We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Kashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of
our website as well. Today we are joined by author Alexandra Hudson. She
is out with a new book called The Soul of Civility, Timeless Principles to
heal society and ourselves. She's also going to be hosting a Civility Summit on
October ninth with some really interesting people, and some really interesting people have blurbed
this book. Alexandra. You have Fukiyama, you have Jonathan Haide, you
have Tyler Cowen, just so many positive reactions to the book so far.
So first of all, congratulations and welcome to the show. Thanks Emily.
Great to be with you here, and yes, please do consider joining the
Civilities on the ninth. Just google civility overrated or Underrated and that should come
up on event right to join the dialogue with some of the most thoughtful people
of our day. Wonderful and you know, we were talking before we got
ready to start recording here, and I have to say, because you mentioned
Brie, I'm just going to mention that, Alexander, you knew the great
Brie Peyton, who we miss every day. You guys met through Claremont,
right we did. Yeah, Bri and I were Claremont fellows together. We're
Publius fellows. And this won't surprise you, Emily, but it was a
little bit male heavy. We were like, you know, one of the
one of like three women, this Clarmont Milicius sa Us girl kind of bonded
together. Over that two week wonderful, wonderful Fellow show. We had so
much fun, you know, reading Lincoln and Lincoln speeches and Douglas's speeches and
pouring over founding documents of our of our country and just like foundational political text,
political theoretical text that I actually growing up in Canada, I had never
had the opportunity to study closely before, and so real privilege to be there.
And you know, I got to learn with and alongside Breed and from
her. She's so smart, she was so smart and just so thoughtful.
So yeah, I missed for a lot. Yeah, Well, we always
I can never turned down an opportunity to mention Brie and give a shout out
to the whole Peyton family. If folks have joined us sometime in the last
four or five years, they may not have heard of Brie, but you
should google b Repayton if you Payton. We miss her every day at the
Federalists, and people around the world, around the country miss Prey every day.
So Alexandra, thank you so much for giving this the opportunity just to
talk a little bit about our friend Measure. All right. So the book
again is called The Soul of Civility, and I want to just start by
asking, you know, Alexandra, to actually define civility because I sense,
and we can get into this a little bit that some of the problem has
to be surrounding how we have different definitions now in ways we may be happened
in the past of what is considered civil. Thank you for that question.
It's the perfect question. It's the question of my book because everyone thinks that
they understand what civility is, and in reality virtually no one does. Heads
the need for my book. So anyway, I argue there's this essential distinction
between civility and politeness. So they're very, very different things. So part
of my story is that I love ideas, I love learning, I love
education. And it was the big break of my career to be offered a
job at the United States Department of Education. And I went in there,
bright eyed, bushy tailed, twenty four years old, right at a grad
school, newly married, very naive and ready to like change the world for
the better, even just marginally. And I could not have been more disillusioned
or discouraged by my season in government. This is twenty seventeen to twenty eighteen,
and I was just so surprised. I had never been so essentialized and
reduced by one aspect of who I was. I just experienced this kind of
vitriol. I was there because Secretary de Oce was my boss. She was
the secretary, and I was, you know, one of her staffers,
and people were afraid, you know, and people do vicious things when they're
afraid, and they were afraid that she was going to you know, they
didn't know what she was going to do. And we fear the unknown as
well, and so I kind of got the brunt of that in the day
to day with you know, many of the people that I worked alongside in
government, and people shouted at me, yelled at me out of meetings down
hallways, and I worked so hard to kind of just show them that I
loved education and I was a decent human being, and I wasn't. I
didn't want to destroy the lives of America's students. I brought in Christmas cards
and Easter cards for my career staff. I was the only political appointee for
several months in this office that administered thirteen billion dollars annually, and I had
three hundred career staff, many whom just despised me. They didn't even know
me, they despised me, and so I tried to kind of just chip
away that prejudice, just with basic decency and kindness. So I took them
for coffee outside of the office, took them for lunch, I invited them
into my home. I brought in cupcakes when my career civil servant's birthday,
because I'm like, you know, who can hate someone bearing cupcakes? Right?
