The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves
By Alexandra Hudson.
St. Martin’s Press, 2023.
Hardcover, 416 pages, $29.
Reviewed by Henry T. Edmondson III.
Speech codes, safe spaces, and intolerant demands for diversity, equity, and inclusion appear to be clumsy and misguided attempts to create an artificial civil environment; yet, social interaction seems less civil every day. If we were to follow Alexandra Hudson’s lead, many a speech code might be superfluous, and a great deal of partitioned safe space re-purposed to better use. It gets worse: critical race theorists and other neo-Marxists now tell us that the very standards of civility, like grammar rules, are cudgels to keep an entire underclass in its place.
All the more reason for this timely book.
Alexandra Hudson has called us back to the centrality of “civility” in our common undertakings. What is “civility”? Like Aristotle trying to explain friendship, Hudson is not sure, nor does she force the issue. She suggests it is not a virtue, but perhaps she would be satisfied with Aristotle’s description of friendship in Book XIII of the Nichomachean Ethics: It is either a virtue or it at least implies virtue. Like friendship, it creates an environment in which virtue can flourish. Hudson is also keen to distinguish civility from faux civility, such as shallow politeness, performance, and spectacle; even Victorian manners get a bad press.
Hudson is not Pollyannaish about human nature, yet she hopes that civility might trump our baser nature. She observes,
The human condition is a contradiction, capable of greatness and wretchedness. We are each a bundle of desires and impulses that are constantly at cross-purposes. And the central tension in our nature is between our sociability and our-self-love.
She describes her book as a “humanistic manifesto,” the newest and most important component of her “Civic Renaissance” project. For Hudson, civility is the ideal that will enable us to “overcome our self-love so that we might thrive with others.” Civility may be best understood in action: “[C]ivility promotes the virtue and integrity that enable us to get on well with others because it helps us develop a correct outlook on others and the world: one that takes personhood and basic respect for others seriously.” So . . . is it civility that promotes virtue or virtue that promotes civility? Surely it is a symbiotic relationship.
Accordingly, in this far-reaching book, she looks at her subject in a variety of ways, including from the perspective of civil disobedience, which she believes may even be governed by civility, despite the inherent tensions, sharp differences, and occasional violence such activity involves. She looks to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to show us the way. Especially insightful is Chapter Six, an extensive discussion of the basis and limits of equality, and the way in which civility is pursued while admitting our natural inequalities but respecting our shared moral worth.
She decries the incivility of the digital age and exhorts us to teach and mold the young and old alike into a practice of civility in our exercise of hospitality and our schools. She warns, as have many before her, that the body politic will not survive without the sinews and tendons of good manners and wholesome customs.
This is an ambitious book—it is better to aim high than low—but it might be reduced by about a quarter and pack even more punch. A little brevity can go a long way. Hudson concludes each section of her book with practical advice, much like the tips on manners her mother has been providing for years. These guidelines do a great deal to bring civility to the home, to the workplace, and to the street. Though valuable, the guidelines occasionally seem trite, but such pedestrian habits are the stuff of life: “Don’t offend your host,” “Public Figures: Don’t Lie, Tell the Truth,” “From time to time, reflect on what it means to be a human,” and, when you pass strangers “remember to look them in the eye.”
Most of Hudson’s philosophical references are fitting, whether they are isolated quotes to spice her discussion or more extensive sections of her narrative; indeed, the book is well-researched and displays an occasional depth and a consistent breadth of learning. The use of Plato’s “Ring of Gyges” as a metaphor for ugly social media behavior enabled by anonymity is brilliant.
Another Plato reference doesn’t work as well. Hudson introduces her idea of “unbundling” people as a technique to focus on another’s good qualities rather than their bad traits. She notes disapprovingly Socrates’ apparent dystopian proclivities in The Republic. On the one hand, she “unbundles the things” she finds objectionable in Plato, like eugenics, the abolition of the family, and prohibitions against art and poetry; on the other hand, she embraces Plato’s scheme of virtues and his call to the philosophic life.
There are two difficulties with this analogy. Hudson’s idea of “unbundling” has to do with interpersonal relations, not sorting through an intellectual body of thought. These are very different, and the latter does not illustrate the former. Secondly, the analogy misunderstands Plato’s complex and multi-layered thought in The Republic. It’s easy to forget that The Republic begins and ends with a search for justice in the human soul by using a grand analogy of justice in the city. The strategy concludes that a city is just if it displays the proper ordering of those classes of citizens who are characterized by prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Applying this to the individual, Plato concludes that the just individual is the one whose soul is prudent and temperate and who faces pain, fear, and deprivation with fortitude.
Plato’s city, then, is a hypothetical construct meant to reveal the make-up of a just individual.
Some of the recommendations in the city with which Hudson objects are to be taken ironically, not literally. Along the way, Socrates engages in political philosophy as his city is an opportunity to explore the nature of individual and civic ideals, all the while showing the limits of those principles, which transgressed, are prone to lead the polity into dystopia.
Hudson begins her book by recounting her bitter experience in several different positions in Washington, D.C. At one point, she found herself in Dante’s 9th Circle of Hell, better known as the Department of Education, and she was dismayed by the dog-eat-dog world of hypocrisy, manipulation, and deceit. So, she decided to fight fire with . . . cupcakes, generously overwhelming her co-workers with birthday goodies, cocktail party invitations and excursions to the coffee shop.
In retrospect, she wondered if that was the best “tactic” for the political catfights in our nation’s capital. Hudson seems willing to admit that she was ill-suited for that “toxic environment”—her gifts lie elsewhere. She is glad to have escaped to the Midwest and perhaps she learned that, though a noble soul herself, there are limits to noblesse oblige.
Another important question Hudson’s “humanistic manifesto” raises has to do with religion. Early in the volume, Hudson finds helpful St. Augustine’s concept of libido dominandi, the lust for domination, which is combined with the incurvatus in se, man’s tendency toward egotism. In so doing, she sets a high bar for civility to surmount. Is it possible to do so without religion?
In Washington’s “Farewell Address” he insists that for most, morality is not possible without religion; so much so that it is unrealistic to expect men and women to overcome their viler tendencies and cultivate virtue without faith in something transcendent. The Soul of Civility includes the occasional ecumenical references to, for example, Jesus, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton, but these are on equal footing with invocations to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Schweitzer, Lao Tzu, and Wittgenstein. Will civility suffice to impel “us to surrender our self-interest,” thus overcoming our “DNA”?
J.R.R. Tolkien said it more pungently in correspondence: “What a rot and stink is left by liberalism devoid of religion!”
Hudson urgently reminds us that if we cannot live civilly with one another, we may have reached the limits of our democratic “proposition,” as Lincoln called it. Hudson has rightfully re-introduced civility into our vocabulary and, in doing so, raises an inspirational ideal and draws a “line-in-the-sand” by which to judge behavior.
Should civility look the same in the third decade of the 21st century as imagined in previous eras? Undoubtedly, it should, at least up to a point, but perhaps Hudson challenges us to look for new and more imaginative ways we can pursue a civil life together and not lazily pine for better days, viewed in the glow of nostalgia. There has never been a romantic time in American or European history in which all citizens alike have enjoyed the comfort and protection of civility. To paraphrase Lincoln, “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of incivility may speedily pass away.” If so, may Hudson’s endeavor encourage the “better angels” of our civility.
Henry T. Edmondson III is Carl Vinson Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Georgia College.
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