"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." 

--Rule 110, George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior 

Excerpt from "The Meaning of Civility" by Guy Burgess, Ph.D., and Heidi Burgess, Ph.D.    Co-Directors, Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado

"The increasingly vocal campaign for civility in public discourse reflects an understandable and widespread frustration with the current tenor of political debate. There is a growing realization that our inability to deal with broad range of problems is largely attributable to the destructive ways in which the issues are being addressed. This raises a crucial and increasingly controversial question--what exactly do we mean by "civility"?

Clearly, civility has to mean something more that mere politeness. The movement will have accomplished little if all it does is get people to say, "excuse me please", while they (figuratively) stab you in the back. Civility also cannot mean "roll over and play dead." People need to be able to raise tough questions and present their cases when they feel their vital interests are being threatened. A civil society cannot avoid tough but important issues, simply because they are unpleasant to address. There must also be more to civility than a scrupulous adherence to the laws governing public-policy decision making. Clearly, there are numerous instances in which the parties to public-policy conflicts act in ways which are destructive and inappropriate, even though they are (and should continue to be) legal.

In short, any reasonable definition of civility must recognize that the many differing interests which divide our increasingly diverse society will produce an endless series of confrontations over difficult moral and distributional issues. Often these issues will have an irreducible win-lose character and, hence, not be amenable to consensus resolution. While continuing confrontation is inevitable, the enormous destructiveness which commonly accompanies these confrontations is not."

To read the entire article, please click on http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/civility.htm 

Additional recommended web sites:

http://campuslife.indiana.edu/Civility/program/Keynote.html 
http://www.brc21.org/newsletters/n12-10.html 
http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/1999/dillon.html 

----------------------