What does civility actually serve? In an age of increasing political polarization, Amy Olberding’s recently published The Wrong of Rudeness defends politeness, with some unexpected help from ancient Chinese thought. This defense sits in tension with a broader social conversation that focuses on the interaction of civility with oppressive social structures. But I argue that taking oppression seriously requires us to reclaim and repurpose civility.
My own interest in civility and etiquette stems from my work in anti-colonial thought and materialism. I investigate how the background conditions of colonial oppression alter decision-making environments for individuals and institutions. A society’s laws, coupled with the patterns of their enforcement, clearly structure and shape social behavior. However, this is only part of the political story. Many social patterns sustain themselves in a rule-governed way without much help from formal rules like laws or regulations, yet play an important role in directing social life and distributing social goods like attention, respect, and status.
Civility and etiquette are basic to social structures, and potential targets of intervention in a struggle against oppressive social structures. Moreover, any non-authoritarian version of a better world—whether your model thereof is, say, a Rawlsian “well-ordered society”, the united workers’ councils after the Revolution, or stateless groups of free association—would also have systems of civility and etiquette. Justice in this informal aspect of social structure is, then, an important part of the wider struggle for social justice.
Politeness and Rudeness
Politeness and good manners, conventionally understood, are far from neutral in the face of wider social injustice. They come with a lot of historical baggage. A cynic might even call politeness and manners the policed borders of political freedom. And like regular policing, the costs and punishments of the “civility” system are applied with extreme prejudice. Neither what politeness demands, who it obligates, nor how it punishes transgression are evenly or fairly distributed. The #MeToo movement, for example, rose in response to the fact that the most powerful—whether by wealth, identity, occupation, or combinations of these—often face the least demands for respect and consideration of other people and the most lenient punishment for trespass of what few lines exist for them. Moreover, calls for civility often function as defenses of the status quo, defanging and diluting the righteous anger of protestors and political gadflies. This shield of the status quo can also be its sword, as Eve Fairbanks notes in her recent Washington Post op-ed linking contemporary conservative calls for “civility” to similar rhetorical tactics used by defenders of slavery in the run-up to the Civil War.
The fact that civility gets mobilized in defense of injustice is no idiosyncrasy of our current political moment, but a natural extension of the sort of role that civility plays in organizing social life. Our everyday interactions both communicate and reinforce the structures of power they occur in. While peerage doesn’t eliminate the salience of manners, much of the most politically important aspects of etiquette deal with how inequalities and hierarchies are managed in interactions.
The history of colonial Africa—a place many European powers made it their explicit goal to “civilize”—is potentially instructive. In Manners Make a Nation, historian Allison Kim Shutt focuses on the case of “Southern Rhodesia,” which became Zimbabwe in 1980 after independence from Great Britain. The Southern Rhodesian government and white power structure created and policed a complex system of etiquette and norms, aiming to create broad social compliance out of quotidian habit. Black Africans had to come when called, defer when challenged, use this segregated train car and that elevator, remove their hats in the presence of whites, and bear all of this without betraying too much displeasure or impatience. Guidebooks, novels, and social clubs instructed incoming white Southern Rhodesians about the proper racial etiquette and character—neither overt racism nor operating on terms of equality were acceptable. Etiquette achieved a golden mean of a genteel, peaceable white supremacy.
But the system didn’t always operate gracefully. The boundaries of the permissible occupying of sidewalks, wearing of hats, and proper salutes were policed by dishonor, humiliation, and violence. The “Native Commissioners” of the colonial administration often took acts of insolence as threats to the entire colonial governance structure. While much of the violence was and continued to be extralegal, “insolence” was criminalized by the 1927 “Native Affairs Act,” which granted Native Commissioners the power to incarcerate or fine those who violated racial etiquette—just before a concerted push to confine Africans to housing on “reserves,” while the most fertile and livable land was reserved for white landowners.
On the other hand, Olberding points out throughout her book (but especially in chapter 6) that rudeness is just as discriminatory. We are often more accommodating of our bosses, parents, and other people with power over us than we are of those peers or strangers whose wrath we feel we can risk. How much less consideration for those who we have power over?
Shutt quotes a guidebook from 1950 saying that it was a “credit to Lobengula [then King of the Ndebele] that, though he ruled his people with a rod of iron, he was always kindly and courteous to the white men who visited him.” Olberding has been both a maid and the Presidential Professor of Philosophy at a major state university, and suspects that the difference in the level of respect and politeness she tends to experience as the latter isn’t because her new company is exceptionally virtuous. I suspect many people with work experience in the service industry can testify to her point from personal experience.
