The Importance of Being Civil

The Struggle for Political Decency

John A. Hall

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400847495
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How civility has shaped and been shaped by historical and social forces, and why it is in danger today Civility is desirable and possible, but can this fragile ideal be guaranteed? The Importance of Being Civil offers the most comprehensive look at the nature and advantages of civility throughout history and in our world today. Esteemed sociologist John Hall expands our understanding of civility as related to larger social forces—including revolution, imperialism, capitalism, nationalism, and war—and the ways that such elements limit the potential for civility.Combining wide-ranging historical and comparative evidence with social and moral theory, Hall examines how the nature of civility has fluctuated in the last three centuries, how it became lost, and how it was reestablished in the twentieth century following the two world wars. He also considers why civility is currently breaking down and what can be done to mitigate this threat. The Importance of Being Civil is a decisive and sophisticated addition to the discussion of civility in its modern cultural and historical contexts.

PART ONE

A COMPOSITE DEFINITION

CHAPTER 1

Agreeing to Differ

For about a quarter century “civil society” has had about it an air of excitement. This is not surprising, for the concept has been taken as a banner by those wishing to be free in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and, most recently, in North Africa, and it has been further invoked by Marxist thinkers in the West who seek a nonstatist theory of the Left.¹ Still, there has always been vagueness as to exactly what the notion implied. This chapter provides the clarity that is needed. The argument is simple: “civil society” only “makes sense” when it contains a heavy dose of civility. It may be helpful to offer a complete definition of civil society immediately: it is a form of societal self-organization that allows for cooperation with the state while permitting individuation. A great deal hangs on “individuation.”

The most obvious alternative to my definition conceptualizes civil society simply as societal self-organization. A moment’s thought makes it quite obvious that this will not do. To begin with, militancy guarantees nothing nice. Weimar Germany was torn apart by the fanatical enthusiasm of Nazi and communist groups who were keen to fight it out on the streets.² Equally, the exceedingly solidaristic self-organization of mafiosi, whether in Sicily or in contemporary Moscow, quite obviously has the capacity for destroying basic societal decencies. Sheer intellectual provincialism makes many forget that settled existence depends on the rule of law being guaranteed by effective state power. The intellectual roots of this blindness derive from nineteenth-century England. A thinker such as Herbert Spencer could imagine a moral world based wholly on contracts between individuals, and this bias worked its way into modern thought as a whole via neoclassical economics. Interestingly, if curiously, this view was taken over wholesale by Karl Marx. The “withering away of the state” that Marx expected under socialism characterizes the general point most evocatively. The fact that the twentieth century has seen viciously effective states that ignored the rule of law provided experience that seemed to underwrite this antistatist ethic. But if despotism is a danger, so too is anarchy. Those who talk of the desirability of curtailing the powers of the state, whether in nineteenth-century England or in twentieth-century United States, overgeneralize on the basis of the pacific consensus that marks their social worlds. This is provincial because it takes no account of bastard feudalism or of Beirut in its worst days, and thereby fails to provide safeguards against further savageries of the type that they represent. Social forces that destroy a liberal state or prevent it from operating efficiently do not contribute to a civil society; that term should be reserved for social self-organization that cooperates with a responsible and responsive state.

It is just as important to stress that the manner in which members of the organizations mentioned are controlled is far removed from any connotation of the word “civil.” The classic instance to bear in mind is that of tribal self-organization,³ which not only destroys organized states but also controls human beings to such a degree as to rule out any possibility of individual self-determination and moral growth. The all-powerful tyranny that closed groups can exert over every aspect of daily life, from clothing to the choice of marriage partner to the details of belief, is antithetical to any concept of civil society. Positively put, a civil society is one in which individuals have the chance of at least trying to create their own selves. This means that the membership of social groups must be voluntary and overlapping, for it is in the complex interstices of social life that individualism often resides. Furthermore, there is likely to be an elective affinity between civil society and fashion: for all the silly pretensions to which the latter can be prone, it remains the area in which many can experiment with and try on new conceptions of their selves.

