← In Our Time
In Our Time
Civility
00:51:23
On the value of keeping conversations going with opponents, from the Reformation onwards.
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- [00:00]
Theresa Bijan
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- [00:06]
Alex von Tunzelman
This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [00:19]
John Gallagher
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [00:25]
Alex von Tunzelman
Join me, Alex von Tanzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts this is.
- [00:43]
Phil Withington
In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello. Civility, in one sense, is among the most valuable virtues in society. The skill to discuss topics that really matter to you with someone who disagrees and somehow get along in another of its senses. When civility describes the limits of acceptable behavior, it can reflect society at its worst, when only those deemed civil enough are allowed their rights, their equality, even their humanity. And as we'll hear, civility is a slippery idea that's fascinated philosophers, especially since the Reformation, when competing ideas on how to gain salvation seem to make civil disagreement impossible. With me to discuss the idea of civility are John Gallagher, Associate professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds, Phil Willington, professor of History at the University of Sheffield, and Theresa Bijarm, professor of Political Theory at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Teresa, so that we can hold onto this during the discussion, can you give us your definition of civility at its best?
- [02:02]
Theresa Bijan
Well, even at its best, I think civility is sort of notoriously difficult to define. There are many different senses of civility that come up historically, many of which will no doubt come on to. But I would define civility, and I think civility as we invoke it today, as describing a particular social or conversational virtue, and it's one that's pertinent in particular to the practice of disagreement and disagreement on questions that we consider to be in some way fundamental, as sort of touching on how we believe and belong and really go to the heart of our differences with other people, so unlike other conversational virtues with which it's often linked. So we might think civility is akin to politeness or akin to courtesy. Civility, I think, is distinguished by what we might think of as its minimal character, as the minimum degree of courtesy that's required in a social situation, or even sometimes in its negative character as sort of the absence of insult as opposed to anything more demanding. And so we might think of civility as mere civility in this sense. It's the virtue that's appropriate to our disagreements with our bad neighbors, our ex spouses, or indeed sort of members of the other party or the other religious sect, the people that we're sort of constrained to interact with, but maybe, if given our own choice, would prefer not to.
- [03:21]
Phil Withington
Well, that's a very good rounding. What's the origin of the word? Did the Greeks and the Romans have anything to say on this matter?
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Theresa Bijan
They did. As ever they did. So civility in English derives from a Latin term. So the term civilitas, which referred to a kind of art of good government, or more specifically the sort of the behavior becoming a virtuous citizen. So the Latin for citizen is. So we see that as the root of civility. So the kives was the member of the civitas, the sort of civil society or state. So civility in that sense was the virtue necessary for good citizenship of people who are living together in a particular kind of settled community under a shared form of government and particularly kind of shared law. And this corresponds imperfectly to the Greek idea of the political sort of politike. So the life of the citizen in Greek political thought as living in a distinctive kind of community, the polis as a kind of self governing political community. And in Greek thought, the polis and the citizen was understood in contrast with the non Greek barbarians who did not live in polis, who did not live in these settled communities, who did not sort of live in these self governing and free communities, but rather lived an unsettled, wild or slavish form of life. So again, we barbarians exactly. Barbarian. So barbarian simply is the Greek sort of way of saying that these people who are not Greeks speak a language that sounds like nonsense. It sounds to cultivated Greek ears like bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. But so even there we can see, going back way into ancient political thought, the civil is understood also in not just in a minimal but an oppositional sense. So the civil is defined in contrast with the uncivil as the barbarian, the savage. And so to say that someone's uncivil is to say that they're worse than impolite. It's saying that they' beyond the pale of kind of a shared civil way of life.
- [05:24]
Phil Withington
Thank you very much, John. John Gallagher, can you take us a giant leap forward to erasmus in the 16th century and how he developed the idea of civility.
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John Locke
Absolutely. So Erasmus of Rotterdam is an extraordinarily important biblical and classical scholar of the early 16th century and kind of a major figure in debates around the Reformation, has kind of kicked off in 1517. And the reason he comes into our discussion is because in 1530 he publishes a little book called De civilitate morum Puerilium on the civility of children. And this is a gorgeous little Latin guide that aims to teach children how to be civil. Because the thing is, anyone with small children will know is that they are fundamentally uncivil and brutish and animalistic and they must be civilized. So this is a book which takes the child and attempts to teach the rudiments of good behavior from, you know, not putting dirty fingers in the shared dish at dinner, not blowing one's nose publicly around other people so that this snot lands on them. So all of these kind of basic things, but also tries to tie them to learning to behave in a very strictly hierarchized and regimented society. They're attempting to teach the child what to do with their body and their speech so that they don't offend their betters, so that they aren't over familiar with those beneath them as well. So it's a guide to behavior and a guide to how to live in society.
- [06:55]
Phil Withington
Can we talk about, skip from Erasmus to Luther, who seems to have had no time at all for civility. How does he fit into what we're going to talk about?
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John Locke
So Luther really is someone who increasingly comes to reject the kind of decorum that people like Erasmus are calling for this idea that you should keep your words within the bounds of appropriateness and acceptability. And Luther, including in his attacks on Erasmus, is very interested in insult, and he is. So he's in a major debate with Erasmus around free will and salvation. He is willing to use insult to suggest that Erasmus is not fully Christian, to suggest that these are fine words, but stupid ideas like dung being served on gold and silver plates. And that's classic Luther, that bringing in of excrement and the bodily and of filth. Because at the same time as you've got codes of civility emerging in the 16th century that are about having more control over the body and our animal functions, you've got someone like Luther who's kind of throwing that out and invoking bodily functions to attack the devil, the pope and all of his enemies.
