Bet that phone was a "must-have" in 1987
For a number of months, with so many other events to write about on the world scene, I have not fulfilled my promise to discuss the second pillar of incivility. Several readers have kept me honest by sending emails to remind me of this and I want to take the time to complete the picture of the three key components of incivility. Once we’ve identified the root causes, we have a higher probability of finding solutions together.
Initially, I identified the core of incivility. The rise of the “I” centric world has been a destroyer of community, of personal relationship and ultimately of civility. If we extend the pillar analogy to include the foundation laid by the “I” centric position, we’d call “I” the stylobate of our temple of incivility. The stylobate is the uppermost step of the base used by the Greeks to provide a level footing for their columns.
On top of this base, we’ve identified the first pillar – the setting of the intrinsic value of life to zero. Our desensitization to the effect of inhumanity reinforces this notion that the value of human life is a zero. And, many events of the last year have raised a personal concern for me that we may be careening into a repeat of many points in history where the value of human life is considered to be a negative integer. This possibility should really give all of us pause. Think of what it means when someone, some government, some regime decides that the value of a single life is a negative number. To put it in non-mathematical terms; can we recall times in history when a body of people has been seen to add greater value to society if they are eliminated from this world? The result of life being assigned a zero is bad enough; an assignment of a negative value to life leads to entire villages, ethnicities, tribes, cultures and religious communities being hunted down and eliminated.
The second macro event that has led to the rise of incivility has been the explosion of consumerism, beginning slightly before the turn of the 20th century. To read about the beginnings of consumerist behavior, as practiced by the nouvelle riche and first robber barons, I highly recommend “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt”. The book does a fantastic job of documenting the rise of a new breed of wealthy American; the self-made man. The explosion of wealth in this era led to a level consumption not entirely different from what we’ve seen in the 21st century. The successful man in the later 1800’s was defined by a massive home in Manhattan, a stable filled with prized racing horses, art from Europe lining his walls, a stunning wife turned out in the latest fashions and a penchant for playing the stock market as well as a card game or two.
The similarities to today’s consumer should not be discounted in the least; even if these gentlemen were buying carriages instead of Ferrari 458 Italia’s some 140 years ago. This time in American history was truly the beginning of an acquisition-oriented culture that eventually had Gordon Gekko as a poster child. Little did we know that a 1980’s fictional film and its villain would pale in comparison to the type of consumerist anti-heroes we’d see in Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Bernie Madoff and Ramalinga Raju.
As I say so frequently in these postings, it is a very easy thing for us to look at these “bad guys” and wag a finger of shame. It is a much more difficult proposition to look at ourselves and see the same consumption-in-mass-quantities behaviors. But we have been a nation living on borrowed time and money. We have financed every conceivable trapping of excess with our home equity, our credit cards, revolving credit lines and unsecured loans. In the last 25 years, the need to have MORE has far surpassed the need to have enough. We stopped listening to our grandparents, who survived an economic disaster exponentially greater than the one we find ourselves mired in today. We forgot the lessons of history, where rampant speculation led to short-term material happiness but longer term financial misery over and over again.
Consumerism is a torpedo in the hull of civility. Now, don’t misinterpret what I am suggesting here. I love capitalism. I am just as guilty of riding the more-more-more wave. Seriously, when did I determine our family needed an Xbox 360, PS3 and a Wii? The problem that rabid consumerism creates is the belief that, much like a shark needs to keep swimming to survive; we must keep buying to live. And not just buying, but possessing. We must have the “it” Christmas present of the year. We have to have the latest super-star endorsed basketball shoes for our 3 year old. We need a faster boat, a faster car, a bigger house. How is it that our parents and grandparents were perfectly happy in an 1100 square foot ranch with a carport, but some couple just bought that ranch and sheared the roof off, added 4 more floors and a heli-pad on top – because it is in the “new” up and coming neighborhood?
People are dying in order to buy what they want. While it seems so absurd as to be impossible, people have gotten in to full blown fights and stores have dissolved into anarchist riots over $149.00 flat screen television sets. Guns have been drawn over dolls, toy hamsters, shoes and video games. Store employees have been trampled to death on Black Friday and consumers haven’t even stopped to wipe the blood from their sneakers – let alone try and help. Consumerism is simply the fiscal manifestation of the phenomenon I’ve already described; “I” versus “you”.
Beyond the impact to civility, the consequences of people buying and consuming multiple times more processed foods, manufactured vehicles and square feet than our very recent ancestors are nearly incalculable in terms of damage to our environment, communities and our fellow man.
I know someone is rolling their eyes right now. “Blah, blah, blah – people dying over basketball shoes, who cares? It doesn’t have anything to do with civility.” Stop rolling them, and consider conflict diamonds. The rampant increase in demand for diamonds directly contributed to the development of the illicit diamond trade in Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo. Billions of dollars in diamonds were mined in forced labor camps, populated by enslaved children as well as enslaved adults. Around the world, men and women are wearing diamonds that were basically pulled from the graves of more than 500,000 dead men, women and children. These people weren’t in those graves yet, but they were digging their own every single day. If the opposite of civility is inhumanity, you don’t need a jeweler’s loupe to see the incivility inside that rock.