And mixed success, squarely mixed success, But you know, it was
just very discouraging, very delision. I also saw and this was a long
not just you know, career staff. This is among everyone I worked with
the government, my own political team light included. I mean, there were
people with sharp elbows. There were people who were willing to step on anyone
to get ahead, Like you just knew they were hostile. I knew to
avoid them, not my cup of tea. On the other hand, there
were people who were polished and suave and polite, and at first I was
like, Okay, these are my people. I can do business with these
people. And I realized, though, that these were people who would smile
at me and and flatteress one moment and then stab us in the back the
next, the moment that we no longer serve their purposes. And that really
threw me for a lot because my mother had said to me growing up that
my mom is kind of a manner as an etiquette expert, but she has
said to me that manners mattered because they were an outward extension of our inward
character. And yet I was surrounded by people who were well mannered and yet
ruthless and cruel. So that really puzzled me. And at first I thought
these modes were two polar opposites, but I realized, actually they're quite similar.
They're actually two sides of the same coin. Both extreme hostility and extreme
politeness both instrumentalize others. They see others as means to their selfish ends,
as opposed to seeing others as our fellow human beings with dignity and equal moral
worth, who are worthy in respect in and of themselves. And that clarified
for me, this experience in government, this essential distinction between civility and politeness.
That civility is just manners alone. It's the super official stuff. It's
etiquette, it's behavior, it's technique. Civility is internal. It's a disposition
of the heart that sees others as our moral equals and sees them as being
worthy of respect. In light of that, just because we're people, we're
all entitled, entitled, and oh others a bare minimum of respect by virtue
of being or shared moral status as members of the human community. Crucially,
emily, sometimes actually respecting someone, actually being civil, requires being impolite,
It requires breaking the rules of etiquette in order to tell hard truths, engage
and robust debate like that's the stuff of actually respecting someone, instead of tone
policing, silencing a disagreement or diminishing polishing over a difference, which is the
realm of politeness. So you know, and there are these two contingents today.
On one hand, there are people who say they harken back to this
golden era of gentility and show where they say, we just we need more
civility and politeness and they wish they look at the back of the golden era.
And I think that more civility and plantness is going to heal our divides.
Now, another contingent says, no, civility and politeness is part of
the problem. They it's the tool of the patriarchy, white supremacists. It's
the weapons of people in positions of power to keep the powerless powerless and out
of society. And I say, both misunderstand what civility is. They conflate
these two ideas. They make the same mistake of interchanging politeness and civility when
actually they're different things. Politeness, again manner is civility a disposition of seeing
our others as equal moral worth, and that sometimes requires being impolite, telling
hard truth, engaging and robust debates. So everyone thinks they know civility,
No one actually does until you read my book Emily Well, so you draw
a line between politeness and civility basically, is that? Is that correct way?
Because I'm thinking back to like the ty Party years. Yes, and
there were parents not dissimilar from or I should say there were people not dissimilar
from parents descending on school board meetings across the country now furious and rightfully so,
with righteous indignation against their school boards, teachers, et cetera. The
Tea Party years, people were showing up at town halls. The media was
saying, you know, we just need to get back to civility. But
if you had talked to the people showing up at town halls, yeah,
that's the same thing. They would have said, yes, late civility,
but they would have been, you know, breaking the media's and the elite
sort of definition of what is civility. So it's that question of what is
politeness and what is civility? Is that right? Totally? And let's go
back to even the original Tea Party Emily, which is where I thought you
were going, Like, that's why I thought we were talking about itaphors,
which is of course an act of civil disobedience, right, Like that is
Americans during the revolutionary work. I guess pre revolution, saying we are rebelling
against these unjust laws of the day to make a social statement, and as
a social statement was expressing at a firm our ideals of equal treatment under the
law and foundational equality. And so in my conception of civility, I reclaim
the whole tradition of civil disobedience, civil protests. So I'll just tell you
that a kind of pneumonic trick to clarify this distinction. I love etymology.
I love the origin of words. That's all throughout my book because it's often
so clarifying and it gives us a little bit of a story to hang ideas
on. So politeness, So the etymology these two words supports this distinction.
So the etymology of politeness is the Latin poly year, which means too smooth
or polish. And that's what politeness does. It's external, and it's superficial,
and it papers over difference as opposed to giving us the tools to grapple
with difference head on. The Latin root of civility is kivetas, and that's
the root word for citizen city and citizenship, and that's what civility is.
