Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. I’m Preet Bharara. In recent years, the fabric of our public discourse has frayed with civility, often the casualty in the crossfire of heated political and social debates.

Disillusioned by the toxic political environment she found while working at the Department of Education, Alexandra Hudson left government to devote her time to studying the seemingly forgotten art of civility. Hudson has since published her first book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. She also explores the human condition through stories from the past in her weekly newsletter, “Civic Renaissance,” and her lecture series, “Storytelling and the Human Condition.” Hudson joins me to talk about her book, the difference between civility and politeness and the power of storytelling. Alexandra Hudson, welcome to the show.

Alexandra Hudson:

Preet, it’s a privilege to be here. Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

You’re so civil. I noticed it right from the outset.

Alexandra Hudson:

Depends on the day, I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

First question, basically, so why this book? Why this issue? Why this topic?

Alexandra Hudson:

I couldn’t not write this book, Preet. My mother is called Judy, the Manners Lady, and while I was writing this book, I actually discovered that there are no fewer than four women who are internationally renowned experts on manners in etiquette named Judy. My mother is one of them. So my mother is obviously my favorite of these Judiths in the courtesy biz and raised me and my brothers to mind our p’s and q’s. I always questioned what she taught me. I’m constitutionally allergic to authority. I hate rules, I hate being told what to do, but I generally followed them because she said they would lead to success in work and school and life.

She was right until I found myself in federal government. I was there 2017 to 2018, and it was this environment of anti-human flourishing, was absent utterly of the basic necessities of life, let alone thriving and flourishing. I saw these two extremes. On one hand, there were people who had sharp elbows, people who were overtly hostile and bellicose. On the other hand, there were people who were polished and poised and polite. They would smile and flatter at me one moment and then stab me and others in the back the next. The second contingent really puzzled me because my mother had said manners mattered because they were outward expressions of our inward character. Yet here I was surrounded by people who are well-mannered, but ruthless and cruel.

So this experience galvanized me to write this book, which is about the most important question of our day. How do we flourish across deep difference? It also clarified for me, a core argument of the book, is that there’s an essential distinction between civility and politeness.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you’ve anticipated my question. I should also just say for the record, in defense of the federal government where I worked for a long time.

Alexandra Hudson:

Oh boy, oh boy.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know the particular office building or group of folks that you worked with, but I had quite a different experience. So I just want to stand up for my fellow members of the federal government who were at neither extreme of what you’re describing, but everyone has different experiences.

Alexandra Hudson:

No, and this is a theme, a recurring theme in my book. I don’t want to paint any vocation, any geography, any period in history or any locale with a broad brush. There are always exceptions, and the human condition is the human condition. The human nature does not change. So this problem is a timeless one, and it emerges from a part of the human personality that we all share. So I want to affirm exactly what you said. I knew good people in government as well, but it was just dominantly-

Preet Bharara:

Nice save, Alexandra.

Alexandra Hudson:

Dominantly, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

So that distinction you make is an important one. I want you to have an opportunity to explain it further. What is the difference between the concept of civility and the practice of politeness?

Alexandra Hudson:

Politeness, I realized is external. It’s etiquette, it’s technique, it’s manners, it’s surface level stuff, conduct norms. Whereas civility is something deeper. It’s a disposition of the heart, a way of seeing others as our moral equals who are worthy of a bare minimum of respect by virtue of our shared moral status as members of the human community. That crucially, sometimes actually respecting others, sometimes actually loving others, requires being impolite. It requires suspending the rules of propriety and etiquette in order to have an uncomfortable conversation, in order to love someone well and tell a hard truth or even have a robust debate that sometimes that’s what actually loving and respecting someone requires.

