Live stream: National Civility Symposium
Watch the 2nd Citizens’ Civility Symposium: http://ustre.am/12e0p
Welcome to the new InstituteForCivility.org. We recently updated our website and we are glad you are here. If you encounter any issues, please let us know so we can correct them.
This is a legacy blog post from the Civility Blog. We hope you enjoy this content, but note that some references may be outdated. You may also be interested in reading our latest updates or learning more about the Institute for Civility.
Watch the 2nd Citizens’ Civility Symposium: http://ustre.am/12e0p
Among presidential primary candidates and pundits, political correctness has once again become a watch word in the last few weeks of 2015. The trend is not exactly new. This past September Donald Trump, responding to criticism of his brusque rhetorical style and specifically of his confrontation with FOX News host Megyn Kelly, proclaimed that he…
While it is obvious that we should all strive for civility in our politics and our everyday lives, there is a certain way that it is a little bit of a tricky prospect. On the one hand, as we discussed earlier this year, political correctness can be a civility red herring. Far from placing us…
Civility is obviously very important, but do you ever feel like it’s increasingly tough to find common ground? Do you ever look at those big, divisive issues that have plagued American politics — abortion, the death penalty, immigration, etc. — and think to yourself: if we cannot even agree to disagree, how can we ever…
Most of us, if we think of logical fallacies at all, remember them as some obscure concept from a years-old college rhetoric class, or as a list of stern don’ts given to us by a finger-wagging high-school English teacher bent on instilling in us the ‘right’ way to write an essay. Avoid these things, perhaps…
This post is part of our ongoing effort to highlight discourse about civility around the web. Our articles for civility linkblogging come from a wide cross-section of blogs and newspapers, magazines and other websites, from the United States and abroad.
This week’s edition of the segment is devoted to some of the high-profile debate regarding civility that has taken place on and around university campuses in the month of September. In September, administrators at the University of California, Berkeley and Penn State University called for civil discourse from faculty, students, and alumni as the new semester got underway. But as several of the articles featured here pointed out, civility in this context is not without its dangers.
Clive Cook, over at Bloomberg View, did a particularly good job last week of articulating one of the central dilemmas that face many of us who are interested in civility within the landscape of our highly charged political present. His article, “Krugman’s Wrong: Civility Isn’t Stupid,” looks at one of the biggest players and one of the most common tropes in progressive politics in the United States; but his point is well made, and equally applicable among conservatives.
The dilemma is this: is it ever acceptable to take a break from civility and launch an ad hominem attack on a political opponent? Especially when it is apparent, from your perspective, that that opponent is acting in bad faith?