Mere Civility MERE CIVILITY Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration TERESA M. BEJAN Harvard University Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 2017 Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved First printing ISBN 978-0-674-97274-2 (EPUB) Cover design: Graciela Galup Cover art: Hernan Pardo / Thinkstock The Library of Congress has catalogued the print edition of this book as follows: Names: Bejan, Teresa M., 1984– author. Title: Mere civility : disagreement and the limits of toleration / Teresa M. Bejan. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Based on the author’s thesis (Ph. D.—Yale University, 2013). | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016021054 | ISBN 9780674545496 Subjects: LCSH: Courtesy—Political aspects. | Toleration—Political aspects. | Discussion—Political aspects. | Freedom of speech. | Forums (Discussion and debate)—History. Classification: LCC BJ1533.C9 B45 2017 | DDC 177/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021054 For my parents CONTENTS Citations and Abbreviations Introduction: Wars of Words 1. “Persecution of the Tongue”: Toleration and the Rise of Religious Insult 2. “Silver Alarums”: Roger Williams’s Mere Civility 3. “If It Be without Contention”: Hobbes and Civil Silence 4. “A Bond of Mutual Charity”: Locke and the Quest for Concord Conclusion: The Virtue of Mere Civility Epilogue: Free Speech Fundamentalism Notes References Acknowledgments Index Citations and Abbreviations The major works of Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke are cited frequently in the following chapters. Full bibliographical details can be found in the references, but the following abbreviations will be used for citations in the text, followed by page number, (except where otherwise noted). Williams Key Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643) in Vol. 1 of The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. Perry Miller. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. BT Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644) in Vol. 3 of The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. YMB Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (1652) in Vol. 4 of The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. GF Roger Williams, George Fox Digg’d Out His Burrowes (1676) in Vol. 5 of The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Hobbes EL Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640), ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. DC Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), ed. Richard Tuck and trans. Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. L Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Noel Malcolm. Oxford,UK: Oxford University Press, 2012. Parenthetical citations include the volume, chapter, and page numbers. B Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament (1681), ed. S.Holmes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Locke FT and ST John Locke, “First Tract of Government” (1660) and “Second Tract of Government” (c. 1662) in Locke: Political Essays, ed. M.Goldie. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. LCT and ECT John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689) and “An Essay Concerning Toleration” (1667) in A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. M. Goldie. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010. SL and TL John Locke, “A Second Letter Concerning Toleration” (1690) and “A Third Letter for Toleration” (1692) in vol. 5 of The Works of John Locke. London: Rivington, 1824. STCE John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” (1693) in Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. R. Grant and N. Tarcov. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. People who expect deference resent mere civility. —MASON COOLEY, City Aphorisms (1990) Introduction Wars of Words Empowered by faith, consistently, prayerfully, we need to find our way back to civility. That begins with stepping out of our comfort zones in an effort to bridge divisions . . . stretching out of our dogmas, our prescribed roles along the political spectrum. . . . Civility also requires relearning how to disagree without being disagreeable. —BARACK OBAMA, Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast (2010) TODAY, POLITICIANS AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS across the political spectrum warn that we face a crisis of civility, a veritable war of words that distorts our public discourse, threatens our democracy, and penetrates the deepest reaches of our private lives.1 Controversies over whether universities should tolerate the uncivil speech of students or professors appear as only the latest outbreak in an epidemic, the inflammatory effects of which can be felt from the halls of the Ivory Tower to the partisan swamps of Washington, in the nation’s pulpits and its neighborhood streets, and in the scorched earth exchanges passing for debate in the media and online, above all. The rich metaphorical language used to describe our predicament conveys a danger deeper than poor manners. Words wound, rhetorical heat fans the flames, and vitriol corrodes the affective bonds between citizens. Incivility infects the body politic as a source of creeping social discord and decay. When wars of words rage unchecked, it suggests, can wars of swords be far behind? Whereas a decade ago, talk of a “civility crisis” focused on the decline of civic solidarity and social capital,2 this twenty-first-century crisis focuses instead on how individuals speak to each other and, more particularly, how they disagree.3 Although its primary site is politics,4 the sense of crisis extends well beyond the increasingly partisan and polarized tenor of democratic debate to religion, education, and areas of broader social and cultural concern. Parallel controversies about hate speech and religious insult in Europe confirm that heated and hateful disagreements are not exclusively American afflictions.5 Still, across the United States, a plethora of centers, initiatives, and scholarly programs have emerged dedicated to the study of civility as a matter of pressing domestic concern.6 This is only fitting, as universities themselves have become ground zero in the latest crisis, with rising protests against hate speech and “microaggressions” on college campuses issuing in calls for “safe spaces” to protect students from expressions of contempt, whether subtle or overt.7 Wars of words, it seems, are catching. On the surface, “eliminationist” political rhetoric, religious insult, and hate speech may seem to have little in common; however, these species of incivility are closely connected. As forms of “verbal violence,”8 they all arise in the context of disagreements we consider to be fundamental—to our worldviews, as well as to our personal and social identities. One does not discuss religion or politics at the dinner table because these are the commitments that people really disagree about, and those disagreements become heated and hateful because we define ourselves and our opponents in the controversy.9 These questions of believing and belonging go straight to the heart of how we see the world—and each other. Whether in politics, religion, or the ideological and identitarian hothouses of academia, the fears underlying declarations of a crisis of civility are the same: that even when they do not bring us to blows, our uncivil disagreements will exacerbate our fundamental differences and push us farther and farther apart. This fear is not without foundation. Since the 1970s, ideology and partisan identity have outstripped race as the lines along which Americans divide themselves, both socially and geographically. The retreat of academics into like-minded