Civility and Community

Civility and Community:

The word “civility” is cognate with “civilization.” And the word “communication” is cognate with “community.” Both civility and communication, I would argue, are essential, if we are to sustain our community and civilization, and thereby avoid endless tribal warfare, in our locality, in our nation, and on our planet as a whole. When civility and communication are undermined by bad faith, sneering, and rancor, it threatens both our community and our civilization. This is one reason why learning how to communicate ideas clearly, with civility, is so important—especially during an unprecedented global crisis.

The words “civility” and “civilization” both derive from the Latin world “civitas,” which means “city.” And cities, as opposed to small towns, are places where people of many different backgrounds—ethnic, social, religious, and ideological—are in constant commerce and interaction with each other. In order to do business, and in order to get along, people in cities had no choice but to learn how to communicate with people unlike themselves in a civil manner.

I have lived long enough now to remember when civility was the norm in our national political discourse. When I was young, there were only three television networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS. These networks were staffed with the top tier of career journalists—people like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, Howard K. Smith, , and later, Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer, with a solid liberal arts education and backgrounds in both radio and newspapers, who had internalized norms of civility throughout their careers, and promoted critical inquiry and thoughtful debate among their guests. They also selflessly served the public interest, holding both Democratic and Republican administrations and elected officials accountable for their actions and words, and their newscasts were followed by everyone in the country.  And so, at that time, widespread public demonstrations like the 1963 March on Washington, or Earth Day 1970, were covered extensively by all three networks. At these times, America was the envy of the world, emulated by everyone else (except, of course, their ideological foes in totalitarian countries like Russia and China).

What happened? There are, of course, multiple causes for the decline of civility into the kind of divisiveness, sneering, blatant lying, malice, paranoia, and rancor that have contaminated our public discourse to the point where people are afraid to even discuss politics unless they know ahead of time that the person they are talking to is “one of us” rather than “one of them.” One could blame the Internet, of course, for creating a situation in which everyone can create their own information bubble, where giant media monopolies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon use algorithms to develop profiles of users and feed them only the news and views (and misinformation) they want to hear.

But this decline in civility and decency, at first gradual, became more precipitous with the rise of Fox News, the malignant brainchild of Australian media mogul and scandalmonger Rupert Murdoch and master Republican propagandist (and convicted sexual predator) Roger Ailes. These two evil geniuses—there is no other word—created a worldwide media empire by abandoning all the norms of decency and civil discourse, and appealing instead to sensationalism, and to the fears, hatreds, and prejudices of the lowest common denominator of their audience. In so doing, they outdid both Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in poisoning the well of public discourse in order to create an unholy alliance between the interests of the corporate elite, on one hand, and the uneducated, embittered, easily manipulated,  lumpenproletariat (i.e. suburban and rural white working class) whose communities were hollowed out and demoralized by globalization, due to multinational corporations exporting manufacturing jobs overseas in search of cheap labor.

Their agenda is to turn the growing rage of this population—not against the corporations that had once provided them secure jobs and a decent lifelihood—but against “the government” who has allowed this, and especially against the “lib’ruls” whom they demonize as “elitists” who pose a direct threat to all that is godly and American. Their logic is simple and deceptive: ethnic minorities and foreigners, supported by “lib’ruls,” are taking away their jobs—while the corporations (that abandoned them) are their friends and will come back as soon as enough corporate tax breaks are given and environmental regulations are lifted.   Through the brazenly partisan 24-7 propaganda of Fox News, led by scurrilous, sneering hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Ann Coulter, these angry, frustrated people are worked up into a lather of resentment and paranoia against anyone who supports taxing the rich or  legislation or regulations in the public interest—rather than against super-rich corporate interests.  Republican operatives call this “energizing the base”—a term whose double meaning should be an obvious indicator of their actual contempt for those they are manipulating.  And oil-funded billionaires like the Koch Brothers planned and subsidized so-called “grassroots movements” like the widespread “Tea Party” protests to defeat an Affordable Care Act that ironically benefitted the protestors themselves.

Yet as late as 2008 and 2012, basic civility between the parties was still evident at the highest levels. I well remember the dignity of John McCain, promptly and firmly suppressing the ugly sneering and catcalls of many of his supporters during his concession speech in 2008, saying of Obama, “He was my political opponent, but now he is my President, and we must all congratulate him.” 

Then came 2016, the rise of Donald Trump, and the end of all semblance of civility in public discourse. In the words of Matthew Arnold, “And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The time has come...

This morning, my wife told me that J.C. Penney's--a renowned, century-old chain of department stores--has declared bankruptcy. And unfortunately, many other large, corporate retail outlets will soon follow in its wake--simply because the still-accelerating Coronavirus pandemic, and the social distancing it requires for our survival, has paralyzed commerce all over the world--and commerce--the buying and selling of commodities--is the lifeblood of what I call "Glomart"--the global market economy--upon which our national economy and our consumer-capitalist culture depends. So, as this grim article portends, the American economy is already into free-fall, self-accelerating collapse, and following shortly thereafter will be the corresponding collapse of democracy, any sense of the public good, and the social contracts that make affluence possible for all but the super-rich.