Olberding mounts her defense of politeness with the help of Confucius. The ancient Chinese philosopher’s time was even more conflict-ridden than ours: By one estimate, there were more than 670 wars in the 259 year “Spring and Autumn” period. In response to this history, he and his students championed li, a single concept that ties together what we might call “civility,” “etiquette,” and “manners.”
These concepts might seem like they are simply about rules, but Olberding is careful to see past the window dressing. Rather, li is about making space for other people and for our communities in all of our interactions, from the symbolically charged to the quotidian. It’s how you move through the world while affirming that other people, the history you share together, and the history you’re forming together right now, matters.
Li and civility start from a kind of rule- or convention-following, but ren (humanity, human excellence, or benevolence) is where they ought to end up. Ren is about the value that these often quite arbitrary rules supposedly issue from and protect. In “Ren and Li in the Analects,” Kwong-loi Shun argues that li and its observance constitute ren rather than simply being instrumentally useful to the value of ren. Chenyang Li disagrees, pointing out that Confucius has acknowledged the possibility that ren and li could come apart. He suggests, instead, to think of li as a kind of “cultural grammar” deciding which behavioral “sentences” are well formed according to the rules of the local political language. According to Olberding’s explanation of Li’s argument, there’s no special, non-conventional connection between respect and moving one’s hand back and forth in the air. But the boring old convention that you and I are aware of converts that bare movement of the hand into an act of waving, which is what enables it to communicate a respectful goodbye.
There is a deep philosophical problem dramatized in the disagreement between Kwong-loi Shun and Chenyang Li but not resolved by simply picking a side. If Shun is right, then how could a “native” African removing his hat in the presence of white company truly be an act that in and of itself constitutes human excellence or benevolence? If Li is right, then what do we say about the person who dutifully speaks the language of respect developed in Southern Rhodesia?
What Incivility Doesn’t Get Us
On the one hand, the rules of etiquette and manners as such seem to be importantly related to respect—whether we prefer Shun’s “constitution” view or Li’s “cultural grammar” view. But on the other hand, these concepts are importantly different than the specific rulebooks that constitute any one culture or community’s version of these. The concrete rules and regulations that we inherit from an oppressive social structure are the things that prescribe how respect is to be performed in a given circumstance. The rules might support performances of etiquette that actually codify disrespect rather than respect, or demand respect behaviors unevenly across persons. What’s there left for the colonized and marginalized to do in a society that builds oppression into its grammar?
Let’s think about a concrete example: In Crisis in Rhodesia, Nathan Shamuyarira (better known as the politburo and chief international press credentials manager of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front [ZANU-PF], the party of Robert Mugabe, the country’s first prime minister and longtime president) recounts not only that nationalist leaders deliberately flaunted the prevailing norms of etiquette, wearing hats in the presence of white officials, but that their willingness to do so became a marker of political credibility. It’s not hard to see the wisdom of this: To follow the li of Southern Rhodesia was to treat the “etiquette” of an apartheid regime as though it were the real, respect-concretizing thing. Thus, it was sensible to look for freedom fighters among the defectors.
But there was and is a danger of overcorrection—of fetishizing the relationship of rudeness and self-respect to political struggle. Though it seems plausible that a critical mass of self-respect is needed to inspire political action, it’s not clear how additional self-respect beyond this threshold would or could help. Given the cold and unfair kind of reception rudeness often gets, especially from marginalized people, it’s not even always clear that additional self-respect is the likeliest result of patterns of rudeness. Even if it were, acts of rudeness might act as a venting process and a substitute for concerted political action and deliberation rather than an inspiration to these, which would put its instrumental value to political struggle in serious jeopardy. This is especially true if there are other things in the way of political action that self-respect-via-rudeness wouldn’t solve: an egregious power imbalance between the political sides in an internal political conflict, the distortive actions of an external political actor, a dearth of effective and well-resourced grassroots organizations, or unreconciled bad blood between would-be comrades. If lighting one match doesn’t get your campfire going, maybe it would be a better idea to replace your soggy wood rather than to light 19 more matches. Similarly, adding more and danker memes about guillotining the bosses to a workplace of exploited workers probably won’t substitute for the effect that, say, a sustained strike could have.
