Civility and Civil Courage

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, Virginia), April 29, 2007, by the Rev. Don Robert Johnson, a former Methodist minister, a former college chaplain, and Leader Emeritus of the Ethical Society of St. Louis. Rev Johnson will be in the pulpit twice a month during Rev. Brownlie’s sabbatical.

Readings

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

David Hume

I like regularity of behavior and courtesy of manner and due attention paid to the existence of other people. I like an ordered life and discretion and reliability.

Anita Brookner

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, canot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

Lewis Lapham

Whenever people say, We mustn’t be sentimental, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. and if they add, We must be realistic, they mean they are going to make money from it.

Brigid Brophy

A society based on cash and self-interest is not a society at all, but a state of war.

William Morris

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

Abraham Lincoln

Tact is making people feel at home when you wish they were.

Anonymous

In society it is etiquette for ladies to have the best chairs and get handed things. In the home the reverse is true. That is why ladies are more sociable than gentlemen.

Virginia Graham

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

George Bernard Shaw

Good manners have much to do with the emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel them, not merely exhibit them.

Amy Vanderbilt

I Civility

In the marvelous movie, “The Age of Innocence,” set in the 1870s in Victorian New York World, based on Edith Wharton’s novel with the same name, the narrator or selected characters make the following comments:

“Fashion is a serious consideration among people who have nothing more serious to consider.”

“There existed such a tenuous balance of convention and conformity . . . which could be destroyed by a whisper.”

“It was a hieroglyphic world where nothing was ever really said, yet somehow known” and this world was like “a curtain dropped down over emptiness.”

This stifling, insulated environment among the aristocracy was so carefully orchestrated that even the color of one residence could be described as “a pale cream controversial” house.

This was the period when an IRA gunman broke into the house of Lord Dunsay in 1922 and started a fire. Before he left he heard these words from the ever so polite butler who he had just pushed aside: “Who shall I say called?”

Or a woman could lose favor among the upper social class if she served burgundy in port glasses.

While a certain kind of civility was embodied in this age, it is not one to which most of us would desire to return. Yet we may have gone from one extreme to another, where being civilized (in the sense of polite, considerate, and courteous) and cultured (in the sense of developing and cultivating a manner of being) has almost disappeared entirely.

It is true, as Francis Bacon pointed out many centuries ago, that convention and custom can be divisive, exercising a conservative, even repressive effect in a culture, thereby impeding true progress. But civility may also serve in a cohesive way in a society, conserving valuable achievements of the past. Habit, ritual, custom, manners may indeed be negative or positive.

Humility before the unknowable, the acceptance that there is much more we will never understand, makes possible self-criticism, self-awareness, self-possession, and self-reflection. They make possible compassion and acts of kindness. They allow us to see ourselves in the stranger, to reach out in solidarity to those who travel with us on this dusty, brief and often lonely road of life. This honesty and humility make possible a diverse and tolerant human community.

The power of custom and convention, the recognition of their influence is not new, as Plato tells us:

We can neither call these things laws, nor yet leave them unmentioned, for they are the bonds of the whole state, they are ancestral customs of great antiquity, which, if they are rightly ordered and made habitual, shield and preserve the previously existing written law; but if they depart from right and fall into disorder, then they are like the props of builders which slip away out of their place and cause a universal ruin—one part drags another down, and the fair superstructure falls because the old foundations are undermined. . . . You ought to bind together . . . in every possible way, omitting nothing, whether great or small, of what are called laws or manners or pursuits, for by these means a city is bound together.

John Dewey, in Habits and Will went so far as to say habits constitute the self, they are will, they form our effective desires and they rule our thoughts.

Mill clearly sought to balance the individual and the community in a point important for our own time:

There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it. The difficulty then was to induce people of strong bodies or minds to pay obedience to any rules which required them to control their impulses.

In some areas of our common life such a time has again arrived where the need is to induce people to pay obedience to rules which require them to control their impulses.

When you read about a driver being shot by another driver because he cut in front of him, or a pedestrian beaten by a motorist angry at his being in the way, you begin to realize all these little problems fit into a bigger picture and become significant because they reveal our culture's disintegration around common, agreed upon daily behaviors.

No, I don't want to see a return to the days of my childhood (where children were to be seen, not heard) but I am a believer in dialogue and contact between the generations rather than the assumption by people, as Mill put it, that nothing whatever had been known in the world before they came into it or that nothing of significance has come since.

