LONA MANNING
  • Home
  • Books
    • Shelley Novella
  • Research
    • About Shelley
    • Peterloo
    • Kitty Riddle
    • 18th C. love poetry
  • Jane Austen
  • Blog
  • About Me
    • Teaching Philosophy

CMP#16  Civil and Civilization

12/3/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Modern readers who love Jane Austen are eager to find ways to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century. Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Click here for the first in the series. 

    “And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of expecting! I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance.”                                                                                                                               -- Darcy to Elizabeth
Explicit Values in Austen: Civility
   In my previous post I looked at how important civility was to Jane Austen. Civility -- treating others with consideration, patience, kindness -- was a moral duty and the mark of a civilized person.
  The Rambling is an online periodical dedicated to scholarship about the long 18th century. ​A 2019 article in the The Rambling discusses a "problem" with civility, a problem that is based in its origin.
  Professor Urvashi Chakravarty asserts that criticizing people for uncivil behaviour is a form of racialized oppression. From "tone-policing" to complaining about rioting in the streets, calls for politeness are the hallmarks of the privileged class lording over marginalized people.
 Further, she implies that oppression is the origin of civility, the very purpose of civility. I disagree with that last assertion...
    The word 'civil’ is based on the Latin civilis, meaning “relating to the citizens.” ​Civilis gives us civility and civilization. Civis gives us citizen and civic. And English has evolved to give us two different meanings for ‘civil:’ (1) an adjective meaning politeness and (2) an adjective referring to civic (government) matters, as in "civil rights."     
PictureThese Olympic athletes suffered socially and professionally for protesting during the medal ceremony
    Civility is upheld through social sanctions, starting with the mother who squeezes our shoulder firmly and says, "And what do we say to Aunt Phyllis for knitting you such a lovely sweater?" On the other hand, the rights and duties of the citizen are enumerated by codes of law. Citizenship is a type of membership. 
   ​ In “The Problem of Civility: a Genealogy,”  Chakravaty engages in some word play around the two meanings of 'civil' to build her case. 
   This is interesting for those of us who like to know about the etymology of words, but is there anything illuminating or profound about mixing up (or “conflating” as Chakravarty puts it) the two different definitions? Sure, I could say there is nothing civil about smashing store windows so why do we call it civil disobedience. But I haven’t proved anything. I haven’t made an argument. I’ve merely willfully ignored the two different meanings of ‘civil.’ It’s as irrelevant as pointing out that “Mrs.” is short for "Mistress." A man’s wife is not his mistress, despite the word origin. 
​   But Professor Chakravaty does conflate the two definitions in her article. She implies that civility is deliberately used by the civil powers to marginalize and oppress. In a minute I’ll discuss the history of civility, but first, I note that Chakravaty goes beyond conflating the two different meanings of 'civil' -– she brings in 'servility' as well. “’Civil’ and ‘servile,’” she writes, “the terms slip from one to the other.”

PictureAnne Elliot, Captain Wentworth and the Musgroves visited Lyme in Persuasion
   Well, except that civilis pertains to citizens and servile comes from servilis which means, ‘pertaining to slaves.’ So apart from the fact that civility and servility come from two different Latin root words with diametrically opposed meanings, and apart from the fact that “servile” means something different from either of the two meanings of 'civil,' yes, you can “slip” from being civil to being servile. 
   You could be the proprietor of the inn at Lyme, bowing and smiling, as he welcomes the visitors from Uppercross, apologizing because its "so entirely out of season," and his street is "no thoroughfare of Lyme," and there is "no expectation of company.” The inn-keeper takes his civility too far, into the realm of servility. Yes, people sometimes do this. But servility is not the same thing as civility, not in Latin, not in English and not in reality, however much slipping you do. 
   Professor Chakravarty also says--as though it were somehow significant--“the assonance between [‘civil’ and ‘servile’] is immediately heard, noted, ratified.”  
  Yes, ‘civil’ sounds a little like ‘servile.’ And ‘assonance’ sounds like ‘asinine.’ So what? This might do for analyzing a poem, but this is not an indictment of anything.

Picture
   ​According to Chakravarty, upholding norms of civility is really--and quite deliberately--about repression. Civility “works in service of regimes of privilege, power, and whiteness, mobilizing an insidious strategy to thwart change by silencing the voices of dissidence and difference.”
   Civility is also used to divide one class from another. “To invoke the “civil” has always been [emphasis added] to demarcate the boundaries of those who do not and cannot belong: the slave, the stranger, the outcast. To rely on civility is to enact and re-enact the forms of psychic, social, and legal violence that have always separated the ‘civil’ body from the uncivil one.” (There’s that ‘conflation’ of the two meanings of ‘civil’ again).
   If civility isn’t oppressing you by forcing you to behave, it’s excluding you when you don't behave the right way. Civility gets you coming and going.  If there is an actual benefit, a good faith reason, for people to treat each other with politeness and consideration, Chakravarty does not mention it.