Some arguments for etiquette and civility are, of course, made in bad faith. Elites have attempted to exert and maintain social control via etiquette. The powerful (and their sycophants) often appeal to it to shut down legitimate grievances and protest. But so what? This tactic has also been used with concepts such as “freedom” and “equality,” which I for one am not about to decide are unimportant ideas because I don’t like what slave-owners and slavery apologists have done with them. The knee-jerk contrarianism of opposing civility because elites have abused it betrays the sort of politics that cannot find any orientation to the world (or even to itself) except in relation to today’s oppressor of choice. It’s an adolescent politics that is without radical or revolutionary potential, whatever its pretensions. We’re better off without it.
We don’t have to wait for revolution to question the wisdom of rejecting li. Even if the oppressed managed to make a strategy out of flaunting a society’s scheme of li, it’s not clear what other political victories would come afterwards. The oppressed may stand several strides ahead in the race for clever and momentarily satisfying shade, but the larger trends in history tend to be dominated by the winners of arms races. The politically oppressed and marginalized are, practically by definition, those who are worst positioned to inspire politeness and consideration by the threat of social costs.
What Civility Might Do For Us
So there are severe limits to a political strategy of opposing li. But the good news is that those of us who want to change society for the better can draw on a rich history of attention to li.
Sometimes the target has been the dominant culture. For example, referring to women as “Ms.” replaced the old etiquette of referring to women by forms of address that revealed their marital status. In many activist and academic communities, nascent norms like asking about people’s gender pronouns are beginning to display the old etiquette (or lack thereof) of assuming. These are cases where pivotal rules of respect can be rewritten in the dominant culture by way of cultural insurgency.
Other times, the target has been the marginalized community itself, especially for those involved in organizing and activism in favor of combating injustice in the wider social system that li belongs to. The first of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense’s “8 Points of Attention” was, simply, “Speak politely.” Several other points of attention and rules for Party members revolved around this theme. Shibdas Ghosh of the Socialist Unity Centre of India once argued for the importance of a code of conduct for party members, claiming both that the “culture and ethical conduct of the leaders and workers” was (along with “propaganda”) the most powerful vehicle for broadcasting revolutionary ideology to the people, and that the inattention to day-to-day interpersonal ethics of people who claimed to be communists was a chief reason for a decrease in standing of communism in India. In some organizing communities, one can begin an organizing session by discussing and voting on “community guidelines” for subsequent with everyone present—essentially, explicitly building up a subsystem of manners and etiquette that will be in place for the duration of the meeting. All of these examples provide constructive ways to think about etiquette and civility that complicate the conflation of these concepts with the oppressive status quo’s deployment of them, and concrete examples of what ground can be won.
It is morally safe to ignore particular demands of civility in the dominant culture that are inextricably linked to disrespect. Jettisoning these demands is easy to justify—if civility just is the setting of rules for interaction that preserve mutual respect, then rules of “civility” that involve ritual humiliation or other forms of disrespect simply aren’t rules of civility and do not deserve to masquerade as such.
The hard work is in another category: the norms of civility that are only contingently linked to oppression. Should we ignore these norms altogether? If we correct them in our own, more local scheme of civility, then in which direction? Bissau-Guinean writer and political organizer Amílcar Cabral suggests we return to the “upward paths” of our own culture, while accepting “positive accretions” from other cultures—even the colonizers’. But which are which? Does taking any of the ruling culture’s norms on board constitute objectionable “respectability politics”? Are there reasons to put on formal wear and exhibit the various social graces beyond mere capitulation?
There’s not much more to say at this level of abstraction—but perhaps that is itself a thing worth saying. When we have a clear sense of what respect is and requires, we have a guide to figuring out what rules of practice would succeed or fail to concretize it. In an oppressive social structure, perhaps we can’t rely on the rules the history that formed that structure has provided us. But neither can we simply negate them—the fact that the whole system of norms fails to be structured around respect does not mean that the same is true of every constituent norm. Those of us who seek justice in such a scenario are simply on our own, in a position of radical responsibility, left with the task of figuring out new and enduring models of respect with whatever tools we can gather. Or, perhaps we are left to build and rebuild our community guidelines daily, taking our cue from activist communities.
But one thing is clear: Civility is not to be abandoned because it is flouted and exploited by those who perpetuate oppression. It is to be embraced, which means taking the defenders of the system to task for the flagrant indecency of the social structure that they fight for.
Photograph: Black Panther Free Breakfast for Children Program, feature for Vi Magazine, by Pirkle Jones. © Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz. Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones Photographs and Papers.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Olufemi O. Taiwo is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. His theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition, anti-colonial thought, German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, and histories of activism and activist thinkers. He is currently writing a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations that offers a novel philosophical argument for reparations and explores links with environmental justice. He also engages in public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism. (Photo by Jared Rodriguez)
