Few states are ruined by any Defect in their Institution, but generally by the Corruption of Manners; against which, the best Institution is no long Security, and without which, a very ill one may subsist and flourish.—Jonathan Swift
Liberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the People are corrupted.—Algernon Sidney
There is a common perception that politeness is only a means to an end, that some more substantive goal, some broad vision of justice or the good society, is what we are really after, and being either polite or rude about it is just a matter of tactics—we should do whatever works. A number of commentators have responded to calls for civility with the contention that, when injustice is afoot, civility will not get the job done. Civility is racist. Civility preserves the status quo. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and every other significant quest for social justice, this argument goes, were built on assertiveness and steadfast resistance, not servile civility. The contemporary anti-Trump resistance fighters, for example, believe that fascism is on the march and that minorities and immigrants are in mortal danger. For them, we are in the throes of a moral crisis of the sort that requires harsh words and bold acts. When deep kindness is lacking, superficial kindness should take a back seat.
But they are making a serious mistake.
Some might view democracy, like politeness, as just one means to an end, such that when a democratic process yields an incorrect or unjust outcome—the election of Donald Trump, for example—we are justified in overthrowing the system and installing something (or someone) else. Or some might argue that free speech is fine and dandy when our side is winning the war of ideas, but if the other side begins to gain too much of a foothold, we need a good, old-fashioned crackdown on dangerous ideas. (This is an only slightly exaggerated version of Herbert Marcuse’s argument in his infamous 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” which provides a blueprint for modern day political correctness and opposition to free speech.)
But Marcuse and others like him are mistaken to assume that they already know what a correct or acceptable substantive outcome entails and can therefore judge the results of a process by that predetermined metric and, if those results fail to measure up, assume that the process isn’t working and must be rejigged or even discarded altogether. Democracy and freedom of speech are needed precisely because there is no predeterminable correct answer to such questions. We cannot guarantee that any subset of us can be trusted to distinguish truth from lies and so, unless their speech puts others at immediate risk, we grant people the freedom to speak their minds. If we notice flaws in the process—certain legitimate votes are systematically excluded or certain views unjustly silenced—we may attempt to fix the process—but not abolish it.
Unlike democracy or freedom of speech, politeness is not often seen as a virtue to which we should adhere, irrespective of circumstances. This is because our conception of politeness and its significance to our political well-being is impoverished. But a far more robust understanding of politeness was articulated by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his 1711 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. While some—sociologist Norbert Elias, for example—may view the imposition of elegant manners as wedded to the exercise of power, authority and repression, for Shaftesbury, politeness is a progressive force, increasing human liberty.
Centuries of domination by the Church and the Crown, Shaftesbury explains, had set the vectors of human action. Pervasive social hierarchies, courtly manners and theology all ensured that the most meaningful aspects of our lives were determined from above, leaving us with not many important choices to make. But, as the influence of these erstwhile sources of unquestioned authority began to decline in Shaftesbury’s England, humans could enjoy new liberties, which meant new opportunities and responsibilities. People were now increasingly free to make their own rules and regulate their lives as they saw fit and this produced an entirely new domain of unsupervised, underdetermined interactions. A new type of creature—the gentleman—emerged and created new habitats—theaters, cafes, clubs, gardens and the like—in which to mingle with his equals.
Politeness, for Shaftesbury, governed the terms of such interactions. Freedom compelled the exercise of judgment and taste. People now had to make consequential decisions about how to act morally and elegantly towards others. Such virtues do not come naturally to us, Shaftesbury argues. For this reason, gentlemen had to become learned in philosophy and the arts: philosophy taught morality, while the arts inculcated an appreciation of beauty and a standard of taste. Taste itself was a faculty that could only develop in a free society. Under regimes that impose monarchical and theological strictures on their citizens, the opportunities for taste to manifest are inherently limited. But, with liberty, taste becomes indispensable. It fills the empty canvas with gridlines. It fashions public culture. It forestalls anomie.
Politeness, for Shaftesbury, serves a role similar to that of religion for Alexis de Tocqueville who writes, a century later: “Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. How could a society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened? And what can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God?” Shaftesbury is already one step ahead of Tocqueville. For him, both the Crown and the Church have lost their moral authority. When religious norms no longer govern conduct, what can furnish moral boundaries and standards of deportment? A shared public culture, fashioned by politeness.
Shaftesbury’s politeness was not just a matter of please, thank you and the occasional curtsey. Every possible interaction and aspect of self-presentation provided an occasion to demonstrate politeness. Politeness reveals its presence or absence, he writes, “in that wch every minute offers & gives opportunity. Eating. Talk. Story, Argument, the common Entertainment, Mirth & Laughing, Voice, Gest, Action, Countenance.” We display politeness in how we speak, what we say, our tone of voice, our accent, our grammar, how we stand, sit, dress, walk and dance, our facial expressions, gestures, sportsmanship, table manners, and behavior at the theater and the concert hall and at parties both as hosts and as guests. These little details matter. Fail to attend to them, and our whole social edifice begins to unravel.
To conclude that Shaftesbury’s vision of politeness is that of a finicky fuddy-duddy from a superseded epoch is to ignore our own deepest intuitions in those moments when they remain uncorrupted by our affected apathy, anti-elitist posturing and other contemporary ideological blinders. Imagine a modern version of the kinds of faults Shaftesbury abhors. Picture a man—but no gentleman—who saunters onto a bus or subway, slouches down in his seat, puts his feet up onto an adjoining seat, blasts his music out at a deafening volume instead of using headphones or engages in loud, profanity-laced conversations. Or imagine an athlete who struts, taunts others and showboats. Or a trashy, nouveau riche reality TV queen, flaunting her gaudy material possessions. Or the scantily clad woman on the dance floor, simulating sex and/or thrusting her butt out with every beat. Some people will argue that such overtly sexualized displays are no big deal, but in our hearts, I contend, many of us feel deeply uncomfortable with it. And, if we don’t, we should follow Shaftesbury’s prescription—steep ourselves in philosophy and the arts in order to cultivate judgment and taste.
