Civility discourse surges when destruction, degradation, and state decline threaten.

Evidence

For one, civility and civil society have been emphasized in moments where the technologies of destruction and degradation are rife. These latter serve as a kind of counter-force to or recoil from the condition. But they offer also an ideological marker of those contrasting themselves as civil from those they take to deny the condition, or even its possibility. Civility and civil society, not unrelatedly, have been emphasized more extensively also in the wake of globalizing neoliberalism’s seeming attack on the state, on the too quickly celebrated demise of the state, as both descriptive and normative matters. If the state’s withering before globalization’s flourishing is a fait accompli, what else is there as appealing form of social life if not for civil society? Civility itself is a form of presumed homogeneity, or at least predicated on a set of presumptive homogeneous commonalities, not least in the face of perceived threats. Civil wars in states deeming themselves sophisticated, modern, and civilized assume the form of culture wars. They are really civility wars. … What, it could be asked here, are the boundaries of the civil? How are these boundaries racially shaped? Why the shift from an earlier social focus on inequalities first to culture and now to civility? — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s work on institutions emerging where knowledge is costly, and to the general theme that ideological terms rise as counter-reactions to perceived disorder.