Civility: Talking With Those Who Disagree With You

Right, start at the beginning. You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. OK, hello. Anyftherin to True Crime? The message was clear. You might like to investigate BBC Sounds. Somebody must know something. Because there's a case load of award-winning podcasts. Do you think this is actually going to go to trial? That castlight on shady cybercriminals, mysterious drownings and unsolved murders from Bergen to Belfast. I didn't know who I could trust. Search, True Crime, on BBC Sounds. The only thing left to do now is run. BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. This is 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 can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, civility in one sense is 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 other of its senses, when civility describes the limits of acceptable behaviour, it can reflect society just 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 for lots of us, especially since the reformation, when competing ideas and how to gain salvation seem to make civil disagreement impossible. When we discuss the idea of civility, our John Gallata, Associate Professor of Early Modern History, the University of Leeds, Phil Willington, Professor of History at the University of Sheffield, and Theresa B. Jean, Professor of Political Theory at Oriol College, University of Oxford. Theresa, so that we can hold on to this junior discussion, can you give us your definition of civility? It's just best. 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 we'll know not come onto. 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 the sense. It's the virtue that's appropriate to our disagreements with our bad neighbors, our expouses, or indeed members of the other party, or the other religious sect, the people that were constrained to interact with, but maybe if given our own choice, would prefer not to. Well, that's a very good round of it. What's the origin of the word? Did the Greeks and the Romans have anything to say on this matter? 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 Kivitas. So we see that as the root of civility. So Kivitas was the member of the Kivitas, 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 a kind of shared law. And this corresponds imperfectly to the Greek idea of the political sort of political case, so the life of the citizen in Greek political thought as living in a distinctive kind of community, the polyse. As a kind of self-governing political community. And in Greek thought, the polyse in the citizen was understood in contrast with the non-Greek barbarians who did not live in police, who did not live in these settled communities, who did not sort of live in these self-governing and free communities, but rather lived and unsettled, wild, or slavish form of life. So again, we have the barbarians. Exactly, barbarians. So barbarians 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 in 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 in polite. It's saying that they're potentially beyond the pale of kind of a shared civil way of life. Thank you very much. John, John Gallagher, can you take us a giant leap forward? Yeah. Fune to Rosmos in the 16th century. And how he developed the idea of civility. Absolutely. So Erasmus of Rotterdam was an extraordinarily important biblical and classical scholar of the early 16th century. And kind of a major figure in debates or in the Reformation that was going to kick off in 1517. And the reason he comes into our discussion is because in 1530 he publishes a little book called Day Civil Attarte Morum Poorilium 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 not putting dirty fingers in the shared dish at dinner, not blowing one's nose publicly around other people so that this not 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. Can we talk about Skipro, or Adam, to Luther, who seems to have had no time at all for stability? How does he fit into what we're going to talk about? 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 Don being served on gold and silver plates. And that's classic Luther, that bringing in of excrement on 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 throwing that out and invoking bodily functions to attack the devil, the pope, and all of his enemies. Is there a sense in which he sees a civility as the enemy of salvation? 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 worship or a place of respect. So we see throughout the reformation this refusal of civil behavior and as a way of insisting that salvation matters more. Thank you very much Phil. Around this time the 16th century, the Italian book, the Book of the Courta. How did that fit in? So Castelloni's book of the Courta is a parallel story to the one that John's telling about Erasmus, I guess. And the important thing about the Courta and a few other Italian books at the time by Stefano Gwazzo and the Civil Conversation and De La 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 Castelloni's book, the Courta is the uber book of this genre. It's interesting because it's rather than writing in the Latin or simply translating Saicissaro who talks about similar kinds of things and propagating it that way. He writes it in the Italian and 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 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 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 conversation and behavior that John's talking about in terms of harassment and education. And that becomes a key aspect of Renaissance auto-didactism, which is a really important feature of the Renaissance. People wanting to improve and better themselves. But did it have a great success? I know we still read it, we're still reading it at university these days. 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 Moorzeutopeia, for example. And this is the age of popular Prince as well. So you have lots more people becoming literate and being able to access this kind of material in print. Yeah. Did the ideas about behavior spread there for into a broader society? Was it more about manners than anything else? I mean, as Theresa mentioned, civility starts off in terms of a 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, ins 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. We can come to Thomas Hobbes now, who's influential in this argument. Can I turn him on you first, Theresa? Yeah, absolutely. And before I maybe get into the specifics of Hobbes' arguments about civility, actually more particularly, insavility might be helpful just to connect it to the Erasmus and Luther discussion that John was bringing up. I mean, so Erasmus's 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, his fellow monks and friars, but even the Pope himself, calling the Pope the anti-Christ. 