Shaftesbury’s gentleman might also seem like a relic of a time when class determined social standing. But Shaftesbury’s gentleman was made, not born. Shaftesbury contrasted the comparative equality of his England with contemporary France, which was still inordinately attached to the kinds of courtliness and hierarchy that stood in the way of his ideal republic. Shaftesbury’s ideal was not the stratified class societies of Old Europe, but ancient Athens, where freedom and self-rule gave citizens the impetus to develop the skills of rhetoric and oratory necessary to the kinds of free-flowing interactions and exercises in dialogical persuasion that might have taken place in the Athenian agora. Indeed, without such skills—the ability to meet, confer, agree and clash in a civil fashion—democracy itself would be impossible. Though, just as in classical Athens, not all the groups we would recognize today were given equal status within Shaftesbury’s paradigm—women, for example, were not—his vision is fundamentally democratic and progressive.
Politeness is not a superficial affectation we can turn on or off, as occasion demands. Politeness is not just a way of doing things; it is the thing we do. It is what we must do for a democracy to function, for all viewpoints to be respected, all voices to be heard. It is what we must do to transform ourselves from mere cohabitants of the same geographical space to citizens of a single republic with a shared culture. As Hegel argues, if individuals do not first come together organically in a civil society, which, in turn, forges the institutions of state, they will find themselves looking at the state as if it were a foreign entity, an imposition, an alien presence. This is the kind of political alienation so many of us feel today. Our politics will never feel like our own, if we do not first undertake the difficult labor of becoming, once again, a civil society, a culture, a people. And we will never become a people again if we do not embrace the shared set of expectations and ritualized norms of behavior that we call politeness. The failure to do that will bring about, to quote José Ortega y Gasset, “the absence of norms and of any possible appeal based on them”—that is, barbarism.
But are we to be polite in the face of racism, fascism, etc.? Are we to stand by and smile politely, while neo-Nazis parade along our thoroughfares? Politeness should not be mistaken for meekness, servility or acquiescence in evil. Jesus may have advocated turning the other cheek, but, importantly, he believed that the meek will—and should—inherit the earth. More importantly, the problem with allowing people to bend the rules in the presence of injustice is exactly the same as that produced by suspending free speech when too many falsehoods are being disseminated: there is no one we can trust to draw such distinctions. If speech or conduct is beyond the pale or outside the Overton window, democracy will take care of it: polite disregard will accomplish much more than the kinds of protests, callouts and freak-outs that only fuel the fire, alienating potential allies. Even when it comes to just causes, few will be more amenable to screaming, screeching, hectoring, browbeating and bullying than to skillful oratory, sharp wit and noble acts and deeds. It is ultimately the latter—not the former—that won hearts and minds during the Civil Rights era. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a dream speech won and continues to win more converts to his cause than any boycott, sit-in or protest ever could. Conversely, bullying, demonization, physical and online mobbing, name-calling and profanity has led to the rollback of some of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, alienating some of those who voted for our nation’s first black president in 2008 but, in 2016, cast their votes for Trump or even—in extreme cases—began to support white supremacy groups that had been dying a slow, natural death over the preceding decades. As multiple studies have shown (see here, here and here), pressurizing people to fight racism routinely backfires. Just as dropping bombs on foreign nations creates lifelong enemies rather than converts to democracy, dropping F-bombs on fellow citizens spreads hatred rather than makes converts to anti-racism. Lecturing, demonizing and lashing out at people have never convinced anyone of anything. Politeness is not only nobler but also far more effective, and—like rudeness and vulgarity—politeness is contagious.
Whatever we may think of Trump’s politics, if we respond to his schoolyard provocations with outrage, we not only give him the attention he craves but contribute to lowering the tone of our political discourse. We are doing damage that may take decades to repair. Against opponents such as Trump, silent supercilious smiles and polite disdain can achieve political victories, without robbing us of our dignity. Ignoring a troll requires patience, but so does waiting to dig in to one’s food until everyone else has been served. Politeness and our long-term collective interests require patience in both cases—a patience in short supply in this age of instantaneous communication and instant gratification.
Let us, then, make a habit of saying please and thank you. Let’s be gallant. Let’s anticipate others’ needs and take them into consideration. Offer seats to those who might be more in need. Hold doors open. Sit up straight. Take our feet off the seats. Clean up after ourselves. Pay attention to the way we walk. Move decorously. Dance in a dignified manner. Dress in clothes in which we wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen by our bosses or our grandmothers. Make an effort to appear well-groomed. Cut out the street talk, slang and profanity. Employ the best grammar we know how to employ. Enunciate. Use a tone of voice appropriate to the context. Avoid broadcasting private conversations. Keep our music to ourselves. Listen to others when it is their turn to speak. Interrupt, if at all, politely. Disagree thoughtfully and respectfully. Abide by the golden rule. Be humble. Be kind. Be courteous. Be considerate. Be generous. Be good. Be better.
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The relationship between science, technology, and left-wing politics may actually be rather more complicated and ambiguous than was suggested by Heike in his February 13 comment on Alexander Zubatov’s essay, or by the excerpt from Ted Kazinsky’s “Unabomber Manifesto” quoted by Heike.
The late C.P. Snow’s celebrated 1959 Cambridge lecture on “The Two Cultures” popularized the view, at least in English-speaking countries, that science was somehow inherently, intrinsically liberal, progressive, or leftist–that, in Snow’s words, scientists had “the future in their bones,” even when they personally happened to be conservative in their politics, while literary intellectuals, by contrast, “wished the future did not exist.” Snow himself cautiously tried to qualify the universal generality of his dichotomy by insisting that he was thinking mainly of the mid 20th century British educational situation. However, his generalization seemed historically plausible in view of the Western Enlightenment tradition’s twin embrace both of science and of social/political liberalism or progressivism. After all, the 18th century Enlightenment and its 19th and 20th century heirs and successors both embraced the scientific rational/empirical outlook and advocated liberal and egalitarian social and political reform (or even revolution)–while the 18th century *ancien régime* and its reactionary heirs both supported religious (or blood-and-soil) anti-rationalism and opposed the politics of *Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité*.
