a powerful counterweight to those who elevate civility while ignoring the conditions that may lead people to put it aside. As Randall Kennedy once succinctly put it, “if you are in an argument with a thug, there are things much more important than civility.”

Austin Sarat