It's the habits and sometimes the duties of citizenship to tell hard truths, to
take action even in the of like including civil disobedience, which is an expression
of respect for our country, to say, look like, you know,
we're taking a stand in the name of higher ideal such as equality under the
law, which is exactly what you know what doctor King was doing with it
with his peaceful, non violent resistance. And really and similarly what the Tea
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and I'm thinking now about how you grew up with a mother who is
an expert in manners, and I have to ask how that you think shaped
influenced the way you approach this question of civility, because it seems to me
that manners are sort of the if you want to talk about politeness, but
a politeness that's kind of rooted in something deeper that maybe that's something deeper that
soil would be civility. You have the sort of Western idea of moral equality
just by virtue of being a human being, and we decide then that manifests
itself in particular ways. I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I'm just guessing tell us you know from your perspective, how all of that
must have shaped the way you saw this topic. So, my mother is
an extraordinary human being. She's someone who is passionate about what the self help
writer Dale Carnegie he called it the fine art of getting along, like she's
passionate about the human social project. She loves bringing people together. There's something
she loves more than just being with others. She's very much a vehement like
social butterfly, so she cares about the rules of etiquette and propriety to the
extent that they facilitate human social life and friendship and community. She's also unbelievably
hospitable and kind and gracious, so she both cares about the form of the
rules but also the substance of true civility. She's my whole life, my
whole childhood. Growing up, my home was a revolving door for exchange students,
international students, immigrants, like newcomers to our community. She was passionate
about making the outsider an insider and the stranger of friends. She literally has
never met a human being that she didn't want to be best friends with.
It's incredible, Like it exhausts me just thinking about that sort of like extra
version. And my grandmother, if you can believe it, her mother was
like an order of magnitude more intense about human social interactions, my late grandmother
who passed away, yeah, three three and a half years ago, right
before my son was born. And I do talk about both her and my
grandmother in my book. So what was that? Like? I always questioned
social norms. This might not surprise you, and maybe you can empathize emily.
I am constitutionally allergic to authority. I hate rules, I hate being
told what to do. I like if someone tells me, I want a
very good explanation for what. And so my mother would tell me to do
these things, and I always questioned them, like wh why do we set
the table just this way? Why do we use works at all and not
just our hands or chopsticks? You know, Like I just always had these
questions in the back of my head that my mother never had thoughtful answers for,
like I empathize now as a mom my son asks why to everything.
I'm like, don't ask, just do it, you know, like I
get it. I get it. So these questions pervaded my childhood and always
kind of lingered with me, and I always hungered for the why of what
we do and why we do them in the origin of them, And in
the course of writing this book, you kind of got to this in your
question talking about like the Western context. But I was curious about that,
like is there something timeless about civility and are there an are or is there
something universal about it? And what I discovered is that well, I mean,
there's a reason I wrote this book now. I believe that divisions in
our country are dangerous and perilous. It's not just a crisis for our democratic
institutions because our politicians can't work together and and and and do things together,
but it's also a crisis for us as citizens. We have the loneliness crisis,
the the opioid epidemic, we have deaths of despair, We have so
many social and cultural challenges that are reflective from the you know, the macro
to the micro of this kind of crisis of alienation, and we long for
community. So there's a reason I wrote this book now. But this question
is also timeless, this question of how do we flourish together even even when
we differ and disagree. This is kind of this is the defining question of
democracy, of the of the classical liberal project. How do we respect freedom
and flourish at the same time. And this is the question of our species
in fact as well, because as human beings, we've as long as we've
been around, we have wanted to come together in groups. We are deeply
social, we become fully human, we thrive in relationship and community, and
yet morally and biology, we are driven to meet our own needs before others.