The economic downturn is, thankfully, causing many people around this country and the world to assess what is truly important and necessary. We are learning the lessons of our grandparents, because we refused to learn from their experience. We have fulfilled George Santayana’s prophecy – we ignored history and now we must repeat it. As we have started buying locally, we remember that small business owners are our friends and neighbors. As we clear out closets, garages and attics and give away clothing, toys and furniture; we remember that we can make a difference in the lives of others in a very material way. As we remind our children that saving to buy something means so much more than buying it on credit. As we look at our home and say “it is a good house” instead of “lets add another 2200 square feet”. As we recognize that enough is not a bad thing, we are abandoning a pillar of incivility.
But, will we remember long enough to keep our desire for the next big Christmas fad from inspiring us to elbow another shopper in the face at 5:00 a.m. in the doorbusting-deals morning?
Posted by rwbird 
Joe Wilson is not uncivil. There, I said it. While this statement is out of step with the barrage of coverage on civility in the past 24 hours, it actually offers a clarification of that most tricky of arenas for the practice of civil behavior; our government.
Anonymity – Familiarity’s Ugly Cousin and the Bane of Civility
October 7, 2009Is being invisible a good thing?
The availability of information, in both volume and speed, has been one of the key contributions made by technological innovation in fostering incivility. Familiarity, as the old saying goes, does breed contempt. But, the greater threat to civility and civil behaviors is most certainly the cloak and veil that technology now provides to each and every one of us in our dealings with each other.
It is a fascinating condition of the human race; that we embrace both the best and worst that a technology has to offer. While I will spend some time today writing about chat rooms, avatars and hate-speech camoflauged as political commentary – the tendency for humans to use and misuse an innovation applies to stone wheels just as much as it does to bits and bytes.
The lowly hammer; it is most commonly used to build things. Hammering nails and framing houses, or fixing the dog house are natural activities for this technological innovation that took us beyond pounding some form of a peg with a large rock. But, that same hammer on many occasions, has been wielded and brandished as a weapon. Pounding a nail or bashing a skull – humans seem to find the light and dark within every single implement. Guns, axes, dynamite, atom smashing, oxycontin; the list of innovations that we corrupt is as long as history itself.
Computer based technology is no different, but the consequences for civility are just as concerning. The darkest aspect of technology, even darker than our continuous exposure to on-line fraud and theft, is the lack of responsibility and accountability that the anonymity of a virtual personality provides. The disconnectedness of being constantly connected manifests in the tendency for human beings to say things in an internet chatroom or on a comment string associated with a news story that they would never, ever say in the presence of a real live human being.
I’ll use an example to highlight how frightening the veil of anonymity has become, and how easy it is to be uncivil in the virtual world. I could link this posting to hundreds, if not thousands, of comments to news stories. But, a recent story in my hometown is certainly as good as any to drive home the point. On September 23, 2009 the Columbus Dispatch reported on a local speech given by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Mr. LaHood took issue with conservative talk show hosts, suggesting that their analysis and rhetoric (“trash talk”) had contributed to a decline in civility.
As I have written before, I don’t find that I learn much about civility by observing or researching politicians or political analysts. We live in an age where conservatives use inflammatory words and phrases but deny that they have any responsiblity for the potential consequences should things get out of control. And, in this same age, liberals are screaming for a more civil discourse and the complete elimination from memory of any of the bad behaviors and vitriolic rhetoric that they leveraged when they were in the minority.
I’m reminded of what Will Rogers had to say about the state of political behavior in the United States some 80 years ago – “I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him “father.”"
What I would ask of you is that you read the comments to this news article, as many of the 1265 as you can stomach. Rather than addressing whether Mr. LaHood’s argument is defensible (are conservative talk show hosts contributing to a decline in civility), the comments immediately focus on demanding that the reader subscribe to one political ideology or another. Since I am in the mood for quotes today, the seething anger and vicious statements made by commentators on this news story recalls a point by Oscar Wilde “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”
Hate, racism, rants, venom – all of these uncivil aspects of discourse, and more, manifest themselves in the comments to this news story. Many of the people on this comment thread could be your neighbors, friends, aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents, your boss or your community leaders. Unfortunately, we can’t tell, because no one knows for sure who they are really are. In fact, one of them might be you. With names like “theTruth”, “Troll”, “Legal American” and “Master Yoda” not only are we denied the opportunity to know who is writing, the writer is given carte blanche to be as uncivil as they want to be. Read some of the most antagonistic postings in this thread, and then wonder on whether the person who wrote it would be inclined to say the same thing – verbatim – in church or at a PTA meeting. Would they be so bold to stand up in a meeting of Rotarians, a Chamber of Commerce or a school board meeting and share the same sentiments? Not only is the answer a resounding “no”, most of these writers would be personally embarassed to make such offensive comments in any public setting.
But, the internet changes everything. The upstanding citizen within our community that deems the anonymous “tagging” of a train box car with graffiti that points out any number of social ills in our inner city as a blight on society, sees no parallel to their own anonymous “tagging” of news stories and blog posts in the same light. The graffiti artist is a social misfit (as opposed to an artist), but an anonymous commentator spouting a hate filled response is not? The anonymity of the internet has created an environment where the absolute worst aspects of our human nature manifest themselves; stalking, pedophilia, bullying to the point of driving someone to suicide, revenge postings of nude photographs of former girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses.
If you were invisible, and could not be held responsible for what you say or do – what would you do with such power? Maybe you don’t need to think about an answer to this thought experiment. Maybe all you need to do is re-read some of the postings you have made in the vast anonymity of the internet. Maybe being invisible has made us much less civil.