‘A disposition of the heart’: Exploring the power of civility to heal divides

Episode transcript

Clay Collins:  How much of a difference in the world could the spread of civility make? And what is true civility – as opposed to just transactional politeness? 

For writer Alexander Hudson, it is, “a disposition of the heart, a way of seeing others as our moral equals and worthy of respect because of our shared dignity as human beings.” 

That definition, which Ms. Hudson explores in her book, “The Soul of Civility,” was discussed in her recent interview by Stephen Humphries, the Monitor’s chief culture writer. 

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Collins:  This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Stephen joins me today. And most of this episode will be a deeper follow up conversation between Stephen and Ms. Hudson. 

Welcome back to the podcast, Stephen.

Stephen Humphries: Thanks so much for having me, Clay.

Collins:  A return appearance for you! You joined us in mid-September to talk about a TV show about a sports team with a storybook storyline, but really to talk about a Welsh community’s come-together moment there in Wales.

Humphries: Yes, and I’ve been following the Wrexham football team in Wales. In fact, it’s fall, so I can now wear the Wrexham scarf that I bought, finally.

Collins: Nice. You had it on with a T-shirt when we had [that] last conversation.

Humphries: Yeah!

Collins: Your story choices, Stephen, show some real breadth and depth. I wonder if you could describe for us the landscape of your culture-story hunting grounds.

Humphries: My beat encompasses everything from pop culture to the culture wars. And, in fact, the word culture is derived from the Latin word, and I’m sure I’m going to pronounce this wrong, cultūra, which really means cultivating something. So I like to think of it as covering a wide range of issues and ideas that are shaping individuals and communities, looking for the fertile ground where good things are happening. And sometimes where there are weeds that need to be plucked out. I’ve written about, for instance, [everything from] how today’s parents might be coddling their kids to a story about estrangements within families to a debate over fairness in sports when transgender athletes are competing. I just like to be where conversations are happening.

Collins:  Yeah. Your author Q&A with Alexandra Hudson got you thinking, it seems, in a way that overlaps with a number of big international exclusive-identity stories and empathy stories (or lack-of-empathy stories). There are all these camps of ideological foes, and you can’t fake respect for other viewpoints. 

Ms. Hudson talks about a “humanistic manifesto,” she talks about curiosity about others and about something she calls “radical hospitality.” As someone who watches the culture, do you see signs of people coming out of their corners and signing on?

Humphries: You know, I do. And in fact, in our interview, Lexi Hudson said she did too. For example, there’s the organization Braver Angels, which holds workshops and debates and other events in which people from the red team and blue team come together to find common ground and to understand each other. That’s a growing and burgeoning movement. And you know, that’s something we like to track in the Monitor, too.

Just recently, we ran a piece on the rise of antisemitism in the United States written by my colleague Harry Bruinius. His story ended with an anecdote about a Muslim student association and a Jewish student union at a Brooklyn high school. The two groups got together and they hashed out a statement focusing on their common lives. In the statement, the two groups agreed that they disagree with the spread of antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination of any kind. Instead, they wrote, we aim to emphasize the importance of humanity.

Collins:  Thanks so much, Stephen. I want to let listeners sit in now on your interview with the author of “The Soul of Civility.” So, thanks for your reporting, and again, for being a return guest.

Humphries: Thanks so much. 

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Humphries: Today I’m talking to Alexandra Hudson, author of “The Soul of Civility.” Thanks for joining us, Lexi.

Alexandra Hudson: Thanks for having me, Stephen. 

Humphries: I’ve been talking about the book here in The Christian Science Monitor newsroom, and one of the things we’ve been discussing of late is what we’re calling “the empathy gap.” People celebrating and cheering the deaths of those who are ideological foes. There was a progressive activist stabbed to death in New York City a couple of weeks ago, and some on the right were really gleeful because he was one of those sort of defund-the-police guys and, in a cruel irony, that murdered activist had also used his social media to cheer the death of Rush Limbaugh, you know, from cancer. We’ve obviously seen that happening in the war between Israel and Hamas, And it got me wondering what accounts for that human connection being severed? 