I love etymology, the story of our language in our word. It’s throughout my book, and it’s often very illuminating. That’s definitely the case here in this instance. So people often conflate civility with politeness, politeness with civility. Either they harken back to a golden age of harmony and comity and they say, we just need more civility and politeness in public life. Another contingent that is very vocal is that they say, no civility and politeness is part of the problem. It’s the tool of the patriarchy, the powerful, white supremacists, people in positions of power to keep the powerless silent and oppressed and we need less civility and politeness in public life. But both these contingents miss this essential distinction and that the etymology supports, that the etymology of politeness is polire, the Latin word that means to smooth or to polish, and that’s what politeness does. It’s surface level and it papers over different, sweeps it under the rug, as opposed to giving us the tools to grapple with difference head on.

The etymology of civility is civitas, which is the etymological root of our words, citizen, citizenship, city and civilization. That’s what civility is. It’s the duties, the conduct, the habits befitting a citizen in the city that especially in a democracy like our own, requires having difficult conversations about. Competing visions of the good engaging in robust debate. Debate is the lifeblood of a democracy.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, so you used the term I was about to mention, you said habit, because there are people who would say that habits of speech and habits of conduct, saying please, saying thank you, engaging in etiquette, although that sounds like it’s surface level, those are the kinds of habits that cause people to have good character and have integrity and to approach, as you said, with their heart oriented towards civility. Is there some truth in that or are those empty gestures of politeness?

Alexandra Hudson:

So it’s a great question that gets to the crux of the relationship between civility and politeness. I think at its best, those right actions, so this is ortho doxy and orthopraxy. Right belief, orthodoxy and forming orthopraxy, right action. So at its best, the disposition of civility, the proper orientation of actually loving, actually respecting our fellow citizens, that’s where right action will flow from ideally. But unfortunately, too often today we’re content with just the surface level action, just going through the motions, just doing and saying the right things. We insufficiently care about cultivating true respect, authentic, authentic respect and love for others. So I think that we should instead focus more on getting the heart, the orientation, the disposition right.

You’re right that there is this link between action and conduct. In fact, one of my favorite stories from literature and history is a short story called the Happy Hypocrite by Max Beerbohm, an English writer. It gets to this idea that how we act can produce moral transformation, inner transformation, but it’s not a perfect correlation.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned the human condition, and I think you’ve suggested that it is what it is. You quote from various people in your book, including from Augustine, and you write that the raw stuff of humanity is defined by self-love first and affection for others second. Do you believe that or are you just quoting someone else?

Alexandra Hudson:

It’s a good question, I’d say both. I am paraphrasing a lot of thoughtful people who have come before me, and that is also the conclusion that my study of human nature and the human condition and the human historical record has led me to. That self-love is like gravity, it is like the default aspect of human nature. That is why this thing called friendship, this thing called community, this thing called society, is never a foregone conclusion. The moment we put this thing called democracy, civilization itself, the moment we put it on autopilot and assume that it will exist in perpetuity without our daily cultivated acts of the will and habits and effort, that’s the beginning of the end.

I learned this by this inductive study of this genre of civility books across history and across culture where thoughtful people observed human nature and said, what works when it comes to doing this thing called life together across difference well? What doesn’t work? Time and time again, people came to this idea of civility as I define and explore it throughout my book, of restraint of the self, restraint of our immediate desires for the sake of friendship, for the sake of flourishing and becoming our best selves. For the sake of increased chances of survival as a species, that this is the stuff of the good life, this thing called community, but it is fragile, it’s precarious, it is not a foregone conclusion. It takes the daily effort of every one of us to see democracy and our flourishing sustained.

Preet Bharara:

So you’re talking about self-love. What about on those days when I wake up and I feel self-loathing? How does that fit into Augustine’s framework?

Alexandra Hudson:

He was full of self-loathing. He was-

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about as a pragmatic matter. So the issue of civility comes up all the time on the podcast and otherwise in the context of politics. People feel very strongly about their candidates, whether you’re in favor of Biden or against Biden or in favor of Trump or against Trump or the senators in your state or whoever it may be. As I said in the intro, dialogue has gotten coarse, debate has gotten certainly very impolite and uncivil. Based on your research and studying and writing, what advice do you have for people on the ground in their neighborhoods, in their workplaces, as they talk about politics and care about it in the way that they do?

