Have we lost our civility?

Standards of common courtesy and decency seem to be disappearing fast from our society. At one time, we might have looked to our civic leaders including politicians to set an example when it comes to living among people whose opinions we neither share nor like.

But the ongoing spat between two senators in federal parliament suggests we might have met a new low when it comes to respectful behaviour.

And it’s not just the politicians who are behaving badly. Dr John Collier, principal of an elite private school in Sydney, has written to warn parents about the abusive behaviour frequently directed at teachers. Collier recognised that a number of factors might explain this spike in rudeness.

For one thing, parents are increasingly anxious about their kids’ performance and fret about their future prospects. For another, parents who fork out substantial sums each year in fees sometimes think wrongly they are entitled to treat teachers like lackeys.

Schools must teach young people how to take part in community a role threatened by the kind of parental behaviour Collier has flagged. But he also pegged parental agitation to what he identified as a more general decline in civility.

Civility is more than being polite. It also includes showing respect for others both those we know and those we don’t. In other words, civility is what equips us for living daily with strangers.

Respecting those we know is easy; especially since we will most likely have dealings with them on a regular basis. But strangers are those we may never encounter again and to whom we have no emotional ties.

However, civility has another element: doing the right thing even when it might not be in our own self-interest to do so. Being civil means we desist from doing what would be pleasing to us for the sake of good relations with strangers.

When French president Emmanuel Macron ticked off a cheeky teenager at a solemn commemoration for World War II heroes, he was quite properly recalling the boy to an appropriate standard of civil behaviour, and reminding him that the values of the French Revolution (liberté, egalité and fraternité) have not displaced the virtue of civility.

Being polite, showing respect, and exercising self-restraint don’t depend on our feelings about other people especially strangers. Civility is about how we should treat others and is quite independent of how we feel about them; whether it’s the French president or the person next to you on the bus.

The problem is that these days we place a premium on individual freedom and personal autonomy. We want to make decisions about our lives and do whatever it is that happens to please us at that moment and never mind what anyone else wants.

There is a ‘downward assimilation’ at work here. When we no longer care about what others think of us and simply want to please ourselves, we eventually loosen the customary moorings of self-esteem that were anchored in the ways we were perceived and treated by others.

But you can’t have freedom without responsibility. I am free to put my feet up on the train seat opposite or sport vivid and confronting tattoos. But when things go wrong, I have to be willing to accept full responsibility for the consequences of my actions whether it’s a fine from the guard, or failure to make the short-list for a job.

Some free speech absolutists hold the misconception that individual freedom from constraint is the high point of social and political evolution that trumps every other demand upon us. Only then, they often say, can we be truly free to think and act just as and when we please.

But that view is wrong: it ignores society’s need for a common culture that we share and in which we live together. One reason multiculturalism is becoming less popular is not that Australians are racist, but that the fetish of diversity is loosening those essential social bonds of civility.

Have we lost our civility already? No, we have not, but we are increasingly confused about what civil behaviour requires of us. So we need to pay heed to the kind of warning issued by Dr Collier. Schools and community and religious groups all have a role to play in promoting civility in our society.

But civility is primarily a matter of how individuals engage with one another. It can be strengthened or weakened by what governments and other organisations do, but the health of civility in Australia ultimately depends on each of us taking responsibility for how we behave to others each day.

Peter Kurti is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies