Response to essay.

Just Be Nice

by Stephen L. Carter

Stephen L. Carter is a professor at Yale Law School and has written extensively on such

topics as affirmative action, the judicial confirmation process, and the place of religion in

our legal and political cultures. The following argument was written for the Yale Alumni

Magazine in 1998, and was later included in Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette

of Democracy, ©1998.

When I was a child, attending grade school in Washington, D.C., we took classroom time

to study manners. Not only the magic words we have already discussed (“please’ and

“thank you’) but more complicated etiquette questions, like how to answer the telephone

(“Carter residence, Stephen speaking’) and how to set the table (we were quizzed on

whether knife blades point in or out). And somehow nobody—no children, no parents—

objected to what nowadays would surely be viewed as indoctrination.

Today instruction of this sort is so rare that when a school tries to teach manners to

children, it makes news. So when the magazine U.S. News & World Report ran a story in

1996 about the decline of civility, it opened with what it must have considered the man-

bites-dog vignette—an account of a classroom where young people were taught to be

polite. Ironically, this newsworthy curriculum evidently teaches a good deal less about

etiquette than we learned back at Margaret M. Amidon Elementary School in the sixties,

but that is still a good deal more than children learn in most places. Deportment classes

are long gone. Now and then the schools teach some norms of conduct, but almost always

about sex, and never the most important ones: Do not engage in harassment and Always

use a condom seem to be the outer limits of their moral capacity. The idea that sex, as a

unique human activity, might require a unique morality, different from the general moral

rules against physical harm to others and harm to the self, is not one that public schools

are prepared to entertain.

Respect for rules of conduct has been lost in the deafening

and essentially empty rights-talk of our age. Following a rule

of good manners may mean doing something you do not want

to do, and the weird rhetoric of our self-indulgent age resists

the idea that we have such things as obligations to others. We

suffer from what James Q. Wilson has described as the elevation of self-expression over

self-control. So when a black student at a Connecticut high school was disciplined in

1996 for wearing pants that drooped (exposing his underwear), not only did he claim a

right to wear what he liked, but some community leaders hinted at racism, on the theory

that many young African American males dress this way. (The fact that the style is

copied from prison garb, which lacks a belt, evidently makes no impression on these

particular defenders of the race.)

When I was a child, had my school sought to discipline me, my parents would have

assumed the school had good reason. And they probably would have punished me further

at home. Unlike many of today’s parents, they would not have begun by challenging the

“The illusion that all

desires are rights

continues its insidious

spread.”

teacher or principal who thought I had done wrong. To the student of civility, the relevant

difference between that era and the present is the collapse of trust, particularly trust in

strangers and in institutions. My parents would have trusted the school’s judgment—and

thus trusted the school to punish me appropriately—but trust of that kind has largely

dissolved. Trust (along with generosity) is at the heart of civility. But cynicism has

replaced the healthier emotion of trust. Cynicism is the enemy of civility: It suggests a

deep distrust of the motives of our fellow passengers, a distrust that ruins any project that

rests, as civility does, on trusting others even when there is risk. And so, because we no

longer trust each other, we place our trust in the vague and conversation-stifling language

of “rights’ instead.

Consider again the boy with the droopy pants. To talk about wearing a particular set of

clothes as a “right’ is demeaning to the bloody struggles for such basic rights as the vote

and an unsegregated education. But the illusion that all desires are rights continues its

insidious spread. At about the same time, a fired waitress at a restaurant not far from Yale,

where I teach, announced a “right’ to pierce her face with as many studs and rings as she

wishes. And, not long ago, a television program featured an interview with a woman who

insisted on the “right’ to be as fat as she likes. Rights that are purchased at relatively low

cost stand a fair chance of being abused, simply because there is no history behind them,

and thus little pressure to use them responsibly—in short, because nobody knows why the

right exists. But even a right that possesses a grimly instructive history—a right like

freedom of speech—may fall subject to abuse when we forget where it came from.

This proposition helps explain Cohen v. California, a 1971 decision in which the

Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a young man who wore on his jacket the

benign legend F _ _ _ THE DRAFT. The case arose as the public language grew vulgar.