Picture
   Nobody would dispute that civility can be used as a weapon. Anne Elliot thought Captain Wentworth’s “cold politeness” and “ceremonious grace” was “worse than anything.”
   But was civility 
developed for the purposes of exclusion and oppression, of “civic erasure”? This would come as a surprise to William Wilberforce. “God Almighty has set before me two great objects,” he wrote in 1787, “the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”  He also formed a Society for the Suppression of Vice and we can see him lampooned in this cartoon.
   By “manners,” Wilberforce meant a great deal more than keeping your elbows off the table. "Manners" is more akin to codes of conduct, which includes how we treat one another, which brings in civility.
​   I think we can agree that Wilberforce did not believe civility was useful for oppressing slaves. Hannah More, his ally in the abolition movement, wrote several conduct books which linked civility with morality and virtue, not servility.
​    Wilberforce and his allies had a profound impact on British society. The 
Enlightenment also played a role. And so did coffee.

Picture
  ​ Further, the rise of politeness led to more social levelling, not more social exclusion. Prior to the mid-17th century, courtliness was for the courtier, for people at the top of the aristocratic tree. But the writings of Lord Shaftesbury, who I mentioned in my previous post, and the philosopher John Locke brought about a revolution in manners based on the idea that human beings can be empathetic and good to one another. Shaftesbury wrote “All politeness is owing to Liberty." His view of civility is the polar opposite of the view that civility is a tool of oppression.
    
According to scholars who have studied the rise of politeness in England (and yes, this is actually a field of study and debate), “politeness was associated with improvement in the sense not just of refinements of style but of moral and other reform.”
   In “Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century,” [The Historical Journal: Cambridge, 2002] Lawrence Klein writes that “the social and intellectual elite of Edinburgh famously adapted the pleasures of polite conversation for the pursuit of public improvement. In Scottish thinking, in particular, politeness was grafted on to schemes of human economic and political development to convey the cultural modernity of commercial polities.”  
   Thanks to the popularity of coffee-houses, people from different social levels began to meet and mingle, to read and discuss the news and ideas of the day, while drinking a stimulating beverage which, unlike alcohol, did not lead to public brawls. According to Professor John Mullan, in a BBC discussion of the rise of politeness, these new public spaces meant that people could "meet on equal terms” despite differences in status.  And because there was a new merchant class moving up in the world, there was an interest in acquiring “polish” and good manners.

Picture18th century tone policing: Jane Austen's father on the benefits of being polite.
   When Francis Austen, (Jane Austen’s brother), joined the Navy in 1788, his father sent him a “memorandum” filled with loving advice. After urging Francis to pray regularly, Rev Austen wrote about the importance and the usefulness of good manners. He reminded his son to show respect to his superiors and “every appearance of unselfishness” to his messmates. “With your inferiors,” he goes on, “perhaps you will have but little intercourse, but when it does occur there is a sort of kindness they have a claim on you for, and which, you may believe me, will not be thrown away on them.”
   Far from regarding civility as something to be used as a weapon against the lower ranks, Reverend Austen preached that the lowly sailors “have a claim” to kindly treatment.    
    Politeness was therefore both a cause and a symptom in a society that was slowly—very slowly—becoming more egalitarian. Obviously, the urbane and civilized conversation in the coffee houses excluded the people back in Jamaica who were growing the coffee. But as we have seen,
 the people who were reforming manners in Austen's time were the same people who were urging that slavery was a moral abomination which should be outlawed.

Picture Miss Grey sneering at the rustic Dashwood girls for not having pronouns in their bios.
    Not all uncivil behaviour is a form of protest by a member of a marginalized group, is it? More often it's just someone being rude and selfish, like a loutish youth not giving the pregnant lady a seat on the bus. What then? Am I "erasing" the loutish teenager when I expect him to give up his seat? Am I enacting social violence on him? Am I first supposed to enquire into his antecedents and calibrate the degree of his marginalization with my own?
​   ​I don't dispute that there are social penalties in our culture for uncivil behaviour, and there are also consequences for civil disobedience. But don’t 
all cultures have conceptions of good or bad or appropriate manners? How could a society hold itself together without norms of civil behavior? It seems very short-sighted, ahistorical and insular to conflate ‘civility’ with ‘whiteness.' To argue that civility itself is problematic is to ignore many countervailing examples from history.

Previous post: Civility and Civilization  Next post: Service and Servility -- first of a series on servants in Austen (how assonant!)   

In my novel, A Different Kind of Woman, the Bristol Chapter of the Society for the Suppression of Vice steps in to stop French prisoners of war from selling obscene carvings and drawings. Click here for more about my novels.
Full Disclosure: The Rambling has nice and friendly proprietors, a charming snail logo, and they published my "literary novel book review" generator in their first issue, which is very funny -- check it out.

For a deeper dive on the importance of civility and the history of politeness (Lord Shaftesbury), try this article by Alexander Zubatov. 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    About the author:

    More about me here. My earlier posts (prior to June 2017) are about my time as a teacher of ESL in China,(just click on "China" in the menu below.) more recent posts focus on my writing, as well as Jane Austen and the long 18th century. Welcome!


    Categories

    All
    18th Century Novel Tropes
    Authoresses
    Book Reviews
    China
    China: Sightseeing
    Clutching My Pearls
    East & West Indies & Slavery
    Emma
    Humour
    Jane Austen
    Laowai At Large
    Mansfield Park
    Northanger Abbey
    Parody
    Persuasion
    Postmodern Pushback
    Pride Prejudice
    Religion In Austen
    Sanditon
    Sense And Sensibility
    Shelley
    Teaching

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    December 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    May 2017
    January 2017
    April 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014


    RSS Feed

    © Lona Manning 2022
Proudly powered by Weebly