- [08:04]
Phil Withington
Is there a sense in which he sees civility as the enemy of salvation?
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John Locke
I think so. And in that he's really Setting up a dynamic that we'll see with a number of religious reformers across the 16th and 17th centuries. So whether that's with John Calvin and the insistence on admonition of sinners and right up to the Quakers, George Fox, the insistence on only ever referring to people as thou and thee, the refusal to use titles of authority or nobility, not even doffing one's cap or taking one's cap off in a place of a place of worship or a place of respect. So we see throughout the Reformation, this refusal of civil behavior as a way of insisting that salvation matters more.
- [08:47]
Phil Withington
Thank you very much, Phil. Around this time in the 16th century, an Italian book, the Book of the Courtier. How did that fit in?
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Roger Williams
So Castiglioni's Book of the Courtier is a parallel story to the one that John's telling about Erasmus, I guess. And the important thing about the Courtier and a few other Italian books at the time by Stefano Coazzo and the Silver Conversation and Della Casta, what they're doing is they're shifting the emphasis on political behavior that Teresa was talking about into the social realm more generally. And civility is applied to these conversations and demonstrated in conversations in all kinds of social interactions. And Castiglione's book the Courtier is probably the uber book of this genre. It's interesting because it's. Rather than writing in the Latin or simply translating, say, Cicero, who talks about similar kinds of things and propagating it that way, he writes it in the Italian and it then gets translated into vernaculars around Europe. So as well as shifting civility from the political to the social, he's also shifting it from the Latin to the vernacular languages, including English, and demonstrating that a people beyond the absolute elites can actually strive to achieve it. So what you have as well is the foundation of a really important genre in early modern culture of the conduct book literature, which people go to to learn how to be civil, learn the kinds of rules and so on, and skills in particular. It's not just rules, it's skills of convers and behavior that John's talking about in terms of Erasmus and education. And that becomes a key aspect of Renaissance autodidactism, which is a really important feature of the Renaissance, people wanting to improve and better themselves.
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Phil Withington
But it did have a great success. And I know we still read it, we'll still read it at university these days.
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Roger Williams
It must be one of the most published and translated texts across Europe. I mean, it's on a par with the Machiavelli's The Prince or More's Utopia, for example. And this is the age of popular print as well. So you have lots more people becoming literate and being able to access this kind of material in print.
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Phil Withington
Did the ideas about behavior spread therefore into a broader society? Was it more about manners than anything else?
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Roger Williams
I mean, as Teresa mentioned, civility starts off in terms of the civic and civitas, and I mean throughout this period and then accelerating thereafter, you have lots of institutions and institutional structures where civility is expected as a norm of behavior. So guilds, corporations, trading companies, inns of courts, universities, they all expect these standards of civility. And of course, all the people, the men mostly, who are going through them, will learn those expectations.
- [11:38]
Phil Withington
And we can come to Thomas Hobbes now, who's influential in this argument. Can I turn him on? You first, Theresa.
- [11:45]
Theresa Bijan
Yeah, absolutely. And before I maybe get into the specifics of Hobbes, arguments about civility and actually more particularly incivility, might be helpful just to connect it to the Erasmus and Luther discussion that John was bringing up. I mean, so Erasmus diagnosis of kind of the problems of the Protestant Reformation is not that it's simply a problem of Protestant theology, the fact that Luther is criticizing Catholic orthodoxy for Erasmus, it's specifically that Luther is doing it in this deliberately uncivil way, hurling insults not only at those who disagree with him, you know, his fellow monks and friars, but even the Pope himself, calling the Pope the Antichrist and anyone who follows him an anti Christian. And so Hobbes, a century later, when he's thinking about the problem of peace and how we coexist in a civitas or state, he's thinking about this in the context of an English Civil war, which Hobbes viewed as a religious war. So Hobbes was very much persuaded by this kind of Erasmian analysis. The problem isn't the fact that Puritans disagree with Anglicans about how the Church of England should be governed, it's that they do so in this deliberately contemptuous and insulting way. They hurl insults at each other. Not just at each other, at their lawful sovereign. In doing so, they corrode the sort of tenuous or fragile social bonds that make peace possible. In his various works of political philosophy, Hobbes actually sort of diagnoses incivility in the specific sense of insult, or what he calls contumely, as a major obstacle to peace. So much so that he actually posits as a fundamental law of nature that no man shall revile or deride another or speak in a hateful or contemptuous way. But Hobbes doesn't think that in order to live peacefully or un murderously, it'll be enough for us just not to insult each other. He thinks that we actually need to go further. So in his work of Latin political philosophy called De Cive or of the Citizen, he describes what he calls the animus civilis, or civil spirit. And this he defines as the willingness of individuals not only to observe a civil silence on controversial questions, so simply not disagreeing with one another about religion, but also their willingness to conform themselves to whatever the sovereign says should be the orthodoxy, specifically in religion. So it's agreeing to agree. And this is what Hobbes understands by sort of being civil or being civil in spirit, agreeing for the sake of peace.
- [14:18]
Phil Withington
Yes. It's peace that he's after, isn't it?
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Theresa Bijan
Absolutely.
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Phil Withington
Peace is the great thing that he seeks right through. Civility will give you peace.
