Ministry Day Keynote Speech

Center Day programs on Thursday, June 21 started with a keynote speech by Dr. Nicolaus Mills, author of The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self, professor of American Letters at Sarah Lawrence College, and coeditor of Dissent magazine. Dr. Mills' speech was entitled "The Perils of Indifference."

Dr. Mills was introduced by Charles Blustein Ortman, who noted that we have a tendency to "gape in amazement at the alarming increase of incivility in our society." Echoing the words of William Ellery Channing, he called upon us as "liberal thinkers and as liberal religionists, to be agents of both knowledge spiritual wholeness." He joined us "to encourage us to engage more deeply into our own thoughts on civility and incivility ... and examine the roles we might play in the way things are .... and the way things yet might be."

Dr. Mills' address departed from the question of how we have come to devalue civility in our society. It is, he pointed out, a deep and far-reaching issue affecting "both the style and substance of our lives," but one that only surfaces during good times, times when other concerns such as economics or war are not pressing on the public consciousness.

Over the last half century surely the base line of civility has improved. We no longer have masses of street children in our cities, children no longer work in unbearable conditions, adults are no longer required to work 12 hour days, and women are no longer banned from voting or denied contraception, and lynchings are no longer a fact of life. Yet we feel that civility is waning. Why?

The figures are startling. Participation in civic organization is down 30% since the 1970's; voting is down from 60% in the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon, to less than 50% in the last election. What lies behind this withdrawal from civil engagement? Why aren't we a kinder gentler nation?

Dr. Mills has identified eight factors are root causes or contributors to our crisis of civility:

First, paradoxically, was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The U.S. has no external threat, and therefore we can begin to war amongst ourselves. We can find our enemy within our own society and marginalize parts of our society.

Second, with the end of the Cold War, we also find the end of the civil rights movement. The people who made that movement happen are alive and well, yet none of these people have the prominence and impact that they had some decades ago. In contemporary society, marches on Washington are led by people touting division rather than those promoting reconciliation.

A third cause of our contemporary incivility is a population shift as a result of immigration. This shift is the dominant issue of urban life at a moment when the cities themselves are struggling. People no longer settle here when they immigrate. Instead they settle into a mobile existence with strong personal, and economic ties to their home country.

Fourth, the inequality between the salary of a CEO and an average worker has changed from 16:1 in the 1970's to 150:1 today. Whole groups of the population no longer have a stake in civic well being, by paying for private services they can truly isolate and withdraw. We no longer believe that people are equal.

Fifth is a disbelief in the government as force for good. The surrender of any attempt to desegregate our resegregated urban schools indicate that we don't trust the government to do well by us.

The sixth factor is a change in journalistic standards. Between tabloid journalism and the Matt Drudges of the Internet, there is no privacy for public figures. The issues that used to cause scandal were large public ones, such as John Profumo's security threat to Britain or Wilbur Mills on stage with a stripper. But the press never used to probe private lives, from Roosevelt to Kennedy. Beginning with the pursuit of Gary Hart in 1987, that changed.

Seventh, modern communication such as the Internet promote "messages" above conversation.

Finally, "virtual war" leads us to a "reluctance to believe [that] risking one's life for any objective" is worthwhile. "Rescue on an international scale is something we are less and less inclined to do."

Changes to the way we view inequality, civil rights, immigration, government, privacy, and social cohesion all conspire to devalue civility. In short, "how do we avoid the perils of self-isolation and indifference? The long-run answer is that as citizens and activists, we work ... for fundamental political and economic change." The short-run challenge is to figure out what to do in the meantime.

Dr. Mills encouraged us to choose to look at four areas in which we can make a difference:

1. We can redefine our language such that it expresses our aspirations for a more civil culture;
2. We can help build our social capital by working together on individual projects to better our society, such as Habitat for Humanity;
3. We can work on strengthening our public institutions. One example might be the increased interest many people are taking in education and our schools; and
4. "We need to transform the isolation that characterizes our country."

Challenging incivility in our society is a task to which we all bring different skills and needs. But without the dedicated efforts of all of us, at whatever level we can contribute, incivility is not a problem that will take care of itself. Incivility has become an impediment to us as individuals and as a nation. We are equipped to battle that incivility, said Dr. Mills. It is our charge, as individuals, to make a difference.

Introductory Remarks by Charles Blustein Ortman

Transcript, "The Perils of Indifference," by Nicolaus Mills, June 21, 2000, Nashville

Reported for the web by Jordan Young, formatted by Kasey Melski, photos by Debbie Weiner.