Hudson: One thing I talk about in the book is that this is not a new phenomenon. It’s really easy and tempting and seductive to dehumanize the other. Because it makes it easier to do or say what’s necessary in order to win. It’s hard to look someone in the eye while we’re dehumanizing them, harming them.

But if in our minds, we tell a story where they’re not fully human, or they’re so bad that we’re doing a positive good by harming them, that our goals are so worthy that anything we do along the way is justified, that makes it easier to do and say horrible things to other human beings. We have an insufficiently high view of the gift of being human. 

Humphries: In your book, “The Soul of Civility,” you write that one of the challenges of our current moment is that we’ve lost a shared vision of the common good. How would you define that common good? 

Hudson: In America, in the democratic context, the common good is a commitment to a set of ground rules, and a set of values. The values are life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, fundamental human equality, equality before the law. And that applies to everyone, not just those that agree with us. The shared set of values, today, also include a commitment to our institutions, to due process, to free and fair elections. As institutional trust is on the decline, as trust in our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens are on the decline, the shared commitment to these goods, these values, it has waned, which is a problem to the survival of our democracy.

Humphries: Speaking of democracy, one of the things you observe in the book is that the vacuum of common good has often been filled by politics. Is that a bad thing?

Hudson: There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. You know, [Karl von] Clausewitz said that politics is war by other means. Like we have political processes in place to help us navigate deep differences without resorting to violence.

But it becomes a bad thing when we overdo it. As these traditional touchstones of meaning in life, family, faith, friendship, community, have been on the [decline] in recent decades, more and more people have found their ultimate meaning in public life, in political issues. That is bad for our democracy because it’s no longer the case of two people having an intellectual disagreement about a matter of public policy. Now it’s easy for people to feel like their very identity is being assaulted because of that disagreement, because their identity has been misplaced in a public and political issue. 

Democracy depends on reasonable, deliberative discourse and conversation and debate. And if people are constantly being thrown into fight or flight mode, we’re not doing our public issues well, we’re not doing democracy well. We’re not doing life together very well. Politics has invaded virtually every aspect of our lives. Where we live, where we send our kids to school, where we grocery shop, how we grocery shop. Like everything has a political valence to it. We need to push politics back into its proper place. And we need to recover things in our lives that are more ennobling, more refreshing of our soul, of our spirit. Our friendship, especially friendship across [differences] and friendship around shared love, shared ideas. Intellectual curiosity. Being curious about the differences between us and other people as opposed to assigning value to them and saying, OK, “difference” is necessarily worse.

Humphries: You’ve got this concept in your book. You talk about how we should try to cultivate hospitality towards strangers, how do you go about doing that, can you expand on that idea? 

Hudson: Yeah. So, when I moved from a very divided government in Washington, D. C., to Indianapolis, Indiana, where I now live, I didn’t have many friends. And someone came up to church, um, after church one day and invited us, made a curious invitation. She said, “Hi, I’m Joanna Taft. Would you like to porch with us sometime.” And I never heard the word “porching” used as a verb before. But we were curious. So we went to her home that afternoon and I realized that she is staging this quiet revolution. From the vantage point of her front porch. She’s curating people across race, politics, geography, in order to inhabit a shared space and form friendships across “difference.” 

We hunger for [a sense of] relationship. We are deeply lonely. And we are divided. There’s no question about that. And what’s powerful about what Joanna and, as I discovered, others are doing, is that they’re saying, I can’t control what’s happening in Washington, D.C., or the world around me. But I can control what was in my sphere of influence and I’m going to make my community better and stronger and more connected and vibrant. There are people across the country who hold court in coffee shops. They use their front lawns. It’s not a physical place, it’s a lifestyle, the lifestyle of civil front-porching. 

Humphries: But Lexi, this all sounds like so much work. I mean, it’s so much easier just to sit back at home on the weekend and watch Netflix. 