We're fallen as a species. Those two aspects are intention. The social
and the selfish are intention And that is why friendship, community, democracy,
civilization itself has will always be fragile, and it always has been. It
is never a foregone conclusion. And I realized as I surveyed other cultures etiquette
handbooks and civility manuals across time and across history, and I had this amazing
realization that while the rules of etiquette and propriety change, those are subject to
taste and subject to fashion, and they often are, you know, things
that people in positions of power or the wealthy and society they set these rules
of etiquette and propriete and fashion to distinguish themselves from Alzheider's you know, within
their own society. But the rules of civility, of sacrificing the self,
the ego for the sake of the social project and for human floor wishing,
those are remarkably timeless all the way back. Did you know that the oldest
book in the world is a civility book. It's given to us from ancient
Egypt twenty seven hundred BC, so five thousand years ago. And you read
this book, Emily, it's called the Maxims or the Teachings of Patahoe Tep
And they could be, you know, in mis Manner's Washington Post column,
like they're just timeless conventional wisdom about how to do well together, like,
for example, don't gossip, don't be good to your friends just when you
want something, be good to them all the time. Don't abuse your power
over others, like be good to people who are weaker and more vulnerable than
you. Just remarkable how people, thoughtful, people who have studied human behavior
have come to these same principles about how to do life together. Those and
it's all about restraining the selfish, restraining the ego, so that the social
aspects of ourselves, the higher part of ourselves can flourish. And those are
remarkably timeless across history and across culture. I was going to ask, I
know, you looked into some sort of cultural analyzes or differences, and it
sounds like at their root, a lot of at their roots, a lot
of different concepts of civility internationally but also throughout history, so internationally over history
as well. Yes, come down to some basics. There's some basics that
we as humans have sort of always agreed on. Yes, there is sort
of this universal language when it comes to when it comes to civility. For
example, a smile. There's something like biological about a smile, Like sure,
we there the stereotypes, but some culture it's like Russians, you know,
never smile. They're just like kind of a chronically austere and like,
you know, unhappy culture. But there's something like you know what, a
baby smiles at you. That's like a universal expression of joy and warmth.
And I love this, So I love etymology. The word comedy cm it
t y is this old word that means kind of unity and social harmony.
We don't really use this word anymore, but it's related to this old Sands
Kurt word for smile. And I love that because because the way that friendship
can can bring a smile, and smiling can foster friendship, there's just like
this reciprocal relationship. So I love your question because yes, there is sort
of this universal grammar when it comes to the timeless principles of human flourishing,
that the ephemeral, like that the manners, the etiquette, that those change
within a culture and between cultures over time and overplace. But this is my
chapter two in my book, that the solution that the timeless principles of civility
about restraining the self so the social can flourish, those are remarkably there's a
remarkable continuity. Caitlyn Flanagan, I was a wonderful writer over at The Atlantic,
made a fascinating point. This is going to sound like a hard pivot,
but about John Fetterman's sweats that he's that was wearing to the Senate before
truck Schumer was sort of shamed into allowing the vote for a dress code after
initially allowing, you know, changing the rules or people's perception of the rules
to allow John Fetterman to wear sweatshirts and whatever he was wearing to the Senate.
What was interesting about Kaitlyn Flanagain's point was that she said working class people
would never show up to an important job dressed in sweatpants. You would dress
up for the occasion. And John Fetterman is not from a working class background.
But if you look at other people like Mark Zuckerberg, for example,
who will wear a sweatshirt to the fanciest thing in the world, there's something
or even like the Tesla, which is a luxury vehicle but looks, you
know, almost like the Mark Zuckerberg sweatshirt of cars. Like it is just
we have this interesting aesthetics thing, aesthetic thing going on in our culture right
now. But I want to ask you about the question of class and civility,
where it seems as though there's always been a perception in America that the
lower you go down the socioeconomic rung. And maybe this isn't true throughout American
history, but recent American history, the less sort of civil people are the
less civilized people. And now it's just so interesting to see in some ways
this weird inversion of that. I don't know if you agree with it,
but where does class kind of come into historically, at least in the West,
this question of civility and its standards. Well, it's a great question,
and I love that you brought up the question of dress code because it's
true. It's a luxury status symbol of the privilege to not have to care,
right that the underprivileged, the working class, they have to do everything
they can in their power to put them at an advantage. But if you
don't care, you don't have to dress the part, right, like you
don't need anything from anyone. And I mean there's this whole vibe on social
media right now about quiet luxury right in the wake of succession, Like it's
like giving off this vibe of I don't have to try, but like it's
you know, I dress for me, I have I have that that that
yeah, so quiet luxury, and it's it's really interesting in the context of
of Congress like that that whole debate will just pivot there really quickly, because
it's laughable that you know, we're in the face of a government shutdown right
now, like our our our are our leaders cannot work together. They're not
working together across difference, right like as our institutions are built for them to
do. And yet we just recently had a debate about etiquette. It's like
they're they're posturing about about decorum, about dress code, right, Like they're
posturing about, you know, maintaining the integrity of the institution by what we
wear and which is the stuff of politeness. Right Like they're they're kind of
doing the sort of bait and switch, like they want they want to folk
distract with politeness and and and to hide at least temporarily that that that the
basic instivility, but that they're not able to. We're at this historic love
where we're not able to our our our our institutions are not function as they
should because our leaders cannot work together. And yet we're having debate about about
etiquet and dress code and propriety. But I love that question about class.
