The upcoming campus event scheduled for September 18, entitled: “Breaking the Barrier: The Importance of Civility and Improving Political Discourse,” has generated controversy over how “civility” should be understood. This is unexpected. After all, the term at first blush seems so anodyne. Does it not simply mean being polite? Why the ruckus about reclaiming civility as an ingredient for advancing constructive public conversations at a time when polarized viewpoints too often either cow folks into silence or provoke shouting matches, and when a coalition of presidential centers has even issued a joint call to underscore its importance to the American political system? Perhaps the term is more complicated than ordinarily perceived.

Western understandings of the word trace to ‘civitas,’ or city in Latin, referring to Greco-Roman notions of a political commonwealth of citizens, such as practiced in ancient Athens through exclusive forms of assembly democracy limited to free, native-born, adult males. Accordingly, ‘civilitas,’ or civility in English, was originally associated with the moral behavior of the citizen, understood not as respectful language and decorum but as dutiful public service and active faithfulness to laws enshrining the communal good or justice.

An additional connection of the word is to civilization, associated with those said to have achieved comparatively advanced levels of social and cultural development. The anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott reminds us that for millennia the decided minority of humankind lived in crowded, hierarchical orders revolving around the punishing rhythms of fixed-field agriculture that gave rise to civilization. This slim slice of humanity routinely coined terms, such as “savage,” for the sake of self-promotion, disparaging the vast majority of the species for pursuing what were regarded as inferior, non-agrarian forms of living as uncivilized hunter-gatherers and nomadic pastoralists. Evidence suggests, however, that these so-called barbarians lived longer and more freely owing, in part, to healthier diets, less susceptibility to zoonotic diseases, more collaborative forms of social organization, and abundant leisure. Today, some might be inclined to identify these people as the “civilized.”

Civility as a concept, then, has deep political roots and charged connotations. Arguably, conventional usage today presumes an implicit symbiosis between the form of discourse used in public affairs and the substance of outcomes. By this logic, a respectful exchange of views may give rise to fair and effective policy since it rests on informed input. This seems consistent with what the organizers of the campus event on the 18th have in mind. Still, this is but one way to conceive the term and ignores the classical understanding tied to the moral pursuit of collective well-being or justice. Divorce from this older conception risks turning civility into a tool deployed by the powerful for transforming what is unpalatable into that which is more defensible and for shrouding the instigation of harm to afford insulation from meaningful accountability. Ultimately, narrowing the word to signify forms of courtesy allows perpetrators of injustice to deflect noisy insistence for justice into rituals of victim-blaming.

Consider, for example, the Berlin Conference, running variously from 1884 into 1885, during which self-proclaimed gentlemen statesmen settled upon rules for partitioning the African continent, “legitimizing” the notion that its resources and fate belonged to non-Africans. Such machinations were civilly undertaken to avoid armed contestation for territorial and economic gain and marketed to skeptics as somehow advancing “the moral and material well-being of the native populations.” All this came at the expense of the Africans who were not included in the polite conversations about their future. The persisting political, social, and economic deformities attending the handiwork of those civilized architects of calamity subsequently spawned so much unrest on the continent that the people of post colonial Africa came to be regarded, in some genteel circles, as naturally disposed to division and incivility. This made them undeserving to make claims on the West for reparative justice. Conceptualized in this narrow way enables civility to obscure causality and obstruct genuine accountability for ongoing harm.

In our day, there is also the operation of the International Monetary Fund. Comprised of nearly all the member states of the United Nations, but whose voting rights accord with the size of their individual financial contributions (their quotas), the IMF especially acts as an international lender of last resort. Monies provided are conditioned on the recipient country’s adherence to policy prescriptions officially designed to restructure their economy and restore financial stability and growth. Unlike gunboat diplomacy of old, these restructurings are formally “negotiated” between the IMF and the governments seeking its assistance.

