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Civility, which comes to us from the Latin word for citizen,
includes not only the notions of courtesy and politeness,
but also such matters as social relationships and proper
conduct in human relationships. For some, civility is the
essential glue that holds society together, and it involves
such important issues as friendship, altruism, responsibility,
dignity, and justice.
Aristotle
saw civility as a form of friendship, which he understood
as a mutual feeling of good will. Aristotle
believed that humans are capable of promoting another person's
interest without regard for our own, and he ranked friendships
according to their degree of intimacy and commitment. "Character
friendship" may be purely selfless; "advantage friendship" is
a mixture of self-interest with perhaps some altruism, and this
is the basis of civil interaction.
By
contrast, Thomas
Hobbes believed that humans are incapable
of sympathy with the interests of others; he said that we are
ultimately motivated by self-interest in all of
our acts. But recent experiments and theoretical developments
have supported the view of David
Hume, who believed that humans are naturally
sympathetic, with our benevolence (or willingness to act selflessly)
guided by such things as reason and custom.
Amid
many wrenching claims that today's society is marked by lawlessness
and a collapse of moral values, it's important to reduce
sweeping historical generalizations to specific comparisons
of time and place. Colonial America, for example, was viewed
in retrospect as a coarse age by the more proper nineteenth-century
Americans - yet these same nineteenth-century Americans exhibited
a great deal of intolerance, and they experienced lawlessness
especially in mob violence (e.g. lynchings). In general, specific
historical comparison, makes it clear that lawlessness, intolerance,
and standards of decorum tend to fluctuate in complex
and interdependent ways.
Modern
American society is marked by a high degree of mobility,
a decline in voluntary civic activities, and an emphasis
on rights (i.e. what others owe me). The result is rootlessness
and detachment from family and friends. Higher crime rates,
chiefly among youth, show a strong statistical correlation with
lack of self-control. And moral disputes are often marked
by dogmatism, the inability or unwillingness to see the
moral force behind another point of view. In response, the possibilities
for improvement include (1) reinvigorating our civic associations,
(2) developing and inculcating self-control, and (3)
demanding higher levels of mutual respect and tolerance
in the way we speak to and treat one another.
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