Unruly Voices by Mark Kingwell

Author:Mark Kingwell [Kingwell, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781926845852
Publisher: Biblioasis

9

“Fuck You” and Other Salutations:

Incivility as a Collective Action Problem

For as laws are necessary that good manners may be preserved, so there is need of good manners that laws may be maintained.

—Machiavelli, Dei Discorsi

CALLS FOR CIVILITY STRIKE a keynote in the current political moment. Greater civility is urged for public discourse, both on-air or online, in shared spaces, whether physical or virtual, and in common undertakings ranging from the mundane (whether or not to recline your airline seatback) to the essential (whether or not to pay taxes). Civility is thought especially important in those areas where there is no explicit regulation, such that citizens themselves must act to coordinate their actions, or in the spaces that run between explicit regulation and its application in the real political world, such that citizens must negotiate the precise details of regulatory execution. The urgency of these calls rises in direct proportion to the amount of everyday conflict that is encountered in social life, from shopping malls and corridors to online encounters and Twitter feeds.

As Machiavelli perceives, the ideal relationship between law and manners is symbiotic. I take “manners” here to mean more than just table manners, say, or the other largely conventional systems of coordinating social behaviour. Hence they should be understood at least to include, if not to indicate, civility as understood in the typical demands for more of it; though more on that later. Each term of this distinction reinforces the other after the fashion of the rules (“laws”) of an organized sport such as football insofar as they relate to the unwritten norms (“manners”) of good sportsmanship in the executed iterations of the game.1 The trouble comes when this symbiosis generates systematic deformations by (legal) advantage-taking within the game that runs contrary to the norms but is nevertheless exempt from punishment. Such advantage then generates incentives for further violations of the norms. This is what I will call, following the usage introduced in earlier essays, the regulatory capture of civility. In normal usage, as we have seen, regulatory capture is what happens when a government agency becomes dominated, through aggressive lobbying and influence-peddling, by the sector or industry the agency is meant to regulate. This results in a failure of the public good. Regulatory capture in effect privatizes allegedly public interests, allowing pools of moneyed interest to obviate individual citizen interest; civility will offer a parallel case, not in the capital markets or the public education system but in the market of public discourse itself.

If nothing else, this approach offers the immediate benefit of novelty. Most defences of civility proceed along positive lines: that is, they argue for civility as a virtue of citizens and/or dialogic participants; or they enumerate goods and outcomes that civility can generate. These arguments, while well-intentioned, tend to fall into that peculiar form of comforting uselessness known as preaching to the choir.2 They do not succumb to lack of validity, only lack of effectiveness. In this essay, I propose to reverse the polarity of civility defences by providing a negative argument.

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