Sixty-five percent of Americans polled in a new study said incivility has reached a "crisis level" in 2014. Not only that, the younger the respondent's age, the more likely he or she was to anticipate an incivility in the next 24 hours.
What happened to the days when we were all so civil? What does it mean to be civil?
"In Austen --particularly in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility--the idea of civility is not just about good manners, it’s also about how prepared we are to comport ourselves with the responsibilities that go with interacting with other people in a democratic society, a civic, a market society."
Koehn went on to contrast Jane Austen's understanding of civility to our contemporary one. "Civility has come to mean good manners. My own sense of public life is that we continue to snowball down this steep slope of rudeness and road rage and all the vitriol that one sees and one hears." Koehn said the internet has degraded some of our civility. "I think the internet enables it. (...) Email does the same thing. It emboldens us."
Koehn said that moment between Wilson and Obama was more our incivility generally, than about rude lawmakers in particular. "Do we know how to interact with people — in a productive way — that offers our respect for each other? That's important whether we're talking about Congress trying to do something," or driving on the highway, Koehn said.
Boston Public Radio co-host Jim Braude called it a Pogo-esque problem. "I think we like the way things are," Braude said. "Why are they giving us horrible television? Because we're watching horrible television."
Koehn said the choice to be civil had to be a conscious one. "Lots of people we look to as figures of authority don't know how to do this too well."
Koehn quoted British mountaineer Edmund Hillary who said, "It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves." She said the drive to be civil has to be self-initiated. Koehn also said our tendency towards a hermetic life — alone watching Netflix, buried in our phones, off in the corner of a party — harms our ability to be better people. "There is a strange way in which we do retreat into our default, into our 'splendid isolation.'"
Koehn pointed to Oprah Winfrey as a model of civility. "She represents something that women — full stop — respect. (...) Oprah is who she says she is. A lot of that is about respect, regardless of zip code, regardless of which fork you use."
And if you can't garner Oprah-level respect? Maybe our collective incivility will course-correct. "Sometimes societies go off their rails, and then come back," Koehn said.
>> To hear the entire conversation with Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, click the audio above. Koehn is the author of Ernest Shackleton: Exploring Leadership. You can read more at Nancy Koehn's website.
