'Grammar' of civil society made up of civility, manners

Last week I had a sobering epiphany. As I listened to President Barack Obama's health-care speech on the radio, with no visual cues to prepare me, I heard a member of the congressional body shout "You lie." No, that wasn't the epiphany. Obama may well have been misrepresenting his plan and Rep. Joe Wilson may well have been right.

The epiphany came as I saw the responses to my Facebook posting that regardless of the merits of Wilson's position on health care, it was simply rude to shout in the middle of a president's speech to Congress. By the time of my Facebook post, Wilson had already apologized for his behavior. My reason for commenting on Facebook was that there had been numerous requests for campaign contributions to Wilson, specifically because of his "courage" in shouting down the president. Of course anyone is free to contribute to candidates and causes they believe in, but a mass donation drive to reward such uncivil behavior only tears at the already thin fabric of civility that is crucial to sustaining the discourse essential to the workings of a democratic society.

While some of the responses to my posting were civil and kind, most of the responses to my posting and the Internet chatter about this issue were full of anger and justification for Wilson's behavior. The justifications fell largely into two categories. First, he was right. Second, our "enemies" engage in the same behavior. For example, a number of commenters noted that Sen. Harry Reid called President George W. Bush a liar. Neither of these rationalizations justifies such repugnant behavior. The loudness, anger and defensiveness of this reaction reflects the depth of understanding inside of each of us that this kind of behavior is wrong.

In the midst of all this back and forth about Wilson and completely coincidentally, I happened to be reading "The Moral Imagination, from Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling," by Gertrude Himmelfarb. This is a collection of her essays about a number of what she calls "political and literary eminences", including Jane Austen, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, John Stewart Mill and Michael Oakeshott.

Included in this collection is a wonderful essay on Jane Austen's "Emma." Himmelfarb notes that "Emma" is essentially a comedy of manners. "In a more important sense, however, it is a drama of manners, with manners in the service of morals. For manners, even more than morals, lend themselves to the subtleties and nuances appropriate to (society)."