In the week since the awful shootings in Tucson, we have heard a lot about the need for civility, about civil discourse in our public speech about politics and public affairs. Some of the immediate public reactions to the shooting, understandably motivated by intense personal grief, unfortunately sounded like tsk tsk scoldings of other Americans: “We (by which I mean you) need more civility, less vitriol, less heated rhetoric, less anger in (y)our discourse.”
The Tucson sheriff was one of the first to publicly blame others less enlightened than he for the crime, first calling his home state of Arizona “the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry”, and then setting his sights even higher, blaming by name Rush Limbaugh and other “spewers of vitriol.”
(What exactly is vitriol, anyway? Well, it’s H2SO4. Does that clear things up?)
Of course, in the past week, as police have released more facts about the shooter, the storyline about blaming conservatives’ lack of civility for the awful murders and maimings in Tucson is quietly fading. It seems that not even Sarah Palin can be blamed for this one.
Ground control to Major Tom…
For as we learned more this past week about the shooter’s own writings about history, language, and government, we encountered haunting aphorisms like this:
If the living space is able to maintain life
at -454 degrees Fahrenheit,
then human bodies are alive inside
the NASA space shuttle.
Human bodies aren’t alive
inside
the NASA space shuttle.
That’s profound. And with the revelations late last week that, on the night before his crime, the shooter took creepy sexualized photographs of himself posing with his pistol and wearing only red G-string underpants, it has at last become clear who the REAL responsible party is in this awful deed, the real inciter to violence.
Not a politician like Palin or even a political entertainer like Limbaugh, the major media figure who has undeniably ruined this young man’s mind with preposterous act after bizarre statement after preposterous act of staged public absurdity and created the climate that pushed the Tucson shooter over the edge is: Lady Gaga.
But enough of trying to find scapegoats. Catholics know and ought to remind our fellow citizens of the truth that when a moral evil is perpetrated, it is the doer of the deed who bears the blame—not his parents, not music and media, and not even the dreadful Ayn Rand books he apparently loved. Catholics know that our common iniquity as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve is enough to “explain” this crime, just as it accounts for all evils small and large, from my minor act of gluttony at the dinner table last night to the Holocaust. Catholics need also to remind the community that, while the large-scale secular order can be more or less just, and ought to be more, the sad truth about individual crimes and tragedies is to be found in individuals, in relationships and persons, and not in large macro-social abstractions like “the media” or “our political climate” or “the availability of mental health resources.”
All sin and crime are local and personal—and it is a mistake to look for large-scale social causes that are commensurate with the large-scale social consequences of an individual crime like this one.
Something else that Catholics are in a unique position to do is to remind our fellow Americans of what exactly civil discourse is. For it is an idea deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition of thought about politics and reason—and if the idea of “civil discourse” is cut off from its source, no wonder it has withered into brittle and unviable notions like “not saying things that make others feel uncomfortable,” or “not criticizing the health care law too strongly.”
Fr. Murray on the cover of Time in 1960.
The American scholar Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967) can remind us what an authentically Catholic idea of civil discourse is. Before he went to participate in Vatican II as an advisor-theologian, Fr. Murray wrote a classic book in 1960 called We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections upon the American Proposition. He begins his book about the need for Catholics to shape American politics with a discussion of civil discourse.
“The basic standard of civility is not in doubt,” writes Murray in the book’s opening chapter: quoting the Dominican Thomas Gilby, he says that “Civilization is formed by men locked together in argument. From this dialogue the community becomes a political community.” Murray says that this view “exactly expresses the mind of St Thomas Aquinas, who was himself giving refined expression to the tradition of classic antiquity, which in its prior turn had given first elaboration to the concept of the ‘civil multitude,’ the multitude that is not a mass or a herd or a huddle, because it is characterized by civility.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, Paragon of Civility
This term “argument” is likely to be troublesome for the contemporary American mind, for whom argument and pointless, nasty bickering are more or less synonymous. If we think that Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly shouting down their TV guests is an argument, or if we think that two presidential candidates standing side by side at podiums and talking past each other while making competing sequential sound-bite loaded speeches to the TV audience is a real debate, then we are not in a good position to understand the classical-Catholic idea of argument and civil discourse.
