“Civility, people!” So shouted my College Republicans colleague as we hosted a debate on abortion, one of the most contentious topics in public life. A professor in attendance had used the f-word: fascist.
Now such language is used by President Joe Biden to describe his political opponents. (To be fair, he prefers “semi-fascist.”) His main rival, former President Donald Trump, is famously no better. Trump is attempting to wind down the Republican primary race by affectionately referring to his last major opponent, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (a job she was appointed to by Trump), as “birdbrain.”
My college days were a model of civility compared to the present climate. Social media has unleashed hordes of keyboard warriors who call people names that in the past would have led to duels.
It is in this context that Alexandra Hudson has come out with her indispensable new book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. The soft-spoken daughter of the renowned “Judi the Manners Lady” has come to combat our coarsening culture.
“I couldn’t not write this book,” Hudson told the Washington Examiner. “I had a very dispiriting experience in the federal government that was the immediate precipitating factor, but I also came by my interest in the subject matter honestly: I was raised by an etiquette expert.”
Not that Hudson always embraced that heritage. “I was raised in this home very attentive to social norms and social expectations. And I always questioned them,” she said. “I am constitutionally allergic to authority. I hate rules. I hate being told what to do. I hate being put in a box and confined.”
Yet while working in an environment starved of civility, Hudson gained a new appreciation for her mother’s rules. “There were people with sharp elbows, they were willing to bully anyone, coerce anyone to get ahead, get what they wanted,” she said. “And on the other hand, there were people who I thought were my people. They were poised and polished and polite. And they would flatter me and smile at me one moment and then stab me in the back.”
Bless their hearts.
“That caused me to flee government and reflect deeply on the stuff of personhood,” Hudson said. “Like, what does it mean to be a human being and what is the bare minimum of respect that we owe to others by virtue of our shared humanity? And what does that look like in practice, even when we deeply disagree?”
“These two extremes I saw in government, they showed me this essential distinction between civility and politeness,” she continued. “Politeness is manners, etiquette, it’s external, it’s polish. Civility is internal, a disposition of the heart.”
And that may be the disposition we need most. “A core argument of the book is the central distinction between civility and politeness, that we don’t need more politeness in our public life right now,” she said. “But more civility, actual respect for the dignity of others might be able to help us emerge from this era of deep division.”
Some divides seem almost impossible to bridge, as the country lacks any consensus about politics, religion, and basic morality. “How might we flourish across deep differences? That is the defining question of our day,” Hudson said. But she quickly added that it is not a new question.
“It’s the defining question of the classical liberal project of democracy. How do we overcome our differences and live in a pluralistic society and peacefully coexist?” she continued. “But this is also the defining human question. … We yearn to be in relationship and community with others, we become fully human, and achieve our potential, with others.”
Yet there is a tension. “Morally and biologically, we are driven to meet our own needs before others,” Hudson explained. “Those two facets of who we are, the social and the self. … It’s always fragile.”
Hudson cites a political philosopher’s observation that a genuinely free society often requires the toleration of ideas that are damaging to a free society. “And that is why a free society is always going to be precarious,” she said.
In this time of polarization, Hudson acknowledges that there are voices on both the Left and the Right that reject civility in favor of moral certitude and combativeness. “They say no, civility is part of the problem,” she said. “We can’t just be nice to the other side. We need to suspend the rules for the greater good.”
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To Hudson, this ignores the importance of recognizing our shared humanity. “I argue that we’ve made an idol out of our politics,” she said, at the expense of relationships and other things that give life meaning.
An election year might be a good time to stop doing this and read The Soul of Civility instead.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed Hudson’s mother’s institutional affiliation. We regret the error.
