Manners maketh the diversion

Senator Thorpe might’ve been rude, but she was perfectly civil

For most people, civility means something like politeness. So when, as inevitably happened, DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara Senator Lidia Thorpe was accused of incivility for confronting the King and Queen of Australia in Parliament the other day, most people read this as criticism of her for being rude, of not obeying certain “rules” of decorum.

“One does love Orstralia”

To understand “civility” in these narrow terms is an incredible sleight of hand, an assertion of power that is effective because it leans into our “common sense” understanding of the word.

The nature of the sleight of hand is that it is more useful for the governing class to talk about manners and civility, in this limited sense, than it is for them to acknowledge the truth of our colonial history. Lidia Thorpe gets chastised, in other words, for being rude, not for being wrong.

The point is civility isn’t just about politeness and the word’s roots in “civil” or “civic” gives us a clue as to what else it might mean.

Civility is also about political argument, the justifications for them, and the underlying moral weight we give to various public discussions. When people attack Senator Thorpe for being “uncivil” by invoking the everyday meaning of civility as mere politeness, they are closing the space for legitimate political discussion by turning her actions—very effectively, I might add—into a matter of manners rather than of politics.¹

It's a familiar tactic.

When Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up her copy of Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech while he delivered said speech on the floor of the Congress in 2020, she, too, was accused of being uncivil. Her response captures perfectly the difference between civility as mere manners and civility as a state in which we seriously address matters important to the body politic and public debate.

Accused of being disrespectful, Pelosi responded that, on the contrary, “It was the courteous thing to do, considering the alternative.”

Elaborating later, she called the speech a “manifesto of mistruths” and said Trump’s words “gave no comfort” to families looking for better healthcare options and he was “not truthful” about his healthcare policies.

Pelosi, like Thorpe, is pointing to a deeper sense of civility, of civic engagement, by bringing the actual content of the complaint back into focus. Thorpe (and Pelosi) can be dismissed as uncouth and beyond the pale without their critics needing to engage with their actual argument, and it is frankly depressing to see even left-wing and progressive types fall for this sort of diversion every time.

As I argued in The New Front Page, civility is not a set of static rules or norms of behaviour that people veer away from because of some personal failing on their part. It is not a fixed standard against which we can judge particular individuals. Given the fuzziness of the word’s meaning, and the way we are likely, in political and social debate, to judge our opponents’ behaviour to be uncivil while giving a pass to equivalent behaviour by those who agree with us, it is much better to see civility as a set of tools that people deploy in democratic debate in order to achieve particular ends. In this understanding, civility — and therefore incivility — is endlessly malleable and inventive, temporary and changeable. They are concepts deployed in order to win debates, influence people, or undermine an opponent’s arguments and credibility.²

It is hilarious to hear politicians who are responsible for the embarrassment that Question Time often descends into now looking for ways to have Senator Thorpe removed, or pressuring her to resign, for her behaviour.

What a bunch of hypocrites. Fucking hypocrites, I would say, if I wanted to make a point.

The fact that Senator Thorpe only confronted the King after he refused to meet privately with her casts a further light on the notion of civility as public-mindedness—and the King’s failure to exhibit it. In this context, demands for Senator Thorpe to be more “courteous” really give the game away, as courteous “expresses that style of politeness which belongs to courts”, with all sense of hierarchy and deference well and truly intact. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Courteous is thus more commonly said of superiors, civil of inferiors, since it implies or suggests the possibility of incivility or rudeness"

US writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is currently being dragged over the coals for a chapter in his new book, The Message, in which he discusses what Israel and the Netanyahu Government are doing to Gaza, makes the same point:

It is amazing to me that the debate is not: “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is perpetrating apartheid, and that is not true and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is not a democracy. It is a democracy and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said half the population that Israel rules are second-class citizens or worse. That is not true. Here’s why.” …

People don’t want to straightforwardly say: “I am defending apartheid because … ” Or “I think the apartheid is appropriate because … ” Or “I think a dictatorship over a group of people that began, conservatively, more than 50 years ago is appropriate because … ”

…The topic is apartheid. Apartheid is the topic. And people who don’t want to talk about apartheid, because it’s uncomfortable, much like they did with the protests last year at colleges, try to turn this into a conversation about manners.

What those criticising Senator Thorpe are demanding from her is a form of public deference that involves the thinnest-of-thin ideas about civility. What Thorpe was demanding from the King, and from the rest of us, was the sort of robust civility that allows us to acknowledge and address historical wrongs from a place of genuine understanding.

And look, sure, in general terms, we might prefer that people assume some level of decorum when discussing political issues, but the instantaneous reversion to pearl clutching about civility that accompanies events like Senator Thorpe’s confrontation with King Whatshisname is a sure that sign that the real topic is being avoided, that our attention is being diverted, in this case, from colonialism to manners.

It’s a hell of a trick.

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1. The distinction is well-made in this piece where the authors discuss the immense literature on civility and public discourse:

The concept of civility has been extensively examined in the sociological literature, for example, in sociological classics like Norbert Elias's (1969) The Civilizing Process and Erving Goffman's (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Much of the contemporary philosophical analysis of civility draws on and departs from those works in order to develop sophisticated conceptual and normative accounts of the concept. Many philosophers have made a distinction between two conceptions of civility: between civility as mere tolerance and civility as affirmation of the ends that others pursue (Sinopoli 1995, 612); between political and polite civility (Calhoun 2000, 255); between formal and substantive civility (Boyd 2006, 864); between civility of etiquette and liberal civility (Meyer 2000, 71); between civility as an ethical concept and civility as a political concept (Edyvane 2017, 345); between ‘civility as politeness’ and ‘civility as responsiveness’ (Laden Laden and Boatright 2019); and between ‘mere civility’ and ‘more robust conceptions’ (Bejan Bejan2017, 159). The details of these distinctions vary, but all of them ultimately share the idea that a distinction should be made between a ‘thin’ and a ‘thick’ version of civility, that is, between a more or less minimal or superficial compliance with social norms and a deeper commitment to moral and political principles based on respect for others.

2. Yes, I have been making these arguments for a long time. Excuse me while I continue to hit my head against the wall.