Meta rec: Civility, by John Scalzi

[beatrice_otter]

In an email, Pablo asks:

Civility: A genuine plea for common understanding, or just another tool to oppress?

I mean, why not both?

Which is to say that one can genuinely wish for “civility” — a sort of courtly and dignified mode of discourse — without understanding all the ways that “civility” generally favors the more powerful parties in said discourse and/or can be used to mask or minimize within the discourse wholly awful ideas, events and opinions. Even the less formal versions of a desire for “civility,” the plaintive cries of “be nice” or “can’t we all get along?” have within them this same dichotomy. And this is why, almost inevitably, “calls for civility” are usually issued by those who have power (or belong to a powerful group): because it’s a rhetorical system of control, whether the person issuing the call consciously realizes it or not.

Really great perspective on how the rules of civil discourse can be and often are used to maintain the existing order, whether or not that's the goal.