Leading By Example

A Case for Civility

...outrage is the business model of about one-third of the companies on the NASDAQ.

-- Sunny Bonnell AND Ashleigh Hansberger

What ever happened to leading by example?

My wife just finished another year teaching second-grade and it seems like the things we teach second-graders somehow don't apply any more...especially to our leaders / politicians. Maybe they don't think they really have much influence anyway.  Or, maybe, we're all acting like this because they do?  Who's copying who is sometimes hard to determine...especially when it's bad.

At the very least, it puts those trying to teach basic civility in a tough spot as they try build a base for children on how to relate to others...not to mention the aggregating negative social impacts that are being revealed in all kinds of ways each day.

No one said it was easy to set an example, but sinking down to the lowest common denominator doesn't even really make sense.  We must have lost all faith in the goodness of humanity and, therefore, believe that the deepest realities are the baser instincts of our fears.  Why else would we effectively sanction bullying in political and social spaces while we try to still pretend like it's a bad thing on the playground?

Whatever the context, it seems like two basic drivers are involved too much of the time — survival and greed.

Unfortunately, one seems to drive the other.  And, it is too often those with too much who are effectively creating the dilemma of survival for the others.  Fear is at the heart of both — one is real and the other is contrived.  Sometimes this is intentional.  But, I'm more concerned about the unfettered and disrespectful ways we are now normalizing and the cultivated blindness involved in doing so.  

When will we realize we all live here together and that just because we have tried to insulate ourselves with some nice trees to block our view, it doesn't mean we're not all still living on the same dirt and breathing the same air?  We have to take care of our shared resources and treat each other in helpful ways.  It doesn't matter if it doesn't bother us directly...doesn't work anymore.

We must resist looking to the frameworks of the past to lead us into the future. Doing so is a way to pretend to control, to tighten our grip and reduce our cultural aerodynamic flexibility. Instead, perhaps we turn to ways of wisdom that cultivate intuition, patience, and ingenuity.

-- Cameron Trimble

I guess the case I’m making here is for something on the order of civility. Think about what we mean by the term 'uncivilized'? At another time and different places perhaps we would have referred to as people as uncivilized. We have even described the logical extension of being progressively uncivilized is being...barbaric. And, the reason that being a barbarian is not a preferred way of relating is because it makes it extremely difficult to engage relationally in constructive ways.

We all know what fight-or-flight instincts seem to produce on an individual or collective level. Unmitigated instinct-only responses, while at times useful, are largely ineffective to the degree that they create significant distraction from more useful kinds of expression and discourse. In most relationships, yelling, name-calling, or putting your fingers in your ears and running away do not produce helpful results, especially when managing for what is desired or conflict between parties.

We even try to stage these better skills way back in elementary school education to help set the framework for constructive environments of learning and discovery. When people are stomping her feet or yelling at someone else, it is often quite difficult to create a learning environment. Things like cooperation are rarely achieved when I’m either attacking you or running away from you. So, we have established more constructive rules of engagement, so to speak, to work through areas of interest or disagreement.

At a fundamental level, it’s not that disagreements should not exist. In fact, they are a given. The point is to learn how to work with people in various states of disagreement. Meanness is a zero-sum game. It perpetuates itself all the way to the point of mutual destruction. So what, in fact, is gained by that technique...nothing really, except more of it. Getting what you want is only as good as everybody getting some of what they want. Anytime you get what you want at the expense of someone else, you create an effect, which makes them want to perpetuate the same. It’s just a matter of time and power. Once those are re-positioned, a similar methodology simply reverses the direction and perpetuates the dynamic even further.

So, in that sense, even civility is a means to an end — a preferred method of achieving some kind of goal and, by the nature of the term, a goal that can satisfy at least some of the interests of everybody involved. Ultimately, goodness is also a zero-sum game because it too is self-perpetuating. However, it’s consequences help us return to things like life, acceptance, and beauty, even prosperity (for all, rather than just for some).

Good or bad, our leaders are setting the example. Those truly qualified to lead should be those that are setting an example for the group to constructively follow. Leading without civility doesn't lead to the common good. How much more evidence do we need, at every level from the personal to the party level; in religion, politics, and as members of an international global community that is increasingly dependent on the welfare of all (rather than the dominance of one group or, even, nation)?

This seems to have escaped many of the current people who effectively are sucking up the oxygen of leadership today and whether it’s shame on them or shame on the audience that laps it up and puts money in their pockets to continue perpetuating greater controversy and shock, either way it’s a vicious cycle. And, the consequences are not the benefits of beauty and neutrality, but rather the vagaries of domination. I think it’s probably safe to say that anybody who dominates has to continue to up the ante because of the cost it took out on somebody else who can only, at that point, not only wish to return to an undominated state, but also to vanquish the possibility of being dominated again (by simply becoming the new dominator and perpetuating the cycle over and over again).

If we want an example of peace and prosperity, then it takes real leaders to demonstrate what that looks like by the way we go about it, not only in content but also in how we treat each other along the way.

For the sake of all, we continue to teach such things in second grade, and apparently many of our leaders need to go back to school.