But despite the pronounced contempt that this European writer has for American culture, our collapse into poverty, tyranny, and chaos will likely be followed by the break-up and collapse of every other industrialized nation on the planet, starting with Britain (because of its foolhardy "Brexit" move).  In a pandemic and global depression, there are no "winners." Even the most intelligent and adaptive nations, such as South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Canada, will face a rapidly shrinking GNP once global commerce has broken down.  And because the flow of capital always gravitates toward the top, these countries will likewise face systemic unemployment, increased poverty and homelessness, and the breakdown of public support for the social safety nets like universal health care and free education, once people are too poor to pay the taxes that it requires. Tyranny--driven by nationalism and xenophobia--will likely follow in these countries as well...

And yet, as Bill Mollison famously quipped, "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities."
A crisis--even a terrifying existential crisis like this one--becomes an opportunity when we look at it through new eyes.  Here is one attempt to do so, by mapping the three core ethics of Permaculture--Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share--onto my own homespun slogan, a generic recipe for these challenging times:  "Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness."

Earth Care - Grow Gardens:  In these (or any) times of growing scarcity, the first thing we all need to do is to start growing our own food, as much as possible. This, of course, is easier said than done!  Gardening is difficult, and requires an array of skills and experiential knowledge that few of us suburbanites have any more. And in our affluent Glomart culture, whose major premises are alienation from nature and consumerism, our default sense of "gardening" involves monocultural lawns, attractive but inedible hybrid flowers (that are useless for pollinating insects), and neat, monocultural rows of vegetables, all nourished by external inputs of bagged topsoil (gleaned from the surface of new suburban developments), chemical fertilizer, designer mulch (often dyed for attractiveness), and of course, herbicides and pesticides galore. But if we combine the injunction to "grow gardens" with the ethic of "Earth Care" we get...Permaculture, which includes saving our "yard waste" rather than having it taken away, composting and nurturing our own topsoil rather than buying new soil, and cultivating biological controls for pests by lots of pollinating plants and shrubs that are attractive to insect predators, rather than spraying toxic herbicides and pesticides.  And this is only a start, for permaculture gardening involves lifelong learning, teaching, healing, and creating.  And this, in turn, leads to...

People Care - Growing Community.  In our Glomart consumer culture, we have all grown accustomed to simply buying what we need and hiring contractors to do what we were unable or unwilling to do--whether they were (ruthlessly exploited) housemaids to clean our houses; groundskeepers to mow our lawns or weed our gardens; plumbers, electricians, and other contractors to do what we lack the specialized skills to do around the house.  But in a contracting economy, such services will be harder to come by, and more expensive as well. There are two ways of coping with this increasing scarcity of commodities and of skilled labor on command.  The first, of course, is to make do with less.  But the second is to reach out to our neighbors--to grow community, whether by direct hire or barter (exchanging services, commodities, or skills) when cash gets short.  And then we may well find that our neighbors are willing to teach us skills we need to know, in return, perhaps, for services offered. Unlike the cash economy, which tends (especially in big box stores) to alienate buyer and seller, an informal barter economy tends to build community and solidarity. But we can take this further, of course, by creating organizations to learn, teach, and propagate knowledge and skills. And in this way, we take a giant step toward...

Growing Awareness - Fair Share Once people in neighborhoods and communities get to know one another and work together, and once they learn mutual respect in the process, it becomes far easier to grow awareness of what is happening in the larger world, and how that affects the local community. And by propagating permaculture, we also grow awareness of the social and ecological consequences of everything we do, so that sharing our surplus with the hungry and needy in turn becomes the first step in teaching them, in turn, how to grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness. By such small steps, a new, localized, regenerative Gaian civilization can evolve, predicated on a culture of learning, teaching, healing, and creating.

Finally, awareness begins with self-awareness. None of the above can happen without a reservoir of good will; otherwise, in hard times, fear and hostility can all-too-easily take hold, and lead to truly ugly outcomes. As President Roosevelt aptly warned us, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  And the first place to master that gnawing fear is within ourselves--by learning and teaching the time-honored skills of breathing, observing, and letting go. A good, simple "starter" mantra for this skill was recently given to us by the Dalai Lama:  "Breathing in, I cherish myself; Breathing out, I cherish all living beings."  So knowing that "we are tied in an inescapable network of mutuality"(the living Earth) let us all renew our Bodhisattva vow to "take care of everyone, and abandon no one" and to condition our minds to do so by breathing, observing, and letting go of whatever thoughts, feelings, or sensations arise in our minds--and then, being well, doing good work, and keeping in touch.