Civility

Meaning: Civility is a matter of mores, etiquette, politeness, of informal rituals that facilitate our interactions, and thereby give us ways to treat each other with consideration.

Explanation:  Despite appearances, the Western world is not undergoing a new immoral age – therefore following right behaviour

· It is suffering a different phenomenon - loss of civility, a deficit of good manners

Examples, illustrations, quotes and statistics:

· Example: What is often regarded as moral collapse is no such thing; western societies at the opening of the twenty-first are by many measures better, in ‘moral; respects, than a century ago: compare (say) Victorian. London's sweatshops, hordes of child prostitutes, and violent street muggers.

· Rather, what has happened is a decay of what rnakes the social machine function — a breakdown of the mutual tolerance and respect that allows room in a complex plural society for individuals to live their own lives in peace

· Civility is a matter of mores, etiquette, politeness, of informal rituals that facilitate our interactions, and thereby give us ways to treat each other with consideration

· It creates social and psychological space for people to live their own lives and make their own choices

· Example: Youths spitting on the pavement and swearing on buses offer merely superficial symptoms of incivility, more serious are such things as invasion of privacy by tabloid newspapers, and irruptions into areas of personal life irrelevant to public concerns — for example, exposés of the sex lives of politicians

· Our age is in fact a moralistic (judgemental) one, nauseatingly so (causing or liable to cause a feeling of nausea or disgust; disgusting); which is a large part of the problem — for moralistic attitudes are intolerant, and intolerance is one of the worst discourtesies.

· Quote: To ask for courtesy is, in one way, to ask for very little; 'We must be as courteous to a man,' Emerson remarked, 'as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.'

· The loss of civility means that social feeling has been replaced by defensiveness, with groups circling their wagons around 'identity' concepts of nationality, ethnicity and religion, protecting themselves by putting up barriers against others

· Society fragments into subgroups whose members hope thereby to shield themselves against the abrasive selfishness and disregard of others

· Quote: 'There is a courtesy of the heart, said Goethe, ‘which is akin to love. Out of it arises the purest courtesy in outward behaviour.'

· This states an ideal; it ignores the fact that civility can, of course, be a mask — it has always been open to abuse, and if we relearned our manners it would continue so; but that does not alter the main point, which is that civility fosters a society that behaves well towards itself, whose members respect the intrinsic value of the individual and the rights of people different from themselves.

· Example: Ill-mannered people are generally so because they falsely estimate their own worth, and think that a waiter (who is probably a medical student earning extra pocket money) or a bus driver (who is probably writing the next prize-winning novel in his spare time) is to be valued by his occupation — or more accurately, by his income, which in these cases could be assumed to be modest — rather than his humanity.

· There begins impertinence: make a person a label, or a sum of money, and he becomes not an end in himself, but an instrument; and to treat anyone as such is, as Kant argued, not Just the supreme discourtesy but the supreme wrong.

· Quote: 'Civility is to human nature what warmth is to wax,' said Schopenhauer. Although conflict is endemic to the human condition, it remains worthwhile to urge the claims of civility as a means at least of managing it

· Conclusion: Even if one grants (as one should not) the relativist view that certain values are mutually irreconcilable, and even if there will never be a clear answer to how certain dilemmas should be resolved, still we can say that civility is our best hope for finding and maintaining that subtle and constantly renegotiating equilibrium on which the existence of society depends.