Calling for civility.

I have called for civility in the past but today I'd like to clarify what I meant by that.

My claim is that WHEN YOU ARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA, you should strive to be polite no matter what others do. Do not rhetorically dehumanise your interlocutors simply because they express a view that you don't agree with. Do not dehumanise them even when they do it to you. We have seen this before among humankind; it is a frailty that we all potentially have, and it is a misfortune that some are now suffering from it. Pity them, but do not call them vermin: In a different set of circumstances, the foibles that they display right now could easily be your own.

You may conclude that certain people are not worth listening to -- that's clearly justified in some cases -- but don't call them names, don't threaten them, don't dox them, and for the love of all that's good, don't initiate violence against them.

In this way you will prevent yourself from becoming the exact thing that you so righteously hate. And so if all goes well, thirty years from now we'll look back at this moment as a time when a few of us lost our minds... but when the rest of us cheerfully remained decent anyway. It's my hope that we won't remember this moment as the time when EVERYONE lost their minds, and when the right's death camps for immigrants competed with the left's death camps for Trump voters.

Do NOT become the thing that you wish to destroy: and avoiding that transformation begins right here, with the necessary protection that civility sets up.

Note that the practice of civility does not demand silence about ANYTHING. You should faithfully describe what you understand to be happening in the public sphere. This is your birthright as a citizen of a democracy. Civility does not require you to sugar coat anything, and you should feel free to pass moral judgements against those who actually perpetrate what you view as wrongdoing.

That said, your civility on social media is not even close to sufficient for being a good person. When you're out in the real world, and when you meet the perpetrators of evil, a different set of imperatives most certainly applies. In such cases you must ask whether your participation with them in the business of ordinary life constitutes an endorsement of policies that go beyond the ordinary screw-ups and callousness that are always associated with having a state, particularly one that presumes to be in charge of us.

You must, of course, refuse to be an accessory to wrongdoing, and it is a commendable action, though clearly not a required one in all cases, to explain to others why you are acting in these ways. Explanation will not always be possible or prudent, but when it is, you should offer it -- as if the future of the republic depends on it. Perhaps it does.