‘What Happens Next?’: Are We Getting More Rude?

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Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts, what will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Scott Stephens: Civility is not politeness. It's not necessarily turn-taking, and it's not being demure in rigorous conversation.

Waleed Aly: Where you have the city being uncivil with one another, then the city really ceases to exist. The civilization cannot hold together because you no longer have any kind of answerability. And in the context of democratic life, then democratic life falls apart.

Lucas Walsh: The question then becomes, what do we have in common? What are our common interests? And how should we behave in order to be able to even determine what those common interests are?

Susan Carland: I know what I'm about to say will make me sound about a million years old, but is it just me or are we becoming more rude?

With a global pandemic mostly behind us, it seems, and this might all be in my head, that society emerged from months of lockdown and we all forgot how to interact with other people.

I'm not excluding myself! I've had to start singing karaoke in the car to keep myself from flipping out when another driver cuts me off, but more about that another time.

But if it was the pandemic that turned us all into barbarians, how long will it take for us to get things back to normal? Surely we should have readjusted by now. And are we using that as a way to let ourselves off the hook? Does anyone else feel like we've all become a little more angry and a little less polite?

Today on the podcast we're talking about civility. Its many layers go much deeper than simple common courtesy. Our expert guests may even convince you that the integrity of some of our most important social structures depends on it.

Civility is more than just being polite. It's a virtue that binds us all together in the common life fostering productive, respectful dialogue and rigorous conversation.

The global challenges ahead of us are immense. Will heightened tensions lead to heightened aggression? And is it too late to stop social media algorithms and media sensationalism from dehumanising us further and stirring up even more contempt? Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Steve Zech: My name is Steven Zech. I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Monash University, and I am super engaged in research on contentious politics.

Susan Carland: Steve, welcome to the podcast.

Steve Zech: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Susan Carland: Would you consider yourself a civil person?

Steve Zech: I like to think so. When people say that, we have to say, “Well, what do you mean?”

Susan Carland: Yeah. Well, what do you mean? How would you define a civil person?

Steve Zech: Well, I think it's clearly an aspirational concept and it comes laden with a bit of judgment, but we like to unpack it for its different dimensions.

There's a bit of a thin civility and a thick civility where the thins very much about politeness and these kind of everyday exchanges, etiquette, manners, that sort of thing. So again, politeness, but then there's something that you can go a little deeper, and that's much more about those kind of moral questions and justifying your aims and policies and that sort of thing.

Susan Carland: It's interesting because one of the first things you said is that you think civility is aspirational.

Steve Zech: Mm-hmm.

Susan Carland: My sense with, at least some people today, when we talk about the big cultural issues of our time, is that civility is actually seen with disdain. That if you are too civil, it's that you are not morally serious, that you are not taking the big issues seriously like you should. And if you were taking them seriously, that you would behave in an uncivil way.

Steve Zech: Yes and no. I think that civility can certainly be weaponised. It can be this kind of tool to oppress, to silence and all those other things.

Susan Carland: Civility shaming.

Steve Zech: Exactly. But I think that at its core, it's that social lubricant. It's the thing that makes social life possible, political life possible. When you have disagreements, when you have these kind of differences in society, it's that thing that lets us potentially cooperate and live better together, I think.

Susan Carland: In their work examining civility, Steve and his co-researcher, Matteo Bonotti, have also worked closely with Professor Lucas Walsh, director of the Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice.

Lucas Walsh: Broadly speaking, someone like Andrew Peterson in the UK would divide civility into everyday civility, which are those, that's politeness, niceness that I was talking about before.

And then there’s political civility, which relates to one's disposition or attitude or interactions with others, as a kind of a virtue of democracy.

There's other subdivisions underneath that. So for example, we see academics actually from Monash University break it down into forms of justificatory civility.

So colleagues from here at Monash University break it down into further categories. So there is the ordinary civility, the everyday civility that we've just mentioned. There's moral civility, which is much deeper than everyday politeness. It relates to your openness to discussion, and an attentiveness to others, and a kind of commitment to the common good.

And then there's justificatory civility, which is where the decisions made by decision-makers don't just reflect a sectarian or a particular ethical view but are grounded in that common good. That they need to be able to justify what they do as part of a wider set of values and not just one particular group.