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Theresa Bijan
Precisely. And so civility in Hobbesian political philosophy is really about the civil as the peaceful in contrast with the violent, and that famous kind of Hobbesian picture of the state of nature as the war of all against, against all. So in order to live together peacefully, we not only must not insult each other, Hobbes thinks that disagreement itself is the problem. As he says in De, the mere act of disagreement is offensive. So in order to live peacefully, we better get religious disagreements off the table.
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Phil Withington
Okay, John, say in the 17th century, there's a feeling that civility could be superficial, could be mere politeness or good manners. Can you tell us about that?
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John Locke
Absolutely. So from really the earliest stages of civility discourse in the 16th century and all the way through the 17th, there's this niggling fear that civility is just plain hypocrisy. There are accusations against those who practice civility and courtesy. There are accusations that they are simply flatterers. And this happens when we're talking about kind of political structure as well. There is also this idea that civility is dissimulation, that this is a kind of lying, that it is to hide what you really think and to hide what you really are. There's also a set of concerns about civility as this art that creates this impossible tension between the inward and the outward. And a lot of writers defending civility say, well, actually, you know, civility only works as an outward performance because it reflects what's on the inside. But its critics will say, well, actually there's the, you know, civility is. Is just putting this on because you're kind of rotten. All the way down. So dissimulation, dishonesty and falsehood are kind of being accusations that are lobbed at civility constantly. And the other thing that does happen, though, is that civility in England is seen as something that's worryingly foreign. So we've seen how Castiglione is used. You know, Castiglione's book comes over from Italy over the course of the 17th century. The models of civil behavior that are increasingly popular among the English are French. And you see from the late 16th century where civil gentlemen are attacked for being Italianate and they to sooner kind of draw a rapier on you and enter into a duel. By the later 17th century, they're fops, they're Frenchified, they're pseudo Catholic, and they're absolutists in disguise. So it's a danger to national identity as well.
- [16:44]
Theresa Bijan
For Hobbes, the hypocrisy of civility is precisely the point. It becomes a kind of virtuous hypocrisy and conformability that makes civil life possible. And you unravel that a bit more. Well, so Hobbes basically thinks that, look, you know, we can't control what people think. Thought, after all, is free within the confines of our individual skull. Our thoughts can roam over anything filthy, profane, sublime, whatever. But what we can control is how we manifest those thoughts outwardly. So for Hobbes, the virtue of civilities precisely is that it governs the outward performance of our. Especially in the performance of worship. In religion, he thinks, believe whatever you want in your mind, but when it comes to worshiping God or worshiping or respecting the sovereign, you must conform your private to the public conscience. And it's not incidental in this case or not a coincidence that Hobbes, when he. So he spent the Civil War basically safely with the Royal court in exile in Paris. When he returns to London, people think him a suspiciously frankified, Frenchified character. He speaks English with a French accent, and so he seems to be a civilitarian, embracing a kind of French foppery and absolutism and hypocritical dissimulation in religion.
- [17:58]
Phil Withington
Do you think there's a paradox here, Phil? Tolerance can become intolerance of those who don't go along with tolerance.
- [18:06]
Roger Williams
Yeah, I mean, civility and tolerance are slimmer in that respect. How do you make people who don't want to be civil civil? And how do you make people who don't want to be tolerant, tolerant? And it's very interesting what John and Teresa are saying about the mid 17th century, because I think a slightly after the Civil War. Yeah. So it's the same kind of issues and the same problems that a different group of people are responding to, and they turn to civility as a way of doing it as well. And it's very complementary in some ways to Hobbes. Although Hobbes, I think, is regarded as an atheist. His position as well, because he's, he's so dismissive of people's inner spirituality and enthusiasm and so on. But what you, what you have, even in, say in 1648, you have comprehensive Presbyterians, if you want to call them like that. Someone like Edward Bowles, who is aware of these huge tensions and these huge differences that have caused this, these massive conflicts, not just in, in Britain and Ireland, but also in Europe. And they. He applies the concept of circumspection, which is a kind of religious adaptation, if you like, of the self control of civility, and pleads with his fellow Presbyterians to be circumspect in all their dealings and so on, and think about their words in relation to other people and other people's faiths and accommodate other people as much as possible. And when it comes to the Restoration in 1660, Edward Bowles is one of the favorites to actually become the next senior dignitary, if you like, within the Restored Church because of this comprehensive position. Unfortunately, he dies. But there's a group of bishops called, they get to be known as the Latitudinarians, who have a similar sense of as long as you have an agreement over the fundamental points of doctrine, such as, I don't know the Trinity or there's a God and so on, you can disagree about insignificant or indifferent things. And it's really interesting actually going back to what John was saying about Erasmus, is that one of the leading latitudinarians is Gilbert Burnet, who ends up becoming the chaplain to William of Orange when he comes over. But William Burnet translates Utopia in 1684. Utopia is obviously Thomas More, who writes, Utopia is a very good mate of Erasmus. This is just before Luther and the Lutheran onslaught on civility. But in Utopia, and this is what Burnett's saying, you have religious toleration in the sense that people can believe exactly what they want as long as they comply with some central tenets, and as long as they don't go on the street and try and convert people by force or use demagogy to persuade them to change their faith. So there's this almost retrospective grabbing of this Virasmian civility, bringing it forward into the latitudinarian position in the 1680s.
- [20:51]
Alex von Tunzelman
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [21:04]
John Gallagher
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [21:11]
Alex von Tunzelman
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcast.