However, the actual historical relationship of science and politics is not nearly so simple or unambiguous as might be suggested by a naïve universalization of Snow’s “two cultures” thesis. A friend of mine used to observe that there have been frequent historical reversals, flip-flops, and “enantiodromias” (from the Greek for “running backward”) in the relationship of political and philosophical (Materialism vs. Idealism, Empiricism vs. Rationalism, Science vs. Faith, scientism vs. anti-scientism) positions. Already in the 19th century, scientific positivism was invoked by some conservative or reactionary thinkers to justify existing social hierarchies and oppose demands for democratic reform or socialist revolution–a conservative use of science that combined with the influence of Darwinian evolutionism to inspire the fashionable late 19th and early 20th century ideologies of Social Darwinism, racism, and eugenics, all of them versions of what H. Stuart Hughes in *Consciousness and Society* (1958) called “scientific fatalism.” In late 19th and early 20th century Germany, nationalist-minded engineers and reactionary social & cultural thinkers together developed what Jeffrey Herf called an ideology of *Reactionary Modernism* (1985) blending an enthusiasm for applied science and industrial & military technology with racism, anti-Semitism, German nationalism, and violent opposition to Enlightenment rationalism and to a politics of *Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité*, that eventually led to Nazism.
In the United States in recent years, Frankfurt School, “cultural Marxist,” and postmodernist hostility to technology and scientific “instrumental rationality” has been echoed and perhaps even outweighed by a “politically correct” suspicion of biological interpretations of human nature and human behavior. Feminists, multiculturalists, and anti-racists have vociferously denounced scientific theories ot findings suggesting biological or genetic influences on human behavior, personality, or ability as supposedly “racist,” “sexist,” “eugenicist,” or “Social Darwinist,” insisting for social and political reasons on a *tabula rasa* (“blank slate”) view of the human mind. Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson in *Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge* (1998), followed by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in *The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature* (2002), have SSSM (“Standard Social Science Model”) of most recent and current anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists as basically a mass of unscientific “PC” political ideology based on a dogmatic adherence to the “blank slate” concept and refuted, in their view, by a lot of empirical scientific research.
The recommendations in the final paragraph of Alexander Zubatov’s essay, on how people should look and carry themselves, that Boaz (Feb. 15 at 5:40 PM) thought maybe a bit trivial, shallow, or distracting compared to the rest of his essay, reminded me a lot of Jordan Peterson’s advice in “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” Which brings me to my own personal pet sociological theory about the reasons for Peterson’s great popularity among college-age young Americans these last dew years. It’s that the economic changes in American society in recent decades (the 2008 crash being only the most dramatic illustration), the increasingly crushing burden of student debt, etc., have made college-age young Americans increasingly skeptical and pessimistic about their chances of ever leaving the struggling lower-middle and middle-middle class and entering the ranks of the so-called “cultural elites,” “effete snobs,” “limousine liberals,” or “Brie and Chablis set” who have traditionally felt free to safely be a bit cavalier or skeptical about the so-called “square” virtues and courtesies extolled by both Zubatov and Peterson, to be a bit irreverent about them and still safely “get away with it,” as seemed much easier and much more realistically possible in, say, the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s! It just plain FEELS far less realistically possible these days than it maybe did 4 or 5 decades ago for a plumber’s, electrician’s, or truck driver’s son (or daughter) to rise someday to become Chairperson of the Yale or Harvard English department or assiciatre editor od “Harper’s” or “The Atlantic”! :=) :=)
When I wrote a little earlier today that the so-called “cultural elites” feel more free than the ordinary lower-middle or middle-middle classes to be a bit cavalier, offhand, or irreverent about the “square” virtues, civilities, and courtesies celebrated by Alexander Zubatov and Jordan Peterson, I was referring to a manifestation of the so-called “countersignaling,” or “showing off by not showing off,” that I discussed a few says ago in an earlier comment on Zubatov’s essay. “Countersinaling,” as defined by various economists and sociologists in the last few years, means that high-status people secure in the knowledge that their social position, talents, abilities, and good qualities are recognized by everybody will tend to feel that no great harm is done if they occasionally stray a bit from strict propriety in their behavior, manners, appearance, or attitudes, that they will still be accepted and respected as elite no matter what–while at the same time other, somewhat less high-status people will be more likely to fear disgrace, ostracism, or even trouble with the law if they depart in any way from the “straight and narrow.” Jordan Peterson’s great popularity in recent years suggests, I think, that college-age young Americans no longer feel nearly as optimistic or confident these days as they would have felt a couple of decades ago about their chances of rising into the social and economic strata who can safely, securely “countersignal” with no real ill consequences–as I facetiously put it in my earlier comment today, of maybe someday becoming Chairperson of the Yale or Harvard English department or associate editor of “Harper’s” or “The Atlantic.” In the past, I’d more generally add, I think that there was more of a widespread general feeling that rising into the ranks of the “cultural elites,” “effete snobs,” “limousine liberals,” or “Brie and Chablis set” was a kind of natural, normal climax of upward social mobility, that if you worked hard and showed talent you would naturally wind up amongst the “cultural elites,” that someday eventually ending up a “cultural elite” type more or less naturally “came with the territory” of “bettering yourself”!
This was a potently written article, but I think some of the things in the list on the final paragraph distracted from the message a bit. While I generally try to follow most of those decorums listed, by the end I figured the author would agree that the ways people look and carry themselves are rather trivial compared to the other items. Otherwise your engagement with them and their ideas is tainted by your shallow judgement about their appearance.
