3 ways to practice civility Steven Petrow
I want to start by telling you
two things about myself
before I get into the full talk.
And the first is that I’ve been writing
about manners and civility
for more than 20 years,
as a book author
and as a magazine columnist.
The second is,
my friends know to be very wary
of inviting me over for dinner
because any faux pas
that happens at the table
is likely to wind up in print.
(Laughter)
So, I’m watching, I can see back there
and I can see through the portals, too.
(Laughter)
So, speaking of dinner parties,
I want to take you back to 2015
and a dinner party that I went to.
To place this in time,
this was when Caitlyn Jenner
was first coming out,
shedding her identity as a Kardashian
and moving into her life
as a transgender activist.
I wrote a column
in People magazine at the time,
talking about the importance of names
and how names are our identity.
And that to misuse them or not to use them
erases us in a certain way.
And especially with Caitlyn Jenner,
I talked about Caitlyn,
but also the use of her pronouns.
Her pronouns.
So I’m at this dinner –
delicious, wonderful, fun –
when my host goes on a rant
about Caitlyn Jenner.
And she is saying that it is
disrespectful for Caitlyn Jenner
to force her to use a new name
and to use these new pronouns.
She’s not buying it,
and I’m listening,
and because I do meditation,
I took my sacred pause before I responded.
(Laughter)
And I reminded her
that when she got married,
she changed her name,
and that she took the name of her husband.
And that’s the name all of us now use.
We don’t use it just
because it’s her legal name,
but we use it because it’s respectful.
Ditto for Miss Jenner.
She didn’t buy it
and we didn’t speak for years.
(Laughter)
So …
I am known as the Civilist.
And it’s probably a word
that you’re not that familiar with.
It’s not in common parlance
and it comes from the Latin
and the French,
and it means an individual
who tries to live by a moral code,
who is striving to be a good citizen.
The word “civility” is derived from that,
and the original definition of civility
is citizens willing to give of themselves
for the good of the city,
for the good of the commonwealth,
for the larger good.
So, in this talk,
you’re going to learn
three new ways to be civil, I hope,
and it will be according
to the original definition of civility.
My first problem is:
civility is an obsolete word.
My second problem is:
civility has become
a dirty word in this country.
And that is whether you lean right
or whether you lean left.
And in part, that’s because modern usage
equates civility with decorum,
with formal politeness, formal behavior.
We’ve gotten away
from the idea of citizenship.
So, let me start by talking a little bit
about my friends on the right,
who have conflated civility with
what they call political correctness.
And to them, callouts for civility
are really very much like
what George Orwell wrote in “1984” –
he called it “newspeak.”
And this was an attempt
to change the way we talk
by forcibly changing
the language that we use.
To change our ideas
by changing the meaning of words.
And I think my dinner host
might have had some of that
rattling around there.
And I first personally understood, though,
the right’s problem with civility
when I wrote a column
about then-candidate Donald Trump.
And he had just said
he did not have time
for total political correctness,
and he did not believe
the country did either.
And I took that to heart, it was very –
The audience was very engaged
about that online, as you can imagine.
There was a thousand responses,
and this one stood out to me
because it was representative:
“Political correctness
is a pathological system
that lets liberals dominate
a conversation,
label, demonize and shout down
the opposition.”
So I think, to the right,
civility translates into censure.
So that’s the right.
Now, my friends on the left
also have a problem with it.
And for example, there have been those
who have harassed
Trump administration officials
who support the President’s border wall.
They’ve been called out as rude,
they’ve been called out as nasty,
they’ve been called out as worse.
And after one such incident last year,
even the Washington Post –
you know, left-leaning
Washington Post –
wrote an editorial and sided with decorum.
And they argued that officials
should be allowed to dine in peace.
Hm.
“You know, the wall
is the real incivility here.
The tear-gassing of kids,
the separation of families.”
That’s what the protestors say.
And imagine if we had sided,
in this country,
with decorum and courtesy
throughout our history.
You know, I think about the suffragettes.
They marched, they picketed.
They were chastised, they were arrested
for pursuing the vote
for women in the 1920s.
You know, I also think about
the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,
the father of American
nonviolent civil disobedience.
He was labeled as uncivil in his attempt
to promote racial and economic justice.
So I think you get a sense
of why civility has become
a problem, a dirty word, here.
Now, does this mean we can’t disagree,
that we can’t speak our minds?
Absolutely not.
I recently spoke with
Dr. Carolyn Lukensmeyer.
She’s kind of the guru
of civility in this country,
and the executive director of a body
called the National Institute
for Civil Discourse.
And she told me,
“Civility does not mean appeasement
or avoiding important differences.
It means listening and talking
about those differences with respect.”
In a healthy democracy,
we need to do that.
And I call that respectful engagement.
But civil discourse also needs rules,
it needs boundaries.
For instance, there’s a difference
between language
that is simply rude or demeaning,
and speech that invokes
hatred and intolerance.
And specifically of groups.
And I’m thinking
of racial and ethnic groups,
I’m thinking of the LGBTQ community,
I’m thinking of the disabled.
We snowflakes
call this speech “hate speech.”
And hate speech can lead to violence.
So, to that point, in the fall of 2018,
I wrote a column
about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
You may remember her,
she was one of the women who accused
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh
of sexual assault.
And among the responses,
I received this message,
a personal message,
which you can see here on the slide.
