Gennady Stolyarov II
Joshua Bills’ Oct. 20 Collegian article, “A lesson in civility,” seriously misunderstands the nature of civil behavior, substituting abject humility and self-abnegation in place of true courtesy.
Bills writes that the imperative to be civil comes from all human beings’ inherent equality of worth. Really? Is a productive entrepreneur equal in worth to a drug-addicted bum who parasitizes off honest men through the welfare state? Is a meticulously rational inventor equal in worth to the totalitarian dictator who enslaves him and expropriates the fruits of his creation?
All men may be created equal, but they do not stay equal for long. Their merits or demerits should determine the manner in which we treat them. The decision to be civil ought inherently involve autonomous moral judgment by the individual contemplating civility. One ought always ask, “Does this specific person deserve my respect and its outward display?”
As a witness to the CCA lecture Bills describes, I state with certainty that the questioner was fully civil and polite; he referred numerous times to specific points in the speaker’s lecture to make his claim. The questioner’s specific disagreement—which Mr. Bills conveniently forgets to mention—was with the speaker’s simultaneous praise of personal property rights and his mischaracterization of private genetic research, an exercise of property rights, as totalitarian and coercive. Most consistent thinkers of the classical liberal and libertarian traditions would have agreed that the speaker’s position was contradictory.
There was not a hint of personal attack in the question, but rather only an ideological divergence. It was certainly not an assertion that “the speaker didn’t know what he was talking about.” Indeed, the questioner was the paragon of civility in separating the idea he criticized from the person espousing it; he thanked the speaker for his lecture and behaved toward him with model courtesy, toleration and interest in his position.
The questioner indeed respected the speaker more than those who would indiscriminately absorb his entire ideology; he at least actively engaged the speaker’s ideas, displaying the virtues of independence, rationality and pride in his ability to think and judge for himself.
Bills, however, condemns the passing of autonomous moral and intellectual judgment. His article—especially his criticism of the questioner at the CCA lecture—suggests that, to be truly civil, one must never question, never disagree, and—God forbid—never make one’s dissent known.
What Bills advocates is not civility, but rather humility, the conviction that one is not worthy to judge and think for oneself. By Bill’s model, one ought only nod one’s head at any idea from an authoritative figure and passively absorb it. Yet all human progress is founded upon innovation, and all innovation inherently departs from the status quo. To innovate is to question and to disagree, to find better answers than those offered by current authorities.
The truly civil recognize the imperative to voice their disagreements while respecting those they disagree with. They, like the great Enlightenment thinkers, have a talent for tearing apart another person’s ideas while remaining on the most cordial terms with that person.
True civility requires a fundamental conviction of one’s own worth: A pride opposing the self-abnegation Bills advocates.
Humility is not a virtue, whatever anyone else may think.
Stolyarov is a Hillsdale College freshman majoring in economics and mathematics.