Alexander Zubatov’s plea for a return to civility, politeness, and gentlemanliness [and ladylikeness!] in American politics, society, and culture suggests a need to explore neglected dimensions of political attitude and behavior largely ignored in our current near-exclusive over-emphasis on power relations and on two-sided oppressor/oppressed, exploiter/exploited, elite/”subaltern,” especially in liberal, ledtist, and progressivist “discourses.” I’d thus like to introduce here the concept of “countersignaling,” or “showing off by not showing off.” Countersignaling is the strategy of people so confident of their valuable qualities that they feel no need to flaunt them. It contrasts with the often exaggerated displays felt as urgently necessary by people with only a moderate amount of the desirable qualities in question–whether of wealth, social status, intelligence, education, competence, pgusical strength, or social position.
Countersignaling seems to be a uniquely human trait, while positive signaling of one’s attractive or dangerous characteristics is widespread throughout the animal kingdom–as in mating displays (e.g., the peacock’s tail) and in the signaling of being poisonous or venomous to potential predators. Signaling among animals has long been studied by biologists and ethologists, but human countersignaling has attracted the special attention of economists in recent decades. The concept was most notably developed by economists Nick Feltovich, Rick Harbaugh, and Ted To in their 2002 paper “Too Cool for School? Signalling and Countersignalling,” published in the *RAND Journal of Economics*, Vol. 33, Winter 2002, pp. 630-649. It was first popularized with that term in a brief unsigned article on “Signal failure? The economics of understatement” in *The Economist*, May 2003, largely a summary of the Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To paper. It has also been discussed by UC Berkeley economist Robin Hanson in “Countersignaling” at Polymathmbox: polymath/polyart/1028.html on December 11, 1998, and by blog participant “Alicorn” in “Things You Can’t Countersignal” on Hanson and artificial intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowski’s *Less Wrong* blog for 19 February 2009.
Countersignaling, showing off by playing humble, modest, or unpretentious, has long been familiar to us in the way that the *nouveaux riches* notoriously flash their cash, flaunting champagne. fast cars, and palatial mansions, while folk with old money are more understated. Countersignaling, however, not only explains why the *nouveaux riches* flaunt their wealth, while the old rich scorn such gauche displays. It likewise explains, researchers have shown, why mediocre students often outperform more talented students, also eagerly answering a teacher’s easy questions, while the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. It is similarly illustrated also by people of average education showing off the studied regularity of their handwriting, while the well-educated often scribble illegibly. It explains, too, why moderate-quality merchandise is advertised heavily while high-quality goods rely on their word-of-mouth reputation, and why minor officials try to prove their status through petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful prove their strength by avoiding such displays, preferring gestures of magnanimity.
The contrast of anxiously diligent signaling of one’s desirable qualities versus confidently casual countersignaling also helps explain why immigrants and the children of immigrants so often display a flamboyantly fervent patriotism or even chauvinism, or why new converts to a religion are often fervently pious and fanatically orthodox (“more Papal than the Pope”) in contrast to the more easy-going religiosity of “cradle believers.” It is likewise the main reason why women in business, academia, and the professions feel they have to be “twice as good” as their male colleagues to be accepted or taken seriously, to diligently, zealously “lean in” to prove their competence, dedication, and professionalism. Another very familiar example of countersignaling at work is the way the middle class (especially the lower-middle class, anxious to distinguish themselves from blue-collar workers and from “underclass” slum-dwellers) have long been bastions of ultra-respectable mainstream culture, while privileged youth often scorn “up-tight” *petit bourgeois* propriety to embrace Bohemian or counter-cultural lifestyles.
In American politics, Joseph McCarthy’s demagogic “anti-Communist” subversive-hunting in the 1950’s appealed especially to many second- and third-generation immigrant “ethnics,” especially Irish Catholics, anxious to prove their 100% “Americanism,” inspiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s witticism about the Fordham men in the FBI checking on the loyalty of the Harvard men in the State Department. It likewise appealed to *nouveau riche* businessmen, such as Texas oil millionaires, unsure of their social acceptance by “old money.” On the other hand, higher-status old-family WASP’s largely despised “Tailgunner Joe” and condemned his reckless charges of disloyalty and pro-Communism, feeling less compulsion to flaunt a frenetic super-patriotism. They also often noted that McCarthy very largely focused his disloyalty accusations on representatives of high-status “Establishment” WASP privilege like Harvard, Yale, the Army, the State Department, and the diplomatic corps.
In the 1960’s, conservative politicians like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and George Wallace exploited white working-class and lower-middle-class fears and resentments of Black militants, “welfare chiselers,” inner-city rioters, hippies, student radicals, and draft-dodgers, appealing to their dislike and suspicion of people both above and below them in social status. Their attacks on “effete snobs,” “limousine liberals,” and “pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals” explicitly addressed resentments of upper-status nonconformity as well as of lower-class criminality and welfare dependency, of affluent as well as of poverty-level refusals or failures to observe petty-bourgeois ultra-respectability. More recently, lower-middle-class white voters resentful both of racial minorities (especially Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims) and of college-educated upper-middle-class “cultural elites” formed an important part of Donald Trump’s political base, along with the less sophisticated sectors of the formally college-educated business, managerial, and professional upper-middle class. Neither group of Trump supporters had yet learned the fine art and *savoir-faire* of countersignaling.
To understand how people can “show off by not showing off,” economists in recent decades have returned to Thorstein Veblen’s classic analysis of conspicuous consumption in *The Theory of the Leisure Class* (1899), largely based on the over-the-top antics of the post-Civil War newly-rich “Robber Barons” with glances also at the much more restrained consumption of the established old rich. Veblen argued that the newly-rich proved their wealth by lavishly, ostentatiously spending their money on luxury goods and other wasteful activities–while the old rich, confident in their wealth and social position, showed their disdain for the *arrivistes* by deliberately cultivating a more modest consumption style. American economist Andrew Michael Spence’s model of signaling (A.M. Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” *Quarterly Journal of Economics*, Vol. 87, 1974, pp. 355-374) formalized Veblen’s argument by showing that wasteful actions (including an expensive education with little or no real direct practical relevance to their actual work) can separate higher “quality” types from lower quality types if the action is less burdensome to the higher quality types–i.e., if they feel they can easily and painlessly afford to waste time and money on prestigious activities of little actual direct practical usefulness.
