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MINDING OUR MANNERSAugust 5, 1998The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript |
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David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Stephen Carter, Professor of Law, Yale University, and author of Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy.
DAVID GERGEN: Stephen, as a young man here in Washington, D.C., you had an experience, which I think may be at the background, or prompted you to write a book like this.
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STEPHEN CARTER, Civility: I think that's probably right. That's how it all started. Back when I was starting seventh grade, which was a very long time ago, my family moved from the integrated neighborhood where we had lived to what was an all-white neighborhood at the time of Northwest Washington. And my keenest memory of that neighborhood is actually our moving day when there were five of us kids and we all sat on the front step of our new house as the movers carried in the furniture, and all our new white neighbors passed by on the street, some driving, some walking, looking at us, some of them stopping and staring for a while, and walking on, not saying, hello, not greeting us. And we sat there in utter despair, thinking this was going to be a miserable experience. And then all of a sudden from across the street came this booming voice of welcome. It was a woman-a Jewish woman, as it happened-who lived across the street, had just come home from work, saw these five strangers. She knew nothing about us, welcomed us in this booming voice to the neighborhood, disappeared into her house. We thought that was the end of it, but it turned out she was back five or ten minutes later with a huge tray of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches to welcome us to the neighborhood-became fast friends with their family, and I would say those are the finest sandwiches I ever tasted in my life.
DAVID GERGEN: Introduced you to the notion of civility.
Civility: "the sacrifices that we make for the sake of living together."
STEPHEN CARTER: Well, it did, because, you know, while we tend to think about civility as being about manners, as being about behavior, and it is partly that, I'd like to think of it as something larger, that civility is the sum of all the sacrifices that we make for the sake of living together. And one of the things I think we're losing in America today is the sense of-to put it simply-going the extra mile, doing something we don't have to do that the law doesn't require of us in order to help someone else's life be a little bit better. The sacrifice will make for a common enterprise.
DAVID GERGEN: Right. For a long time you note in the book America was thought to be an ill-mannered nation, and various Europeans came here and wrote about us along the way through the 19th century.
STEPHEN CARTER: Yes.
DAVID GERGEN: But the coming of the passenger train, the coming of their intercontinental railway seemed to-transcontinental railway-seemed to change that.
STEPHEN CARTER: The railroad is a remarkable thing in America in the 19th century, because it's true that Europeans always looked at us as a very ill-mannered nation. But here was something new. The railroad, we tend to forget today, was the first time in history that it was possible for human beings to travel faster than on horseback, faster than something natural, and everybody wanted to travel. Everybody had some place to go, but the interesting thing about the railroad trains is in the old days especially the way you traveled was you were all stuffed together like sardines on a little bench. And what happened and historians note this with some surprise, was the people behaved extraordinarily well. There were codes of conduct for things you don't do on the railroad, like talking in a loud voice, or singing or spitting, things that would annoy other passengers. There was an explosion of etiquette books. Everyone suddenly wanted to know how to behave, because somehow being pushed together with strangers like that for the first time created in people a need to figure out how to get along with these strangers.
Being passengers on the same journey.
DAVID GERGEN: And then you wrote from that about we're all-there was a sense then of being passengers together, even though you were strangers, you were all passengers on the same journey, and is that sense you think we've lost or we're losing.
STEPHEN CARTER: The thing about traveling on the railroad was that everybody had to cooperate, or the journey wouldn't work with everybody pushed together that like. One of the metaphors I use in the book is the comparison of the railroad and the automobile, because in our cars we have the illusion that we travel alone. I think that illusion has come to expand over so much of today's life that people-it's almost an attitude of not so much self-indulgence as self-importance, that only I and my desires matter. I don't think it's any surprise that 89 percent of public schoolteachers today say that they regularly-regularly suffer abusive language from students. I don't think it's any surprise there's been a sharp rise in people using their cars as weapons to physically attack other people. And it's no surprise because somehow we are losing a sense of obligations to others and to our community and thinking more and more only about ourselves and what we want.
DAVID GERGEN: All right. Let's go deeper on this, because the point you're making, that civility is more than simply a matter of matters, you really think there's a moral argument, and it's the breakdown of a moral code, which is behind the incivility.
STEPHEN CARTER: The simplest way of thinking about a moral point of civility is the idea that we have an obligation to love our neighbors, which has been a principal teaching of the western religious traditions all through their history, to love our neighbors in the sense of actively doing things for them, or restraining ourselves on their behalf. I think it's very interesting that both the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, trying to end slavery, and the Civil Rights movement in the 1950's and 60's were not only church-based movements but movements that centered around this idea of loving a neighbor, a very important part of the text preached constantly, and calling individual people to make real genuine sacrifices, doing things they didn't have to do, on behalf of others; whereas, nowadays we live in a world where no politician, for example, would dare run for office asking people to sacrifice, saying, I'm going to ask you to do something that's hard, something that's special for others.
DAVID GERGEN: You speak in the book about rebuilding a three-legged stool as a way to restore civility.
The three-legged stool.
STEPHEN CARTER: One of the deep problems of our growing incivility is that our children are not learning how to behave. Our children are not getting-for lack of a better term-a moral upbringing. And the traditional model of the moral upbringing was that children learned values on a three-legged stool. And the three legs of the stool were the home, the school, and the place of worship. And the idea was that if any one of those three didn't do the job, the stool only had two legs and would topple over. And nowadays the problem is that a lot of young people aren't learning their rules of behavior, aren't learning their rules of morality at home or at school or at a place of worship. They're learning it from television; they're learning it from movies; they're learning it from politics; they're learning it from the marketplace. They're learning it from a lot of places that have no particular interest in teaching us the values of self-discipline and sacrifice.
DAVID GERGEN: You wrote a book earlier about religion. Can you speak more about what role religion should play in the restoration of civility.
STEPHEN CARTER: I don't think it's going to be possible to restore and rebuild civility in America, civility in the strong sacrificial sense, I'm talking about, unless we have institutions that will help to call us to an understanding of our responsibility to sacrifice for others. And religions, I think, are the only institutions in America today with the power to do that. They don't always do it. That's a very bad thing, but at their best-at their best, religions can call people to sacrifice. These religions have to focus our attention on the transcendent, on the idea that we have duties that go beyond what we want to claim as ours at a particular moment.
DAVID GERGEN: So should we look at the place of religion in our public life as a larger question than simply religion, itself, but as a way to rebuild a civil society?
STEPHEN CARTER: I don't think it's possible to build a civil society or, frankly, a moral society without the strong and forceful participation of religious voices in our national debates. Saying that religion has to participate is not saying religious voices have to win, only that they have as much place in the national debates as anybody else does, I think an important and honored place in our history.
DAVID GERGEN: So where would you go from here then? What steps do we take? How do we-recognizing that when you drive down a road and people yell and scream at you and use their cars as weapons, there's nothing like being in that passenger train-how do we get out of this?
STEPHEN CARTER: Well, there's no legislative answers, but as I know, for example, in New York, Mayor Guiliani is kind of trying to legislate civility and a couple of towns have tried to ban cursing and one state tried to ban negative advertising and so on. Those aren't the answers, I think. The answers begin with the small-the answers begin with the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches in Washington. The answers begin with how we treat each other every day. The small sacrifice that we make for others and for the community will, I hope, inspire others and inspire our children.
DAVID GERGEN: Stephen Carter, thank you very much.
STEPHEN CARTER: It's been my pleasure, David. Thank you.
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