Observations on Some Tribulations of Civility

Extract

THE INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS REQUIRED FOR THE freedom of expression of beliefs and the representation of intertests and ideals – both of which can be divisive – can function effectively in society if those who use them for their own particularistic ends are at the same time restrained by an admixture of civility. Public liberties are conditions of the proposition, confrontation and persuasion of contending beliefs, of their cultivation in autonomous corporate bodies and of their presentation to public authorities. Representative institutions are the arrangements through which contending beliefs and interests are brought forward, considered and taken into account in the making of laws governing the territorially bounded society. The institutions in which beliefs and desires or interests are proposed and confronted in argument and the institutions in which beliefs and interests are taken into account and digested discriminatingly into law cannot work acceptably without some constituent civility and consensus of the contending parties. If the contending parties are vehemently irreconcilable and if effectively contending beliefs and interests are very widely disparate, one or another of the groups will resist physically or seek to impose its will by coercion and actual violence on the other. The representative institutions cannot moreover work effectively if they have too many tasks to master and if the different contending parties within them are irreconcilable to the point where they deny the legitimacy of the institutions themselves, of the procedures for arriving at decisions and the decisions themselves, should those decisions be uncongenial to their own beliefs and interests.