- [21:23]
Phil Withington
Can I go back a step or two? Did the Civil War change things radically in this respect? You're nodding.
- [21:29]
John Locke
Yes, I think massively so. So you've got, you know, as Teresa has mentioned, you've got this way in which civil discourse has broken down, where you've got kind of obscene publications like Mercurius Fumigosis, which is kind of larded with insult and profanity, where you've got parliamentarian soldiers desecrating altars by placing their naked bums on them. All this kind of thing. So this has been occurring, but you also have a sense, you know, in 1660, the Royalist Richard Ulstree writes a book called the Gentleman's Calling. And he starts from the principle that this is all about reconstruction, that you've had such an utter collapse of gentility and of social Hierarchy, and from 1660, the Restoration onwards, that hierarchy has to be rebuilt somehow, and a form of godly civility might be the way to do that. But he says, you know, the leveling principle, but also all of the. The crimes and sins of a puffed up gentry have demolished the hierarchy as was in England. And now it is the role of all good royalists to rebuild it from scratch. So to find a way of being civil, of being honest, but in a way that returns to a kind of dreamt of status quo and a kind of a social hierarchy as it was beforehand.
- [22:36]
Phil Withington
So you want to say something?
- [22:37]
Roger Williams
Yes, it's just, you know, Andrew Marvell, the famous Restoration poet, his biggest insult or criticism that he could make at the bishops who were responsible for this profound incivility in terms of not making space for other denominations and not making. Listening to other voices, was that they were rude. So rude is a severe criticism in the Restoration period.
- [23:01]
Phil Withington
Just take these points up between you whenever you.
- [23:04]
Theresa Bijan
So to go to the question about civility and toleration. So the picture that we've been painting here is, of course, those who are appealing to civility in General in this 17th century in England, are Those who are opposed to religious toleration, sort of broadly construed. The idea is that if we permit people to disagree publicly about religious questions, then inevitably we will descend not only into a war of words in which we hurl Lutheran style insults and scatological images at each other using this great advancement in communications technology, the printing press, but from there it's but a hop, skip and jump to the all out destruction of civil war. That's the Hobbesian picture. And although few people would admit to agreeing with Hobbes on this, I think this is really almost a kind of consensus view. You cannot have a civil society that is also a tolerant society. But what happens in the 17th century is that people that we might expect to be the most sympathetic with Luther, these evangelical hot Puritan Protestants, a few of them begin to see that if they are going to be able to claim toleration for themselves, they're going to have to sort of reclaim civility too. And so one of the most interesting people in this regard is a hot Protestant called Roger Williams, who's sort of a very close contemporary of Hobbes. Although a much more obscure figure. He is theorizing civility from the perspective of someone who is seen by almost everyone around him as paradigmatically uncivil. He's an evangelical Protestant who's constantly calling people sort of followers of the papal Antichrist, accusing them of worshipping the devil, etc, etc, but he's doing so in the British colonies of North America on the colonial frontier.
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Phil Withington
He's Rhode Islander.
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Theresa Bijan
Absolutely. So Roger Williams is known today, if he's known at all, as the founder of the colony of Rhode island, which becomes the state of Rhode Island. And effectively what happens with Williams is he is so uncivil to his fellow Puritans in Massachusetts Bay that they end up banishing him in the dead of winter. And he survives only through the hospitality of the local Native American tribes, so the Narragansett and the Wampanoag. And so Williams finds himself in this sort of somewhat uncomfortable position of realizing that actually there is more civility among the unchristian pagan inhabitants of the New England wilderness than among his fellow Christians in Massachusetts Bay. And this leads Williams to pioneer an argument which we'll later see again in John Long, which is effectively to say society can tolerate not just varieties of Christianity, but it can tolerate even sort of non Christian religions. For Williams, he thinks the most paganish Jewish or Muhammadan consciences, even Catholic anti Christians, remember he's a kind of Lutheran. He sort of believes that Catholics follow the Antichrist can live together if they but keep the bond of civility. And ultimately, when toleration triumphs by the end of the 17th century, it's with this idea that one can be civil without being a kind of good Christian.
- [26:04]
Phil Withington
Can we move to Locke here?
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Theresa Bijan
So that same argument, we see it in Locke's famous letter concerning toleration, published in 1689. So Locke effectively says, look, it's not religious diversity that's the problem. It's not the fact that people disagree on these really fundamental questions and sort of argue and compete with each other in the domain of religion. It's that they do so in a way that violates this code of civil conduct. They do so in an uncivil way. So he says, if men just keep the softness of civility in their disputes, then we can peacefully coexist together in religion. And so Locke his toleration is not quite so extensive as Williams is, but he nevertheless, he says, if we may speak frankly, as becomes one man to another, neither pagan nor Mohammedan nor Jewish should be restricted in his civil rights on matters just because of differences in religion.
- [26:59]
Roger Williams
Yeah, but Nanaram have said, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.
- [27:02]
Theresa Bijan
Exactly. It's the manner of disagreement, not the fact.
- [27:07]
John Locke
And it's quite neat that at the same time as Locke is kind of theorizing toleration and civility in that context, he's also much like Erasmus writing on children and education. So he writes in his Some Thoughts on Education, which is one of the most influential educational tracts of the modern era, huge in North America and elsewhere, he is skeptical about maybe the. The fripperies of civil behavior. But even Locke, at the same time as he's got that skepticism, urges parents to send their children to dancing masters, because he says that that is the best way to learn the carriage of the body, that you simply need to be able to perform bodily civility in the exact same way, and that Erasmus was arguing over a century beforehand.