Hudson: You’re right, there are many aspects of modern life that are different. It’s easier to go about our lives and not encounter people that we don’t want to encounter. It’s easy to go from our office, to our car, to our home and back again, and get food delivered, groceries delivered. You know, we don’t even have to leave our house to the movie theater because you said we have Netflix. You know, it’s, it’s … it takes work to go out of your way to encounter people across divides and to reach out. 

But there’s power in that and democracy depends on that, on reaching out to the stranger, focusing more on what we have in common as human beings and as Americans with a shared commitment to a set of values.

Humphries: There have been a lot of instances in which people have broken off friendships and even relationships within family over politics. But you talk about nurturing these relationships in a way that isn’t about glossy politeness, but actual civility. For instance, you write that true friendship requires civil truth-telling in love, not patronizing politeness. So how do you successfully nurture those deep relationships when there is that divide? 

Hudson: You’re right, I’ve read stories and I know people who have cut off or been cut off by family, by long time friends, over political differences. And that I think gets to this idea of misplaced meaning, where these public political issues are becoming ultimate sources of meaning for us. And that’s a tragedy. People and friendships, they’re too precious to be discarded over political differences.

My book argues that there’s an essential distinction between civility and politeness. And I learned this in government. I was at the United States Department of Education as a special assistant. And then I was in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services for six months. When I first got to government, I was surrounded by these two extremes. On one hand, there were people with sharp elbows, who were hostile, who were willing to do and say anything to get ahead. On the other hand, there were people who would smile at me one moment, and stab me in the back the next. I realized that these two modes are actually very similar. They see others as means to their selfish ends, as opposed to beings who are inherently worthy of respect in and of themselves. 

Civility is a disposition of the heart that sees others as beings who are worthy of respect. And that sometimes actually respecting, actually loving someone requires being impolite. It requires engaging in robust debate, telling hard truths. 

Humphries: You talk about this concept of “unbundling,” which means that if someone has a flaw or they make a misstep, sometimes we need to have a little bit of graciousness and understanding that human beings are complex, and that if you just cut someone off because of some transgression, then perhaps we’re missing the fuller picture of who they are.

Hudson: That’s right. We live in this era of a strange perfectionism. We take one aspect of who a person is and extrapolate that: “OK, that’s all I need to know about who you are and what you stand for.” But that’s so reductive and it’s degrading to the dignity of the human person.

Unbundling people is seeing the part in light of the whole, seeing someone’s mistakes even in light of the dignity and an irreducible worth they have as human beings. I had experience doing that with two intellectually formative people in my life. One was Jean Vanier, one was Socrates. So Socrates is someone who taught me the beauty of the philosophic life, the beauty of ideas, just so inspiring to me and ennobling to me. And yet, he’s someone who has a lot of problematic views. He’s a proponent of eugenics, according to his student Plato. He wanted to abolish the family, wanted to abolish art and music. And as a creator and artist, as a mother, I oppose all of those. But I’ve chosen to unbundle him. I can see the good in his ideas and thinking, and disagree and discard the bad, we ought not let the part define the whole.

Humphries: Well, I think my final question is: Are you at all optimistic that we can move toward a greater civility in today’s society? And are there any grounds you see for hopefulness? 

Hudson: I am hopeful. Because I’ve spoken to thousands of people who are working to be part of the solutions in their every day. And I hope that my book reaches thousands more and encourages other people who are similarly frustrated by the divided and rancorous status quo. To encourage them that their everyday, small, microinteractions are powerful. We can reclaim the soul of civility and heal our broken world. 

Humphries: That’s a great note to end on. Thanks so much for chatting, Lexi. Looking forward to chatting about your next project whenever that comes about.

Hudson: Thanks for having me, Stephen.

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Collins:  Thanks for listening. You can find links to this story and to Stephen’s other work in our episode show notes at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. Please rate and review this podcast if you listen on a platform that allows that. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton. Our theme music is by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.