Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy
Stephen L. Carter
Basic Books, $25

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by Paul Gediman

Reading Stephen Carter's new book is a frustrating experience. It's punctuated by some valuable insights into American manners and the way those manners affect conduct in public affairs and politics, but even readers who basically agree with Carter are likely to grow impatient with his pedantic tone.

In his preface, Carter, a law professor at Yale, writes that Civility is the second book, after Integrity, in a series intended to explore "elements of good character" that are "pre-political, by which I mean that we should all struggle to exemplify them, whatever our philosophical or partisan differences." Carter contends that a renewed appreciation of these homely virtues will do much to improve our public life. At first, when he approvingly cites a nineteenth-century etiquette book called Politeness on Railroads, Carter appears intent on fulfilling a reader's worst fears of being subjected to a moral primer on manners. Indeed, Civility is filled with starchy admonitions ("Civility requires that we express ourselves in ways that demonstrate our respect for others") and disapproving references to such uncivil phenomena as Dennis Rodman, road rage, and boys who sag their pants at school. But the book, while similar to Integrity in form, is more closely related in content to Carter's previous effort, The Culture of Disbelief, in which he argued that American society, dominated by secular liberalism and a widespread misunderstanding of the First Amendment's establishment clause, doesn't accord religion its rightful place of honor in public life. This time, he takes the argument further: "I think it likely that only a resurgence of all that is best about religious faith will rescue civility in America, for there is no truer or more profound vision of equality than equality before God."

There's something to what he says. Certainly religion can be a force for civility in public life if we accept that civility, in two of Carter's many formulations of the term, "creates not only a negative duty not to do harm, but an affirmative duty to do good" and "does not depend on whether we like [the people to whom we are obligated to be civil] or not." As in previous books, Carter cites the religious roots of the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement, noting that, in addition to fighting for justice, both movements exhibited what he calls "sacrificial civility." The abolitionists showed civility in recognizing the humanity of the slaves, and the civil rights activists demonstrated it in recognizing, through the practice of nonviolence and in their notion of civil disobedience, the humanity of their oppressors.

The problem with Carter's brief for religion is its claim of exclusivity. Not content with the assertion that religion is good for civil society, he asserts that only religion can maintain and create a civil society: "Only religion possesses the majesty, the power, and the sacred language to teach all of us, the religious and the secular, the genuine appreciation for each other on which a successful civility must rest." Without religion, Carter writes, "civility, like any other moral principle, has no firm rock on which to stand. Civility that rests on the shifting sands of secular morality might topple with the next stiff political wind."

This is one side of an old and unresolvable argument. In America it often goes as follows: The committed secularist quotes the Declaration of Independence to the effect that the moral truth of equality is "self-evident"; the person of faith then directs the secularist to the Declaration's next clause, which asserts that our unalienable rights are "endowed" by a "Creator"; the secularist says the reference to God is a figure of speech; the person of faith says it isn't. And around and around. It's a waste of time. Similarly, committed secularists would be wasting their time by objecting too strenuously to Carter's exclusivist claim for religion, because it amounts to nothing more than "ethical monotheism" (a term embraced by Reform Jews early in the century and subsequently appropriated by their critics, who thought that Reform Judaism strips the theological content from Judaism and retains moral content with which few non-religious people of good will could argue). In fact, there's a revealing passage in which Carter uses the word "good" instead of "God" with no substantive change in meaning, arguing that secular ideologies of liberalism and conservatism cannot rescue us from the incivility of "the shackles of market language . . . without the aid of a belief in a transcendent good-the aid that religion supplies." Carter never convincingly refutes the argument that such a transcendent good can be found outside religion, whether in a notion of the state as a moral community or in a notion of citizenship that exhorts us to virtue without making its final appeal to divine authority. But enough. Only the most committed atheist, someone dogmatically and hysterically opposed to the presence of religion in public affairs, need feel threatened by Carter's enthusiasm for the role of religion in civil society and even for the role of religious motivation in partisan political behavior. If transcendent good and transcendent God mean the same thing for civility, agnostics need not worry.