- [27:47]
Phil Withington
Did civility become something that you had to pursue and enjoy and join in order to be accepted in acceptable society?
- [27:55]
John Locke
Absolutely. So civility and the language of civility disperses throughout society across the early modern period.
- [28:03]
Phil Withington
So if you look, what dates are we talking about?
- [28:05]
John Locke
So throughout the 16th and 17th century. But if you start to look at the records of church court disputes, so kind of parish level disputes of people having, you know, Barneys in villages in the early 17th century, they are already using the language of civil and uncivil my neighbour has behaved in a most uncivil way towards me. She is a most uncivil woman, meaning that she's not honest, that she's not chaste. And there develops this market across the 17th century, as Phil mentioned, for manuals for books that will teach you how to be civil, but they start to kind of penetrate all kinds or all aspects of society. So you can learn to be a civil shopkeeper, you can learn to be a civil housemaid, you can learn to be a civil servant who teaches you.
- [28:46]
Phil Withington
Who'S giving you this learning.
- [28:47]
John Locke
So there's a wide variety of people writing these manuals. So for instance, you'll get William Scott writes an essay of drapery which aims to teach merchants and shopkeepers this kind of behavior. You'll get Hannah Woolley writing for serving maids and gentlewomen at the same time. So regular working authors are finding a way to teach civility across the board. If you're learning a new language, you're Latin grammar will contain material on how to act civilly. And if you go on the grand tour or if you go and undertake educational travel, that too becomes an education in civility as well.
- [29:20]
Phil Withington
Phil, is there much evidence of a reaction against civility at this point?
- [29:23]
Roger Williams
There's plenty of positions you can take or forms of sociability you can adopt. But you have Greek models like the Hetarea and the Komos which are very ritualized and quite abusive masculine forms of drunkenness which get taken up in the early 17th century by English soldiers and groups, privileged young men who are causing havoc in taverns and so on, often learning these ideas and these ritualized behaviors abroad on the continent and fighting the wars. You have ideas of making merry where you would go to the ale house and you would engage in banter, usually drunkenness again or good fellowship. That's another kind of category of behavior where you wouldn't necessarily conform to rules of civility. And then you have more philosophically probably engaged positions a bit later like libertinism, which Alpha Ben as the poet or I suppose Rochester is the central figure and they are more deliberately uncivil or anti civil in a kind of ideological way.
- [30:27]
Theresa Bijan
Treasure so picking up on that and making sort of explicit something that's been implicit in a lot of what we've been saying. Civility as a code of civilized conduct or kind of virtue of civil conversation combines elements of equality and hierarchy in interesting ways. So we are meant to abide by this code of civility so as to have the kind of conversation that can take Place between those who are free and equal, a conversation that is absent domination. But in doing so, we're also expected to conform ourselves, ourselves to the hierarchical codes of behavior on the basis of our place within the kind of status quo. And so this is really clear in the case of considerations of gender. So another example of the consummately uncivil person, or maybe let's say the paragon of incivility in this period, would be the female prophet who insisted not only on speaking on the basis of her direct line to God, but doing so in a way that was at odds with the feminine ideal of civility as being exhibiting a kind of comely effeminate silence. Right.
- [31:31]
Phil Withington
I'd like to move forward now. And starting with you, John. How did this civility we've been talking about slip into ideas of civilization?
- [31:39]
John Locke
Yeah, so, you know, civility is, for people in the 16th and 17th century, something that you can bring people to, that you can reduce people to civility. And so for very. From very early on, it becomes a tool and a language of domination and this idea of the barbarous against the civil. So we have in Ireland, for instance, with the English presence in Ireland, the Irish are characterized as barbarous and rude and needing to be brought to civility. So we get this with people like Edmund Spencer, it is very, very clear that the rude and wild Irish need to be tamed and brought to civility and to civilization. And, you know, when we have massacres, for instance, of British. British settlers in Ireland, that's seen as being a collapse and a failure of the civility. That and the protestant civility the plantation was meant to bring in. At the same time or around the same time, at the beginning of the 17th century, with the growing English presence in north America, you see the same exporting of this language. So you see in kind of early communications around, for instance, the Virginia company and presence in the Chesapeake, and around, you see the language of rudeness, of barbarity, and of savagery being used to describe indigenous Americans.
- [32:49]
Theresa Bijan
Just to agree with John, I mean, so the. The idea of civilization, the term civilization really comes in kind of the 18th and 19th centuries, but from the beginning, and when I was talking earlier about the sort of Greek sense of political life as opposed to the life of a barbarian, there's this sense that the uncivil is rude, unruly, violent, dark, superstitious, all of these things, and all of these antonyms come in and inform the ideal of the civil person over and against those. And we can think of this as maybe the kind of the dark side of civility or civility talk. To appeal to civility is always to kind of raise the specter or the possibility of needing to suppress or exclude the uncivil other. I may have used. I think I used the phrase earlier, beyond the pale to describe the uncivil person is beyond the pale. It's a really suggestive phrase because it derives from the kind of Latin palace for stake or fence. So the person who's beyond the pale is the barbarian living beyond the fence. And of course, in the. In the case of Catholic Ireland, it was the idea that the sort of savage Irish, barbaric Catholic lived beyond the pale of sort of Anglicized, civilized Protestant Dublin.