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. And in doing so, they corrode the sort of tenuous or fragile social bonds that make peace possible. So in his various works of political philosophy, Hobbes actually sort of diagnoses incivility, in the specific sense of insult or what he calls, consumely, 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 an order to live peacefully or unmerdorously, 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 Kivere of the Citizen, he describes what he calls the Anomest Chalice 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 to 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. It's peace that is after, isn't it? Absolutely. Peace is the great thing that he seeks. Right, so civility will give you peace. Precisely, and so civility and Hobbesy and 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 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 Kivere, the mere act of disagreement is offensive. So in order to live peacefully, we better get religious disagreements off the table. Okay, John, I was saying 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? 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 flatters. And this happens when we're talking about political structure as well. There is also this idea that civility is dissimulation, that this is a kind of lying, that it is too 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, civility only works as an outward performance because it reflects what's on the inside, but its critics will say, well, actually, because civility 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 loved 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 Castellone is used, Castellone'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 the adissooner kind of draw a rapier on you and enter into a jewel, by the late 17th century, their fobs, their friendship hide, their pseudo-catholic, and their absolutists in disguise. So it's a danger to national identity as well. 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 it's not- Can you unravel that a bit more? Well, so Hobbes basically thinks that, look, we can't control what people think. Thought after all is free. Within the confines of our individual skull, our thoughts can roam out over anything, filthy, profane, sublime, whatever. But what we can control is how we manifest those thoughts outwardly. So for Hobbes, the virtue of civility is 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 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 francified, French-ified character. He speaks English with a French accent. And so he seems to be a civilitarian, embracing a kind of French, foppery, and absolutism in hypocrite, called dissimulation in religion. Do you think there's a paradox here? So tolerance can become intolerance of those who don't go along with tolerance? Yeah, I mean, civility and tolerance is still in their 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 Trey's were saying about the mid-17th century, because I think, slightly- You don't know 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 complimentary in some ways to- to Hobbes, I think, is regard as an atheist, is a solution as well, because he's so dismissive of people's inner spirituality and enthusiasm and so on. But what you have, even in say in 1648, you have comprehensive presbyterians, if you want to call them like that, some like Edward Bowles, who is aware of these huge tensions and these huge differences that have caused this- these massive conflicts, not just in Britain and Ireland, but also in Europe. And he applies other concepts 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 circumspecting all their dealings. And so on and think about their words in relation to other people and other people's faiths and the accommodate of the people as much as possible. And when he comes to the restoration in 1660, Edward Bowles is one of the favourites to actually become the next senior dignitary, if you like, in 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 Latitude Nareans, 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 Latitude Nareans is Gilbert Burnett, who ends up becoming the chaplain to William of Orange when he comes over. But William Burnett translates utopia in 1684. Utopia is obviously Thomas Moore 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 demagoguity to persuade them to change their faith. So there's this almost retrospective grabbing of this verasmian civility, bringing it forward into the Latitude Narean position in the 1690s. Can I go back a step up to? Did the Civil War change things radically in this respect? You're nodding. Yes, I think massively so. So you've got, as Theresa has mentioned, you've got this way in which civil discourse has broken down, where you've got kind of obscene publications like Mercurias Fumigosis, which is kind of loaded with insult and profanity, where you've got parliamentarian soldiers desecrating altars by placing their naked buns on them on this kind of thing. So this has been occurring. You also have a sense, in 1660, the Royalist Richard Ulstery 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 crimes and sins of a puffed up gentry have demolished the hierarchy as was in England. And now it is the role of all godly 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. I thought you wanted to say something, yes. Well, it's just, you know, Andrew Movell, the famous restoration poet, his biggest insultor criticism that he could make out the bishops who were responsible for this profound in civility 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. Just take these points up between you and me. So to go to the question about civility and toleration, so the picture that we've been painting here is of, those who are appealing to civility in general in this 17th century in England, are those who are opposed to religious tolerations, 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, so you know, 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, is parodigratically uncivil. He's an evangelical Protestant who's constantly calling people sort of followers of the people anti-Christ, accusing them of worshipping the devil, et cetera, et cetera. But he's doing so in the British colonies of North America on the colonial frontier. He's rode on in this. 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 and 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 tribe, so the Naragansat 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 un-Christian pagan inhabitants of the New England wilderness than among his fellow Christians in Massachusetts Bay. And this leads Williams to pioneer an argument, which will later see again in John Locke, which is effectively to say, society can tolerate not just varieties of Christianity, but it can tolerate even non-Christian religions. For Williams, he thinks the most paganish, Jewish, or Muhammadin 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. Can we move the Locke here? 