There's this great book that I reference in my in my book by a commentator
called Pull Fusel, and his book is called Class in America and an insight
that that he several insights he offers that I think are very fascinating. America
is kind of this this this sticky wicket for class, like we kind of
deny it exists, at least in theory, right, Like we're the class
list society. We abandoned the old world. We and with it we we
we you know, shoved off the monarchy and the aristocratic you know, rank
and hierarchy, and we build a system of in a way of life where
all men are created equal and anyone can build for themselves the life that they
want and become what they want because we have this this this story about the
bootstraps narrative and the ragist richest narrative, Like with hard work and determination,
we can be who we want to be and succeed in life. And what
Paul Fusel says is that you know, class still very much exists, but
we just deny it exists, and we have to It makes them more complicated.
We have to kind of invent new norms and new codes, a new
language because we don't have it given to us by tradition and by you know,
our position to the monarchs. We don't have a monarch, so we
have to like reinvent it. And so he's absolutely hysterical. It's hard to
know when he's when he's joking, when he's being serious, because it's just
a very ridiculous book. But one point I think he makes, it's really
fascinating, and it kind of gets to this idea that Flanagan was getting at.
He says that when it comes to rules of etiquette and propriety, just
guess who would be the most fastidious about the rules. Just just guess,
like, if it's low class, middle class, upper class, who would
you who would you suspect? I think I would guess middle class. That's
exactly right, that's exactly it's the middle class because they're the So as a
country, we're perpetually status conscious, but the middle class are the most status
conscious. And we're mostly a middle class country in America right now. And
so Fusel says, in the middle class, we're constantly, like you know,
striving to be, you know, a little bit better and to make
ourselves feel okay, because we're never perfectly okay. There's always more to grow.
We're not at the top yet, there's always more we could have in
terms of status, status and social approbation. So he says, the middle
classes are the ones who are always looking around them for social infractions, who's
not following the rules and who's pointing fingers because as someone else is breaking the
rule that I'm okay at least right now. And I love that because I
hope that readers, you know, hear that story and they feel a little
bit more grace for other people who are breaking the rules, like, oh,
like you know, that's a middle class thing to do, and we
can have a little more And because it's true, it is a luxury of
the upper classes to be able to break the rules and get away with it
because they're going to be okay, they don't need anyone. But I think
that's really a really fascinating insight that that both you and Flanning and got to
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sort of famously skewered Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson and kind of historically we think
put an end to crossfire. That's kind of the legend that John Stewart goes
on Crossfire, skewers them to their face, and crossfire goes away. Stuart's
argument was basically that there was something that was not civil about arguing about politics
in this kind of theatrical cable news format, and they were killing the country.
They were tiring everyone apart. Going back to the dawn of cable news
twenty four to seven news cycles, Fancy Studios CNN. There have always been
complaints that there's something is not civil about mass media and journalism, that kind
of combination yellow journalism even I mean, we can talk about all of those
things, but it strikes me that Stewart was making that point before social media.
