Chicago
Journal
Civility and the
pursuit of truth
Can the two be reconciled
in a university setting? Faculty and students meet and debate.
It was a curious juxtaposition: life-sized
angels carved from the ceiling ridgepoles soared above a
scattering of yarmulke-covered heads, the former absorbed
in their wooden scholarly readings and the latter in an
interfaith dialogue on civility, attempting to bridge the
divide between disinterested scholarship and communal inquiry.
The question on the floor was posed to the faculty panel
by moderator Daniel Brudney, associate professor of philosophy:
“Why should I have respect for someone who believes
my view to be pernicious?” How, he pressed, can civility
be maintained in an academic setting? And what can the teachings
of the three major monotheistic faiths—Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism—lend in finding an answer?
Photo by Dan
Dry |
Where academics
fear to tread: a University-wide civility code.
|
Some 50 faculty, students, and visitors
were present January 13 in the Divinity School’s third-floor
lecture hall to open a two-quarter conversation on civility.
The event, “A Forum on Civility: The Resources of
Different Religious Traditions,” came on the heels
of the president’s September statement to the Council
of the Faculty Senate that Chicago will not adopt a civility
code, retaining instead the structure of free exchange outlined
in the 1967 Kalven Report. The forum was the first in a
series organized by the Civility Project, a committee of
faculty and members of the University’s Hillel Center,
chaired by Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund distinguished
service professor of law and ethics.
The common thread running through the
panelists’ remarks—that, as the three religious
traditions demonstrate and Provost Richard Saller concurred
in his opening remarks, civility can exist without rules
to define it—sparked a lively discussion and some
dissent.
Presenting the Christian approach to
civility was David Tracy, the Andrew and Grace Greely professor
in the Divinity School. “How do you command
love for neighbor? It is one of the great paradoxes. Yet
if a Christian acts to follow that command, they will be
empowered to do so,” he said. Citing the Christian
theory of love from the school of Reinhold Niebuhr, which
divides the virtue into mutuality, self-sacrifice, and equal
regard, Tracy noted that equal regard describes how to act
in the absence of laws. “If Christian thought is to
contribute to this discussion,” he reflected, “it
can do so only in a welcome, pluralized world, where the
desire is not to proselytize but to articulate what love
and justice mean to the Christian and to see if that is
helpful for the other: Jews, Buddhists, Muslims.”
Yet courtesy and respect, he said, are only part of what’s
needed for civil discourse. Debate, argument, inquiry, and
interpretation must also have a place.
Similarly, Islam calls on its followers
to practice "right conduct" that is not necessarily
laid out by laws, said Rasheed Hosein, AM'01, a doctoral
candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations studying
early Islamic history. The five pillars of Islamic faith—prayer,
pilgrimage, fasting, charity, and declaration of faith—are,
he said, “both intensely personal and intensely communal,”
creating the “mortar of the civilization.”
The 29th chapter of the Koran, Hosein
continued, addresses civility across faiths: “Be courteous
when you have discourse with people of the Book [i.e., Christians
and Jews].... That which is revealed to us was revealed
to them. We all surrender ourselves to one God.” And
come Judgment Day, he concluded, “the heaviest thing
on the scale is how you conduct yourself” within the
community.
In the Jewish perspective, according
to Michael Fishbane, the Nathan Cummings professor in the
Divinity School, the basic necessity for civility is right-mindedness.
The Talmudic notion of tikkun olam, he explained,
outlines an obligation to maintain order so that life is
sustained and flourishes within a community. “Scripture
and religious traditions cannot say everything,” he
said. “You have to enter every situation without the
claim of total truth, and as a result, a huge amount of
space is opened to the cultivation of equity” and,
therefore, civil exchange.
Several hands went up as the floor was
opened for questions and comments. “What do we do
about evil?” asked one man. “We’re all
trying to be good Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but what
do we do about those who aren’t?”
Each panelist offered his take on how
the religious traditions deal with evil. Noted Fishbane,
“These traditions are trying to maintain hierarchies
of morals, to cultivate patterns to move beyond the evils
that are always possible and toward a higher ideal.”
Yet it was Provost Saller’s empathetic response that
seemed to resonate most with the audience. “One thing
I find distressing but don’t think happens often on
this campus is turning the opposition into evil,”
Saller said. “It’s the most distressing to deal
with, and I don’t have an answer for how to do it.”
Next Richard Strier, professor of English,
spoke from a back row: “The demand of civility is
minimal, as these panelists have all shown. Yet so often
it is not carried out. Why, given how undemanding it is,
do we at the University still fail at it?”
“I don’t think I’d
accept that,” Saller replied. “On the whole
I think this is a remarkably civil community in its debate.”
This prompted philosophy professor Josef
Stern to join the discussion. “The speakers all confirm
the wisdom of the University not to establish a code—the
refusal to commit to rules has long been a tradition here—and
talked instead about trying to cultivate a sensibility,”
he remarked. “Yet in religious traditions this takes
place against the backdrop of rich, baroque systems of law.
In the absence of that rich sense of rules, what are we
at the University to do?”
The answer, offered Saller, lies in the
University’s higher purpose: the pursuit of truth.
“I think this University as a community is very motivated
by that purpose. And as compared to a lot of communities,
it is fairly unified in this pursuit.”
As the session ended, attendees lingered
over tangerines, rugelach, tea, and coffee. Later in the
quarter they’ll reconvene to hear student speakers
and continue where this conversation left off.
— Sharla A. Stewart
Corrected 2/28
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