BOOK REVIEW!

Alexandra Hudson's The Soul of Civility

Here’s my review of The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Alexandra Hudson, St. Martin’s, 2023. It appears in the most recent print edition of The Dorchester Review.

In May of 1858, Charles Sumner, Republican, addressed the Senate on the matter of admitting Kansas to the Union as a slave- holding or free state. Sumner accused two Democratic senators as the principal advocates for the pro-slavery side. One of them was Stephen Douglas whom he upbraided as “a noisome, squat, and nameless animal.” The other, Andrew Butler, he accused of taking “a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight — I mean,” he paused, “the harlot, Slavery.” Three days later, Preston Brooks, one of Butler’s fellow senators from South Carolina, took revenge by attacking Sumner on the floor of the Senate and bludgeoning him unconscious with a cane.

That acrimony and assault foreshadowed the American Civil War which erupted three years later. Such violence had been unusual in US politics up to that moment, but the foul, vituperative language was not. In the debates between Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, also held in 1858, Douglas called Lincoln a “hatchet-faced nutmeg dealer.” But this insult was mild in comparison with those traded by Jefferson and Adams in the election of 1800. Jefferson’s campaign attacked his rival in the press as a “blind, bald, crippled, toothless man” and “a hideous hermaphroditical character with neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams responded that Jefferson was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw raised on hoe cakes, sired by a Virginia mulatto father,” and that John Hamilton, the other candidate, was “a Creole bastard brat of a scotch peddler.”

Those are only a few examples which suggest that the present moment of American polarization and odium politicum could really be worse. It is false to suggest, as the likes of Barack Obama once did, that 21st-century politics are uniquely polarized and uncivil. It is obvious that there is room for improvement. But this would require antithetical partisans to acknowledge the sincerity of their opponents, and to remind themselves that all political antagonists have more in common than they think.

This is what Alexandra Hudson’s The Soul of Civility urges upon a divided country. The book is not principally about politics. The thin veneer of charm and manners that mask many a political operator’s brazen self-interest inspired Hudson to write it when she was a political staffer in Washington. I have seen it firsthand. A decade in federal and provincial politics taught me that even colleagues on one’s own team can be polite or outwardly collegial and yet entirely self-serving or deceitful double-dealers. And so there is a distinction to be drawn, Hudson says, between mere politeness and civility. The former is connected with “external compliance with the rules of etiquette,” whereas the latter is “the motivation behind our conduct that sees other persons as our moral equals.”

Civility is what Tocqueville called a “habit of the heart.” For Hudson it is a habit which invites you put others first, but may nevertheless require you tell harsh truths, to set limits for oneself, and perhaps even to commit civil disobedience if necessary. Consequently, instructive examples of civility range from Enkidu, the hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, to the Homeric emphasis on guest-friendship and hospitality, Socrates, St Augustine, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and practically everyone in between. And the second chapter is a survey of much of ancient history, covering the relationship between civility and civilization.

Here I have an important quibble. Hudson assumes that civility makes a civilization, or, in her own words, that “civilization is civility writ large.” There must be some relationship, of course, but exactly how it works is not obvious, and it is a deep subject. Anatomically modern man has spent only a short time living in settled communities. What we call civilization is comparatively new, since it arose only at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,500 years ago. The great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China are younger still. Before the Ice Age, human beings lived in very small groups, wandering about with only ephemeral relationships to persons and places. We spent some 40,000 years in so-called Upper Palæolithic period, during which there was, as we know from archaeology, no shortage of art and music, definitely social cooperation in hunting, and surely some form of religion also. And yet, there was no civilization. Did our ancient ancestors establish the first permanent communities because they discovered how to be civil? Or did civility arise because settling down in a community created the right conditions for it? This is a deep question, which is beyond the scope of Hudson’s book, but worth pondering anyway.

A certain Ptahhotep should be regarded as the hero of the book. He was an Egyptian vizier who wrote a book of maxims on civility somewhere between 2375 and 2350 BC. His readers are counselled to revere the gods, to avoid repeating, or even listening to, slander and gossip, to speak only when one has something worthwhile to say, and to set a good example for one’s children by cleaving to tradition, and so forth. Ptahhotep seems to have inaugurated the tradition of political advisors writing books of advice — a tradition to which ex-Washington apparatchik Alexandra Hudson now belongs.

Codifying civil behaviour or manners, as the likes of Ptahhotep, Confucius, Baldassare Castiglione, or Emily Post did, always happens after some kind of breakdown or decline, not when right conduct is widely observed and taken for granted. Such exhortations often explicitly hark back to the manners of a former time, and sometimes to those of a single person. A good case in point is the Confucian enthusiasm for the archaic Chinese state of Zhou and its beloved regent the Duke of Zhou who set a high standard of gentlemanly conduct, which had vanished in the Warring States Period. Baldassare Castiglione, who idolised the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, was also looking back upon the ducal court at Urbino which had inspired a Golden Age: a better, more civilized time before the French invasion of Italy in 1494 and the ensuing wars that ruined the life of the old Renaissance courts. In contrast, Hudson looks back upon the vast scene of human history and finds instruction in every age and examples of good conduct in every culture.

But if there were a single person and a single standard to be imitated in our own time, who and what would it be? Is there a Western analogue to the immense gravitational pull of, say, Confucius which even the Maoist Chinese politburo cannot escape? In the 1999 presidential campaign, George W. Bush said that Jesus Christ was his favourite political philosopher. And, in the Victorian Age, there was a concept of “Christian Manhood,” wherein Christ was the leader and example to follow — a recent expression of the ancient ideal of the imitatio Christi. But such examples find little public acknowledgement now. This is not to say that there is no Western ideal of civility, but rather that there are many and not all are good, though the postmodernists and their epigones would surely reject the notion of ideals altogether as yet another grand récit to be debunked and forgotten.

And so, the main problem is not necessarily teaching Western Man to be civil, but rather persuading him that restoring some form of ideal standard would serve us well again. We cannot keep living out the Boomer-hippie ideal of a world of total individual autonomy without shared norms and expect social harmony and civility to take root again simply because we ask for them. The mid-20th-century vision of individualism has lately taken on monstrous proportions, and needs to be cut down to size through proper education and upbringing of children. Hudson knows this, and devotes some pages to the benefits of a classical education for the inculcation of virtue. And much invective is directed at what St Augustine called the libido dominandi (the lust for power over others), which is surely bad, but I think it is now more of a by-product of contemporary hyper-individualism than the cause of it.

The examples I presented at the beginning show that you can often get your way through incivility, especially in politics, but this is not the route to a flourishing society. For Hudson, the route thither runs through civility. But, once again, is society a mess because we are uncivil? Or are we uncivil because society is a mess? However that may be, it has been 30 years since the End of History when a new world of mutual respect and harmony seemed imminent; and yet nothing of the sort has happened. Perhaps we are finally ready to revisit older customs and attitudes, as Hudson recommends. If and when the renewal of Western civic life comes, Hudson’s Soul of Civility will surely have contributed to it.