Are there historical references or discourses about civil conduct?
Just about every era in human civilization has put together books of conduct, has elaborated rules of considerate and civil behavior. We find these rules in the Bible, we find them in the Middle Ages, we find them in the books of courtesies of the Renaissance. And, of course, they were very big in the Victorian age. Why does civility matter? For a number of reasons. One of them is that very often those acts of violence for which we have documentation are born of an act of incivility or an act of disrespect. Many studies have shown that there is a spiraling of an act of incivility into an act of physical violence. [Incivility also] takes a toll on the quality of our everyday lives. Acts of incivility add up, and at the end of the day, they make a difference in our ability to say, “I had a good day.” And in a much larger scope, we know that in order to have a sane and serene life, we need to be part of a network of people who care for us and for whom we care. We need what sociologists ca
