What is missing is a robust recovery and articulation of the essential attributes of humanity—in a word, human teleology—which is needed in constructing a framework of public civility. That is, to ground public civility, we must resource a notion that is truly universal to every human person, regardless of religious tradition or community—a notion that can be articulated in terms of the essential attributes of humanity: this notion I call “the human good” (which I unpack in detail in chapter 4). Allow me for now, then, to continue to outline the need, nature, and scope of public civility.
The Nature and Scope of Public Civility
In addition to vertical and horizontal civilities, there is another kind which one might call personal civility, as distinct from but connected to my notion of public civility. In a landmark, social historian Norbert Elias shows how throughout Medieval and Renaissance Europe the notion of civilité had to do mainly with “curtois [courtly] society” whereby: gentilhomme (gentlemen) both made and made up Kultur and Zivilisation. In short, the mark of “civilized” society was its artistic, intellectual, and religious achievements (e.g., in Germany) as well as its political, economic, and social progress (e.g., in England and France). Anything less than such “civility” was considered naïveté or barbarity, or both. Civility, in other words, consisted mainly in the manners and monuments of the knights, kings, and courtly society of high Kultur. While visible and therefore “public” in one sense, this kind of civility I call personal civility, given that its origin lay largely in the high culture of refined dining and demeanor, rather than in the robust civic engagement of citizens qua citizens of plural societies.
The focus on personal civility is illustrated particularly poignantly in the sixteenth-century work of Desiderius Erasmus, De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (a manual for “good manners for children”). Historian Philippe Ariès describes the particular context within which Erasmus’s text and early modern personal civility are set: “The word ‘civil’ was roughly synonymous with our modern word ‘social.’ The word ‘civility’ would thus correspond to what we call ‘good manners.’ . . . Civility was the practical knowledge . . . necessary to have in order to live in society . . . : [It is] what colloquially might be called etiquette[, i.e.,] the older name of ‘courtesy.’” This personal civility was codified in “manuals of civility or manuals of etiquette” which ranged over three broad categories: courtesy, morality, and “arts of love.” Such manuals were meant for and read by not only school children being trained to assimilate into the “civility” of adult life, but also adults who were considered “insufficiently versed” in the courtesies appropriate to social life. Civility was about speaking, dressing, acting like adults.
This personal civility is related to but distinct from public civility. They are related in that they share a common etymology with words like “civilized,” “civilization,” and “city,” an etymology whose Indo-European root refers to “members of the household.” Thus, personal as well as public civilities have to do with the manners to which one adheres when engaging with other members of the household—whether in the literal private oikos (household) or the larger public polis. Public civility, in this way, marks the manners and mode of interaction between members of a polis. As Aristotle notes, a balance between personal “liberty” and communal “equality” marks the essence of democracy. Legal scholar Stephen Carter picks up this idea: “To be civilized is to understand that we live in society as in a household, and that within that [civic] household . . . our relationships . . . are governed by standards of behavior that limit our freedom.” Civility, in this sense, is the practice of living with the tension between individual liberty and communal equality. Thus, what I call public civility characterizes the attitudes, affirmations, and actions of participating in the common life of a plural society—a life which conduces to just peace and social harmony.
That said, there is a marked difference between personal and public civilities. Here, it is important to note the meaning of the term politeness and its connection to the polis. Politeness shares its etymological root with the terms like polity, politics, and policy. In French, “courtly” people used the term “civilisé”—as nearly synonymous with cultivé, poli, and police—to mean a particular type of behavior. I suggest this private politeness, like personal civility, must be reconnected with a kind of political politeness proper to a life lived in the polis. That is, what demands the civility of the person living in the polity is her status as a member of a civic household: accordingly, the activity befitting and demanded of citizens of the polis is the construction of a public—not merely private—civility.
We should also note that public civility is not strictly limited to the political realm of the nation-state; rather, public civility has to do with the attitudes and actions that human persons ought to have toward one another qua human persons, thereby rendering the scope of public civility as ultimately no less than global. While I unpack this idea of a global public civility in detail in chapter 9, I would like here to develop, preliminary at least, the idea of what I shall call “moral cosmopolitanism” before moving on. So, having discussed the nature of public civility, I would like now to discuss its scope.
Moral philosopher Anthony Appiah writes, “Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities”; and “to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality.” And, in connection to our study here, “the very idea of morality” is intrinsic to our notion of public civility, for public civility must be shown to, or rather must be constructed with, persons to whom we have responsibility, i.e., members of our civic household. But a question arises: How large is this household? Who are its members? And where, if at all, do we draw its boundaries? At this point in the investigation, we would do well to remind ourselves that we are focused on securing a basis of public civility specifically across Christian-Muslim divides.
That said, we also are interested to see whether this basis—which I shall argue can be found in the human good— also could serve as a basis in constructing a global framework of public civility. For, if the human good, as noted above, are those attributes which inhere in every human person, then the scope of public civility must be applicable not only to Christian-Muslim divides, but to divides found across all of humanity. Indeed, to augment Appiah’s apt definition of morality, I might add that the “very idea of morality” includes not only those whom one knows, but also simply those whom one knows about. As one peace studies scholar writes: “The moral imagination has a capacity . . . to understand that the welfare of my community is directly related to the welfare of your community”; and this capacity “create[s the moral] connection between the local and the [global] public.”
(excerpted from chapter 1)