These considerations have by now entered into general understanding. But there is something behind antipathy to such “caging” that has not been understood to anything like the same extent.⁴ It can be stated very straightforwardly before turning to its theoretical exemplar and an account of its genealogy. Civility is based on recognition of difference and diversity. Caging is dreadful in large part because it presumes that there is one road to truth in all matters. Varied attitudes can be involved here. Some welcome diversity enthusiastically, while others put up with it with resignation. A still more sophisticated attitude is that of those who think that a good deal of truth can be discovered but who are reluctant to force-feed human beings into accepting every detail of a morality. This was the position, for example, of the narrator of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: seeing a young boy about to waste years, as he had wasted them himself, along the false trails of “society” and art, Marcel refuses to intervene—on the grounds that moral learning can only take place through making one’s own mistakes. A key analytic point derives from this. That type of holistic liberalism represented by Durkheim, in which socialization is all-encompassing and all-effective, is not at all civil. A civil society will allow the individual room to experiment, doing so most of the time from a position of mild relativism—that is, one that doubts the presence of a single set of universal rules about every aspect of behavior. Relativism of this sort needs to be distinguished from total or blanket relativism. To say that the recognition of difference is shared and the decision to live together with diversity is mutual is to note a background consensus, an agreement to differ, that enables civil society to flourish. The consensus in question should, of course, be minimal, including, most obviously, respect for the rule of law, attention to empirical evidence, and abhorrence of violence, while its characteristic attitude will be that of ironic and affectionate amusement at the foibles of humanity within the resulting settled world. All this can be expressed more bluntly: the diversity that is acceptable to civil society is that within a particular world with its own boundaries.

There are several thinkers who both theorize and exemplify civility. To my mind, the greatest is Montesquieu, whose worldview is brilliantly laid before us in his early philosophical novel, Les lettres persanes. The skepticism of the book is at times open and bluntly stated. The story of the troglodytes prefigures the distaste that Montesquieu had for the political theory of the ancient world. The disciplined and unitary world of civic virtue demanded too much of us, and it was—as he would show in the book he wrote next, The Considerations on the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans—far too militaristic. In contrast, Montesquieu has sympathy for wealth rather than virtue, and famously asserted later in The Spirit of the Laws that the interests might limit the passions, that moneymaking (to make use of Samuel Johnson’s expression) might be less dangerous than the pursuit of political power.⁵ But the witty iconoclasm resulting from Persians observing our customs, and from our observing their own, is much more subtle. Montesquieu can be seen time and again almost throwing his hands up, with varied mixtures of delight and despair, when considering how we should live. Virtually everything that we take for granted—food, religion, love and sex, much of politics, art—is the result of custom, and is thereby wholly bereft of philosophical grounding. He goes to an extreme in one instance: the only wholly happy relationship in the book is, it is not always realized, an incestuous one between a brother and sister, Apheridon and Astarte. More typical, however, is his wry amusement. Women and men deceive each other, for sure, but the fact that women have a measure of negative resisting power is far from bad, as Rica, the more sympathetic and open-minded of the two Persians, stresses:

If [the Asians] in their turn argue that Europeans cannot be happy with women who are unfaithful to them, the answer is that this faithfulness, which they make so much of, does not prevent them feeling the indifference which always ensues when passion is satisfied; that our wives are too exclusively ours; that being so firmly in possession leaves us nothing to desire, or to fear; that a certain amount of fickleness is like salt, which adds flavour and prevents decay.⁶

Uzbek, the dominant Persian character, makes the same point.⁷ He admits, without any sense of what this means, that the very possession of the women in his harem has destroyed his desire for them—and the story of the novel shows his inability to relinquish control, even though it makes him miserable. Montesquieu had attended salons run by aristocratic women, and it is surely from this background that he gained his occasionally bemused admiration for the independence of women. Fashion might be a little ridiculous, but it allows for moral experiment, for the trying on of different personalities.

The extensive relativism stressed by Montesquieu, the insistence that we really do not have any basis for much of what we believe, has decided and absolute limits. It is again Rica who makes the point most strikingly, in a letter to Uzbek.

I can tell you that I knew nothing about women until I came here. I have learnt more about them in a month than I should have done in thirty years inside a seraglio. With us everyone’s character is uniformly the same, because they are forced. People do not seem what they are, but what they are obliged to be. Because of this enslavement of heart and mind, nothing is heard but the voice of fear, which has only one language, instead of nature, which expresses itself so diversely and appears in so many different forms. Dissimulation, which among us is so widely practiced and essential an art, is unknown here. Everything is said, everything can be seen, and everything heard. The heart is exhibited as openly as the face. In conduct, in virtue, and even in vice, there is always something spontaneous to be perceived.⁸

So there is a voice of nature, a true grounding for some universal values. The Persian Letters makes it clear that slavery is wrong, as is despotism, whether political or religious: both speak the language of fear—and fear is something universal. We can go a little further. The famous letter on suicide notes the cruelty of being punished twice: first for the misery that some people find in existence and then with the social opprobrium of having the suicide’s body dragged through the street. This says something about civility. Montesquieu is its best representative because he is aware of horror and had indeed witnessed torture in his early career in Bordeaux. Some eighteenth-century proponents of civility speak of polish and refinement, and so sound a little prissy. Montesquieu is harder: civility is a necessary virtue to help us negotiate a world of pain. That is why he places so much emphasis on knowledge and, above all, on toleration, itself almost a synonym for civility.