It wasn't you know, it's directly about social media, and now we
have so many of those sort of bigala versus Carlson style conversations, not in
person, not face to face. And Ben Nominat, who we both know
you used to host the show, makes a wonderful point that we like to
talk about here on the show that actually having that public debate modeling for people
that you can sit face to face across from another person and disagree with them
on existential questions, questions of your faith, questions of everything, was a
really positive thing to have in society. We'd lost when we sort of decided
to move on from that model and we moved on from that model and straight
to social media. Social media is a huge question I imagine you think about
all the time, So this is kind of a big point to ask you
to address. But what did social media? What has it done? What
is it doing to our norms of stability. Yeah, it's a it's a
really important question. I think it's worth zooming. I mean, tiny footnote
to what you said. I didn't know about John Stewart coming on an ending
crossfire, but I did, uh watch that documentary called is it called Firing
Crossfire Fire? Yeah, it's the best of Enemies exactly, and I remember
being really it was really evocative that final vignette where it goes from them shouting
into their Gorvidal and Bill Buckley to you know, people in MSNBC and Fox
News talking heads screaming at each other like really in quick succession, and of
course it kind of paints that picture that that's where it all began, you
know, that's when things all went off the rails. And I think,
so what's interesting is we those stories are really seductive. We like to have
meat narratives about Okay, this was the point where things went, you know,
went to hell in a handbasket. And what's interesting is that people have
been telling those stories for a really long time, and people have been to
crying the state of our public life, wanting more civility, and not just
in America, but across human history, across across culture as well, like
all these civility handbooks I I mentioned a second ago from the Middle East,
from ancient Egypt, from ancient Greece, Like people wouldn't have taken the time
to write these things down if they hadn't felt like their society needed it and
society was perfect and okay, right, And you know, on this point
about social media, there are a lot of, you know, appropriate concerns
about what social media is doing to our democracy, to our children, to
our public discourse, to our own souls, lots of lots of worthy concerns.
I am grateful. I think it's a privilege to be a student of
history. I love studying the past because I think that it's both a caution
and a comfort. It's a caution to us because it gives you a perspective
like things have been bad before they can get bad again. But it's also
a comfort like they're not as bad as they have and we're not for example,
when it comes to a division, we're on the brink of a civil
war, and so that's a comfort to us. But as a student of
history, technology has always been this destabilizing force. Like a new technology in
ters society and people go crazy. They're like, oh my gosh, we're
going to collapse and social trust is down and we're going to have a civil
war. And the example I think that is a really tight analog to social
media and how disruptive it's been to society is what today is considered widely considered
the greatest invention of technology of all time, which is the Gutenberg printing Press.
So when the Gutenberg printing press was invented in the late fourteen hundreds,
people felt the exact same way that we feel out social media right now,
like, oh, it's destabilizing our institutions and it's causing mistrust. A gentleman,
a monk named Martin Luther, was a really savvy social media practitioner and
and he wrote these viral this pamphlets that went viral that so mistrust amongst many
people, amongst like all of you know, Europe, in the institutions of
the day, which were the Catholic Church and the ruling you know, ruling
authorities, and caused a lot of havoc. Shall we say, that's putting
it mildly like there was violence, there was war, and but today,
you know, we don't think of the I mean depends on you know,
your religious perspectives. I don't think that the Protestant Reformation was a you know,
laterally bad thing, right. We don't think of the Gutenberg printing process
as you and a laterally bad thing, like we think it was a good
thing. But for the same reason people people debated and they did in fact
have censors, right, you had to have a license to print stuff for
for a very long time, and so Luther had this underground system of printing
his pamphlets and and distributing them. So there's a lot of really tight tight
comparisons and analogus between that and our current moment where social media is selling this
trust between you know, people and their institutions and destabilizing society and the spread
of fake news and misinformation like that was a criticism that was a concern.
Then five hundred years ago do their prostant reformation, And so I think that's
helpful because it's interesting how with time and distance history kind of it takes on
new shape and we see things differently. So in the moment now, it's
scary, right, there's a lot we don't know, and there's a lot
of reasons to be concerned. But I also think that again, looking the
past and these other destabilizing forces are it's helpful and it's comforting, and it
gives us healthy perspective. It's so funny because you've just sort of walked into
one of the longest running bits on this podcast, which is of our many
many Catholic guests and guess House claiming the Protestant Reformation really was a major mistake.
But I'm a Lutheran, so I am firmly in the camp. Yeah,
you know where I fall on that too. Yeah. Oh gosh,
well, yes, shout out to Chris Bedford and I'm sure he is listening
to this. But anyway, the next question I wanted to ask actually was
is there is it the case that sometimes civility or civil civilizational decline and civility
is the Canarian a coal mine for broader civilizational decline? Do you see that
across history? Is civility sort of always kind of up in the air,
except for maybe like Victorian the Victorian era that we historically kind of associate with
it, Or is it, you know, really a Canarian a coal mine
for something broader problems? No, I think it's a fascinating question insight that
civilization really does live or die in the in the norms of its citizens.