So they're the different kinds of civility. What we see in terms of the changes in the emergence of new kinds of civility is, for example, in the ways in which we conduct everyday interactions.

Susan Carland: You know, your area is education, so obviously a big part of that would be education of young people.

And I wonder, do you think in your experience, are the young people of today having a new experience, a new take on civility? Or is that simply that every older generation has always said, “Younger people these days, they have no manners, they don't do things the right way, there's no civility, they don't respect their elders…” Is this just the common complaint of the older generation, always about the younger generation who are trying to, often, make positive change?

Lucas Walsh: So two parts to my answer. The first is that if we look to what I would consider to become leading thinkers such as Andrew Peterson in the United Kingdom, he points out that empirically finding a decline in civility is very difficult.

So there's no clear empirical evidence of a decline in civility, and therefore he says it's much more about perception. And we can come back to that because social media has amplified that perception. It's taken a conversation between you and I that might be a challenging conversation and equipped it with a megaphone.

Then there's the second side to it, which is more an anecdotal one: That that incivility is by no means in any stretch of the imagination confined to young people in the societies that we've been talking about. That we see… I would personally say I see so-called adults behaving extremely poorly, but that breakdown is not necessarily confined to a generation – if indeed it is a breakdown.

Susan Carland: Steve's research actually has identified a rise in uncivil behaviours, especially in the wake of major stressful events – a global pandemic, for example.

Are we becoming less civil or do I just feel that because I'm getting old and grumpy, and every old person believes that the younger generation are rude monsters?

Steve Zech: You're not wrong. It seems like every decade there's the new claims of, “Has civility ever been this bad?” sort of thing.

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Steve Zech: And there is evidence to suggest that it is getting worse, though.

Susan Carland: Ah.

Steve Zech: So a lot of the research we've been doing and then the research that does exist, there seems to be evidence that, at least incrementally, in some contexts, so say Australian politicians for example… We've done research, we went in and looked at 120 years of Hansard records –

Susan Carland: Mm.

Steve Zech: – And they have coding for language, dismissive language and cursing, and then the way that they actually justify policies, which is a dimension of civility that we look at. Yes, it's gotten incrementally worse.

Susan Carland: Huh.

Steve Zech: And there's more pronounced effects in some of the US studies when it's looking at people's experiences of incivility, especially in the workplace following COVID. But compared with the same types of questions, just 10 or 20 years earlier, it's gotten worse. People are more frequently experiencing incivility.

Susan Carland: So why do you think we are becoming less civil? You said your research has showed maybe over the last 10 or 15 years. What happened 15 years ago?

Steve Zech: Well, it's just certain types of actors. So when we do disaggregate that incivility of politicians, and here in Australia, for example, it'll be more like fringe parties do carry those subtle differences that… You generally have more or less consistent levels of incivility by the centrist parties on the left and the right, looking at Labor, Liberal Coalition, Nationals. So it's more or less certain types of actors, I guess, that are more uncivil.

Susan Carland: Mm. So that's with politicians. Do you think the everyday person on the street in Australia is becoming less civil?

Steve Zech: I like to be a bit optimistic about it. I don't think so. I think we hear more about it, sure.

But I do think that there are moments, there are crises, particular events where incivility might be kind of a flashpoint or come out more. And what I mean by that is something like unintentional in politeness as a dimension of civility because we again, disaggregate as this kind of thin incivility around these kind of cordiality…

And when we had something like COVID, we lost our signals. We had clear things where you smile, disarming smiles, and the handshakes, and the commentaries we make in certain settings.

When all that's thrown up and we don't know how to queue anymore, and you can't sit down and interact with the wait staff in the same way, or you're passing a stranger as you're walking along the bay in your five-kilometre radius and you can't smile because of the mask, you come up with new signals to try and again to signal this, “We're in this together. Things are happening.”

But again, this is the social lubricants of everyday life that we set up to kind of just make everything much smoother.

Susan Carland: Yeah. Right. So I imagine it's not just that we couldn't see each other's faces to smile and we had to be apart and we had to engage online, which does make things weird at best, but everyone was incredibly stressed. Is stress a big incivility instigator?

Steve Zech: Yes. Again, a lot of the general research on this either are differences in incivility in the online space and under certain conditions.

And yeah, people maybe forgot how to be civil in some sense. As we all entered back onto the planes and people were yelling at flight attendants, and you're going to restaurants, and again, people were rude.