disciplines and of students on campus into activist enclaves reflects a similar trend of ideological “sorting” and polarization on the micro level.10 Given the ubiquity of claims that rising incivility is to blame for this trend, however, the causal evidence is surprisingly anecdotal.11 Recent work using survey data and content analyses of news reports has demonstrated that the perception of a crisis of “rude” and “nasty” politics in the United States has been on the rise since the 1980s. Still, without a clear baseline scholars are generally overhasty in drawing conclusions about the underlying realities or long-term trends.12 As some more skeptical commentators note, periodic cris de coeur about a loss of civility have been a more or less permanent feature of the American political landscape since the earliest days of the Republic. As uncivil as our language may be in an election year, modern Americans are (we hope) still a long way from canings on the Senate floor or the regular riots, insurrectionary protests, and mob politics of other periods in our history.13 This civility-skepticism is healthy, but it also misses the point. It doesn’t really matter whether incivility is, in fact, on the rise, because the “crisis” of civility is identical with the growing perception that there is such a crisis and that something must be done. But what? The solution seized upon by political practitioners and theorists alike has been “more civility.” In societies committed to free expression, this consummately liberal virtue would seem the only plausible restraint—and a largely uncontroversial one. Not only did Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, make the need for civility a central theme of his first inaugural address,14 Michael Sandel dubbed civility “an overrated virtue” over twenty years ago precisely because it is so uncontroversial, and “democratic politics, properly conducted, [should be] filled with controversy.”15 Endorsed by so many, in such different places and times, one might be forgiven again for thinking the current crisis much ado about very little. Calls for civility can often sound more like whining about the ordinary dirtiness of politics, while accusations of incivility have proven to be an effective, if cynical, strategy for scoring points against one’s political opponents.16 Even so, many political theorists such as Jeremy Waldron and even Sandel now insist that the harms caused by certain forms of egregiously uncivil speech are so severe that they require more than encomia to conversational virtue. Specifically, the damage done by hate speech, religious insult, and other forms of “group libel” to vulnerable groups and individuals, as well as to society at large, is significant enough that these forms of incivility should be banned outright.17 While the hate speech laws defended by Waldron offer the clearest example of efforts to restore and maintain civility through legislation, speech codes on college campuses provide another. As Jacob Levy has argued, private organizations like universities or churches often have compelling interests in regulating the speech of their members to which the free speech protections applicable in public spaces and institutions do not apply. While they may not be “laws” in the fullest sense of being authoritative enactments by the state, the internal rules and sanctions imposed by non-state institutions nevertheless have legal standing.18 For instance, a student expelled from a university for violating its speech code, like a person excommunicated from a church, cannot appeal to the state for readmission. And since the 1990s, these codes have been formulated increasingly in the language of civility as a standard of conversational decorum applied to students and professors alike.19 Thus, while they may at first seem quite different, hate speech laws and speech codes are of a piece. Both proceed on the shared assumption that standards of (un)civil speech can be articulated in the form of general rules that can, in turn, be reliably and impartially enforced.20 This is, of course, precisely what opponents of such legislation dispute, even many who share the goal of a “more civil” public discourse. In matters of civility, they insist, not only is unequal enforcement inevitable, but the voices most critical of the status quo will necessarily be the hardest hit. The result is a “chilling effect” on public debate, one that dooms the possibility of fundamental, yet civil, disagreement that the proponents of legislation sought to safeguard in the first place. Civility may well be a worthy goal, even an essential virtue. But under the banner of “free speech,” these critics view all attempts at enforcement with profound suspicion. In debating these questions, commentators on both sides often assume that the current crisis of civility is unprecedented, the product of technological, social, and cultural transformations unique to the modern world. One often hears that the Internet is to blame, along with other forms of mass media associated with modern, mass democracies.21 Yet concerns about the propensity of fundamental disagreements to become heated and hateful have an ancient pedigree. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates complained that differences of opinion about “the just and the unjust, the noble and shameful, and good and bad” made for “quarrels,” “enmity,” and “anger” between the gods as well as men.22 The word polemic itself derives from the Greek word for war, and Roman writers on rhetoric would regularly counsel conversationalists to avoid the insults and violent expressions characteristic of pugna verborum or “the battle of words.”23 Such concerns about uncivil disagreement were not exclusive to the West. Issued in India in the third century BCE, the edicts of the Mauryan Emperor Asoka enjoined religious sects to exercise “control of one’s speech” and to “honor” each other’s doctrines for the sake of social harmony.24 These long-standing anxieties about uncivil disagreement rose to new prominence in Western Europe after the Reformation, when—with the help of that recent advancement in communications technology, the printing press —Protestants and Catholics began to broadcast their polemics far and wide and hurl insults at each other at an alarming rate. The ease and abundance of printed material, along with new (if sporadic) attention to popular literacy through the Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura and biblical translation, meant that theological controversies hitherto the province of elites became irreversibly democratized.25 Democratization was accompanied, in turn, by increasing ideological division, insulting invective, and sectarian splintering that, from the standpoint of our contemporary crisis of civility, can look surprisingly familiar. Indeed, many of the religious labels (literally, denominations) that appear entirely uncontroversial to us today—including Protestant, Baptist, Puritan, and Quaker—actually began in this period as pejoratives capable of deeply wounding a believer’s “tender conscience.”26 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, this was understood specifically as a crisis of civility, and as this book will show, participants on all sides of the ongoing debates about religious toleration in this period would appeal to the concept in familiar ways—both as the norms of respectful behavior or “civil worship” governing social interactions and as a conversational virtue reflecting one’s willingness to observe these rules, especially in disagreement with others.27 In the midst of this increasingly vitriolic war of words, fears that uncivil religious disagreements and so-called “persecution of the tongue” might sever forever the vinculum societatis (“bond of society”) of true religion and