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 contact. They do so in an un-civil way. So he says, if men just keep the softness of civility in their disfuse, then we can peacefully coexist together in religion. And so Locke, his toleration is not quite so extensive as Williams is. But he never says that he says, if we may speak frankly, as becomes one man to another, neither pagan nor Muhammadin nor Jew should be restricted in his civil rights on matters just because of differences in religion. Can we come in? Yeah, but non-Aramah said it's not what you do. It's the way that you do it. Exactly. It's the manner of disagreement, not the fact. That's good. 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 Arasmus writing on children and education. So he writes in his son thoughts and education, which is one of the most influential educational tracks of the modern era, huge North America and elsewhere. He is skeptical about maybe 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 courage of the body, that you simply need to be able to perform bodily civility in the exact same way, and that Arasmus was arguing over a century beforehand. Did you do civility become something that you had to pursue and enjoy and join in order to be accepted in acceptable society? Absolutely. So civility and the language of civility disperses throughout society across the early modern period. So if you look... What did you talk about? What did I do to be talking about? 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, people having, you know, Barney's invilages, and in the early 17th century, they are already using the language of civil and uncivil. My neighbor 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 chased. 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 housemate. You can learn to be a civil servant. Who teaches you? Who's giving you this learning? 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 Wolley writing for serving maids and gentle women 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, your Latin grammar will contain material on how to act civilly. And if you go on the ground tour or if you go undertake educational travel, that too becomes an education in civility as well. Phil, is there much evidence of a reaction against civility at this point? There's plenty of positions you can take or forms of sociability you can adopt. But you have Greek models like the Heteraya and the Kommos, 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 philosophicality, probably engaged positions a bit later, like libertinism, which are, for when as the poet I suppose, Rochester is the central figure and they are more deliberately uncivil or anti-civil in a kind of ideological way. 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 is a code of civilized conduct or kind of virtue of civil conversation combines elements of equality in 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 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 that's sort of 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 cunly in feminine silence, right? I'd like to move forward now. Starting with you, John, how did this civility we've been talking about? Sleeping to ideas of civilization? Yeah, so 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 early on, it becomes a tool and a language of domination. And this idea of the barbarous against the civils. 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 when people like Edmund Spencer is very, very clear that the rude and wild Irish need to be tamed and brought to civility and to civilization. And when we have massacres, for instance, of British settlers in Ireland, that scene is being a collapse and a failure of the civility, that and the Protestant civility that 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 the presence in the Chesapeake and around, you see the language of rudeness, of barbarity and of savagery being used to describe indigenous Americans. Horrida. Just to agree with John. So the idea of civilization, the term civilization, really comes in kind of 18th and 19th centuries. But from the beginning, and when I was talking earlier about the 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 Antonims 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 spectra 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 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. Hill. I mean, I think one of the things we haven't talked about so much is the idea of the civil conversation, which is a kind of literary genre learning tool of the skills, but also a kind of formula for how you can engage with people who have serious disagreements with. And I mean, one of probably the grossest misapplications of civility, just going on from what John was saying about Ireland and the early Americas, was the slavery complex and the fact that civility played into part of the justifications of why we could turn black people into shadow property and so on and treat them, so in human beings. Can you just say a bit more about that? With civility as a justify catering point for that kind of nexus and the development of the slave economies in Barbados and in Caribbean and then over in America as well. So going back to the idea of the civil conversation, which Gwatsso, one of Castelloni's Italian compatriots, introduces into the vernaculars in the 16th century, you find this guy called Thomas Trion, who's a sugar trader, so involved in and compliciting 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 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 a quite an early date. And that's, I think that's an important skill to relearn. 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 barbarists 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 publication in 1643 is what's called the key into the language of America. And what it 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. Can we say more about John Rose? I think Theresa can. Yeah. Just skip way forward in time. I mean, so we've been talking in a, in a, in a, 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 Rose 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. I mean, another guy who, another philosopher who is working in the same ballpark is Habermass and his idea of them, the kind of bourgeois public experience, so on, which has criticized at the time for being the latest and gendered and so on. But in terms of the underlying principles which have 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 taught to each other about so many different issues, I think. So 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. Can I just go across to you, John? What aspects of civility were you, Jettison, if you were asked to lighten a load in the balloon? Today 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, 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 bodily functions and other things. There's a kind of rise of shame across this period. And maybe counter-intuitively, 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 we have witnessed a collapse of civil discourse at the moment in part because we have lost the ability, society 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. Do you think that? 