In 2001, economist Damon J. Phillips (University of Chicago) and sociologist Ezra W. Zuckerman (Stanford University) published research supporting the long-familiar idea that conformity is high at the middle but low at both the top and the bottom of a status hierarchy, that conformity increases as actors value their membership in a group but feel insecure in their membership, in “Middle-Class Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets” (*American Journal of Sociology*, Vol. 107, No. 2, September 2001, pp. 379-429). Phillips and Zuckerman argued that while medium-status members of a group feel insecure in their membership and therefore struggle to prove their worthiness, in contrast to the more insouciant attitudes of both high-status and low-status group members. Since high-status members feel confident in their social acceptance, they feel free to deviate from conventional behavior. At the same time, low-status members feel free to defy accepted practice because they are excluded regardless of their actions. Finally, in contrast to the relative freedom experienced by both high- and low-status people, Phillips and Zuckerman concluded, middle-status conservatism reflects the anxiety felt by people aspiring to a social station who fear exclusion or rejection. Such insecurity fuels conformity as middle-status individuals labor to prove their *bona fides* as well-behaved, productive, trustworthy group members.
Of course, the basic idea of countersignaling, if not the word itself or its analysis in economic terms, has been familiar long, long before Veblen, to say nothing of Feltovich, Harbaugh, To, Spence, Phillips, and Zuckerman. Harvard social historian Barrington Moore, for instance, noted its historical antiquity in his *Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy* (1966). The landed aristocracy, Moore observed, “has in many countries furnished a congenial climate in which the ideal of the amateur has grown and flourished,” but that ideal also “has of course roots that ramify much further.” In “one form or another,” the amateur ideal is “probably characteristic of most preindustrial civilizations.” Because aristocratic or gentlemanly status, whether or not strictly hereditary, was “supposed to indicate a qualitatively superior form of being” not arising from “individually acquired merits,” the “aristocrat was not expected to put forth too prolonged or too earnest effort in any single direction.” He “might excel, but not just in one activity as a consequence of prolonged training,” which “would be plebeian.” The aristocrat, whether or not strictly hereditary, was “expected to do all things very well, but none of them, not even making love, *too* well.” [Barrington Moore. *Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World* (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 488]. Doing “all things well, but none of them… *too* well” is a good description of countersignaling! In the Western European Renaissance, we might add, this ideal of doing “all things very well, but none of them…*too* well,” with no appearance of “put[ting] forth too prolonged or too earnest an effort in any single direction,” was called *sprezzatura*, from the Italian word for “negligence, disdain,” in this case suggesting “effortless ease” or “easy, casual skill,” a term popularized by the Italian courtier and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione (1488-1529) in *Il Cortegiano* (“The Courtier,” written 1513-1518, published 1528), the book that made him the chief arbiter of aristocratic manners during the Renaissance.
While the countersignaling concept, under that name, has largely been analyzed and popularized in our time by economists using economic frames of reference, I believe it points to a subjective, psychological dimension of human behavior not fully reducible to strictly economic or material factors. It suggests that some social tensions and political cannot be explained simply by objective differences of access to material resources or to the means of coercion, but rather also involve subjective perceptions of social or cultural status differences. Such perceived, psychologically salient status distinctions may exist even within “the same social class” in strictly economic, material, or institutional terms–e.g., between “old money” and *nouveau riche* segments of the wealthy, or between WASP, Jewish, Italian-American, and African-American neighbors in the same tax bracket in the same suburb. Such groups of people might be hard or impossible to distinguish in strictly structural terms, but may yet be very different in their political attitudes and behavior–and might devote much of their politics to attacking each other rather than people or groups clearly above or below them in structural economic level. Here, I think, we have a serious weakness of “vulgar Marxist” political analyses!
More broadly, I think, this also suggests that social, political, or cultural activists and analysts who consider themselves “liberal,” “progressive,” “leftist,” or “socialist,” including feminists and advocates for people of color, should perhaps reconsider a simplistically binary two-sided “us versus them,” “oppressors and oppressed,” “elite and subalyern,” or “top-dogs and underdogs” perspective. They should seriously consider at least partly adopting certain perspectives traditionally associated with more conservative analyses–a suggestion, by the way, that I think could be considered impeccably “postmodernist”! Feminist, queer, transgender, Black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and anti-colonialist theorists and advocates, often invoking postmodernist concepts, have in recent years increasingly embraced a starkly dualist, quasi-Manichean “us versus them” outlook enshrining a binary antithesis of white male straight bourgeois cis-gender “privilege” versus all the various oppressed non-white, non-male, non-straight, non-bourgeois, and trans-gender “Others,” with no interest in exploring (and possibly exploiting) differences, fissures, or internal conflicts among the all-too-hastily demonized straight bourgeois white males! This strikes me as clearly a falling back into *Vulgarmarxismus*!
A focus on relative prestige and status, on differences in life-style, taste, outlook, individual psychology, and subjective likes and dislikes rather than on “real” differences in wealth and power, has often been considered frivolous by radical social critics concerned with “serious,”“substantial” issues of wealth, power, and social structure, who see such a preoccupation with “mere” prestige and snobbery as fundamentally conservative. Thus, the German-born British socialist scholar and historian of Marxism George Lichtheim (1912-1973) once dismissed David Riesman and Nathan Glazer’s *The Lonely Crowd* (1950) as “not sociology, but market research,” for what he saw as its excessive, misplaced focus on life-styles, tastes, and consumer preferences rather than on substantial questions of social and economic structure. Traditional conservative social, political, and cultural thought has indeed often been more attentive to subtle differences in attitude, opinion, and sensibility between different sectors of the “privileged” class(es) than liberal, radical, or leftist thought.