The 19th and early 20th centuries offered a tradition of public insults that were witty,

pointed, occasionally cruel, but not obscene or particularly offensive. Politicians and

other public figures competed to demonstrate their cleverness in repartee. (One of my

favorites is Benjamin Disraeli’s explanation of the difference between a misfortune and a

calamity: “If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune. And if anyone

pulled him out, that would be a calamity.’) Nowadays the tradition of barbed wit has

given way to a witless barbarism, our lazier conversational habit of reaching for the first

bit of profanity that comes to mind. The restraint and forethought that are necessary to be

clever, even in insult, are what a sacrificial civility demands. When we are lazy about our

words, we tell those at whom our vulgarity is directed that they are so far beneath us that

they are not worth the effort of stopping to think how best to insult them; we prefer,

animal-like, to make the first sound that comes to mind.

In Cohen v. California, the justices were unfortunately correct that what the dissenters

called “Cohen’s absurd and immature antic’ was protected by the freedom of speech. But

it is important to add that when the framers of the Constitution envisioned the rough-and-

tumble world of public argument, they almost certainly imagined heated disagreements

against a background of broadly shared values; certainly that was the model offered by

John Locke, by then a kind of political folk hero. It is unlikely that the framers imagined

a world in which I might feel (morally) free to say the first thing that came into my head.

I do think Cohen was rightly decided, but the danger deserves emphasis: When

offensiveness becomes a constitutional right, it is a right without any tradition behind it,

and consequently we have no norms to govern its use.

Consider once more the fired waitress. I do not deny that the piercing of one’s body

conveys, in many cultures, information of great significance. But in America, we have no

tradition to serve as guide. No elder stands behind our young to say, “Folks have fought

and died for your right to pierce your face, so do it right’; no community exists that can

model for a young person the responsible use of the “right’; for the right, even if called

self-expression, comes from no source other than desire. If we fail to distinguish desire

from right, we will not understand that rights are sensible and wise only within particular

contexts that give them meaning. The Constitution protects a variety of rights, but our

moral norms provide the discipline in their exercise. Sometimes what the moral norm of

civility demands is that we restrain our self-expression for the sake of our community.

That is why Isaac Peebles in the nineteenth century thought it wrong for people to sing

during a train ride; and why it is wrong to race our cars through the streets, stereos

cranked high enough to be sure that everyone we pass has the opportunity to enjoy the

music we happen to like; and why it was wrong for Cohen to wear his jacket; and why it

is wrong for racists to burn crosses (another harmful act of self-expression that the courts

have protected under the First Amendment). And it is why a waitress who encounters the

dining public every day in her work must consider the interest of that public as she mulls

the proper form of self-expression.

Consequently, our celebration of Howard Stern, Don Imus, and other heroes of “shock

radio’ might be evidence of a certain loss of moral focus. The proposition that all speech

must be protected should not be confused with the very different proposition that all

speech must be celebrated. When radio station WABC in New York dismissed a popular

talk show host, Bob Grant, who refused to stop making racist remarks on the air, some of

his colleagues complained that he was being censored. Lost in the brouhaha was the

simple fact that Grant’s comments and conduct were reprehensible, and that his abuse of

our precious freedoms was nothing to be celebrated.

The point is not that we should rule the offensive illegal,

which is why the courts are correct to strike down efforts to

regulate speech that some people do not like, and even most

speech that hurts; the advantages of yielding to the

government so much power over what we say have never been shown to outweigh the

dangers. Yet we should recognize the terrible damage that free speech can do if people

are unwilling to adhere to the basic precept of civility, that we must sometimes rein in our

own impulses—including our impulses to speak hurtful words—for the sake of those who

are making the democratic journey with us. The Proverb tells us, “Death and life are in

the power of the tongue’ (Proverbs 18:21). The implication is that the choice of how to

use the tongue, for good or for evil, is ours.

Words are magic. We conjure with them. We send messages, we paint images. With

words we report the news, profess undying love, and preserve our religious traditions.

“How we treat one

another is what civility

is about.”

Words at their best are the tools of morality, of progress, of hope. But words at their

worst can wound. And wounds fester. Consequently, the way we use words matters. This

explains why many traditional rules of etiquette, from Erasmus’s handbook in the

sixteenth century to the explosion of guides to good manners during the Victorian era,

were designed to govern how words—those marvelous, dangerous words—should be

used. Even the controversial limits on sexual harassment and “hate speech’ that have

sprouted in our era, limits that often carry the force of law, are really just more rules of

civility, more efforts, in a morally bereft age, to encourage us to discipline our desires.

My point is not to tell us how to speak. My point is to argue that how we speak is simply

one point on a continuum of right and wrong ways to treat one another. And how we treat

one another is what civility is about.