Part of that's them forgetting the social niceties, being isolated in different ways and being really stressed out for a very understandable reason. There was this big shock to our lives. And again, some of it's unintentional, but then some of it is intentional.

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Amanda Stephens: Hi, I'm Amanda Stephens and I'm a senior research fellow at the Monash University Accident Research Centre. My background is in understanding driver behaviour.

Susan Carland: Amanda, welcome.

Amanda Stephens: Ah, thank you.

Susan Carland: Do you think we are becoming more angry?

Amanda Stephens: Definitely on the roads people are saying that drivers are becoming more angry and aggressive, but we don't actually know whether they are, or whether we are just getting back into the swing of it and seeing our old habits rise again.

Susan Carland: When we talk about people feeling that we are getting angrier on the roads, is it just that we're getting angrier on the roads or we feel that it's getting angrier on the roads?

Or is it just society in general? Do people just feel angrier in general? Is it the traffic? Is it just that we're getting used to being back in the traffic post-pandemic? Or is it that people are angry on social media and there's political instability and there's a war in Ukraine? What actually is going on?

Amanda Stephens: I think we drive as we feel. And we don't get in the car and return to a state of normal. So whatever's going on in our lives, or more globally, and we’re feeling the effects of that, we don't leave that at the car door. So that sits in the car with us and it shapes how we drive. It shapes our tolerance to other road users.

Susan Carland: One thing I've noticed when I'm driving is that I'm more likely to get angry or annoyed if someone cuts in front of me or does something that I feel is rude, whatever, a bit aggressive, in a way that I am not if I'm walking down the street and someone walks in front of me. What is it about driving that seems to up our agitation levels?

Amanda Stephens: Well, absolutely. And I think there's a number of things. I think it's because we have different social rules on the road. And part of that is also because we're in our bubbles.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Amanda Stephens: We're de-identified. So we no longer have to feel we need to behave in a certain way.

Susan Carland: Hmm.

Amanda Stephens: So you're absolutely right. I wouldn't tut at someone in a supermarket if they were slow, but I might tut at another driver if they're driving slowly.

And I think unfortunately our vehicles give us a sense that we're alone on the road. We're protected by this big metal cocoon. So instead of seeing other drivers on the road, we see other vehicles on the road. So we're automatically separated and it's sort of an us versus them at times.

Susan Carland: How would you define traffic incivility? What does uncivil behaviour on the road look like to you?

Amanda Stephens: It's not sharing the road, and that can come through in a number of ways. So it can be just being hostile or swearing or shaking your fist at another driver. It can be using your vehicle when you're angry and putting yourself and the other driver at risk. So it can be a number of things, but it's also not thinking about the repercussions of that behaviour.

So I always say it's a bit like a ripple effect in the network. So if I'm a little bit rude to another driver, that might make them angry –

Susan Carland: Mm-hmm.

Amanda Stephens: – And then they might be a little bit rude, or they might use their vehicle in a dangerous way when something happens down the track for them. So they might do that to another driver, and that driver might become anxious.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Amanda Stephens: And they might change their driving behaviour and they might change their behaviour in a way that other drivers then become angry at them.

So it's a ripple effect that can actually continue after that first driver's got off the road.

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Susan Carland: So difficult circumstances make us tense and may cause us to react with less grace than we might otherwise. I'm rude to you, which makes you react badly to the next person and so on and so on. Things can spiral outwards quickly with far-reaching repercussions. If we're not navigating life guided by a moral compass, some of our most vital institutions are at risk.

Scott Stephens: Hi, I'm Scott Stephens. I'm the ABC's Religion and Ethics online editor. I also co-host The Minefield on ABC Radio National.

Waleed Aly: Hi, my name is Waleed Aly. I co-host The Minefield on Radio National with Scott Stephens. I'm a broadcaster and also an adjunct here at Monash University.

Susan Carland: By the way, Waleed's also my husband.

Scott and Waleed, welcome to the podcast.

Scott Stephens: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Susan Carland: Scott, how would you define civility and what do you see as its relationship to contempt?

Scott Stephens: Look, it's probably best to say what civility is not. Civility is not politeness. It's not necessarily turn-taking, and it's not being demure in rigorous conversation. In fact, rigorous conversation can in fact be one of the purest, truest forms of civility.