- [33:59]
Roger Williams
I mean, I think one of the things we haven't talked about so much is the. The idea of the civil conversation, which is a kind of literary genre, a learning tool of the skills, but also a kind of formula for how you can engage with people who you have serious disagreements with. And I mean, one of the probably the grossest misapplications of civility, just going on from what John was saying about Ireland and the early Americas, was this, the slavery complex and the fact that civility played into part of the justification, justifications of why we could turn black people into chateau property and so on and treat them. So can you just say a bit more about that with civility as a justificatory point for that kind of nexus and the development of the slave economies in Barbados and in the Caribbean and. And then in over in America as well. So going back to this idea of the civil conversation, which Guazo one of Castiglione is Italian compatriots, introduces into the vernaculars in the 16th century. You find this guy called Thomas Tryon, who's a sugar trader, so involved in and complicit in the slave trade at an early stage. Nevertheless, writing this in 1684, a civil conversation between an Ethiopian slave and a Christian his master. And what you find is that the enslaved person leading the discussion and following civil conversation norms is able to convince and show the Christian master that how inhumane and how uncivil and how brutal the treatment of the slaves has been and how they can reach a point of not abolition but amelioration based on their conversation. So you have the perfect civil conversation being applied to the most imperfect, if you like, application of civility at quite an early date. And that's. I think that's an important skill to relearn.
- [35:49]
Theresa Bijan
I mean, this idea. Williams is such an interesting figure because he encapsulates all these different discourses of civility we've been talking about. So the civil as opposed to the barbarous or savage, the civil as opposed to the violent, and the civil as kind of the way of life of the urbane sort of merchant in London, because he's the son of a merchant tailor born in London and who speaks friend of John Milton, speaks myriad different languages. And it's precisely his facility with languages that allows him to master Narragansett language. So his first. His first publication in 1643 is what's called the key into the Language of America. And what it is is it's a fascinating sort of handbook of American Indian language, culture and ways of life as a way of trying to open up what seems like savagery from the perspective of Protestants of Old England to show that actually civility is there in the New World among the so called savages.
- [36:44]
Phil Withington
Can we say more about John Rawls?
- [36:49]
Theresa Bijan
I think Theresa can, to skip way forward in time. I mean, so we've been talking in a loose way about this developing sense of a link between civility and toleration. We see it in Roger Williams, we see it in John Locke, and we see it in sort of even in 20th century liberal political philosophy. So John Rawls is the most famous philosopher of liberalism. He too sort of picks up on civility as being the key to coexistence between people who disagree deeply, especially disagree deeply in religion. In his book Political Liberalism, he talks about what he calls the duty of civility, and he imagines it specifically as the willingness of the members of a secular liberal society to conduct their disagreements only on the basis of a shared commitment to secular liberal principles of justice and their willingness not to bring in their kind of partial religious commitments or authorities in the course of conducting their political debates. So again, civility as keeping the sort of the uncivil, in this case the religious out.
- [37:57]
Roger Williams
I mean, another guy who, another philosopher who is working in the same ballpark is Habermas and his idea of the kind of the bourgeois public sphere and so on, which was criticized at the time for being elitist and gendered and so on. But in terms of the underlying principles, which are probably taken from ideas of civility going back to the ancients, and then thinking about the crisis of our public discourse at the moment in the Western world, at least both in terms of our demagogic leaders and areas of discussion like social media and so on, you can see that you need some kind of recourse to civility to Reform or improve the way which we talk to each other about so many different issues? I think so.
- [38:40]
Theresa Bijan
There's a kind of paradox that comes up again and again of sort of civility being essential for the possibility of tolerance on the one hand, but also the way in which civility talk, and especially accusing people of incivility becomes a tool of intolerance. We could coexist very well together in the midst of all our differences. So long as you sort of shut up.
- [39:01]
Phil Withington
Can I just go across to you, John? What aspects of civility would you jettison if you were asked to lighten the load in the balloon today?
- [39:10]
John Locke
I think there are two. One is the use of appeals to civility as a means to silence people by saying, you are being uncivil, therefore I don't have to listen to you. But maybe more controversially, you know, the historical sociologist Norbert Elias argued that the early modern period witnessed a civilizing process and the people were urged to feel more shame about, you know, bodily functions and other things. There's a kind of rise of shame across this period. And maybe counterintuitively, I would like to argue that we should bring back shame in civil discourse. You should be ashamed to lie in public, you should be ashamed to slander opponents in filthy terms. And I think that, you know, we have witnessed a collapse of civil discourse at the moment in part because we have lost the ability societally and politically to force those in power to feel shame for shameful acts and shameful words. So bring back shame. That's what I said.
- [40:02]
Phil Withington
Do you think that.
- [40:03]
Roger Williams
I think that's a really good point. And the basic principles of accommodation and self knowledge as well, I think are really significant. But shame is definitely the way to go.
- [40:17]
Phil Withington
Is there is a. Can I keep asking you to for a moment, Is there any way in which you think. You think public stability is diminishing or it's in a steady place or where are we?
- [40:28]
John Locke
Yeah, I think that, you know, we have, for all their problems, we have centuries of discourses about tolerance and learning even when it's difficult to live together. I study immigrant communities in 16th century London and I think we are witnessing a sustained chipping away of kind of hard won ideas about how you live with neighbours who are different to you, even if you don't like it. And I think that there is, for all that there are painful and violent legacies of civility and these ideas. I think there are also things that are worth keeping about how you live with difference and how you thrive in difference as well.