By traditional conservative social and cultural thought, by the way, I definitely don’t mean the populist-reactionary or sometimes even racist grousing, punditry, or propaganda of the Rush Limbaughs, Steve Bannons, Sean Hannitys, Bill O’Leary’s, and Ann Coulters, of so many of Donald Trump’s (or the late Margaret Thatcher’s) ardent admirers, of the Alt-Right and the white supremacists, of the followers of Joe McCarthy in the 1950’s or George Wallace in the 1960’s and 1970’s, or of fervent believers in “Pizzagate” and “Clinton White House Murder Plot” conspiracy theories. I likewise definitely don’t mean what the subtle, brilliant poet, historian, and conservative social thinker Peter Viereck (1916-2006) once called the “indiscriminate anti-liberalism of hothouse Bourbons and czarist serf-floggers” bent on “suppressing individual liberties in the Continental fashion of czardom, Junkerdom, Maistrean ultra-royalism.” I’m thinking rather of the thoughtful, often quite subtle and sophisticated social and cultural observations and analyses of thinkers in the Burkean tradition like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Alexis de Tocqueville, José Ortega y Gasset, Irving Babbitt, Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck himself, John Lukács, and August Heckscher, as well as of Friedrich Nietszche’s brilliant insights. Such thinkers, I feel, practiced and encouraged a careful attention to seemingly superficial questions of style and nuance with yet potential practical effects on political behavior, to which “progressive” thinkers and activists should also pay more attention. A greater attention to such subtleties, I think, would greatly enrich and deepen liberal and progressive thought–as well as rescue conservatism from Trumpite vulgarity!
As I just noted. Conservatives, traditionalists, and moderate liberals are often fascinated or even obsessed with distinctions such as those between “old money” and *nouveau riche* subgroups of the wealthy, or first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants within an ethnic group, minutely exploring differences in intangibles like taste, style, “class,” manners, cultivation, sophistication, “couth,” “cool,” and “hip” vs. “square” among people or groups of the same gender and skin color who may be similar or identical in “objective” terms of money, formal education, organizational position, or political office. As I said, this fascination is generally scorned by dogmatic Marxists and by today’s “politically correct” postmodern militant feminist, anti-racist, queer, and “intersectionalist” theorists and activists, who don’t want to be bothered with trivial fine distinctions among the straight white male cis-gender bourgeoisie.
The conservative and moderate liberal interest in subjective, psychological, and stylistic intangibles naturally makes them attentive to the countersignaling of “showing off by not showing off.” Conservatives and moderate liberals, far more than radical leftists, are thus sensitive to the disdain of long-established higher-status folk for their more recently-arrived or only middling-status relatives, neighbors, classmates, or co-workers who “try too hard” to be respectable, proper, and well-bred, who “put forth too prolonged or too earnest effort” and lack the *sprezzatura* (as Castiglione called it in Renaissance Italy) of knowing how to “do all things very well, but none of them, not even making love, *too* well.” Those conservatives and moderate liberals are likewise more attentive and sensitive than many zealous “social justice warriors” to the resentment of the recently-arrived and the middling-status for what they feel to be the arrogant, decadent, frivolous over-civilization of the “effete snobs” looking snootily down on their own drably earnest meat-and-potatoes lace-curtain decency, hard work, propriety, piety, and patriotism. Centrist liberals and conservatives can understand, without necessarily accepting or approving, the willingness of themselves very respectable, proper, and moral “Middle Americans” and “Silent Majority” types (or their Canadian, British, etc. counterparts) to cheer seeming blatant rogues, bullies, slobs, or vulgarians with coarse manners and sometimes dubious personal morals who yet “have the guts” to “give the finger” to the “effete snobs,” “Brie and Chablis set,” “pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals,” “limousine liberals,” “striped-pants diplomats dripping with degrees,” and “Washington Insiders”–hence the popular appeal of figures like Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s, George Wallace and Spiro Agnew in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and now Donald Trump–an appeal the “SJW” types however simply attribute to “racism,” “sexism,” or “bigotry” by “deplorables.”
Another way of putting all this is that centrist liberals and conservatives are Pluralists in their vision of society and politics, while extreme leftists and right-wingers are Dualists. Moderate liberals and conservatives see both society and politics as a spectrum of many distinct, competing groups and shades of opinion, some pretty similar to one’s own group and viewpoint with a few slight differences and others quite different. Radical leftists and extreme right-wingers, on the other hand, have a starkly black-and-white vision of themselves (and maybe a few close allies) versus a homogeneous (despite meaningless superficial internal differences) bloc of unredeemable, irreconciliable enemies. Centrist liberals and conservatives see numerous significant differences among their opponents, some of whom can be reasoned with or even persuaded to be allies or benevolent neutrals while others can only be seen as adversaries. Extreme leftists and rightists alike, however, see no significant or meaningful distinctions between different subsets of their opponents–no real difference (for the Left) between liberal and conservative, “hip” and “square,” or educated and uneducated straight white cis-gender males, no real difference (for the far Right) between moderate liberals and outright Communist sympathizers (though a century ago, before the Russian Revolution, communists were preceded by anarchists as ultra-conservatives’ usual radical-left bogey-men). In any case, radical Leftists and radical Rightists alike tend to suffer from a similar foreshortened perspective on their opponents, ignoring or dismissing distinctions that centrist liberals and moderate conservatives are more willing to recognize and exploit.
First of all, it was refreshing to see references to sages and thinkers of past generations, as in Alexander Zubatov’s quotes from Jonathan Swift, Algernon Sidney, Shaftesbury, Ortega y Gasset, and Alexis de Tocqueville and not just from Foucault, Derrida, Franz Fanon, or current “critical race,” feminist, intersectionalist, “white privilege,” and “white fragility” theorists. It’s good to see someone putting current political controversies and kerfuffles in some sort of longer-range historical and cultural context, as Zubatov attempted to do.
