ABSTRACT

Cultural historians are busy charting and critiquing the national erosion of comity-mutual courtesy, civility-in the public sphere. Media examples of the coarsening of our society, the erosion of manners, and the rise of incivility (speech or action that is disrespectful or rude) have in recent years increased sharply. “Sifting the shards of America’s fractured taste and manner,” as conservative columnist George Will puts it, cultural historians are suggesting that the “casual coarseness” and incivility so evident today in public action and discourse is symptomatic of the “New Economy” (“Coarsening of Society Product of New Economy”). Our forebears, at times, may have been ignorant of manners, but they were not hostile to them; today many are convinced that we are both ignorant and hostile to manners and matters of civility.