- [41:06]
Phil Withington
Do you want to take that?
- [41:07]
Theresa Bijan
Yeah. I mean, just to go back to the question of sort of what I jettison and what I'd keep with civility, I think that one of the aspects of civility that's worth reviving in the midst of this kind of contemporary crisis of civility, especially in sort of very polarized democracies like this one, is recovering the kind of mereness of mere civility, the sense of the kind of minimal nature, civil behavior, civil disagreement, as meeting a low bar grudgingly. And I think that that's what Roger Williams really saw in appealing to civility was that we've got to be able to live together peacefully, even with those people that we regard as damned right. And we've got to be able to maintain the sort of possibility of coexistence while also remaining convinced that our neighbors are going to hell. There's this wonderful example of this from Williams's own life, which is that he remained convinced throughout his life, even though he was impressed by the civility of the American Indians, that they were participating in devil worship. But nonetheless, upon one of his returns to London in 1651, he brought with him a petition on behalf of the Narragansett people for toleration so that they may not be forced from their religion. Again, Williams thought this religion was devil worship, but nevertheless he thought it must be tolerated that they could live together civilly with that which he could not approve.
- [42:31]
Phil Withington
Last word from you, John.
- [42:32]
John Locke
Well, actually, that makes me think a little bit of Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne, the French essayist, in his essay on cannibals, where he, you know, says that you've got these kind of 16th century discussions of supposed cannibalism in the Americas. But he looks at the French wars of religion on his doorstep and these kind of hecatombs, these extraordinary massacres that are ongoing and poses the question of where barbarity really lies. And I think you see a way in which these discourses can be used to turn the mirror on European society. And that kind of critique, I think, is extraordinary power.
- [43:05]
Phil Withington
Well, thank all of you very much indeed. Thanks to Theresa Bijan, John Gallagher and Phil Withington. In Our Time now takes its annual break and we'll be back on the 18th of September. Have a good summer and thanks for listening.
- [43:20]
Alex von Tunzelman
And the In Our Time podcast gets.
- [43:22]
John Locke
Some extra time now with a few.
- [43:24]
Alex von Tunzelman
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:27]
Phil Withington
What did you not say? Did you think you didn't have time to say that you would like to.
- [43:31]
Roger Williams
Have Said, I think I didn't talk as much about the social spaces that civility penetrates. But actually John picked up on some of those spaces when you mentioned the shopkeepers and gender relations and so on. So the parallel trajectories of the political, the religious and the social are really interesting. And John mentioned Hannah Woolley who wrote. She was probably the most successful writers full stop in the later 17th century in one of her conduct books called the Gentlewomen's Companion from 1673, which was C.O. written with her publisher Dorman Newman. So it's not quite clear who's written which bits. And she was quite cross that he'd written probably too much at the time. She defined civility as gentle plausibility and also a science of the right understanding of ourselves and how to dispose of our words and actions in the proper place and time. And I think the fact that that kind of sensibility and that sense of expectation of self knowledge and self awareness is penetrating this is about how to talk to equals, but also how to subordinates to talk to mistresses and mistresses to talk to subordinates and so on.
- [44:45]
Phil Withington
But that went right down society. What didn't there was in little town I was brought up in, underneath the Congregational Church. That's where they had the, what they call the socials, which are the dancers. One trumpeter who'd been in the army, one guy who played the drums and made a living by painting posters. And we danced to that and learned how to dance to that. And the interesting thing reading about this and coming to this is that I went out from when I was a little boy, from late. And you go to somebody and say, may I have the pressure of this dance? And then you go lead them back to their chair. And I think that was common in what could be called working class communities. It had gone to that extent. Is that, is that idealistic or do you think there's something in that?
- [45:27]
Roger Williams
No, I mean, I think there is a huge penetration of civility through the social order. I mean, the dangers, going back to the issue of making people civil who don't want to be civil, the reformation of manners is part of that process. And that was often quite a. A persecutory alienating process because it is, you know, it's not straightforward to make people behave how you want them to behave, even if it's possibly for a civil society's good and so on. So there's. There's always that tension between the social control and the power and, and the empowerment and the improvement that people might get from it. I mean, the idea of civility is that it enables you to succeed in social situations as well, but least at the same time it's reproducing the inequalities that structure those situations. And that's a kind of massive paradox, I think.
- [46:15]
Phil Withington
Yes, I think.
- [46:16]
Theresa Bijan
I think the problem is that when the aspirational element of civility and the exclusionary element of civility come together. Right. You define civility in an ever more demanding way while also preserving this sense of the uncivil as intolerable.
- [46:29]
Roger Williams
Yes.
- [46:30]
John Locke
Or you change what it's called and you develop politeness, and you do it in other spaces where you can be something that looks very like civil, but some of the people who are starting to get a bit close aren't really allowed to enter or to participate in the same way.
- [46:42]
Theresa Bijan
Absolutely. That's right. I mean, I wish I could have said a bit more about the kind of tolerant and civil society that Roger Williams himself founds in the New World. Sort of the colony of Rhode Island. Absolutely. So Rhode Island, I mean, is interesting for a lot of reasons, but basically Williams's colony, it's the most tolerant society.
- [47:01]
Roger Williams
That the world has seen.
- [47:01]
Phil Withington
We're talking about Rhode island now.
