Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration

"Teresa Bejan is a political philosopher and historian of 17th century thought. She wanted to set some of the current debates that we’re having over the public and political discourse in historical context. There’s a lot of concern at the moment about civility, ‘Are we having a civil enough discourse? Or is that impossible these days?’ She argues that if you go back to post-Reformation Europe and the New World you see the same arguments playing out in this very different but oddly similar context. She started off wanting to make the case that civility doesn’t matter as much as we think, that actually it’s a way of excluding those who are “uncivil”, the impolite, from the conversation. In other words, it’s a power move. In the course of writing the book, she comes to a more refined point of view, which is that there is a role for civility, because what civility does is enable you to have really vigorous disagreements with each other. There’s a very basic civility which enables you to be uncivil. Honesty is hugely important and it allows you to have heartfelt, emotional, passionate political exchanges of view with each other. The figure that she focuses on is Roger Williams, who also became a touchstone for my book. He was a lower middle-class Englishman. Sir Edward Coke, a very senior barrister and judge, sees something in him and scoops him up into the elite. Williams becomes friends with John Milton. They’re both Puritans, absolutely bursting with idealism and religious zeal. Williams goes to Massachusetts to join the colony there. He looks around him and thinks that they’re not Puritan enough and they expel him because he’s a troublemaker. He’s this hugely charismatic, charming guy who’s always getting into arguments because he just can’t help himself. He’s a fundamentalist. He’s a zealot. But he’s an unusual form of zealot who believes that all humans are equal, it’s just that some of them are wrong. He believed that you should be arguing with each other all the time, because you should be trying to convert people. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . You see this brought out in his relationship with the Native Americans. He traded with them, but he also had long conversations about life and death and religion with them, in which he constantly told them that they were wrong about everything, and that they needed to see the world as he did. So, on the one hand, you might say, ‘Okay, well, this guy has been terribly patronizing and offensive, coming along and telling these people what to think.’ But he was also the guy who openly said Native Americans were equal to Westerners and should be thought of as such, which almost nobody else was saying at the time. In fact, he accused the colonists of stealing their land and declared the entire American project to be a fraud. He is just an inspirational figure. Civility is what you need to keep the other person engaged in the argument. And you want to keep the other person engaged in the argument because you want them to come around to your point of view, eventually. The argument that we don’t need civility is ultimately self-defeating, I think. The only proper response to somebody who says, ‘We don’t need civility’ is ‘f*** you’. That’s the end of the conversation. Fine, but that means that nobody gets persuaded, and no change happens. It’s completely futile. When it gets confused with an elaborate code of decorum and manners, that’s when it becomes exclusionary, but that wasn’t what Roger Williams was interested in. He wanted to have these arguments out. You have to be interested in them. Williams is unusual for a zealot in that he was really interested in how other people thought and how they believed and how they worshiped. He was interested in the Native Americans. Ultimately, he thought they were going to hell and that they were terrible sinners and needed to be redeemed. But he wanted to understand them better. His vision of a good society was one in which anybody can come along, but you all have to listen to each other. You certainly have to listen to me, so I can persuade you that you’re wrong. And so he went on to found a community in Providence, Rhode Island, which was probably the most religiously, ideologically diverse society up until that point in history, in which Jews and Christians, including Catholics—who even John Locke didn’t think should be included in the Commonweal—were able to come along and live. He wasn’t a liberal. He didn’t think everybody can just come along and is free to believe what they want: ‘I’m not going to tell you what to believe; you’re not going to tell me what to believe, we’ll just worship in our own way.’ No: he thought he was right, that his way of seeing things was the only way, but he wanted to argue with you about it. That’s an interesting distinction. It’s the baseline of civility you need to keep other people in the room with you. The point of civility is to enable you to row. The point of civility is not so we all get along and are nice to each other and don’t row. It’s the opposite."