Protection of individual autonomy does not mean that one mode of existence or of conduct is not preferable to another, nor that no common manners, customs, or traditions matter. Being fashionable is not, of course, my idea of an ethic of civility, but how, where and when one addresses a person with whom one disagrees, and a little forbearance, patience, responsibility, and courtesy in the small, daily expressions of life do have an impact!

And the education of the young or the unknowledgeable in some basic acts of civility is part of an ethical society. We are, after all, a long ways away from the superficialities of the Victorian age, yet we are not free of our own superficialities. While we need not take each daily act or habit as of religious solemnity, yet to value a shared meal, hold a door, refrain from constant use of foul language and gestures can make our lives far more humane. We don't have to exceed all of the past in our rude excesses. Yes, Moliere, Chekhov, and others rightly challenged the hypocrisy and superficiality of proper society, but they were not calling for an end to all civil behavior.

One of the ways we will create civility in our time and yet protect it from the worst of the Victorian excesses is to recognize the power of place and build public spaces of civility. Instead of the Victorian models of hidden homes of luxury, levels of hierarchy, and burdensome restrictions, we need places that are levelers of distinction, that encourage connection and conversation, that offer accessibility and accommodation for all, and relieve the pressures of modern, technological stress (e.g., see The Great Good Places by Ray Oldenburg).

Lewis Mumford, in The Basis of Human Development said:

Most of man's evaluations and choices, naturally, were made long ago by the society and culture in which the person finds himself. Significantly, in their origin, the words ethics and morals are equivalent to habits and customs; and firm social habits, since they are the very basis of orderly and calculable behavior, are fundamental to all higher forms of development. While we may rise above our habits into freedom, we must never sink below them into random caprice. Life would be one long blundering frustrating confusion if each generation had to discover entirely by itself what was good for it. That is why a purely experimental ethics, worked out from day to day in the light of the situations encountered in a single lifetime, will ordinarily lead to disaster. But even when human conduct is based on sound tradition and guided further by reason, sound choices are not automatic or infallible; nor is there any assurance that good intentions will produce good results. Eve! n when values are well established and widely assimilated, they must still in each particular case be recognized as appropriate to the occasion and carried out. The habitual, the traditional, the conservatively moral, are necessary starting points for the proper conduct of life; but they do not in themselves guarantee man's development.

Civility, then. is the attitude members of a healthy society have toward each other and is followed by similar good behavior.

The basis of civility is not that the participants know, love, or even like each other; there is no fundamental principle to which they have sworn allegiance; there is no overarching ideal whose inspirational force establishes their solidarity. We do not treat others decently because we like them. Indeed, we could not like them, since the vast majority are strangers to us. Civility is the attitude that permits strangers, who are connected only by adherence to the same social morality, to live together harmoniously.

An old Jewish teaching compares the tongue to an arrow. Why not another weapon, a sword, for example? one rabbi asks. Because, he is told, if a man unsheathes his sword to kill someone, and the other person pleads with him and begs for mercy, the man may be mollified and return the sword to its scabbard. But an arrow, once it is shot cannot be returned, no matter how much one wants to. Jewish teachings go so far as to compare cruel words to murder.

That words are powerful may seem obvious, but the fact is that most of us, most of the time, use them lightly. We choose our clothes more carefully than we choose our words, though what we say about and to others can define them indelibly.

In early Christian writings, in the Book of James which emphasizes deeds, the writer says faith without works is dead, yet emphasizes the power of the tongue and the importance of words.

Speak No Evil Day, which is observed on May 14 has both short- and long-term goals: to eliminate all vicious and unfair talk for twenty-four hours, and thus plant the seed of a more permanent shift in our consciousness.

II. Concerning Civil Courage

Also in this address I am urging us to go beyond the concept of civility as cosmetics. (Changing the name of a group from Indian to Native American while important, is still only a surface change unless we truly move beyond stereotypes.) In the term civil courage I am trying to emphasize the determination and persistence necessary if we are to improve our public life.

Otherwise the philosopher Clement Rosset will be right when he reported:

It was said of the United States that it is one of the rare nations in the world to have evolved directly from barbarity to decadence without having gone through the stage of civilization.

Courage will be necessary if we are to move forward as a people, in both small and major ways:

One spring I walked out of a building onto Central Park West and to go to a reception. At this corner was a family - a mother, father, and two small children about two and four. They were standing, waiting for the traffic light to change to green and to the walk sign. I noticed adults hurriedly passing them by on both sides, thoughtless as to their own actions. I went to the corner and stood next to the family - waiting for the traffic light changes. It may seem a little thing - yet I felt awkward and embarrassed just standing there while real New Yorkers whizzed past. Do we have no obligations towards the parents who were trying to teach important lessons to their children? What role do we have in relationship to public safety? Or even public courtesy?