It’s been largely redacted.
(Laughter)
This message was 50 words long.
10 of them were the f-bomb.
And the Democrats were called out,
President Obama was called out,
and I was referred to in a pretty darn
vulgar and coarse way.
There was an explicit threat
in that message,
and that is why my editors at The Post
sent it to authorities.
This came shortly before the pipe bombs
were sent to other media outlets,
so everybody was really
kind of on guard there.
And the larger context was,
only a few months before,
five staffers had been killed
at a Maryland newspaper.
They had been shot dead
by a reader with a grudge.
“Shut up or else.”
And it was around that same time
that a different reader of mine
started stalking me online.
And at first, it was …
I’ll call it light and fluffy.
It was around this time last year
and I still had
my Christmas decorations up
and he sent me a message saying,
“You should take your Christmas
decorations down.”
And then he noticed that my dog
was off leash one day,
and then he commented
that I had gone to the market.
And then he wrote me one that said,
“If anyone were to shoot and kill you,
it would not be a loss at all.”
I wish that were the end of the story.
Because then, a few months later,
he came to my door, my front door,
in a rage and tried
to break the door down.
I now own mace, a security system
and a Louisville Slugger baseball bat.
(Sighs)
“Shut up or else.”
So, what’s to be done
to forestall civility from turning ugly,
from turning violent?
My first rule is to deescalate language.
And I’ve stopped using
trigger words in print.
And by trigger words, I mean
“homophobe,” I mean “racist,”
I mean “xenophobe,” I mean “sexist.”
All of those words.
They set people off.
They’re incendiary
and they do not allow us
to find common ground.
They do not allow us
to find a common heart.
And so to this point,
when John McCain died in 2018,
his supporters noted
that he never made personal attacks.
But his opponents agreed as well,
and I though that was
what was really noteworthy.
He challenged people’s policies,
he challenged their positions,
but he never made it personal.
And so that’s the second rule.
So the problem of civility
is not only an American one.
In the Netherlands, there are calls
for a civility offensive right now,
and as one Dutch philosopher has put it,
the country has fallen
under a spell of “verhuftering.”
Now, this is not a word that I knew before
and I did quite a bit of research.
It loosely means bullying
and the disappearance of good manners.
It actually means much worse than that,
but that’s what I’m saying here.
When you have a specific word, though,
to describe a problem like that,
you know you really have a problem.
And in the United Kingdom,
the [2016] Brexit vote …
you know, has divided
a nation even more so.
And one critic of the breakup
called those who favor it –
I just love this phrase –
“the frightened parochial
lizard brain of Britain.”
The frightened parochial
lizard brain of Britain.
That’s personal.
And it makes me miss “Downton Abbey”
and its patina of civility.
But therein lies the third rule:
don’t mistake decorum for civility.
Even if you have a dowager countess
as fabulous as Dame Maggie Smith.
(Laughter)
[Don’t be defeatist.
It’s so middle class.]
So let me end with one last story.
Not that long ago, I was at a bakery,
and they make these amazing scones.
So, long line –
there are a lot of scones.
And one by one,
the scones were disappearing
until there was one woman
in between me and that last scone.
(Laughter)
Praise the Lord, she said,
“I’ll have a croissant.”
(Laughter)
So when it became my turn, I said,
“I’ll take that scone.”
The guy behind me –
I’d never turned around, never seen him –
he shouted, “That’s my scone!
I’ve been waiting in line 20 minutes.”
And I was like, “Who are you?
I’ve been waiting in line 20 minutes,
and you’re behind me.”
So, I grew up here in New York,
and went to high school
not that far from here.
And I may seem, you know,
very civil here and so on,
but I can hip check anybody for a taxicab
in this room, on these streets.
So I was surprised
when I said to this guy …
“Would you like half?”
“Would you like half?”
I didn’t think about it, it just came out.
And then, he was very puzzled,
and I could see his face change
and he said to me,
“Well, how about if I buy another pastry
and we’ll share both of them?”
And he did, and we did.
And we sat and talked.
We had nothing in common.
(Laughter)
We had nothing in common: nationality,
sexual orientation, occupation.
But through this moment of kindness,
through this moment of connection,
we developed a friendship,
we have stayed in touch.
(Laughter)
Although he was appalled to learn
that I’m called the Civilist after that.
(Laughter)
But I call this the joy of civility.
The joy of civility.
And it led me to wonder,
what is the good we forgo,
not just the trouble we avoid,
when we choose to be uncivil.
And by good, I mean friendship,
I mean connection.
I mean sharing 1000 calories.
But I also mean it in a larger way.
You know, as communities
and as a country and as a world.
What are we missing out on?
So, today, we are engaged in a great
civil war of ideas and identity.
And we have no rules for them.
You know, there are rules for war.
Think about the Geneva Conventions.
They ensure that every soldier
is treated humanely,
on and off the battlefield.
So, frankly, I think we need
a Geneva Convention of civility,
to set the rules for discourse
for the parameters of that.
To help us become better citizens
of our communities and of our countries.
And if I have anything to say about it,
I would base those rules
on the original definition of civility,
from the Latin and from the French.
Civility:
citizens willing to give of themselves
for the greater good.
For the good of the city.
So I think civility, with that
understanding, is not a dirty word.
And I hope the civilist will not become,
or will not stay, obsolete.
Thank you.
(Applause)