by Todd May
This context, at least in its broad outlines, is not difficult to grasp. We should recall that the previous president, Barack Obama, was often the object of barely concealed racism, not the least from Donald Trump himself. Moreover, the Republicans who opposed him in office declared at the outset of his presidency that their goal was that he should fail. There was no attempt to work with him, to compromise, or to seek common ground. There was among many in Congress a willingness to shut down the government in order to oppose him. The orientation of almost the entirety of the Republican party and its supporters was one analogous to war, where there are two sides and no common ground in a game that is zero sum. There is no possibility of everyone winning. If they win, we lose, and vice versa. If politics is defined as the art of compromise, then it has been a while since we’ve seen any politics here in the US.
In a situation like this, many of the normative constraints on behavior come loose. Things that were not acceptable to say or to do under other circumstances become permissible. It is not that there are no normative constraints on behavior. Murdering one’s political opponent is still forbidden. However, the space of admissible speech and behavior becomes significantly wider. It comes to include things that I have called here indecent.
This indecency does not confine itself to the sphere of traditional politics. It is expressed, for instance, in the open and even casual racism that has re-emerged in recent years: verbal slurs against Muslims and African Americans, racist slogans painted on people’s doors or cars or in public places, claims that those who continue to be marginalized are in fact privileged in our society.
So far I have discussed the emergence of indecency as though it were solely a phenomenon of the political right. And I will admit here that my politics tilts toward the left. But the left has not been without blame in contributing to indecency. This can be seen most spectacularly in a couple of violent attempts to prevent right-wing speakers from addressing college audiences. At the University of California–Berkeley, for instance, violent demonstrations forced the cancellation of scheduled speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, an admittedly odious personage who was recently found to endorse sex with boys as young as thirteen years old.1 This demonstration, which was nationally televised, did nothing to endear the left to the US populace, but it did give Yiannopoulos the kind of television coverage and public exposure he clearly coveted. (By contrast, when Yiannopoulos spoke at my university, Clemson, progressive organizers on campus decided not to protest his speech. Many people who live in and around Clemson—and much of the rest of the nation—never knew he had been here.)
This incident was followed by another one at Middlebury College, where a protest shut down a speech by conservative Charles Murray and in which a professor was injured.2 In the wake of these events, there has been a vigorous debate about what constitutes “free speech” and whether the invited speakers were or were not entitled to express opinions that many find to be contrary to informed public debate. However, I would like to remain focused on the issue of decency. Protests such as these contribute to the incivility that has come to characterize US political culture, and, often to a lesser extent, political culture in a number of European countries.
I am not saying that the left and right are equally culpable in the creation of such a culture. It seems obvious to me that the indecency characterizing our political space is far more a product of a right-wing movement marked by racism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ sentiment, and misogyny than a left which has rarely been more than marginal in the US. However, the response to this indecency has sometimes contained its own elements of incivility, elements that to my mind are neither tactically wise nor—the relevant point for us—morally decent.
Approaching Political Decency
How might we begin to frame a decent politics, or more precisely for our purposes a decent way of behaving politically? As a first step let us return to the underlying theme proposed in chapter 1: moral action recognizes that there are others in the world who have lives to live. We share the world—the narrow world within which we conduct our daily lives, the wider world that forms our political culture, and the planet—with others who, like us, are trying to construct lives that are worth their living. As I put it in the first chapter, people seek “to engage in projects and relationships that unfold over time; to be aware of one’s death in a way that affects how one sees the arc of one’s life; to have biological needs like food, shelter, and sleep; to have basic psychological needs like care and a sense of attachment to one’s surroundings.”3 In previous chapters we have asked how to integrate that fact into our own living such that even though we do not necessarily become altruists we are nevertheless sensitive to the fact of sharing our world with others who are like us in this way.
When it comes to politics there is an added dimension that complicates matters. Some of these others with whom we share the world do not see it in the same way we do. Further, this difference in vision can affect the space in which we live. There are many different manners of seeing the world in divergent ways. One can consider ice cream an excellent dessert while another would argue instead for cake. Some consider literature to be better than psychology for understanding people, while others would demur. It is entirely possible (although history has not been kind in this regard) for people to differ in their religious views and yet still engage with one another in ways that are comfortable for everyone. But when it comes to politics the situation is often different. People of different political views can coexist peacefully, even comfortably. The difficulty begins when these political views are not simply different but also conflicting.
Politics involves what we might call the normative construction of shared space. That is, in politics we are concerned with what the common space we occupy should look like. What I am calling “shared” or “common” space, I should add, is not the same thing as what is often called “public space” as opposed to “private space.” As many feminist thinkers have pointed out, what is often considered private space, for example the home, has political dimensions that are continuous with public space. Our shared or common space, then, is all of our space inasmuch as it is shared.
