Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1998 by Adam Goodheart

by Stephen L. Carter Basic Books, $25

Let me start with a tale of two cities. I live now in Washington, D.C., in an apartment complex where I don't know my neighbors' names, although I do know what they watch on television, because the noise comes through the walls. The only time I come into contact with a broad cross-section of my fellow citizens is on the subway.

Not long before moving to Washington, I lived for a few months in a small town on the southern Italian coast. Every evening, nearly all the citizens, rich and poor, young and old, would gather in the piazza. Dressed to the nines, arm-in-arm with friends or relatives, they made stately laps of the baroque square. The young townspeople I knew told me that every night in the piazza, they saw their entire extended families, as well as nearly everyone else they'd ever known since they'd learned to walk. They also told me -- almost every last one of them -- that they longed for the day when they could move away and live somewhere else.

I suspect Stephen L. Carter, on the other hand, would rather enjoy living in that Italian town. In his new book, Civility, Carter joins the swelling ranks of writers (including Gertrude Himmelfarb, Alan Ehrenhalt, and Robert Putnam) who have bemoaned Americans' loss of community spirit and social graces. Carter, who teaches law at Yale, makes it clear that he is fed up with sullen sales clerks, heedless motorists, public displays of profanity, telemarketers, strangers who call him by his first name, and people who don't know the names of their own neighbors. In short, he believes -- with some justice -- that many of his fellow Americans have just about given up having any regard for the opinions and feelings of others.

"We care less and less about our fellow citizens," Carter writes. "We may see them as obstacles or competitors, or we may not see them at all, but unless they happen to be our friends, we rarely think we owe them anything. ... A big part of our incivility crisis stems from the fact that we do not know each other or even want to try; and, not knowing each other, we seem to think that how we treat each other does not matter."

This is no mere reminder to stand up straight and mind our language: Carter's definition of civility goes far beyond mere good manners, though these are part of what he has in mind. Rather, it rests ultimately on the biblical injunction to love thy neighbor. Carter's supreme example of a civil act, one that he refers to throughout the book, is the story of a neighbor who welcomed him and his family, who were black, when they moved into an all-white neighborhood in 1966. The woman "bustled into her house, only to emerge, minutes later, with a huge tray of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches, which she carried to out porch and offered around with her ready smile."

There's no denying that most Americans would find this image appealing. So the obvious question is: If it was so great, why don!t we live that way anymore? What could have induced us to turn our backs on this Eden of smiling neighbors bearing sandwiches? Here is where Carter's account -- like those of most communitarian writers -- gets somewhat fuzzy. "I keep coming back to my long-standing hunch that it all began to go bad around 1965," Carter writes in a chapter titled "The Death of the Golden Age" -- the golden age, as usual, being the 1950s. Lest we be shocked that one of America!s leading black intellectuals should venerate the Eisenhower era, Carter quickly explains: In ridding ourselves of the bad tradition* of racism and sexism, we also mistakenly threw out many of the good traditions that had sustained us. Technology played a part, as well. From television to the Internet, Carter writes, the inventions of the last half century have encouraged our radical solipsism. Could it be, though, that Americans actually know exactly what they want? That we've embraced technologies like the Internet not despite their distancing effects, but because of them?

There's always been a precarious balance between the individualist themes of our democracy and the communitarian ones. When Americans in the 1780s started bandying about possible designs for the new federal coinage, one prototype featured the proposed motto "E pluribus unum" another, the words "Mind your business." Still, even radical democrats like Jefferson spoke endlessly of the citizenry's duty to support the common good actively, even strenuously. They called the fulfillment of this duty not "civility," but "virtue," a far broader and more challenging concept.

Carter draws not at all on this secular American tradition, preferring to encourage a return to traditional, unobjectionable Judeo-Christian values. He speaks in the gentle, thoughtful, slightly weary tone of a suburban pastor preaching the familiar homilies, knowing that his flock has heard it all before, knowing that he!lI be giving the same sermon on countless Sundays to come. Perhaps "incivility" isn't a bad description of our predicament. But exhortations that we all just be nice to each other only trivialize a complicated set of problems, and an even more complicated history.