Alexandra Hudson:

My main piece of advice is to talk about politics less. It’s counterintuitive, but in order to save our democracy, save our public square, we actually have to relegate it to its proper place. I argue in the final chapter of my book, it’s called, “On Misplaced Meaning and Forgiveness,” that as these traditional touchstones of meaning in modern life, but also across human history. Things like friendship, family, faith, they have been on the decline in recent decades. Too often, people have relocated their ultimate source of identity, their meaning, in political issues that they’ve made an idol of religion out of politics.

There are three symptoms of this that I see. As a result, this is bad for our souls and bad for democracy, but several symptoms of this misplaced meaning that I see are the fact that previously apolitical venues now have a political dimension. What sports teams you root for, where you live, where you send your kids to school, where you grocery shop, where you get your newspapers. It feels like politics has invaded every aspect of our lives. That is atypical and not good for our souls, not good for democracy. We’re overdoing democracy and undermining it as a result. Another symptom of this misplaced meaning that I see is the way in which people can go from zero to 60. Just happy to rage like you’ve never seen before, at the broaching of one issue that is really dear to them that they feel is being treated with insufficient reverence.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, and that issue is often being cut off on the highway.

Alexandra Hudson:

There you go, it could be. Yeah, that’s a great point. That something small is kindling on the fire of our souls. The frustration builds and builds, and then it’s like this, kicking the cat.

Preet Bharara:

You have to be aware, you just have to be aware. I had a colleague once and I asked her about driving and she said something like, I don’t drive. I said, why don’t you drive? She just said, matter of factly, because I have road rage.

Alexandra Hudson:

Well know thyself, right? That’s what Socrates says is the beginning of wisdom. If that’s not a happy place for her soul, then bless her, then good for her.

Preet Bharara:

So on the one hand you say we shouldn’t make necessarily, I don’t know that everybody will agree with this, but we shouldn’t make politics as the center of our being and our focus. But even if it’s somewhat part of your focus, what’s the way at the Thanksgiving table or in other contexts between family and friends, if you are talking about politics, how to talk about it?

Alexandra Hudson:

So this was actually the third point I was going to get to is that because I think we’ve made politics matter too much in our lives, that another sad thing I’ve seen time and time again is the end of lifelong family relationships, friendships, people cutting one another off based on who they vote for, their position on X, Y, Z public issue. That to me is a symptom, as Plato would say, of disordered loves. We’ve let things that are not as important become the most important thing to us. We’ve let that displace really beautiful, central things to the level of happiness and joy in our life, like friendship, like family relationships and we’ve essentialized other people and degraded them by reducing them to one aspect of who they are, who they voted for, their view on one issue.

We have to, I think in order to do public life better and life together better, we have to have other… Recover a love of things that are non-political, non-controversial, in nature. So in order to talk better with your uncle at the dinner table about COVID or Donald Trump, maybe start about a shared love first, if you must talk about those things. Again, my general ethos and recommendation is to not, but if you must, talk about your kids first, talk about something joy filled and beautiful, establish that trust and connection first because that’s the problem of where we’re at today. We have no level of trust, we have no level of basic affection for our fellow citizens across difference. That’s doing a disservice for how we’re talking about the hard issues and how we’re talking about the difference.

Preet Bharara:

You draw from a very wide array of folks and thoughtful people as you mentioned already. To give some sense of the spectrum, I want to mention and ask you quickly about two before I let you go. One, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who I spoke about with a guest a few weeks ago and we focused almost exclusively in the podcast on his unbelievably important, impactful, seminal work, letter from Birmingham Jail, which you also quote from. What’s the lesson of civility when it comes to protest and the movement that Martin Luther King promoted and advocated for civil disobedience?

