Name: 【TED】Teresa Bejan: Is civility a sham? (Is civility a sham? | Teresa Bejan)
Uploaded: 2018-12-05T16:46:45.000Z
Duration: 13 min 54 s
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I'm here because I wrote a book about civility,

right around the 2016 American presidential election,

I started getting lots of invitations to come and talk about civility

and why we need more of it in American politics.

The only problem was that I had written that book about civility

because I was convinced that civility is ...

Now, that may sound like a highly uncivil thing to say,

and studying the long history of civility and religious tolerance

I came to discover that there is a virtue of civility,

and far from being bullshit, it's actually absolutely essential,

so societies like this one, that promise not only to protect diversity

but also the heated and sometimes even hateful disagreements

that "disagreeable" is a synonym for "unpleasant."

As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes pointed out

that's because the mere act of disagreement is offensive.

And Hobbes is still right. It works like this:

how am I to make sense of the fact that you are so very, very wrong?

It couldn't possibly be that you've just come to a different conclusion

No, you must be up to something, you must be stupid,

So the mere fact of your disagreeing with me

is implicitly an insult not only to my views, but to my intelligence, too.

And things only get worse when the disagreements at stake

are the ones that we somehow consider to be fundamental,

whether to our worldviews or to our identities.

You know the kinds of disagreement I mean.

or increasingly, the politics of popular culture, at the dinner table,

these are the things that people really, seriously disagree about,

and they define themselves against their opponents in the controversy.

But of course those fundamental disagreements

are precisely the ones that tolerant societies

like the United States propose to tolerate,

which perhaps explains why, historically, at least,

tolerant societies haven't been the happy-clappy communities of difference

No, they tend to be places where people have to hold their noses

and rub along together despite their mutual contempt.

That's what I learned from studying religious tolerance

And I also learned that the virtue that makes

that un-murderous coexistence, if you will, possible,

because civility makes our disagreements tolerable

so that we can share a life together even if we don't share a faith --

that when most people talk about civility today --

and boy, do they talk about civility a lot --

they seem to have something else in mind.

So if civility is the virtue that makes it possible to tolerate disagreement

so that we can actually engage with our opponents,

seems to be mainly a strategy of disengagement.

It's a little bit like threatening to take your ball and go home

is that it's always the sin of our opponents.

well, we seem to develop sudden-onset amnesia,

or we can always justify it as an appropriate response

to the latest outrage from our opponents.

So, "How can I be civil to someone who is set out to destroy

Also convenient is the fact that most of today's big civility talkers

when it comes to what they think civility actually entails.

We're told that civility is simply a synonym for respect,

but at the same time, it's clear that to accuse someone of incivility

is much, much worse than calling them impolite,

because to be uncivil is to be potentially intolerable

So to call someone uncivil, to accuse them of incivility,

is a way of communicating that they are somehow beyond the pale,

that they're not worth engaging with at all.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Teresa Bejan: Is civility a sham? (Is civility a sham? | Teresa Bejan)

eventually

strategy

crisis

tend