Robert P. George & Cornel West Friendship Has Much to Teach America

As politics becomes a battleground where clashing worldviews, frustrations, and experiences collide, the notion of “civility” finds itself attached to a slew of contradictory connotations. For some, civility is the convenient mask of cowards, a noble veil behind which enablers hide their turpitude. For others, civility remains a foundational virtue, a precondition for discourse, a pillar of democracy now disgraced by performative radicals in search of influence. While bombastic rhetoric and ominous imagery permeate our screen-infused world, appeals to decency and shared memories sound increasingly quaint, if not outright credulous. Galvanized mobs abound, partisanship thrives, and media outlets cash in on the methodical dismemberment of America’s national body.

This generalized cultural malaise is by no means particular to our time. For millennia, in fact, ideological fissures of this magnitude would have been settled with swords, bayonets, and grenades. Violence is humanity’s most universal language. Dante was not exaggerating when he sent the two factions of the Florentine civil war, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, to the deepest circles of hell. Nor was Shakespeare when he portrayed the atrocities committed by the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet. The course of human events has been punctuated by a myriad of carnages; cities were born out of fear, nations out of blood. As the Polish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer put it, “literature is the memory of humanity.” And to those who delude themselves into thinking that the past was somehow more “civil” than our dire present, literature responds with a procession of bloodbaths described without euphemism, from Homer’s Iliad to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

About the Author

Mathis Bitton

Mathis Bitton is an editorial intern at National Review.

As politics becomes a battleground where clashing worldviews, frustrations, and experiences collide, the notion of “civility” finds itself attached to a slew of contradictory connotations. For some, civility is the convenient mask of cowards, a noble veil behind which enablers hide their turpitude. For others, civility remains a foundational virtue, a precondition for discourse, a pillar of democracy now disgraced by performative radicals in search of influence. While bombastic rhetoric and ominous imagery permeate our screen-infused world, appeals to decency and shared memories sound increasingly quaint, if not outright credulous. Galvanized mobs abound, partisanship thrives, and media outlets cash in on the methodical dismemberment of America’s national body.

This generalized cultural malaise is by no means particular to our time. For millennia, in fact, ideological fissures of this magnitude would have been settled with swords, bayonets, and grenades. Violence is humanity’s most universal language. Dante was not exaggerating when he sent the two factions of the Florentine civil war, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, to the deepest circles of hell. Nor was Shakespeare when he portrayed the atrocities committed by the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet. The course of human events has been punctuated by a myriad of carnages; cities were born out of fear, nations out of blood. As the Polish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer put it, “literature is the memory of humanity.” And to those who delude themselves into thinking that the past was somehow more “civil” than our dire present, literature responds with a procession of bloodbaths described without euphemism, from Homer’s Iliad to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.