| Chapter 2: | Bringing the Civil in “Civil Society” Back |
|
|
behind the concern with civility, thereby making incivility the ghost that permanently haunts civil society.
The nature and character of civic institutions, including social movements and other aspects of citizen politics, is implicated in this indictment of civil society. Official empirical critiques of civil society increasingly center on the deficits in community organizing and social capital. However, the problem of incivility (manifested in the manner in which citizens engage and participate in the system) is almost always overlooked in the contemporary scholarly discourse on civil society (see, for instance, Etzioni, 1995, 1996; Putnam, 1993, 1995). It is also ignored by key development agencies—the United Nations, the World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—where the presumption has often been of a liberal and tolerant order comprised of public-spirited, altruistic citizens working for the good of all.
Sufficient examples now exist (of terrorism, hate crimes, violent social uprisings, and urban crime, for example) to support Keane’s (1996) thesis that existing civil societies have the potential to destroy the very civility upon which their character as civil societies depends. The premise is that the normative ideal of a civil society is inextricably bound up with the various civic attitudes and practices that surround it (B. R. Barber, 1998, p. 13; cf. Boyd, 2004; Elias, 1988; J. A. Hall, 1995; Shils, 1992; Swift, 1999). Because genuine grievances and philosophies sometimes underscore actions that are taken in the name of civil society, it is important that the overarching desire for civility take into account the complexities and ambiguities of social agency and human responsibility—specifically, those elements that constitute incivility and cause real disruption in the building of a truly civil society.
But what exactly does one mean when one uses the term civil society? How useful is it to make a distinction between a civil as opposed to an uncivil society? What factors make some societies appear more civil than others, and attendant to this, why is the concern with this problem of incivility more acute in some societies than in others? How should one make sense of the tendency of some civil societies towards self-destruction? To what extent does this predisposition exacerbate anxieties