Once we recognize that politics concerns this entire shared space and that we often disagree with one another about what this shared space should look like, we can see that the stakes of politics are both numerous and often prodigious. They concern questions as diverse as whether we should tax the wealthy at a higher rate than the poor, whether abortion should be permitted, how to engage with humanitarian crises abroad, and what the proper criteria are for citizenship. Disagreements about these matters are disagreements about the proper character of the social field we occupy with one another, about how we should live with one another. In contrast to, say, common decency, there is an element of our political interactions that can be threatening. It is no wonder that people often avoid political discussion or that it can descend so quickly into vitriol.
The problem we are confronting—or failing to confront—here in the US is that vitriol has become the very ethos of our political behavior. Our political relationships are conducted not so much through disagreement as through anger and the related desire to silence all opposition. And so we find ourselves currently in a common space that seems irreconcilably fractured, a sort of war of some against some.
To participate in or contribute to this ethos, even though the stakes for each of us is high, is to be politically indecent. It is to refuse to recognize that others also occupy this space and are trying to conduct their lives in it, much less that they have their own viewpoints that are often legitimate at least in their own eyes. And so we might say that the first task of political decency—although, as we shall see, not the last—is civility.
How might we characterize political civility?4 At its most basic level, it will involve behavior that stems from a recognition that other people with whom I inhabit a common space have lives to live, just as I do. This, of course, is the guiding thread of our vari
ous reflections here, and so doesn’t need further elaboration. In light of the problem of normative disagreement, though, we need immediately to add something to this, something that will speak to such disagreement. What we might add is that the fact that there are those among these other people who disagree with me on political matters does not diminish the legitimacy of their viewpoints. They may be mistaken or even cynical in their views, but the sole fact that we disagree is not enough to dismiss them. Disagreement itself is not enough to prompt confrontation. There are—and we shall return to this—disagreements in which one side is indeed egregiously wrong or untrustworthy or oppressive, and there must be ways of confronting those who act this way. However, this needs to be distinguished from the mere fact that there is disagreement.
If we make this distinction then we can make our way to a second step in political civility. In addition to recognizing the other as having a life to live in a common space, we can, at least as a default, take disagreement to be precisely that: disagreement. When I have a disagreement with people I know, I have several ways I might navigate that disagreement. If nothing much is at stake, then I can ignore it or accommodate it. When my friend leaves a smaller tip at a restaurant than I would have desired or turns the heat up a little too high while we’re driving or vents to me about someone I don’t know well in a way that feels a bit too disparaging, I can let these things go. However, as we have seen, politics often does not concern matters with smaller stakes—although sometimes smaller stakes can be mistaken for larger ones. So what do I do when a friend and I disagree about something important? I talk to them, but in a way that shows that while we may disagree I recognize them as having a viewpoint that is worth recognizing even if I consider it mistaken. I show them, often through my demeanor rather than my words, that I do not take them to be dumb or deceitful but rather, to my mind, simply mistaken. (Of course, none of us do this without fail, but we almost always regret it when we don’t.) In short, I take my friend seriously as another person.
Part of taking them seriously as another person is to be open to the possibility that it is I who might be mistaken. This is a complicated attitude, so we should linger over it a moment. To say that I am open to the possibility of being mistaken does not mean that I don’t really believe what I believe. I really do believe, for example, that there should be a progressive tax structure and that affirmative action fosters a healthy diversity and that if we institute free public health care it won’t create incentives for too many people to abuse the medical system. But I believe these things in a way that scientists believe what they believe: they stand as true for me until I am convinced otherwise. New evidence may perhaps challenge my beliefs in ways that I cannot foresee—after all, if I could foresee them I would change my beliefs now. The difference between a conversation with a political opponent and a scientist is that in the latter case it is new scientific evidence that can shake a belief whereas in the former case it is a good argument.
In short, my relation to my own beliefs, whether normative or factual, is one of fallibility. My beliefs may be true—I certainly take them to be true. But they are also fallible, open to revision by my further experience. If I approach those with whom I disagree with this attitude, I am more likely to be civil toward them rather than patronizingly trying to explain to them why they’re wrong or dismissing them as just stupid or benighted.
In a polarized political atmosphere such as ours, it is difficult to maintain such an attitude. We are all encouraged to move to our political corner and fight from there, taking on all comers and ceding no ground. But in fact it is precisely at moments like this when the attitude of civility is most necessary. We in the US are often said currently to live in two overlapping countries, a red conservative one and a blue liberal one. These two countries may overlap geographically (although there is some separation, for example between country red an urban blue), but not socially. And indeed since the election of Donald Trump as president it is increasingly difficult to open up political conversations with those with whom we might disagree. Nevertheless, if we are to be able to inhabit a common space with one another it is imperative that we develop an attitude of civility, taking others with whom we disagree seriously as people who have their own lives to live and who may have cottoned on to some bit of truth that we have missed.
Because this attitude of civility can be difficult to display, particularly in circumstances of political polarization, there should be places of respite for it as well. I am not suggesting that we always feel fallible in our beliefs, that at every moment we assume the mantle of civility in our thought about others. At home with our partners or among like-minded friends we often need to blow off steam, agreeing that this or that public figure is an idiot or just plain evil. (At the limit, I suppose that it is even possible to display civility outwardly while thinking to oneself that the person one is talking to is an idiot or evil, but that is a tougher trick to pull off successfully.) Without these outlets, civility could become a more altruistic demand on us. However, in order to be politically civil toward others, we need to habituate our behavior enough so that it becomes something we’re capable of in our common space. Civil disagreement with another person in a political atmosphere of shouting and recrimination, and indeed violence, is not a demeanor that we can just pick up without practice or thought. We need to instill in ourselves practices of civility to be able to display them in the common space we share with others who are often very different from us.
However, there are limits to this type of civility. While there may not be limits to the underlying attitude of civility—that others with whom I disagree have lives to live and that they may have a grip on some corner of the truth that I have missed—there are certainly limits to what can be discussed within a framework of civility. For my part, and I believe I am not alone in this, views that are racist or homophobic or misogynistic or that blame the poor for their poverty or celebrate winning at all costs are not up for discussion. And these are all attitudes—and in fact policies—that are current in the US political context. These are not, to my mind, matters of conversation in which I take the attitude that I could be wrong. I do not say to myself, maybe I’m mistaken in my view that African Americans as a group are equally intelligent to people of European descent or in my view that people in poverty do not deserve their lot. But how then is it possible to take this attitude and remain civil? How can I be politically committed to act on a position I refuse to question while remaining politically decent? How do I recognize another person who is racist or homophobic as someone who has a life to live while at the same time challenging not simply their beliefs (or perhaps not their beliefs at all) but their actions?
Before addressing this question, we should pause to recognize two important aspects of phenomena like racism, sexism, homophobia, and callousness toward poverty. These are all ways of denying the full humanity of others. Take the most obvious instance, racism. At the extreme—slavery—there is a denial that the enslaved person is really a person at all, or at least a person in the same way the enslaver is. Of course in most parts of the world we no longer face the problem of traditional slavery.5 However, when white people think of those of African descent as lazy or less intelligent or when they do not want African Americans living near them or when, as is often documented, African Americans are turned away from job opportunities at a greater rate than less qualified whites,6 it is clear that many white people do not see African Americans as having a life to live in the same way that they do. There is a refusal to recognize African Americans as seeking to create a flourishing or meaningful life for themselves in the same way that whites do.
What holds for racism holds as well, although in different ways, for sexism, homophobia, what has come to be called “ableism,” and indifference or hostility toward the poor. The often pervasive attitude that women are not as intelligent or committed to work as men, the refusal to recognize gay marriage as equally worthy as traditional male/female marriage, t
he assumption that someone with a physical disability is less intelligent or emotionally nuanced as those without a disability, or the attitude that poor people are impoverished because they don’t care to better themselves: these are all expressions of a mindset that perceives others as less fully human than oneself.
This is not all. There is a second aspect of these attitudes that we should recognize, an aspect that gives them their particularly political character—that is, their character as part of the ethos of our common space. Individuals don’t just happen to be racist or homophobic and so on. They are not born that way. These attitudes are developed in a cultural space that encourages them and that weaves the oppression of marginalized groups into the very fabric of a society. It is sometimes said, for instance, that when police in the US kill innocent African Americans, it is because of a few “bad apples” in the police force. However, the use of police to suppress African Americans has a very long history in my country, a history whose effects have bearing on every person who puts on a police uniform. For a person in the police not to be racist (and this includes, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, African American police officers) requires a conscious effort to resist those effects.
While recent police actions are a vivid demonstration that our society is characterized by racism, it can be seen underlying other racist attitudes as well, and further in the attitudes that underlie sexism, homophobia, ableism, and insensitivity toward poverty. Moreover, it can be seen not just in the attitudes of individual people but in the very structure of the society itself. For instance, over the past decades the US has seen a massive transfer of wealth to those who are already wealthy, and away from everyone else.7 This has left stagnation for the poor in its wake, a stagnation that at the moment of this writing is still not being addressed and in fact may worsen if certain policies are enacted. This stagnation itself in the midst of plenty is a social refusal to recognize the full humanity of those who are impoverished, a refusal that is not a matter of individual attitude but of the social structure itself. To be sure, such a refusal often informs and interacts with individual attitudes, but it would be a failure of perception if we did not observe that practices that refuse to recognize the full humanity of others are not just a matter of individual attitudes but instead reflect something deeper and more pervasive in our society.