Civility or Skin in the Game?
Can We Be Passionate About Being Cool?
Liberals love to praise the virtues of civility and civil discourse. Illiberals, or post-liberals, by contrast, see civility as problematic in that it makes a norm of being cool. But what if things deserve to heat up due to the seriousness of the situation? Carl Schmitt—and various agitators on the right—would say meaning is found where there is conflict and passion. One can’t be passionate about being cool (Leo Strauss would counter, yes, but one can’t be passionate about being passionate, either). On the left, civility is seen to be a form of privilege and a cover for “respectability politics.” “Who gets to be civil?” “Who gets to be seen as civil?” asks the social justice activist.
A diminishment in the cultural prestige of civility tracks with a general sense of political polarization.
Meanwhile, one of the common criticisms leveled at elites and experts, from both left and right, is that they lack “skin in the game” (a phrase popularized by Nassim Taleb). Ok, left and right disagree about who the villains are. But both want to see someone go down. For the Occupy Wall Street crowd it was bankers. Since George Floyd’s death, maybe now it’s the police. On the right, perhaps it’s the WHO, CDC, Fauci, and Big Tech CEOs. Hawley and AOC would both like to stick it to Jeff Bezos, albeit for different reasons.
To me it seems that we face a tradeoff between “skin in the game” and “civility.” The civil can be civil precisely because they don’t have skin in the game—if they did, they’d likely be more combative. If I’m right, then liberal demands for civility are possibly demands for us to have less skin in the game or to see ourselves as not having much skin in the game. Either that, or else to be chill and polite about the fact that, if we fail—or are seen to fail—we might suffer more than our reputations.
Do you think civility and skin in the game are reconcilable? And if not, which value are you willing to sacrifice?
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