A well-known radio talk show host suggests that a young woman who testified to Congress about insurance coverage for contraceptives is a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

      A TV news commentator refers to the President as a “retard.”

      A different TV commentator refers to a different President as “a rube” and “a yokel.”

      An afternoon talk show host calls a former governor “an idiot” and suggests someone should defecate into her mouth.

     Welcome to 21^st Century America where rudeness, incivility, and outright nastiness are as a commonplace as gamblers in Las Vegas. Although the examples above are drawn from America’s political landscape, incivility is all too easy to find in other areas of our society. Turn on a daytime television show and you are likely to see ordinary people hurling insults, accusations, and sometimes fists at each other. Take part in an online discussion and you may find yourself ridiculed and mocked by those who disagree with you. Go for a drive and you may be the target of expletives uttered by a fellow motorist who thinks you are moving too slow.

      As a child, I received firm instruction on good manners; as a student, fair and effective communication received strong emphasis in my education from high school through graduate school. So I view the decline of civility with both regret and a sense of loss. Perhaps not coincidentally, the decline of civility has been paralleled by a paucity of persuasion, at least outside the world of commerce and sales. Few people want to take the time to persuade those who disagree with them. You seldom hear someone say, “You should change your mind to my position, and here’s why.”

     In the political realm, the decline in civility seems to have started in the 1990s and early 2000s. Incidents such as the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, the disputed 2000 Presidential election, and the second Iraq War both polarized American voters and left many of them embittered. The recent 2016 election clearly only added fuel to the fire.

     The loss of civility among the general population is harder to figure out, but I would argue that the emergence of social media has facilitated it.  Social media – Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, on-line chats, etc. – does not lend itself to persuasion. That’s because persuasion takes time. You need to present evidence, make reasoned arguments, and explain your line of thinking, and these measures can seldom be accomplished with 140 figures or on a Facebook post.  But insults and name calling can be done quickly; the same is true of a personal attack on an individual or a sweeping generalization about a whole group. Even worse, on-line chats can be done anonymously with monikers that don’t often reveal the true identity of the people involved.  Here are some excerpts from recent online discussions over President Trump’s travel ban and Besty DeVos’s nomination for Education Secretary:

     “Try North Korea…you should like it there.” 

     “You are a disgusting slob.”

     “Fat poor people vote.” (Explaining how Donald Trump became President.)

     “Repugs have such horrible nominees…”

     “Every Democrap Senator…should be hung.”

     “It’s the clueless woman again.”

     “Get back under your hood.”

     To be sure, some people in these conversations tried to make reasoned arguments.  One opponent of the DeVos nomination pointed to her support of “failed” school reforms in Detroit as evidence that she is unqualified to be Secretary of Education:

Douglas N. Harris, professor of economics at Tulane University, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that DeVos was partly responsible for “what even charter advocates acknowledge is the biggest school reform disaster in the country.” In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Detroit had the lowest reading and mathematics scores “by far” over any city participating in the evaluation. She designed a system with no oversight, said Harris, and where schools that do poorly can continue to enroll students.

     In a future blog, I will look more closely at the kinds of rude behaviors that are often seen today especially among people who have political disagreements. I will close this blog with the three principles that guide my own behavior toward others and that hopefully keep me from adding to the incivility that I see around me.

–          I never make a public statement without signing my name to it or otherwise identifying myself as the author.

–          I try to treat others as I would like for them to treat me.

–          Unless the person is a close friend or family member, I don’t presume to know the motivations that are behind his or her behavior.

     Of course, I am only human and I don’t follow these principles to perfection. On the other hand, I’m sure I’ve never called anyone a “clueless woman” or “a fat slob” or suggested they travel to Kim Jong Un’s North Korean “paradise.”