It is important at this point, as we move from the character of civility toward an account of its genealogy, to warn against a misconception. Gore Vidal once suggested that the deepest meaning of Creation, his magnificent novel about the origins of the world religions and ethics, was that agrarian civilizations before the advent of the great monotheistic creeds were the most tolerant in the history of mankind. There is some justification for this view. On the one hand, the logistics of agrarian civilization meant that they had no capacity to penetrate let alone to police the thoughts of the tribes and peasant communities over which they ruled. On the other hand, monotheism brought in its train the potential for—and, with Christianity once Constantine had converted, the enthusiastic and vicious practice of—intolerance, even though the principle of universal salvation envisaged and allowed the incorporation of all human beings into society for the first time. Nonetheless, the classical agrarian civilizations were not civil societies. Civility has everything to do with the modern world, in which differences conflict with one another rather than being ignored because people live in social silos that do not interact. What matters is the agreement to tolerate, albeit within clear limits, so that it becomes possible to live in peace.

The origins of toleration of this sort lie within Europe. Perhaps its deepest roots result from the way in which the removal of the centralized authority of Rome placed power in several sets of hands.⁹ What is most striking in comparative perspective is the separation between ideological and political power. This separation has its origins in Jesus’s injunction to deliver to Caesar what was Caesar’s, but to give to God what was God’s—a remark that amounts to saying that Christianity’s concern was with spiritual salvation rather than political order. Christianity later refused to provide ideological justification for Rome, and it found thereafter that it could survive and prosper without the benefit of an imperial polity. Once it realized that it could not itself create a theocracy, fear of concentration of power in the hands of a secular emperor led the church to encourage kings whom they made more than primus inter pares by ritual anointing and the singing of the Laudes regiae. If those policies were conscious, very different activities by the church may have done as much to encourage state formation in Europe. The church’s greed for land seems to account for the breaking up of obligations toward one’s extended kinship network; if the way in which this resulted in a family pattern responsive to Malthusian pressures is well known, the manner in which its atomization of society made for easier state-building may be quite as important.¹⁰ Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine that royal power became unfettered as the result of these two forces. Rather, state-building took place within a field of preexisting social forces. Kings were faced with feudal nobilities whose property rights were firmly established, as were those of the church. In these circumstances kings sought to enhance their powers by granting autonomy to towns; these became islands in the feudal sea in which new ideas and social practices could develop. So here was an acephalous world in which liberties were both widespread and firmly codified in a legal system that privileged corporate rights.

This vesting of power into separate bodies might have led to a static society in which different sources of power merely blocked any sense of a common enterprise. This did not happen, with European society in consequence gaining a restless dynamism that changed the pattern of world history. A measure of cooperation was initially made possible by the sense of unity provided by Christian norms; shared membership in a civilization certainly helped to revive and deepen economic interaction even within the medieval period. But over time a patterned and interactive division took place. State-society relations within countries became increasingly intense due to the endless competition in war caused by life within a multipolar world of states. The need for monies for war led to the practice of calling assemblies of the realm, that is, of church, nobles, and townsmen, to whom were added representatives of the peasantry in parts of northern Europe.¹¹ Such assemblies took over tags of canon law—“what touches all must be agreed by all” and “no taxation without representation”—which gave Europe a sense of the rule of law. Of course, the fact that there were several states was of enormous importance. A measure of internal decency was encouraged once it was realized that foul treatment of key social elements might encourage them to move and thereby to en...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: A Composite Definition
• 1. Agreeing to Differ
• 2. Sympathy and Deception
• 3. How Best to Rule
• 4. Entry and Exit
• 5. Intelligence in States
• Part Two: Enemies
• 6. Down with Authenticity
• 7. The Disenchantment of the Intellectuals
• 8. The Problem with Communism
• 9. The Destruction of Trust
• 10. Imperialism, the Perversion of Nationalism
• Conclusion
• Index