Dear friends!

Yoav Peck kindly draws our attention to Stephen L. Carter and his writing on civility and dignity.

Yoav responds to Linda Hartling's reflections on respect:

"I am fascinated by the example you give about the Oneida tribe. (Where are they living now?) This is what we call Dignity. The coming to the other with dignity, regardless of stature or achievements. It is achievements, behavior, that can earn or un-earn the other’s Respect. But Dignity, prior to anything the other is or does, this is the active focus of our work. One brings dignity to one’s interaction with the other. Stephen Carter writes beautifully about this in his Civility book, by the way..."

Thanks a lot, dear Yoav!
Gratefully,
Evelin

Yale Law professor Stephen Carter in his book Civility says that our actions and sacrifice are a "signal of respect for our fellow citizens, marking them as full equals, both before the law and before God. Rules of civility are thus also rules of morality; it is morally proper to treat our fellow citizens with respect, and morally improper not to. Our crisis of civility, is part of a larger crisis of morality" (p. 11).

Carter, Stephen L. (1998). Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Please see here more quotes from Carter’s book, assembled by Yoav:

When I was growing up, a frequent admonition, at home and school alike, was, “Say the magic word!” This phrase, always spoken with enormous gentleness, was a reminder to preface a request with Please and to acknowledge a kindness with Thank you. If we failed to say the magic words, we did not receive whatever we were asking for, a discipline that helps a child learn quite quickly. There is no simpler piece of the civility puzzle, not only because the magic words are a part of our letter of introduction to the rest of the world, but also because using them is a symbol of respect for others.
(p. 59)

Civility… is the set of sacrifices we make for the sake of our common journey with others, and out of love and respect for the very idea that there are others. (p. 23)

Democracy demands dialogue, and dialogue flows from disagreement.
But we can, and maybe must, be relentlessly partisan without being uncivil.
Indeed, the more passionate our certainty that we are right, the more urgent our need to practice the art of civility otherwise, we make dialogue impossible, and the possibility of dialogue is the reason democracy values disagreement in the first place. (p. 24)

Civil dialogue requires us to sacrifice the opportunity to display our own
self-righteous anger, even when we have good reason to be angry.
It requires us to see God in those who would rather not see us at all. (p. 35)

….the question of how we should treat our fellow citizens is independent of the question of how we feel like treating them. (p. 35)

A big part of our incivility crisis stems from the sad 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. (p. 56)

Carter recalls moving into a new neighborhood and the greeting his family receives from the neighbors….
We were not waiting for them to love us. We were only waiting for them to greet us. …..we require civility precisely to mediate our relationship with those we do not love. (p. 71)

In writing about democratic “rights”, as opposed to norms of civil behavior, Carter offers the following example:
Suppose I purchase a house in a neighborhood where the very friendly people all loan each other tools and where everybody keeps beautiful gardens and neatly trimmed lawns. If I let my grass grow wild and allow the weeds to run rampant in my garden, I am not living up to the expectations of my neighbors. They probably cannot take legal action against me, but through implicit and perhaps explicit criticism, they would place upon me enormous pressure to conform to the neighborhood’s norm of lawn care. To say that I have a “right” to keep my garden as I like is only a distraction: if such a right exists, what my neighbors believe is that I should not exercise it. If I insist on exercising it anyway, I am demonstrating that I am not interested in membership under the community’s rules. (p. 81)