Civil argument, according to Murray and the Catholic tradition, is a special kind of rational discourse about the common good, distinguished by its dispassionate and controlled reasonableness.
An exercise in failed brotherhood.
For unlike the other communities of the tribe, the church, or the family, civilization—which ought always to leave plenty of room for the former (see CCC §1883 on “subsidiarity”)—is NOT a community that calls for passionate expressions of supra-rational loyalty, love, or even erotic affection. Those aforementioned communities are characterized by their warmth, by the ardent bonds between their members; civilization, by contrast, is something
cool and dry, with the coolness and dryness that characterize good argument among informed and responsible men. Civic amity gives to this climate its vital quality. This form of friendship is a special kind of moral virtue, a thing of reason and intelligence, laboriously cultivated by the discipline of passion, prejudice, and narrow self-interest. It is the sentiment proper to the City. It has nothing to do with the cleavage of a David to a Jonathan, or with the kinship of the clan, or with the charity, fortis ut mors, that makes the solidarity of the Church. It is in direct contrast with the passionate fanaticism of the Jacobin: “Be my brother or I’ll kill you!”
Civilized argument is not something that can take place among enemies—it is actually an act of friendship, of the special kind of limited “political friendship” that exists between citizens of the same community, an idea first developed in writing by Aristotle, but integrated into the classic tradition of political philosophy that followed him, from Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas to the contemporary Catechism (see especially §§ 1931 and 1939).
What follows from this classic definition of civility as cool reasonability is that non-rational discourse about politics is ‘uncivil’. But it is not just the intemperate or, dare we say, the vitriolic speech that is uncivil. Barbarism, the opposite of civility, takes many forms. According to Murray,
Society becomes barbarian when men are huddled together under the rule of force and fear; when economic interests assume primacy over higher values; when material standards of mass and quantity crush out the values of quality and excellence; when technology assumes an autonomous existence and embarks on a course of unlimited self-exploitation without purposeful guidance…Barbarism likewise threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws. There are laws of argument, the observance of which is imperative if discourse is to be civilized. Argument ceases to be civil when it is dominated by passion and prejudice; when its vocabulary becomes solipsist, premised on the theory that my insight is mine alone and cannot be shared; when dialogue gives way to a series of monologues; when the parties to conversation cease to listen to one another, or only hear what they want to hear, or see the other’s argument only through the screed of their own categories…When things like this happen, men cannot be locked together in argument. Conversation becomes merely quarrelsome or querulous. Civility dies with the death of the dialogue.
To the extent that Catholics have been shaped by their own classical tradition of cool, rational, and amiable discourse about public life and the common good, we can, like Murray tried to do half a century ago, remind our fellow Americans of what they are really hungry for when public agony about a murderous rampage leads many to cry out in anguish for more civil discourse. As bearers of an ancient tradition of reason that speaks to the unbeliever as well as to the faithful, we are called not only to hold our passions and prejudices in check when we speak with our fellow citizens, but to be witnesses to the real existence of truths accessible to human reason, which is the only thing that makes discourse fertile and hopeful.
Catholics are required to resist the barbarism of words without meaning, the tyranny that would chase anyone from the public square who wants to engage in real argument about the good. We are impelled by our tradition to be witnesses of hope to those who have lost all hope in dialogue about ANYTHING with “the other side.” For as our Catechism reminds us, there is no “other side”—neither as Americans nor as humans are we truly divided against each other. All human persons are bound together by “our common origin and by the equality in rational nature of all men, whatever nation they belong to” (CCC §1939).
Last week in Tucson, without any hint of scolding or scapegoating, President Obama expressed the cautious hope that the awful murders of the week before might give Americans some reason to be more civil to each other. If we take his words at face value, the president essentially asked Americans to be more faithful to the Catholic tradition of rational and cool argument.
Are we up to the task?
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