- [47:03]
Theresa Bijan
Absolutely. In the 17th century. It's the most tolerant society the world had ever seen and actually would see for a long time thereafter. In Rhode island, there's no established church, and on top of that, there's a kind of what we would think of as equal protection. So everybody enjoys the same and equal rights of free exercise, free association, and also free expression. And so what happens in Rhode island is you get this very kind of idiosyncratic, of mere picture, of mere civility. To its critics, Rhode island just seemed. They called it the. They called it Rogues island and the Latrine of New England. Basically, all of the religious riff raff and castaways, as well as American Indians, were sort of living together in a way sort of where they would sort of disagree freely on the sort of most fundamental questions. But for Williams, this was kind of the key point. Civility had got to be understood in contrast with and sort of as different from spirituality or spiritual goodness. So to be merely civil was not the same as being a good person, a good man, or indeed a good Christian.
- [48:04]
Phil Withington
Phil.
- [48:04]
Roger Williams
I think there's also a danger, because of very powerful narratives like Elias's civilizing process and things like that, that we've approached civility as this blanket sort of ideology which everyone is always is pressing down on people. The whole Time. But of course, in. In reality, people go to different social contexts and situations and they behave differently because, you know, I mentioned there's those different kinds of interactions that you can have that were valorised. You know, people could do one, be civil and part of civil society in one part of their day, and they could do something else in the other part of their. You know, Hogarth, William Hogarth's painting, the Modern Midnight Conversation, where you have all these very civil and respectful, respectable men absolutely out of it at 12 o' clock at night, as it's in John's Coffee House or something like that. You know, juxtapose that with the. The Conversation pictures that he also painted, some of which were the same people with their families or with civil people. You know, people have these different situations. There's a very good article about this kind of occasional politeness, occasional civility, occasional witness. And so it's not. It's not a constant. It's not like your mother watching you the whole time, 24 hours a day kind of thing and monitoring your behavior. People are different in different contexts.
- [49:22]
John Locke
I think it would have been really interesting as well in that context to talk a bit more about travel and particularly about the Grand Tour, because this is one of those places where the bands of civility are tested, where people come into contact, in close contact with people who are different religions to them, where you have to make snap decisions, like you're a Protestant in the streets of France and the Blessed Sacrament is being carried past you. Do you take off your hat and kneel or do you attempt to kind of, you know, withstand it as a good Protestant, what's the right thing to do? And it's really interesting because if you look at the two kind of major foundational texts for the Grand Tour in England. So Jean Gaillard writes the Complete Gentleman, which is kind of all about how you should do this kind of travel. But he is coming off the back of an extraordinarily problematic and difficult period of travel with the young gentleman, Sir Philip Percival, which got so bad that Gailard gets dumped in the middle of France and has to travel home on his own. So it's kind of a long breakup letter in one way. But the other person who's really famous in this is Richard Lascelles. And Richard Lascelles is an extreme. He's the person who comes up with the phrase the Grand Tour. He's an extremely well regarded guide to Italy and to Italian art and culture. But he's Catholic, He's Catholic priest. And you have this idea that you're through travel and you have places like spa towns, like cities, like Rome, where people have to work out every day in occasional civilities because you cannot constantly be at war with your tour guide or your tutor or your valet, rubbing.
- [50:44]
Theresa Bijan
Along together, getting on with it.
- [50:45]
John Locke
And then you're expected to bring it back to England. What you learned from that and turn it into a proper English civility with no flavor.
- [50:51]
Roger Williams
And also final word, if we understand civility is these skills, these social skills, then when Hannah Wool is defining her science in the 1670s is precisely been able to understand context relative to other contexts and adjusting your behavior accordingly. That's the key. It's not having a blanket set of rules like using a fork in the same way, it's being able to adjust to these situations as and when they arise. And I guess that's the empowering aspect of the. Of the ideology of civility as a. As a sort of social ideology.
- [51:21]
Phil Withington
Well, thank you all very much again. Thank you. Thank you. I enjoyed that. Did you?
- [51:27]
Roger Williams
Yeah, it was really good. Tea or coffee?
- [51:31]
John Locke
Black coffee, please.
- [51:32]
Roger Williams
Black coffee.
- [51:33]
John Locke
Melvin?
- [51:34]
Phil Withington
I'll have a little coffee, please. Coffee.
- [51:36]
Roger Williams
Thank you very much.
- [51:39]
Theresa Bijan
I did have a Puritan quote just to amuse us all, but Thomas Watson in 1660. Civility doth but wash the outside. The inwards must be washed a sea. A sow may be washed, yet a sow still. Civility is but strewing flowers on a dead corpse.
- [51:55]
John Locke
Oof.
- [51:56]
Phil Withington
Oh, dear.
- [51:57]
Theresa Bijan
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production from BBC Radio 4. The Russians will be launching a satellite sometime in the next three weeks. I'm Kim Cattrall, back with a new series of Central Intelligence.
- [52:13]
John Locke
This is a CIA covert Top Secret.
- [52:16]
Theresa Bijan
The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out. Starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, and me, Kim Cattrall.
- [52:25]
John Locke
Ms.
- [52:25]
Roger Williams
Page, such a pleasure to meet a real American.
- [52:29]
Theresa Bijan
Listen to Central Intelligence Series 2, first on BBC Sounds.
- [52:37]
Alex von Tunzelman
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the first World War.
- [52:50]
John Gallagher
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny. You'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [52:56]
Alex von Tunzelman
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes. Wherever you get your podcasts.