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Civility versus Consensus Many people are sick of the confrontational nature of today's politics. Some are encouraging getting back to a time when people were willing to compromise in politics to lessen mean confrontations and to get things done in areas where government assistance was needed. Such is a nice sentiment, but it may not be the right approach. The characteristic of confrontation in today's life is not limited just to politics. People regularly use unnecessary confrontation just to get their own way, and others who are not prone to dealing with confrontation let such people have their own way. My profession - law - is to a great extent based upon confrontation. However, the practice of law is now aggressively nasty in ways that it has not been in the past. Lawyers threaten other lawyers with claims just to get an advantage in dealings. Lawsuits are frequently threatened when there is no intention of pursuing a suit because a person does not have a claim. This same nastiness is present in our regular social interacction. In daily life people butt in front of others or cut people off in traffic just to a few seconds often without the intended result. There has been a confluence of three characteristics in our daily lives which add to or have created this lack of civility in our daily lives. Some time ago we began saying that one person did not have a right to criticize another person's actions. Thus, coarse actions and language are no longer criticized, and, if they are, the person who criticizes is the one who is considered to have been wrong. The lack of social criticism has resulted in the second sad phenomenon, namely questionable dress and actions in places where such would not have been accepted years ago. This second occurrence results in the third occurrence, an effort to use the law to set some minimum standards. Using the law in this manner is counterproductive since we end up with too many laws which cannot be enforced which itself leads to more selfish and coarse actions. In short, in our community lives we are in a circle that can only be broken by people not relying upon the law, but instead going back to an accepting criticism and ostracism of people who do not meet certain minimum standards of behavior. In the political arena the concept of consensus - usually meaning compromise - has at least two negative aspects to it. First, some people are not willing to yield at all on their positions. These positions often are minority positions. Reaching consensus - compromising - in such a situation means accepting a minority position which may not be appropriate, but which wins only because the person or persons holding the position will not yield. Further, some view compromise on a position as nothing more than a means of gaining an initial step towards a desired end which becomes easier to attain since the next few steps will be minor by comparison. This phenomenon can be seen in all levels of politics. The children's health insurance program was sold as something necessary soon after the full nationalized system recommended by Hillary Clinton was rejected. Recently there has been an effort to expand the system and to expand Medicare to some extent to cover more people. The effort was rejected as not necessary, but the groundwork has been laid. A local example is the recommendation made recently to the Albemarle County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors regarding a proposal to limit development in the rural areas. A compromise was reached between rural landowners and preservation activists. The rural landowners in public hearings made the point that they were willing to accept the restrictions on property rights as long as all three aspects of the proposal were instituted, and if no further restrictions in this area were imposed. Many of the preservationists who supported the proposal did so with the statement that the compromise was a good first step, a stab in the back after having just taken the position that they could live with the compromise. This sort of stab in the back is what has become common place with people who want to have more and more control over the lives of others and over the property of others without having the economic commitment or risk - the economic aspect of fascism. What is needed then is not consensus and compromise, but civility and acceptance of the limitations of one's own influence and rights. Being willing to accept that one will not always win is essential to having a civil society and a functioning government. There is another change in attitude which would make things better, namely accepting that government is not the answer to every perceived slight, need and concern. Private action versus government action is often much more effective, is more responsive, allows for greater flexibility and allows for different answers to slightly different situations. On the other hand, government intervention is slow, cumbersome, cannot be changed or adapted quickly when needed and does not allow for different approaches to similar problems. Government decision and control leads to one-size-fits-all which just does not work. |
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