So I think civility, if you think about certain virtues, or certain moral practices, that attend to different aspects or areas of human life, there are virtues that are peculiar to politics for instance, there are virtues that are peculiar to medicine or to be in an academic.

If you think about civility as the virtue that is particular to the life of the civitas, the life of the city –

Susan Carland: Mm.

Scott Stephens: – Or the life of human beings that have been thrown together by choice or by chance. In other words, it's the virtue that binds together a group of people that don't have anything else in common apart from the fact that they live together in some kind of common life.

And so if you think about civility, then, as one of the ways that we cultivate the space between us so that we can have rigorous, rich, even severe conversation, so that we can deliberate together about what it is that matters most to us and about the ends that we ought to be pursuing together.

And it's also the way that we negotiate those forms of radical, even rich disagreement that might emerge when any group of people that are serious about their common life come together.

Waleed Aly: Embedded in what Scott just said there is really the concept of answerability.

Scott Stephens: Yeah, nice.

Waleed Aly: So civility is cut off where one's response or one's declaration is such that it not only does not invite a response, but it holds oneself unanswerable to the person that you're addressing it.

If I speak to someone in an uncivil way, I'm speaking to them in a way that actually is declaring to them, “You know what? I have nothing to hear from you.” And I'm speaking in a way that also says that “I hold myself unanswerable to you”. So whatever your response might be is more or less irrelevant, I'm now in a process of declaration. It's just declaratory mode.

And that is important because, and Scott's sort of outlined the etymology of it, where you have the city being uncivil with one another, then the city really ceases to exist. Then, the civilization cannot hold together because you no longer have any kind of answerability.

And in the context of democratic life, then democratic life falls apart because democratic life is all about exchange, negotiation, debate, disagreement. But disagreement can only happen when there is actually some kind of answerability.

Scott Stephens: When Waleed mentioned before about contempt being morally inflected, I think that's really important because very few people today think about contempt as being an immoral act or something that's morally problematic. Instead, in our relationships, political, dialogical – contempt becomes one of the ways that we serve what we believe to be high moral ends.

So you would say, for instance, that winning an argument against people that are palpably wrong, that are obviously unjust, that are obviously on the wrong side of capital-H History, winning an argument is doing the work of the angels, right? And so all that matters is winning the argument. All that matters is bringing that particular page of history to a close. What doesn't matter is the way that you get there.

So contempt can be a way of winning an argument, but winning an argument in the worst possible way of shutting down the possibility of response, but also accelerating the goal that you think is the only proper goal to reach in such a way that the other person who's just been vanquished has no part in that future, has no place in that.

I mean, if there's one concept I think that holds together the very idea of democratic life, it's that the way that you get to wherever you're going anticipates where it is you're going. You can't get to a just place through unjust means. You can only realise some future justice by pursuing just means on your way there. And it seems to me that civility is one of the ways that we honour the demands of justice in the meantime, while we're trying to pursue some kind of proper just end.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Scott Stephens: John Rawls saw that there are two basic emotions that act like acid on any democratic society. One is envy. If you see another person as having something that's rightfully mine or that they have no entitlement to, then you look at somebody as an opponent rather than as someone who's a participant in a common life.

The other one that he identified was contempt. When you see the other person as someone who really rightfully has no share in our common life and he needs simply to be vanquished, rather than come to... I mean, understand is too weak a term, but someone with whom I can discover a neighbour, someone through whom I can learn, someone who can, in certain circumstances, be my teacher, then he says, that's like an acid that drips through the entire thing.

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Susan Carland: Scott and Waleed say the breakdown of civility can be partially blamed on the fact that the Western world’s gotten out of the habit of moral thinking. We tend to mostly consider our principles as they relate to major issues like power, oppression, and justice rather than interpersonal relationships.

But another major factor is the de-identifying bubble that Amanda mentioned when we get into our cars. When we don't see each other as humans, we don't treat each other as humans. And the media and social media are a big part of the problem.

Waleed Aly: When the barons figured out how to make media profitable, they figured out that the way to do it was to enlist people in a kind of morally inflected enraged sense where they would have something to protect usually against an enemy that was a bit of an abstraction. And I want to focus on that word, abstraction, because that is in the end what media provides us with, a series of abstractions.

