THERE IS NO FACT MORE UNBEARABLE TO THE PARTISANS...:

Mere Civility is centered in the years after the Reformation, when the emergence of myriad Protestant sects splintered communities across Western Europe. [...]

Take the way in which Bejan's recovery of that uncivil era challenges the yearning for lost civility that is a commonplace of the chattering class. By revealing that there is little historical basis to justify such a yearning, Bejan exposes that yearning to be more romantic than rational. It is not grounded in deep knowledge of the history of modern liberalism, particularly in the early modern period when questions of civility were at the fore. It is grounded mostly in wishful thinking.

So today, when public intellectuals -- political theorists foremost among them -- make calls to restore or strengthen civility, their wistfulness clouds out wisdom. They aim at a standard that is more aspirational than actual, imagining civility to augur a society flourishing with mutual respect, empathy, fellow-feeling, open-mindedness, peace, love, rainbows, unicorns, and kumbayas (or at least some of those). Scholars as distinct as Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls, and Jeremy Waldron all imagine civility as the key to social harmony and imbue it with almost celestial importance.

As appealing as those visions of social harmony are, though, Bejan reminds us that they neglect key facts of human psychology. We humans are partial creatures, and we invariably disagree about important matters. When we encounter people with whom we differ about those important matters, we get frustrated with them. We disrespect them. We feel contempt for them. We try to ignore them. At best, we somewhat clunkily navigate through our disagreements. Even if we have deep and abiding love for someone, we can become unhinged with rage when that someone sees important issues differently -- a phenomenon Americans confront every year when trying to figure out how to survive Thanksgiving dinner with relatives whose political positions are anathema. You can call it a success if nobody gets stabbed with a carving knife; you're courting disappointment if you wish for much more.

Civility, therefore, should not be grounded in the unrealistic wish for fundamental human concord, but has to have its roots in what Bejan calls "the messy real word of unmurderous coexistence between individuals divided on the fundamentals and mutually disdainful of others' contrary commitments."

In other words, against the contemporary wish for more civility, Bejan would have us aspire to mere civility.

She takes this term from Roger Williams, the political and religious leader who, having been kicked out of Massachusetts by the Puritans, founded the Providence Plantation -- what would eventually become Rhode Island -- in the service of spiritual freedom. For Williams, the question of how you maintain some amount of order in a society where there are deep and enduring differences was an immediate and practical one. He did not imagine that profound mutual respect was going to emerge under such conditions. To the contrary: He knew that when faced with deep and enduring differences, people were going to want to yell at each other. Williams himself wanted to do that; he was an evangelist who never tired of telling others how damnable their beliefs were. His mere civility was a means by which people could be true to their own partiality within the context of a functioning society. Williams did not think that civility required deep respect for the inner lives of other individuals, just a minimal respect for social order. Bejan describes Williams's thought this way: "While we are stuck in the same boat with people we hate, we had better learn to make the most of it. There is no reason, however, to think that this will make us respect or like each other more. It is usually the opposite."

When compared with Williams, contemporary political theorists look pretty darn naïve, or at least pretty darn removed from real politics. Bejan becomes her most passionate self on this point, almost jumping off the page in italics. "In equating civility with mutual respect, theorists necessarily move the discussion to an aspirational realm of ideal theory in which the kinds of problems civility is needed to address do not even arise," she writes. These are "scholars we might hope would know better and be able to offer something more precise. It seems reasonable to expect theorists to understand reality, first, before moralizing about how to change it."

One of the subtle but important undertones of Bejan's argument is the idea that many contemporary intellectuals are blinded by a secularism that is best (if somewhat strangely) described as holier-than-thou. They fail to learn from debates among early moderns because those debates were couched in religious terms; they quickly assume that the debates have little to offer us in this more "enlightened" time. To paraphrase Bejan, they assume that religion was the problem (or that religion is the problem), when really people are the problem. We humans may have achieved many things in the last 500 years, but we have not transcended ourselves.

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