I’d also just add here myself that some of that longer-range cultural and historical perspective may be found, as well, in reading some of our last generation’s pre-“woke,” pre-“PC,” pre-“SJW,” pre-“intersectional’ liberal historians, sociologists, and commentators, like Richard Hofstadter, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, etc., who also illuminated yesteryear’s social, political, and cultural conflicts and tensions in ways that may perhaps still be found enlightening today. They also show us that it’s not really necessary to become a right-wing Republican in order to oppose the “call-out culture” of today’s intolerant, authoritarian “regressive left.” Likewise, what they observed about the political conflicts of earlier generations might prompt us to wonder, for example, whether some of the political and cultural clashes of the 1950’s Joe McCarthy era were really all that fundamentally different, for instance, from that of our own current Trump era? Or whether George Wallace’s 1960’s third-party “white backlash” supporters were all that different from Trump’s supporters 50 years later?
Zubatov very perceptively observes that “pressurizing people to fight racism routinely backfires,” that “dropping F-bombs on fellow citizens spreads hatred rather than makes converts to anti-racism,” and that “[l]ecturing, demonizing and lashing out at people have never convinced anyone of anything.” Politeness, he quite correctly notes, is “not only nobler but also far more effective.” That is EXACTLY what I myself have been saying. While I’m generally not exactly an avid fan myself of popular self-help books, I really think our liberal and leftist political activists would do well to recall Dale Carnegie’s reminder over 80 years ago that “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Lecturing, demonizing, dropping F-bombs, and lashing out at so-called “deplorables” is definitely NOT a good way to “win friends and influence people.”
Zubatov is quite correct in criticizing the “common perception that politeness is only a means to an end, that some more substantive goal, some broad vision of justice or the good society, is what we are really after, and being either polite or rude about it is just a matter of tactics—we should do whatever works.” Civility is not just “whatever works”–it is the ONLY thing that works, unless of course one seriously contemplates a Leninist-style coup d’état.
Zubatov’s encomium of politeness and gentlemanliness, with his extended quote from Shaftesbury on politeness “in that wch every minute offers & gives opportunity. Eating. Talk. Story, Argument, the common Entertainment, Mirth & Laughing, Voice, Gest, Action, Countenance,” also suggests that something perhaps might actually even be said in favor of snobbery, as unedifying an emotion as it’s usually considered–or perhaps snobbery is not quite the right word for what I have in mind. However, be that as it may, I’ve often felt that liberals and progressives perhaps should not always be so down on snobbery as they generally profess to be.
Liberals rather should regard it as maybe a “Good Thing” if it leads the upward-mobile sons and daughters of the “lower orders” to despise racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia as vulgar, tacky, low-class habits, as signs of a regrettable lack of good taste and good breeding! One should leave such prejudices behind when one enters (or aspires to enter) the ranks of educated, cultured, well-bred ladies and gentlemen, just as one leaves cellophane-wrapped Krafft or Velveeta processed cheese slices, McDonaldsburgers, Diet Coke, Coors beer, and hunting ‘n’ fishing behind after one has discovered Brie and Camembert, quiche, Perrier water, Chardonnay, and art-show openings! :=) :=) Surely, for example, the upward-mobile, if they are at all socially perceptive, should notice that in the college-educated upper-middle-class to which they aspire groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the League of Women voters definitely have more social prestige, more of a “Brahmin” and “civic-minded leading citizen” aura, than the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Elks Club, Rotary, or the Knights of Columbus! Being a racist, on the other hand, is just SO Moose Lodge! :=) :=)
This sort of thing, I suspect, is part of what David Riesman and Nathan Glazer may have had in mind in their 1955 article on “Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes” on the social roots of 1950’s “McCarthyism,” when they noted that while many of the “newly prosperous” mid-20th century American working and lower-middle classes rejected the “traditional cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened upper and upper-middle classes,”some of their college-educated children had “become eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values now held by the discontented classes.” Not only did many of those “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture” accept liberal values and attitudes for their own sake, out of temperamental affinity or rational conviction, but also, I suspect, they noticed early on that there was something a bit “déclassé” or “downmarket” about some of their parents’ or families’ attitudes and prejudices, that in the educated, sophisticated upper-bourgeois circles to which they aspired it just wasn’t “done” to display a certain sort of super-patriotic Joe McCarthyite or John Birchite Cold War anti-Communism, to express certain prejudices against Jews or “Negroes,” or to crack certain sorts of “little woman” jokes or make certain sorts of “woman driver!” remarks. If you exhibited such opinions and prejudices, perhaps it might be just as well if you stuck to your bowling alley or “Royal Order of Raccoons” lodge and forgot about the art museum, the faculty lounge, and the tennis court! :=) :=)
I love that Mr. Zubitov is unafraid to tackle not just the run-of-the-mill kinds of political antics that are discussed in most of these articles on “civility” but also the more general decline in public behaviour that’s really part of the same issue but that doesn’t get enough airtime. Political incivility is indeed just the tip of a much larger iceberg, which consists of all these manky wankers taking a piss or worse on streets or in transport or making a spectacle of themselves with their obstreperous noise, street language, offensive dress and other vulgarity and buffoonery. If we don’t fix that problem, we’ll never fix the more superficial issues that are afflicting our politics.
I certainly agree with the author (who happens to be a friend) that politeness is an essential element of a democratic republic such as our own, the absence of which is a sign of its possible demise.
However the author appears to skip over an entire category of political action, which underlay the success of Gandhi and much of the civil rights movement: non-violent protest. The author writes that “polite disregard will accomplish much more than the kinds of protests, callouts and freak-outs that only fuel the fire, alienating potential allies.” Yes, “freaks-outs” will just fuel the fire, but the author seems to move from “screaming, screeching, hectoring, browbeating and bullying” (bad) directly to “skillful oratory, sharp wit and noble acts and deeds,” citing MLK’s famous speech. By doing so, he seems to suggest that protest of any kind is ill-advised. I think we should rather say: protest, but peacefully, with politeness.