While civil discourse may be said to characterize such talks, discussions are not undertaken by equals and the IMF reserves the right to withhold resources if it determines that a structural adjustment agreement has been violated. Abiding by these civil pacts, which invariably include such measures as austerity programs, tariff reductions, currency devaluations, termination of subsidies for health care, education, food and fuel, and the privatization of public assets, among others, typically exacerbates social fault lines and provokes unrest. To restore order, governments may unleash repression, which can lead to diminished popular governance or efforts at forcible regime change from above or below. Since states solicit the IMF and agree to its conditionalities, the Fund’s harsh medicine can be justified for aiming to cure economic illness, and it can escape blame for resulting harms by claiming the patient mismanaged prescribed remedies and overdosed. The IMF, run by suits with advanced degrees, also dodges accountability within high-income economies as it is the Fund’s government clients that are targeted by desperate citizens. Such victims know both that the plutocratic IMF is beyond their reach and that the structural violence flowing from handshake accords bears disturbing resemblance to what would otherwise be suffered through defeat in war and foreign occupation. Conquest through contract is very uncivil indeed.

In the case of the September 18 event, each of the dimensions of civility have come into play. One of the panelists, James Blanchard, became the first Michigan governor to sign an emergency financial manager law in 1988, which he expanded upon in 1990 to enable any local governmental unit in fiscal crisis to be taken over by a state-appointed Emergency Financial Manager (EFM). The law was premised on the notion that as local governments are but subdivisions of state authority, EFMs can preempt elected officials to address problem areas falling within state government. Article IV Section 4 of the federal constitution guarantees each state a “republican form of government” but the 1988 law permitted an exception (117.1b) to municipal home rule. The other panelist, Rick Snyder, was the first Michigan governor to use the emergency financial manager system extensively. In March 2011, Snyder signed a law that renamed the position “Emergency Manager” (EM) and allowed for earlier interventions. Backlash against the law followed. Opponents condemned it as an excessive grant of authority, such as by empowering EMs to cancel collectively bargained labor contracts. Voters narrowly repealed the law by a 53% to 47% tally in November 2012, only to see the Republican-majority legislature pass a Snyder-endorsed replacement law that December in lame duck session. While the new law was said to provide financially straitened municipalities and school districts more options and a speedier return to fiscal health, some Michiganders, especially those in localities where elected officials would be preempted by state-appointed EMs, decried the exercise as undemocratic. This sentiment was underscored by the attachment of an appropriation to the substitute law immunizing it from citizen referendum.

Since Snyder’s hyper Emergency Management Law effectively overruled the preferences of voters, and as the decisions of EMs triggered the lead poisoning tragedy in Flint and mass water shutoffs (and more) in Detroit, there have been demands from below for the September 18th panel to expand to include some of those on the receiving end of his policies. With the discussion topic centered on a narrow version of civility, not inviting participation from members of the public victimized by Snyder administration-appointed EMs further severs civility from its original meaning–the dedicated pursuit of justice or the public good by an active citizenry. Just as the civil Berlin Conference speciously connected its blueprint for continental depredation to concerns for the “the moral and material well-being” of indigenous inhabitants, so too was Snyder’s law for emergency management ironically designed, in part, to “minimize the likelihood that a local unit of government would be unable to provide basic services to its citizens.” And, like the 19th century Africans, residents of Black-majority cities governed by EMs were deprived of formal means to blunt the policies that harmed them, let alone design their own version of the common good.

Under IMF structural adjustment, the leadership of borrowing states consent to the ensuing austerity, even if their publics stand opposed. But under Snyder’s emergency management regimes, the imposition of austerity was entirely undemocratic and tragically deprived residents in Flint, Detroit, Benton Harbor, Pontiac, and beyond effective access to elected officials during a time of catastrophe. Stifling their voices was inconsistent with any understanding of civility.

Advocating that the September 18 panel be enlarged to include those who fought the injustices of Snyder administration policies is a civil and therefore a just demand. After all, as the taxpayers of the state subsidized the legal expenses former Governor Snyder incurred to defend official acts, the least he could do is have a face-to-face civil conversation with some of them. For those who would argue that such insistence is discourteous, civility then becomes a way to deflect blame from those responsible for causing harm by accusing people seeking redress for injury as uncivil. This thin gruel form of civility fosters the very incivility it condemns. Folks agitating for a more inclusive panel do not aim to “cancel” a campus discussion on civility in public life. Rejecting a reconstitution of the event, however, does further thwart the much-needed restoration of civility by unjustly marginalizing the views of those whose input for constructing a more genuine commonwealth are essential.