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. Is there, can I keep asking you to for a moment? Is there any way which you think public stability is diminishing or it's in a steady place or where are we? Yeah, I think that 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 neighbors who are different to you, even if you don't like it. And I think that there's, 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. Do you want to take that? Yeah, I mean, 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 meerness 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' 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 Narragans at 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 civility with that which he could not approve. Last word from you, John? Well, actually, that makes me think a little bit of Monten, Michel de Monten, the French assist in his essay on cannibals, where he says that you've got these 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 hackitons, these extraordinary massacres that are ongoing, and pose a 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, powerful. Well, thank all of you very much indeed. Thanks to Theresa Bajan, John Gallagher, and Phil Widdington. 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. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not say? Did you think you didn't have time to say that you would like to say it? 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 where you're, when you mention 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 Wolley, who, right, she was probably the most successful writer's full stop in the later 17th century. In one of her conduct books, it called The Gentle Woman's Companion from 1673, which was coven with her publisher, Norman 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 to talk to subordinates and so on. 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 called 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 a little boy from late in the night, and you would go to someone and say, may I have the pleasure of this dance? And then you go to lead them back to the chair. And I think that was common in what could be called working class communities. It had gone to that extent. Is that idealistic or do you think there's something in that? 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 persecutory alienating process. Because it is not straightforward to make people behave how you want them to behave, even if it's possibly for a civil society is good and so on. So there's always that tension between the social control and the power 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 at the same time, it's reproducing the inequalities that structure those situations. And that's the kind of massive paradox, I think. Yes. I think the problem is that when the aspirational element of civility and the exclusionary element of civility come together, you define civility in an ever more demanding way while also preserving the sense of the uncivil as intolerable. Yes. Or you change what it's called. And you develop politeness. And you do it on 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. Absolutely. I wish I could have said a bit more about the tolerant and civil society that Roger Williams himself founds in the new world, sort of the colony for Ireland. Absolutely. So Rhode Island is interesting for a lot of reasons. But basically, the Williams' is colony, it's the most tolerant society that the world has ever seen. We talk about Rhode Island now. 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 picture of mere civility. To its critics, Rhode Island just seemed they called it Rogues Island the train of New England, basically all of the religious riffraff 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 is 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. I think there's also a danger because of very powerful narrative like a liice as civilizing process and things like that. The weak approach civility is this blanket sort of ideology which everyone is always is pressing down on people the whole time. But of course 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 valorized. You know, people could do, want 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, ho-gaths, William Ho-gaths, painting the modern midnight conversation where you have all these very civil and respectable men absolutely out of it at 12 o'clock at night in soon as it's in John's coffee house or something like that. You know, juxtapose that with 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 wit and so on and it's not constant. And 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. 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 of travel, but he is coming off the back of an extraordinarily problematic and difficult period of travel with the young gentleman's filipersival which got so bad that Guy-laud gets dumped in the middle of France and has to travel home on his own. So it's got a long break up letter in one way. And but the other person who's really famous and this is Richard La Celle. So Richard La Celle is an extremist, 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. And but he's Catholic, he's Catholic priest. And you have this idea that you're through travel and you have places like Spar Towns, like cities like Rome where people have to work out every day and occasional civilities because you cannot constantly be at war with your tour guide or your tutor or your valley. Some civility is rubbing along together, getting on with it. And then you're expected to bring it back to England. What you learned from that and then turn it into a proper English civility with no flavor of food. And also, if we understand civility and the skills, the social skills, then when Hannah Woolie's defining her science in the 1670s, it's precisely been able to understand context relative to other contexts and adjusting your behavior recording that's the key. It's not having a blanket, so everyone's like using a fork in a certain way. It's been able to adjust to these situations as and when they arise. And I guess that's the empowering aspects of the idea of civility as a sort of social ideology. Well, thank you all very much again. Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy that, you do. Yeah, it's really good. You want to go to your coffee. Yes, please. Black coffee, please. Black coffee. Melvin? I don't have a little coffee, please. Coffee. Thank you very much, James. I did have a pure tin coat just to amuse us all, but Thomas Watson in 1660. Civility, doth, but washed the outside. The inwards must be washed. A sow may be washed, yet a sow still. Civility is what's brewing flowers on a dead corpse. Oh, yeah. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tilletson and it's a BBC studio's audio production. From BBC Radio 4, the Russians will be launching a satellite sometime in the next three weeks. I'm Kim Katrell back with a new series of central intelligence. This is a CIA covert op top secret. The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out, starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, and me, Kim Katrell. Miss Page, such a pleasure to meet you, the American. Listen to central intelligence series 2 first on BBC Sounds.