The Steep Price of Declining Civility

A review of "The Soul of Civility" by Alexandra Hudson.

Civilization is fragile. Countless social and commercial interactions build civilization. In one of his most essential essays, “Individualism: True and False,” F. A. Hayek warns, “While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.”

Today, an alarming number of people see a collapse as a good thing. Some deeply pessimistic brokenists view our institutions as beyond repair, making a restart preferable. Some radical activists desire the collapse of Western civilization.

Hayek might say, be careful what you wish for; few will escape the carnage that a collapse in civilization would bring.

If you are concerned about Hayek’s warning, then Alexandra Hudson’s superb book The Soul of Civility is part of the educational corrective.

I write educational corrective because Hudson would argue that if our institutions are failing, it’s because we are making bad moral choices. We can and must do better, not only for ourselves but for the sake of humanity. Hudson writes, “We can’t change society, but we can change ourselves and how we operate in the world around us. And if enough of us decide to change ourselves, we might be able to change the world we live in, too.” This is not a call to elect better leaders or align with a tribal identity.

Civility, Hudson informs us, “is the basic respect we are owed by virtue of our shared dignity and equal moral worth as human beings.” She continues, “We owe this to others regardless of who they are, what they look like, where they are from, whether or not we like them, and whether or not they can do anything for us.”

Drawing on the work of philosopher Martin Buber, Hudson argues, “We must consciously battle the perennial temptation to see the world and others exclusively through the lens of our own experiences and advancement. We instrumentalize people when it suits us — and are quick to (appear to) be kind and generous when we have something to gain.” (Recall that we met Buber’s ideas during our study Terry Warner’s Bonds That Make Us Free.)

Hudson provides a simple guideline: “Moral habits that promote human flourishing are virtues. Moral habits that divide us — within ourselves and between us and others — are vices.”

Hudson explains that civility is not the same as politeness, and a cultivated personality is not the same as character. She encourages us to stand for timeless principles even when others strongly disagree.

She argues that virtue cannot be legislated. As we become more virtuous, enlivened in us is the moral sentiment that, by birthright, every human being is equal to others.

Hudson’s mission is to inspire virtue to save liberty. Many thinkers influenced her, including Ben Franklin, who warned, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

She quotes Edmund Burke, who wrote, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in the exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” Like Franklin, Burke saw that if the “controlling power” is not found within individuals, it will be found without in the hands of authoritarians.

Hudson shares what the American jurist Learned Hand wrote in the twentieth century: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

Perfect Days, a hauntingly beautiful film by Wim Wenders, depicts the life of a Tokyo street toilet cleaner. The baseline high level of cleanliness in Japanese public restrooms and streets is unimaginable in US cities. Law does not mandate this individual attention to cleanliness; it’s a demonstration of respect for others.

Recently, in a Philadelphia bar, some young people danced and took selfies to a sign saying “F##k the Jews.” One of the students involved claimed it was just an “edgy joke.”

“Government can’t legislate thought,” said Congressman Thomas Massie when he voted against a bill condemning antisemitism a few years ago. Massie is right, but he is making Hudson’s point.

If you want to live in a society where antisemitism has been normalized, don’t expect to escape the consequences.

“Obedience to the unenforceable” is a concept introduced by John Fletcher Moulton, a nineteenth-century English mathematician and judge. Moulton and Hudson agree this obedience is where “the real greatness of a nation, its true civilization” lies. Hudson adds, “The more society relies on self-regulation — and the less it relies on law, coercion, conflict, and litigation — the freer it is.”

She makes the case that “a free society depends on its citizens deciding to do the honorable and virtuous actions even when they have the opportunity not to do so.” Hudson wants us to consider our willingness to be obedient to unenforceable virtues.

On a good day, if you stay off social media and the news, you may never have cause to think about the ideas in Hudson’s book. On a good day, your life works pretty well. You have electricity at your fingertips, food on the table, and people who love and care for you. It’s unlikely you’ll ever visit that Philadelphia bar.

Our character is tested not by our good days — the calm seas of economic prosperity and social cohesion — but by challenging economic times and times when the bonds of civil society are frayed. Hudson’s book is preventive medicine.

Recently, during a fitting for my wife’s dental crown, the dentist and her assistant worked well into their lunch hour to get the fit precise. Some dentists might have cut corners. Instead, the dentist placed my wife’s needs first. Hudson advises we need more of such transactions in everyday life. She writes, “Our everyday interactions can either elevate or degrade our experience of living in society together. Our considerateness toward others promotes mutual trust, and in turn, our freedom and flourishing.”

Building on Hayek, Hudson points out that there is a difference between the thick trust we have with families and friends and the thin trust we may build with strangers.

Thin trust makes commercial society possible. Hudson writes that thin trust “is generalizable trust, or the trust we place in the countless strangers we interact with every day. Thin trust lowers the transaction costs in our anonymous society, and is built by our small acts of kindness and generosity toward strangers.”

The “tranquility of mind which is so necessary to happiness… is best promoted by the…passions of gratitude and love,” wrote Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Hudson writes, “No earthly battle is worth compromising the health and life of our soul. At the end of the day, we cannot control the civility or incivility of others. We can only control ourselves.”

Each of us will fail to control ourselves many times today. What matters is not that, as flawed humans, we make errors, but that we are willing to have those errors corrected by the bonds of affection that help us all flourish.

This essay was orginally published at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Here is a bonus quotation from Alexandra very much in keeping with our work at Mindset Shifts U:

When you’re tempted to be offended by someone’s thoughtlessness, try to interpret the incident in isolation: there is no cosmic, orchestrated plot against you. Thoughtlessness is not malice. Most people are tired enough merely surviving, trying to meet their own basic needs and those of their loved ones. Our baser, selfish natures prompt us to tell stories to ourselves that place us at the center as the victim. Remember that this is our selfish nature in action, and it’s usually not accurate.—Alexandra Hudson

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