Ultimately, the book's major flaw is not Carter's emphasis on religion. It's his emphasis on civility, which fails to provoke much thought as a unifying theme. At the end, he recapitulates 15 italicized component definitions of civility introduced at various junctures of the book: civility requires that we come into one another's company with "a sense of awe and gratitude"; we should be civil not just to those we know but also to the stranger; civility requires generosity and trust; it sometimes requires that we criticize others ("but the criticism should always be civil"); and so on. Carter crams so many notions of virtuous behavior into his discussion of civility that the term ceases to have any specific meaning at all. Sometimes, the circuitous routes he takes in order to bring every issue around to his theme are inadvertently funny. Here's Carter in the midst of a lament about political TV talk shows: "I think that Roderick Hart, in his book Seducing America, captures the aspect of these programs that should most worry the student of civility who understands what Erasmus was trying to achieve. Erasmus wanted us to learn to discipline our instincts for the sake of our humanity." Erasmus? Do we really need Erasmus to tell us that the McLaughlin Group is a just forum for preening exhibitionism rather than civil debate?

This passage shows Carter at his worst, preachy and gratuitously erudite, and it illustrates the book's conceptual flaw: the assumption that all public and most political issues can be fruitfully examined through a discussion of virtue, and that all virtues can be packed into the concept of civility.

And yet, though globally flawed, the book offers quite a few local pleasures. Carter provides a smart, if standard, treatment of the ways in which Americans have come to value their rights more than their responsibilities. He clearly makes the point that having a right to do something does not make doing it right. And, making a careful distinction between the demands of morality and legality, he writes: "if we are to reconstruct civility, especially in a nation that prides itself on being free, we need to do it through better habits, not better laws." Along the way, he also offers interesting observations on how technology has contributed to incivility.

Finally, there is a crucial point he makes frequently but never systematically: "Civility requires resistance to the dominance of social life by the values of the marketplace." Amen. Certainly, as Carter notes, the religions have given us languages and categories of reasoning capable of mounting a formidable intellectual and moral challenge to the primacy of a market logic that increasingly reduces public interactions to economic transactions. However, Carter writes of public life being "overwhelmed by the values of politics and the market" without distinguishing between the values of politics and the values of the market. He repeatedly mentions them in tandem, as if they were identical-or, at least he refers to them as twin evils when, even if we accept that they are evils, they are certainly not twins. There's no doubt that, in current American life, politics bears many market traits. But political values need not be identical to market values (and need not be as detrimental to civility as market values). Politics is not, by definition, about having our acquisitive snouts in the public trough. Just as a Senator is both a delegate (charged with securing what she can for her constituency) and a trustee (obligated to consider the national good), so each voter is not only a consumer (choosing to buy the sales pitch of a candidate who promises to help him fulfill his material desires) but also a citizen (obligated to consider the national good). Most important, while market values are intrinsically amoral, political values can be moral or immoral.

Carter frequently uses the term "the student of civility" when referring to the hypothetical person who strives to embody the virtue of civility. It's a curious term, representative of the haze of abstraction that hangs over the book. Why not a meatier term that implies action as well as study? How about "citizen"? It makes a nice alternative to "consumer." Citizenship, in fact, would have been a much more productive notion than civility upon which to ground an argument that we should free ourselves from the thrall of market values. I don't know how many more books, after Integrity and Civility, Carter intends to devote to individual "pre-political" virtues. But I hope he skips them, jettisons his Sunday-school tone, and cuts to the chase. We need another sermon on virtue much less than we need a rigorous ideal of citizenship that addresses, with both passion and logic, the awful consequences of the encroachment of market values into so much of our public and private life. Such a formulation might very well include an appeal to "pre-political" virtue. But let's hope it articulates some political virtue, too.