The case for Civility Day
An email conversation last week with the inspirational Deacon Don Grossnickle, an activist for hope and peace from Arlington Heights, led me to envision an entirely new kind of holiday, one devoted not so much to relaxation and reflection but to work and duty. My running name for it is Civility Day. Or maybe Democracy Day.
The concept emerged as I reflected on Grossnickle's sincere quest for practical approaches to counteract the rancor afflicting our politics. It appears to me that though we often think the tenor and viciousness of present-day politics are somehow different from the past, they are really just a natural function of democracy.
Were we really more civil as people and as a government during the impeachment of Bill Clinton? Were the "Hope/Dope" campaign posters ridiculing President Bush the product of thoughtful political examination? In 1856, for goodness sakes, after an anti-slavery speech by Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner - which lasted for two days, by the way, and was filled with personal invective against Sumner's political enemies - U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina sneaked up on the senator while he worked at his desk and beat him with his cane so severely that Sumner wasn't able to work for years. In the campaign of 1828, President John Quincy Adams derided the wife of challenger Andrew Jackson so mercilessly that Jackson blamed Adams for his wife's death. One can go on and on, back indeed to condemnations even of President George Washington for laying "deep and incurable public evils" upon his country.
Why, I wondered, is our press and our history so filled with the language of personal ridicule? The answer that comes to me is that we are all so convinced of the rightness of our own thinking that we cannot conceive of any reason to question us save for the stupidity or outright malice of our adversaries. The one thing common to us all, whether we are conservative, liberal or middle-of-the-road, is the certitude of our own thinking. But of course we can't all be right. Democracy is the process whereby some of us get to periodically affirm our superiority by virtue of pure numbers until others of us manage to tilt the numbers in their favor for a time.
It's an ugly process and seems interminable, but I have an idea that could make it a little less so or at least a bit more endurable. Taking the idea from the rules of debate competition in which debaters have to be prepared to take either side of a position, I propose that on Civility Day, we all have to adopt the complete opposite positions to our own on topics we hold dear.
Abortion-rights supporters have to argue in favor of restricting abortions. Gun-rights activists have to throw their ardor into support for gun control. Liberals have to become conservative, sincerely conservative. Conservatives have to become liberal, sincerely liberal.
Through such a practice, if approached conscientiously, one will have to discover that the ideas of an adversary are honorably held and have as much basis in universal compassion and adherence to logic as any of our own.
This is not to say, understand, that there is no right or wrong, but it is to acknowledge that none of us holds the patent on them.
Civility Day wouldn't necessarily make us all change our points of view for every other day of the year, but if we did it right, it could help us respect the points of view of others. And that, it seems to me, would lead to actions based more on fact and honest deliberation than on emotion and vile insult.
If we really wanted to improve the world, we would throw ourselves into the kinds of one-good-deed-at-a-time nonpolitical activities Don Grossnickle undertakes - like his latest, soliciting funds to buy cows that fight malaria in African villages. Failing such altruism, though, the least we can do is to try to understand each other better.
Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is a deputy managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.