Editorial: The Key to Civilization Is Civility
By • September 11, 2024 0 277
Twenty-three years later, we remember the fear and horror of 9/11, but do we recall the days that followed? On Sept. 12, and for weeks afterward, we showed more kindness toward one another than before. We seemed more caring and united — or was it just a dream?
Amid today’s coarse social behavior — whether we are thinking of the Harris-Trump debate, school shootings or the unstable international situation — the need for civility stands out.
In this troubling Age of Rage, we find the following observations apt. “Civility is not a tactic or sentiment,” said President George W. Bush. “It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.” In Van Jones’s words: “Civility isn’t just some optional value in a multicultural, multistate democratic republic. Civility is the key to civilization.”
Last year, citing the distress of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, David Brooks wondered: “Why have Americans become so mean?”
“I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week — something that never used to happen,” Brooks continued. “A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did.
“The words that define our age,” Brooks wrote, “reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.”
American history is full of periods of division, but we have always survived and moved on. No one disputes that we live in challenging and, for many, anxious and depressing times. Civility, alas, is one of the first things that goes overboard.
Brooks concluded: “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen — to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard and understood.”
Will that post-9/11 unity ever return? Perhaps we can turn over a new leaf today, on Patriot Day, thinking back not to the attacks of 2001, but to the genuine, if temporary, reemergence of our better, more civil, natures.