Alexandra Hudson:

I had the privilege of speaking just last week at the Alabama Supreme Court about these ideas just right next door to Dr. King’s church on Dexter Avenue where he also preached and worked through these ideas, and just a stone’s throw from where Rosa Parks was kicked off the bus and subsequently arrested for failing to sit at the back of the bus. So I was speaking, as you might imagine, to, it was a very illustrious group of educators, of jurists, and lawyers, predominantly white males. I spoke about protests, I spoke about the civil disobedience as a duty of citizenship.

I have a whole chapter in my book dedicated to civil disobedience. That sometimes the duty of citizenship requires speaking truth to power, calling out the hypocrisy of an unjust status quo. That Rosa Parks, she broke a specific law, specific Jim Crow era law, but her conduct was in accordance with what Martin Luther King Jr. might refer to as the eternal immortal law. She broke a bad law for the sake of a higher principle and upholding the rule of law and the eternal law. That we have that obligation to do so as well. So Dr. King is very central to my theory of civility as a duty of citizenship and why we have an obligation to speak truth and to take action sometimes even when it’s costly, even when it’s uncomfortable, but doing so in ways that still is respectful of the dignity and personhood of others.

The Imago Dei, that this notion of man being created in God’s image, that was central to Dr. King’s theory of personhood and his whole philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience. That informed his conduct, that it meant, it compelled him to take action, but it also took certain action off the table at the same time. For example, he knew that he could never degrade the personhood of another through violence, through [inaudible 00:17:37] attack, through destroying their property. That was dehumanizing and that would be contradictory and undermine his entire project to begin with. So Dr. King is central and a hero of civility in many ways throughout my book. Thank you so much for that question.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m going to now mention, in some different spectrum and in a different category of person, you also draw from the work of Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm. So it’s a little different. I don’t see a lot of parallels there, but what is the relevance of Larry David’s work to your work?

Alexandra Hudson:

So I’m a big fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm. So Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, he’s television’s favorite curmudgeon, and this is my hot take on Larry David. I call him the foremost defender of civilization today. So Larry David, he calls himself on the show, a social assassin. He’s the person who, he’s everyone’s inner ego and inner it. He does and says the things that we think every day, but he actually goes out of the way and does it. If someone double parks at the grocery store, Larry David is the one that’s like, excuse me sir, this is society. Someone doesn’t return their shopping cart as they should, he’s like, excuse me, you don’t get to do that. Your actions have consequences.

I tell the story several anecdotes about Larry David in the context of a discussion about why democracy depends on us acting in ways that consider the needs alongside others voluntarily. That if we don’t want a state, a government, a bureaucrat, micromanaging our everyday interactions, that we need to choose to do so voluntarily. If we don’t, the government has and will do that for us, and so we ought to be grateful sometimes as annoying as they are, to the Larry David’s of the world who offer this check on that, that thoughtlessness. It’s not even overt malice sometimes. Sometimes we’re just thoughtful, we’re in a rush, we’re too busy going from point A to point B and getting through our to-do list, to think about returning our cart or whether we’ve parked across the line or any other of the low grade aggravations that make life together vexing.

Preet Bharara:

The funny thing about that is, and it goes back to the original distinction that we discussed, is Larry David is usually thought of as being fairly rude and not polite. Yet, as you posit, he’s the defender of civil society.

Alexandra Hudson:

Right, but is he civil? Is he telling a hard truth that we need to hear for a greater good? Is he actually not patronizing people by pushing a hard truth down the road and letting a person’s unchecked self-interest hurt other people in the longer term? Is he actually doing society a service?

Preet Bharara:

Thanks for working on this subject. I think it’s very important in American life, especially now. Alexandra Hudson, thanks for being on the show. The book is again, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Thanks so much.

Alexandra Hudson:

Thanks for having me, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

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If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #Ask Preet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at (669) 247-7338. That’s (669) 24-PREET. Or, you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director, who is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara, Stay Tuned.