Civility: The Invisible Glue of Society

Adam Smith recognized that true human flourishing requires more than riches.

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Commentary

There has never been a time when more people had an “excuse” for being rude at an airport.

During the recent Transportation Security Administration (TSA) government shutdown, some airports, including Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, experienced screening lines in which, on some days, people had to wait for more than six hours.

During the showdown, my wife and I flew home through Atlanta. Thanks to a real-time Reddit thread, we found the fastest line and didn’t encounter anything close to a six-hour wait.

Although no one was happy, travelers accepted their plight stoically and civilly.

Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is the busiest airport in the world, handling close to 300,000 passengers daily. A miraculous mixture of cooperation and specialization makes that possible. Most of the more than 2,000 arrivals and departures are on time. A wide variety of food choices are available while you wait, and the purposeful faces of humanity hustle past each other, with no one being jostled.

Civility was the order of the day. Despite the hardships at the airport, only occasional miscreants tried to cut in line. Few acted like entitled boors.

F.A. Hayek explained how a healthy society functions when individuals submit to the “discipline of abstract rules.” These rules, which we may not even be able to articulate, create an environment in which people can form expectations and cooperate with others.

Even when meeting strangers, we rely on shared abstract rules. Hayek explored how, when traveling to another part of our own country, “Though we have never before seen the people ... their modes of conduct and their moral and aesthetic values will be familiar to us.”

Civility is a pillar of freedom. Hayek warned, “Coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.”

In totalitarian societies, order is accepted as the product of a “deliberate arrangement” and, in Hayek’s words, “must rest on a relation of command and obedience.”

In a tribal society, norms of honesty and human regard don’t apply to those outside the tribe. Without coercion, people would not remain civil for long while standing in line with strangers for six hours at an airport.

As political tribalism grows, norms of mutual regard that make shared life possible shrink. Seeing others as objects that serve our ends overtakes the mindset of seeing people as real as we are.

What will happen in America as us-versus-them tribalism grows? One poll showed that 80 percent of college students would not room with someone who voted differently from them.

A crisis of civility is also a crisis of freedom. Is a crisis of civility coming our way?

What Adam Smith Understood

Adam Smith opened “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” with a challenge to beliefs some hold about human nature. However selfish we suppose a person to be, he wrote, there are “some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Activating empathy requires a disciplined willingness to see the world from somewhere other than the center of our own concerns.

Smith’s mechanism for this was the “impartial spectator”—that internalized judge we can learn to consult, who evaluates our conduct not from the vantage point of our own interests but from the position of a disinterested observer.

“We can never survey our own sentiments and motives,” Smith wrote.

“We can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us.”

To maintain freedom, the inner work of civility is required.

Smith understood what was at stake if we failed to do this work.

“Society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another,” he wrote.

Justice, or not injuring others, he argued, is “the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice.” Remove it, and “the great, the immense fabric of human society ... must in a moment crumble into atoms.” But justice does not generate itself. It depends on habits of mutual regard, whose automatic responses toward strangers carry at least the minimum of respect that social life requires.

Civilization progresses or regresses, Smith believed, depending on our adherence to those habits and our willingness to tame what he called “the great division of our affections”—the selfish side that, left unchecked, will always treat other people as props in one’s own story of me.

At the airport, the number of people thinking, “Don’t you know how important I am?” is still largely limited to members of Congress.

Civility Is Not Politeness

Most of us use “manners” and “civility” as though they mean the same thing. Alexandra Hudson wants us to understand what that confusion is costing us.

In “The Soul of Civility,” Hudson drew a clear line between the two.

Civility is something deeper than manners. Drawing on the work of philosopher Martin Buber, Hudson sees it as a disposition to see other human beings as inherently worthy of respect. Manners, she wrote, are “the form, the technique, of an act, but civility is more.” Without the inner disposition, politeness is a performance. With it, even blunt speech and action can remain genuinely civil.

A poll shows that 80 percent of college students self-censor out of fear of offending. Freedom is not maintained by people fitting in.

Civility—not agreement—is what we owe one another as participants in a shared society. With civility, we recognize that the person across from us—in the TSA line, in the comment section, in the meeting room—is a genuine human being and not an obstacle, irrelevant, or merely a means to our end.

When we fail to make that recognition habitual, we reveal what Smith understood: Social fabric is far more fragile than we imagine and would tear without our everyday moral exertions.

Hudson put it plainly: “[Civility] promotes social and political freedom by empowering us to keep the expressions of our baser, self-interested instincts in check instead of relying on external forces, such as government mandates, to do so.”

Habits of self-governance are demonstrated by the small daily acts of deference, patience, and mutual recognition. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism arise when self-governance weakens and is replaced by compliance.

With precision, Hudson identified the root of the problem: “[The] outsized self-love of human beings continues to be the preeminent threat to social concord today.” The antidote to that self-love is not a regulation.

“[It is civility] tempering our self-love out of respect for others, but also so that our social natures can flourish,” Hudson wrote.

We can stand in a TSA line, seething at the traveler in front of us who is struggling to find his boarding pass. Yet, despite an external polite performance, our every sigh makes it obvious that we regard this fellow traveler as an obstacle.

The alternative is to recognize that he is probably as stressed as we are and as likely to see everyone else as the problem. We can, in Smith’s language, view the scene from a distance. From that distance, our irritation becomes harder to justify, and the humanity of the fellow traveler harder to ignore.

It is in those smallest of daily encounters that civility is strengthened, and freedom is renewed.

From the American Institute for Economic Research