Democracy depends on the norms of its citizens. Samuel Johnson, who you know,
didn't invent he transcribed he you know, author the first English Dictionary.
He has this great line in seventy to fifty five. He has this great
line that civilization, the test of true civilization is how society cares for its
weakest and most vulnerable. And so he's, you know, he's saying that
like civilization lives or dies in the in the character of its citizens, are
we is a civilization full of citizens who care about the vulnerable, care about
the oppressed, care about justice, care about equality for all? Or is
it is it comprised of people who are indifferent to those things, and that
that is the stuff of barbarism in the decline of civilization. But I think
it's a really interesting point, and I talk about this in the book,
that our daily decisions to affirm the dignity, the humanity and the personhood of
everyone we meet, our uber driver, our clerk at the grocery store,
that is the stuff that gives us all resolved to kind of keep doing this
hard thing of life together, or to want to give up Like I think
we insufficiently appreciate the way that the small things that we do every day have
huge, serious consequences for society. So to that extent, I think you're
right that it is appropriate to take the daily exchanges that we have and extrapolate
it like, Okay, how healthy is a society? How? Because it's
like how committed are we at the individual level to this joint partnership of self
governance that is a democracy? And self governance is key there because that's what
civility is. It's voluntarily choosing to restrain what we want, our our immediate
desire, our impulse for the sake of society. We live in community,
we live in civilization, and we can't just monolithically, unilaterally do what we
want to do at all times in all places. Like that's the if you
live in an island, go ahead, but you don't. If you don't,
if you choose to lean society, you have to consider the needs and
well beings of our fellow persons and our citizens alongside of ourselves. That's that's
just part of the social contract. We have to do it. And and
this is this is an explore in the book that when enough people fail to
do that, autocrats past and present have tried to get involved. And I
tell several stories, one of which is of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Politeness campaign when
he was mayor of New York City. He you know, had thought,
or people thought, that there had been a fever pitch of incivility in New
York and that it was time to do something about it. And so he
instituted all of these laws to mandate common condecency and courtesy, all these these
laws against petty rudeness, uh, you know, putting your feet on the
subway next to you, if you're a kid at your at your child's baseball
game, if you're too rowdy, find fifty dollars. If you're texting the
movie, you're fined fifty dollars. If you spit on the street, Yeah,
that's gross, but fined fifty dollars, you know. And New Yorkers
did not like being civilized by their local government. And it was also didn't
work. It was impossible to enforce, so that didn't That was very short
lived. But it's a cautionary tale because in our democracy, our our limited
government, our free and flourishing way of life depends on our decisions every day
to restrain ourselves for the sake of others, and so we can flourish because
there's high promise in community. Life with others is the highest and best life.
But it is hard. It's very hard, and we each have decisions
to make each day about how committed we are to this project. But we
each have a role to play in it. Yeah, it's weird to think,
you know, sort of over time of these you know, wealthy plantation
owners who were imbibing the finest art, the finest everything at the time,
or a certain you know, twenty cent tree dictator who famously didn't eat meat
because it was just barbaric what we did to animals while doing awful, unspeakable
things to human beings. The definition of civility seems to be so easily weaponized,
or like it seems like you're easy. It's easy for people to reprogram
their ideas of what it is right. I mean, this is the beauty
of the English language. So I mentioned Samuel Johnson earlier when he defined the
English language. He defined every word in English in seventeen fifty five. He
took a descriptive approach. He just defined words as they were currently used in
everyday conversation. And that's different from other other languages. For example, French,
there's the institution called the Academy Francis that they decide what words mean,
and even if they're slang or you know, words take on different meanings outside
of their definition. They don't acknowledge it. They don't recognize a very inflexible,
structured language that that's like the custom of the French culture. How dare
you? You know? But but English is very loose and free flowing and
it's and so I think that it's appropriates very much in keeping with what English
is as a language to say, look, we need clarity about this concept,
and this concept being what civility is. And I will say, you
know, for all of his virtues, Samuel Johnson, I think got it
wrong. He defines civility in terms of politeness, politeness in terms of civility,
and we've been doing it ever since. If you go to dictionary dot
com right now, you will see civility in terms of politeness, fin civility
and so. But so I think we need to disinviguate them and to robust
to define him them as as I as I have to help us think more
clearly about what do we want less of in a society. And I think
we want less home policing. We want less to focus on, you know,
pretending to be good and just shuring at respecting people. And I think
we need more civility in society, actually being good, actually respecting people,
even if that makes us uncomfortable and requires demands that we have tough conversations,
but we need to have. That's what democracy is. We have to have
those conversations to flourish and do this thing called life together. The Watch dootwn
Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack the connection between
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Down Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get
your podcasts. Well, this is my last question. You have a book
coming out the week after the historic first yanking of a Speaker of the House
from the chair, the first successful notion of vacate House of Representatives, famously
the sort of chamber of the messiness of democracy. So I wanted to ask
just looking back, we're kind of in the middle of now we're recording this
the day after McCarthy was actually ousted. But looking back on everything that just
transpired, we had a Democrat pulling the fire alarm over the weekend, Republicans
sniping at each other on the floor of the House. As somebody who's just
written a book on civility, how do you analyze what just happened or how
do you see in this context of American civility what just transpired in the House.