I saw a program on the Little Rock Central High School where integration took place with the aid of federal troops in 1957. One woman shared her own actions in those events — she was in one of the classes with one of the nine black students who were integrating the school on that day. Students were told to open their books to the assignment.

She noticed from across the room he had no book and she got up, moved her desk across to his and shared her textbook with him. Throughout her senior year, she paid the consequences for her act of civil courage.

It reminded me of a wonderful parishioner by the name of Georgia Warner, in a church I served in Southern Iowa who shared with me one of her own acts of civil courage. She went to the deep South in the early 50s on a visit. Shocked at the symbols of segregation before her, the water fountain and the restrooms separated into “white” and “colored,” she defiantly used the “colored” facilities and ended up at the police station.

Or I think of an article on the Civil War battle at Fredericksburg, VA. The Union army suffered an immense defeat, losing over 3000 soldiers in less than an hour. Fallen comrades tried to grab the heels of those following them to try to warn them to turn around. After the battle the agonizing cries of the wounded and dying reverberated in the ears of those alive. The only monument erected is to a South Carolina Confederate soldier, Sergeant Richard Kirkland, who kept imploring his officers to let him go to the aid of the Union soldiers until they gave in. He climbed the wall, and by his civil courage became an angel of mercy.

I have marveled at the stories I have learned about people who have had to start their lives all over again. I think of Darcie Deneal. Darcie is a nurse who can remember watching a March-of-Dimes telethon when she was about 4. She was moved by nurses talking about traveling around the world to treat the ill, and she became a nurse.

Darcie lost her only son in an automobile accident in 1998, when he was seventeen. I have always felt that the grief of losing a child has to be among the hardest mournings. One never expects to outlive their children. One of her few comforts after his death were the many photos she had of him growing up. After Jeremy's death, Deneal realized how important the photos of him were to her own comfort with “a hurt you think is going to get better but never does.”

So she started the Jeremy Project. Deneal began offering to take pictures for families dealing with special issues of children with terminal illnesses. The powerful black-and-white photographs are of intimate images of infants with shortened life expectancy, from a few hours to a few years, and their families. The graceful images are filled with warmth and life. Here, even in the facing of death one sees the powerful love that exists, honors, and finds meaning in parents lovingly nuzzling newborns, portraits of love that help sustain these families in their own difficulties and losses.

This serves as a wonderful example of a person “creating a life anew”, and doing it in a way that aids others. Darcie Deneal, we salute you (see <www.thejeremyproject.org>).

I also read the story of Jason Robertson, who contracted HIV/Aids when he was 5 as result of blood products used to treat his hemoplhilia. Jason lived through the controversy of school parents protesting his being allowed to attend school, the loss of his few friends, who also had hiv/aids dying, and his attempts to build some semblance of a normal life over his short 23 year life.

I read of a caring nurse, who recently died when she stopped on the interstate to check on people in an accident and was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Or I can mention Albert Lexie, a 61 year old shoeshine man in Pittsburgh who for the past 20 years has gotten out of bed at 5 am every Tuesday and Thursday, takes 2 buses to get to the Children's hospital in Pittsburgh and makes his rounds offering to shine shoes for $3. And every Tuesday afternoon he goes in with his weekly donation to the hospitals Free Care Fund. In 20 years he donated over $89,000 to the fund for pediatric patients.

I know such civil courage has happened by the acts of people in this very room and we heard of many heroic acts of last week.

Kevin Granata was a world-class researcher who studied neuromuscular control and the mechanics of how people walk and run, work that could aid new developments in cerebral palsy. We now know that last week he rushed students into his office behind a locked door and then went out again to check on others and the noise. He gave his life out of concern for others.

Livulu Librescu, a Romanian born Jew, was a senior researcher and lecturer in engineering. When he realized what was happening last week he blocked the door from the gunman while students took cover or leapt from windows to safety. A Holocaust survivor, he died on Yom Ha Shoah, the day of remembrance of the victims and heroes of the holocaust.

Civil courage is necessary in order to call into question the status quo that is oppressive, to counter the customs that have moved from becoming the great guide of human life to means destructive of mutuality, cooperation and community. The good life and the civil society come about when we have the wisdom to know the difference between meaningless, oppressive behaviors and those that stand as means for a positive common life.

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