This raises however several other points:
1. To what extent should “politeness“ or civility also be required of the media? Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh and their many colleagues have found that appeals to fear, and outrage, “sell” very, very well, and reap big political rewards as well. Incitements to hatred are common: Alexander Vindman and Mitt Romney, labeled as “traitors” by certain persons in the media, each must now have at least some fear for their security. What now can stop this particular form of “impoliteness”? Former media constraints on one-sided political discourse have been eliminated (partly in the misguided belief that individuals are fully capable of separating rational discourse from irrational, but just as significantly, because “money talks” when it comes to legislation).
2. How bad is the “screaming, screeching, hectoring, browbeating and bullying” the author mentions; What extent is it real, to what extent is it imaginary? Many of my conservative friends seem truly to believe that the “anti-fa” (in which they seem to include supporters of “Black Lives Matter”, most immigrants, militant lesbians, etc.) are ready to start a civil war at any time — though as my conservative friends calmly inform me, they will be ”ready” if so, since they keep their weapons close at hand.
3. Who can set examples for us to follow? The following headline has just appeared in my news feed: “Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of kids are bullied in classrooms”. This is rhetoric straight from the top.
I am completely in favor of politeness, for the reasons the author identifies.
We have, however, at the same time, other grave problems that suggest that a “return to politeness” will not be enough to restore civility in our democratic process. The rot in our republic runs much deeper.
Hi, Greg (and thanks for reading the article!). Completely agree with you that maybe I wasn’t as clear as I should’ve been that some peaceful protests are NOT “the kinds of protests, callouts and freak-outs that only fuel the fire.” My view, however, is that protesters, peaceful or otherwise, are not exempt from the general norm of politeness; they should be conducting themselves in a dignified manner, and many of our modern-day protest movements are not doing that at all. Antifa bullies and intimidates people, often going to the point of violent attacks against conservatives and conservative journalists, the women’s marches with the obscene pink hats are … well … obscene, as are so many of these “F*ck Trump!” celebrities and protesters, the recent New York subway “protests” were really just a bunch of pathetic hoodlums sowing chaos and trying to return the subway to the graffitied-up crime-ridden days of the 1970s/80s, and so much of the rhetoric of BlackLivesMatter, despite the noble intentions of some, has been full of profanity and virulent anti-white hatred and racism. Those kinds of protests aren’t constructive. They are repulsive — and I mean “repulsive” in the sense not only of being aesthetically repulsive to me and many others personally but also in the sense of repelling potential allies. For example, my view of BlackLivesMatter is that it’s overheated, aggressive and racist rhetoric turned an issue that should’ve been an all-concerned-citizens-of-every-race-against-police-brutality issue into a blacks+liberal white elites vs. working-class whites+cops issue. The statistics I’ve seen show that when you compare apples to apples (for which you have to take into account crime rates by race to track the disproportionate rate at which people of different races interact with cops in a law-enforcement scenario in the first place), the rate of police killings of unarmed whites is actually equal to or even a bit higher than the right of police killings of unarmed blacks, and certainly in absolute numbers, the number of police killings of unarmed whites is significantly higher. This shouldn’t have been a race issue AT ALL. It should’ve been an issue about how we as a society ensure that laws are enforced while, at the same time, also ensuring that people engaged in adversarial interactions with cops don’t get unjustifiably brutalized in one fashion or another. Instead of bringing us together as a nation, the BlackLivesMatter movement tore us apart.
So many of the current protest movements and the sensation-peddling media’s overheated, inflammatory rhetoric on race and other identity issues have, in my view, only hastened the exile of the white working class from the Democratic Party and have directly fueled Trump’s election and continued support. In no way do I condone or justify Trump’s own boorish conduct, but he represents a reaction, a tit-for-tat, the white working class (supported by the Republican corporate class for their own reasons) saying, in effect, “We’ve had enough of these endless attacks by media elites and celebrities and others demonizing everything we are, viz., our race, our gender norms, our religion, our national traditions, etc.” The result has been, as I described in the article, the total demolition of the cross-racial, race-blind consensus (an ideal towards which we had been steadily progressing) that had been the triumph of the Civil Rights Era after so much progress had been made, with renewed balkanization, increasing membership in hate groups on all sides and working-class whites being sent into the waiting arms of the guy who was wiling to stand up to the attacks on them and tell them, brashly, clearly and unapologetically, “I am your voice!”
That is what happens, in my view, when politeness falls by the wayside. The worst, loudest, most vulgar voices come to the fore, driving division and social unrest, and then you get this inevitable game of one-upmanship on both sides, Trump, as another commenter pointed out below, refusing to shake Pelosi’s hand and Pelosi ripping up his speech, unproductive bottom-feeding investigations into Hillary’s e-mails, Trump’s Russia ties, Trump’s Ukraine shenanigans, Biden’s son etc. Instead of coming together to address actual pressing issues, we get mired in the muck, cross-accusations of impropriety, digging into the past, trying to dredge up some allegedly thing someone may have said or done when they were 17 years old in 1982 or whenever, etc.
So I agree with you that there’s a larger picture here, but my view of that larger picture is probably a bit different from yours, and I think the decline in civility (driven in many ways by social media as well as by other forces) is, if not the core of the issue, certainly one of its primal components.
Agree entirely with this author’s point. The way I’d put it is that children throw tantrums, while adults have conversations, and a nation is a kind of ongoing conversation intended to adjust and refine our collective conception of the good life. If you want to take part in that conversation, however, you have to abide by certain conventional rules of conversational etiquette and decorum. If you can’t do that, you deserve to be treated like a child, given a “time out,” put in the corner and, if all else fails, grounded. We shouldn’t tolerate politicians refusing to shake hands or ripping up speeches.
(This is an only slightly exaggerated version of Herbert Marcuse’s argument in his infamous 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” which provides a blueprint for modern day political correctness and opposition to free speech.)
It’s not exaggerated at all. A lot of people saw this coming.
Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else’s academic freedom. (This is “political correctness.”) The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control.
— Ted Kazinsky, “The Unabomber Manifesto”