So there there, it's crazy, right, it's a spectacle. It's
insane. Like I have friends on the on the hill I was texting with
yesterday're like everyone's at a tizzy, like literally no one knows what to do.
And you know, this is kind of tame, really compared to what
things have been in Congress before again, history is such a good, healthy
ballast. It helps us keep perspective. So here's you know, here's the
story of of uh that that shows this. During the debates about abolition,
there was a congress person, uh no, there was a Senator, Charles
Sumner, and he was vehemently you know, anti slavery, right, and
he on the Senate floor one day he gave a speech that got personal.
He called out a particular congress person and for being pro slavery. And that
congress person's brother or cousin, I forget. A congress person named named Preston
Brooks came over, you know, from the House side to the Senate side,
and and and beat similar to death, almost to death, within an
inch of his life. And he took he took three two or three years
to recover from this, basically an assassination attempt on the Senate on the Senate
floor. And what's interesting about this, you know, that's a very famous
instance of you know, shall we say, in politeness and in civility,
like beating someone with an inch of their life is neither nor civil. But
what's interesting about this is that there was this hole in the South. There
was this whole culture, this whole artifice at this time of politeness, of
gentility, and they loved King Arthur and the Knight's the rounds table and it's
you know, it's sweet because I'm my son's name is Perceval, and we
read those stories to him every night, like the stories of like Enchantment and
Marlin, and it's beautiful. But they love those things and they literally recreated,
they consciously self created their whole society around recovering these ideals of chivalry and
gentilic. They jousted, they've literally you know, jousted in the South,
and yet that was a pretty you know, polished, refined exterior on an
unjust society that subjugated half of their population or you know, like African Americans
and through through slavery and so anyway, the point is that when Preston Brooks
attacked Charles Sumner, he did not attack Sumner as he would an equal,
and he would if he had seen Sumner as as his equal, as his
moral equal, he would have what would he have done, challenge him to
a duel, you know like that, that's how gentlemen you know, quarreled
back then. But instead he approached him from behind and beat him to almost
death like he would a slave, because he didn't respect him as as as
is moral equal. And that was a whole concern tiny foot note with the
character of this of the South, there was a whole whole concern that slavery
owning, that the whole entity of owning a slave to form the soul of
a slaveholder and made them unfit for self governance and democracy. Being cruel and
literally owning another person's property made them unfit for tomorrow. That was a whole
debate during that time, and I think that's really well embodied in this instance
where a congressman beats the center than an end of his life as he would
slave. They did that. Southerners look down on and didn't respect Northerners as
their moral as their moral equals. So all that is that. I think
it's a powerful story for many reasons, most of which this is again,
this is tame. This is tame compared to compared to what our country has
been through before. So I have hope. I think we'll make everyone's in.
It's hissy, but I think we're okay. There you go. The
book is called The Soul of Civility, timeless Principles to heal society and ourselves.
The author is Alexandra Hudson you've been listening to on this edition of the
show, Alexander. Alexandra is the founder of a Civic Renaissance and is hosting
a Civility summit on October ninth. The book is out on October tenth.
Alexandra, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.
Emily. Of course you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio
Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky, culture editor here at the Federalist. Will be
back soon with more. Until then, new lovers of freedom and anxious for the Fray