When I was a boy, Emily Post sometimes came to dinner. We often ate with a copy of her book Etiquette on the table — a higher authority, should my mother need one, to settle disputes over table manners. That this was a somewhat unusual habit never occurred to me. And many years would pass before I realized that Mrs. Post’s compendium of dos and don’ts was not as arbitrary as it then seemed. When I was thirteen, it never dawned on me that there was a reason not to speak with your mouth full — namely, that it is unattractive. And still less did I understand that, like all her rules, this one was an act of civility. I had yet to learn that what etiquette asks of us is to be considerate of others. If, as I would later discover, a beautiful meal is more beautiful still when shared with someone with beautiful manners, then the converse is also true: the person who holds his knife and fork as if he were butchering the steak, rather than merely eating it, is committing an aesthetic crime against anyone unfortunate enough to sit at the same table.

Emily Post was concerned with the quotidian: table manners, thank you notes, forms of address. But the most profound civic impulses — public service, charity, philanthropy — spring from the same place. Civility in all its forms, those that interested Aristotle as well as those that obsessed Mrs. Post, is generous. It exists when individuals feel they are part of something larger than themselves. It has its roots in the soil of community, which, sadly, is not as deep as it used to be. As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam observed in his groundbreaking book, Bowling Alone, the infrastructure of community engagement — the extended family, church attendance, membership in labour unions, parent-teacher associations, volunteer organizations and fraternal associations — is deteriorating. Even voting, the simplest act of citizenship, is in decline. Putnam reported that nearly 80 million Americans went bowling in 1993, almost a third more than voted the following year in the congressional elections, although a growing number of the bowlers bowled alone (hence the book’s title).

Of course, Putnam was writing about the United States, not Canada. As pollster Michael Adams (Fire and Ice) and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (Continental Divide) have taught us, the differences between the two countries, appearances notwithstanding, are often profound. Religion, for instance: twenty-first-century Canada is overwhelmingly secular, whereas the United States has more places of worship per capita than any other country on earth. But on this, the gradual erosion of community engagement and the consequent decline in civility, our experiences are remarkably similar, and have been for some time. Dalton Camp was lamenting civility’s demise in the pages of Saturday Night almost thirty years ago. And in the past fifteen years, the philosopher and cultural theorist Mark Kingwell has written not one but two books — A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism (1995) and The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age (2001) — making the case for civility in the face of its apparent abandonment.

Kingwell is like a dog with a bone, as he acknowledges in his essay in this issue (“The Shout Doctrine”). “It is difficult,” he writes, “to make the argument for the value of civility when the immediate response to the argument is Don’t frigging bore me, you long-winded doofus.” And yet he persists, choosing on this occasion to focus on the debasement of political discourse. Could his timing be any better? There is nothing new about the dumbing down of the country’s many legislatures, as a perusal of federal and provincial Hansards from the past twenty-five years will confirm. But lately it has gotten worse. Whereas name-calling and other inappropriate behaviour were once rare among Canadian politicians, they now border on commonplace. Whereas political advertising — a banal substitute for debate — was once reserved for election campaigns, it is now increasingly employed any time a political party senses weakness in an opponent. There are no great debates anymore, although, as Kingwell writes about prorogation, the only thing worse than uncivil discourse is no discourse at all.

Clearly, a decline in civility is unhealthy for our democracy, and it follows that we should do something about it. Kingwell is doing his part. But the problem, as much cultural as it is political, seems overwhelming. How do you teach an entire society to chew with its mouth closed? And as for the vulgarization of political discourse, let us admit that the media, including the so-called new media, are among the worst offenders. The New York Times recently reported that Fox News, proudly and extravagantly uncivil, is now more profitable than CNN, MSNBC, and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC, and CBS combined. Emily Post would not approve.