Book: How Civility Works

How Civility Works

By Keith Bybee

I enjoyed reading this good book by my old professor, Keith Bybee.??He now carries the august and well deserved titles of Vice Dean and Paul E. and Hon. Joanne F. Alper ’72 Judiciary Studies Professor at the College of Law.??Say that ten times fast.

As you will no doubt know, discussion of civility is?au courant.??No, that’s not fair.??Discussion of civility is?everywhere, and it should be.??Our country – set aside the world for the moment – is so very divided, and so very nastily so.??Many rightfully fret about the state of discourse, the nature of disagreement, and the future of a nation that sometimes feels as if it is tearing itself apart.??Far too often, we can’t even nowadays seem to agree on the _basis_ of agreement.??The truth itself is up for grabs.??Even the concept of truth – whether something is knowable for a certainty in the first place – is under assault.??And the tone of the debate, such is it might be called debate rather than something far less worthy, is ever so mean.??Disagree with a person, and you risk being called a bigot.??What a mess.??These days, the American experiment is under test.

But many point out – you have heard this, maybe – that we’ve been here before.??Maybe not in our lifetimes, but in those of our predecessors.??In prior centuries, Presidential candidates have accused each other of fathering illegitimate children.??Broadsides and pamphlets were published containing outright calumny and libel in political and business contests.??Newspapers printed flat lies.??Today’s nastiness is just more of the same.??“It’s always been thus,” is the line.??(As an aside, we see a lot of that kind of ahistorical nonsense in Silicon Valley, which is populated by geniuses and their acolytes who, nearly none of them, know the first thing about history.??Here, in technology circles, when you hear “it’s always been like this,” it’s very usually a canard.??You know the kinds of claims I mean.??They sounds like this: “A massive social media platform consumed instantly by billions is just like a telephone pole where posters used to be stapled or the local village public square where activist used to make her claim known.”??Silicon Valley does give us many great goods, but along with them come obviously wrong full-throated defenses such as these, proffered by otherwise qualified and sane individuals.)??In the case of American history and the complained of perpetual decline in civility – we might call it yet another example of the American jeremiad – there is some power to the idea that “civility” follows a bit of a sine wave, sometimes rising and other times descending.

That is, I think, the central hope (if not idea) of?How Civility Works.??It was published in 2016, before Trump’s presidency moved the goalposts on just about everything the book treats, from disinformation to facticity to rhetoric.??The manuscript was nearly fully conceived – and, it appears, nearly fully finished – before Trump's ascendancy and the full sound of his voice had become so very clear.?The book has both the strength and weakness of focusing much of its energy on the by-now-mild mid 2010s.

I suppose I found myself unfairly wanting something else from How Civility Works.?I wanted the book to grapple, insofar as it was going to treat the Trump-and-later moment (or the Internet-meets-Democracy moment), with the challenge to facticity that is upon us.?The book understands the problem and the importance of the moment very well.?“Many commentators consider current conditions to be a crisis and a harbinger of imminent social collapse.”?(68)?That's exactly right.?But one might, again, be permitted to read the book to – no no stopping now – shoehorn this exactly well-stated problem into the “example” or “locus” of “civility.”?I can't imagine that 900 or even, perhaps 990, commentators out of 1,000 would say the actual major failure today lies in the scope and practice of civility.?(I do think that the George W. Bush campaign era, flush the jovial nastiness of Karl Rove and crew, might have yielded the "wherefore civility?" threnody. But today is something quite different.)??No doubt the incivility of the Trump era (though not yet, perhaps, of 2015-16) was a lamentable symptom of the underlying actual problems they would cite.?But I would speculate that nearly all of these commentators would suggest that lying, alternate truth-telling, disinformation, and attendant facial challenges to shared forms of facticity, to shared paradigms of knowability and proof, to shared definitions, to shared epistemology – those would be deemed the major causes and symptoms, and incivility would be cast as a sidebar.?It struck me, as a reader who is no doubt rooting for the book and the author, that locating the problems of today in the familiar, episodic, classically American jeremiadical absence of civility is like locating the civilian problems of 1945 Hiroshima in the absence of running water.?While somehow true, it is also, well, quite beside the point.?By the account of the book itself, truth and civility are only fairly distant cousins, and that must be especially true in moments of political upheaval, as compared to the salon and porridge discourses of Miss Manners and her predecessors.?

For myself, I think it is an open question whether our prior notions of democracy and republican government can and will prove to be compatible with the Internet.?I hope we will conclude yes, and it's an objective worth the battle.?But it is not yet clear to me -- nor, probably, to most of us who have lived and breathed the strengths and frailties of Silicon Valley and its non-ironic solutionism – that democracy remains inevitable in the long run.??I have spent much of my last fifteen years working on closely related problems.??I remain hopeful.??But I don't think it comes down to relative predominance of civility, which, as the book says, is easily provably a sine wave function in at least the western democratic tradition.

But again, my reservation about the book is, on some level, necessarily unfair.?The damage wrought over the past four to five years was not really yet visible when the book was published, nor, I am guessing, when it was written.?The mistake might be to imagine that the book could accurately anticipate what was to come shortly after it appeared.

I wonder what Bybee might write now.??I wonder what the next edition of the book might bring. #Civility #Book #BookReview

Recommended:?https://www.amazon.com/How-Civility-Works-Keith-Bybee/dp/1503601544