Very few people will have met the prime minister. The prime minister exists as an abstraction, as an image that sort of flicks in and out of your life, usually in certain prepackaged moments, within certain confines. He’s not a full human being. You don't know anything really about this person.

Now, I want you to imagine, if that's the way that media generally works, it's one thing for this to be going on at the top as a way of navigating in mediating, albeit imperfectly, our public lives through institutions that we really can have no practical way of accessing directly. But what happens when you multiply that by the demos? What happens when you multiply that by every single person, or near enough, being on social media and engaging so that they are their own broadcaster at the same time as they're their own consumer? And interactions become more and more, more and more virtual in this way, and people become more and more avatar-like, people become more and more abstract.

At that point, not only is contempt possible and permissible, contempt’s almost inevitable. The gravitational pull of moral judgement, meaning the unreality of the person that you are speaking about, that is, they become a symbol that does not embody the full moral force of a human being. Contempt is almost something that gets precipitated involuntarily out of that mix.

Scott Stephens: The other side of that, though, is that we then become avatars to ourselves. When my –

Waleed Aly: Yes, exactly. Which is the performative aspect of this.

Scott Stephens: Yeah. When my enemy is just the digital embodiment of a cause that needs to be overcome, then I myself become a little more than the abstract embodiment of a cause. Which means even if this person is coming close to persuading me on a particular point, I cannot. Morally speaking, politically speaking, I cannot at that point enlist the proper emotions that says, “You know what? There is something radically human, even good, here, to which I should respond.”

Waleed Aly: The way I think about it is, politicians talk to each other this way. How often does a politician see the full humanity in their opponent and be persuaded by their argument? They don't.

The reason they don't is this is a performative space –

Scott Stephens: Exactly.

Waleed Aly: – And they're not pursuing, actually, persuasion. What they're pursuing is some kind of victory in a political conflict.

And we as people look at our politicians like this all the time and go, “Oh, why do they have to behave like that?” And I agree. Fair enough. That is a fair enough criticism.

The great irony of our age is that all the citizens are becoming politicians. All the citizens are imbibing this mode of behaviour and adopting it.

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Susan Carland: If we want to stop being avatars and start communicating as humans again, it would help to reach a consensus on the common good. But Lucas says it's becoming harder and harder to achieve that agreement.

You mentioned moral civility and that being the kind of civility, which is a deeper form of civility, our openness to other ideas, our commitment to the common good and to each other.

I feel like that is an area where we are struggling with at the moment. So much of our conversations in the media, on social media amongst friends, seems to be about what we can and can't talk about, what is acceptable to talk about, our openness to other ideas, which ideas are acceptable or not, and even how we define what the common good is.

In your research, are you seeing that this is a particularly important area?

Lucas Walsh: You’ve put your finger on one of the biggest challenges. Yes, it's absolutely critical area.

As we've seen growing recognition of diversity within our communities – and rightly so – we, at the same time, we come up against tensions on how we engage and talk about and talk to those communities. And in turn, how those communities want to be spoken to themselves.

The idea of the democratic project emerging out of the Enlightenment in Western… the Anglosphere particularly, has in some ways broken down because those shared values are less visible.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Lucas Walsh: And so our work is trying to find out, what are the things that, particularly in our research, young people have in common? And what do they have in common with their wider communities?

Because I think we need to urgently come to some sort of consensus about that, even though we know it's going to change over time because we've seen it change over time. But in the absence of having some shared values, it's creating very problematic discourses.

And I mean, this can be easily traced to the increasing individualisation of society that we've seen since the late 1970s in the UK and Australia and the US. This atomisation where everything is located in the individual.

And this might emerge from, for example, models of economics adopted by the right wing, but it's also just as evident in identity politics, which are deeply rooted in the self.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Lucas Walsh: So the question then becomes, what do we have in common?

Susan Carland: Mm.

Lucas Walsh: What are our common interests, and how should we behave in order to be able to even determine what those common interests are? That seems to me to be the biggest challenge.

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Susan Carland: The road to greatest civility may be rocky, but it's essential for the future of our world.

Thank you to all our guests on today's episode, Dr Waleed Aly, Dr Amanda Stephens, Scott Stephens, Professor Lucas Walsh and Dr Steven Zech. We'll be back next week to chart a path forward in our final episode of this season of What Happens Next?.

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