What Is Civility—Really?

Civility is not about being polite. It’s about having the moral courage to protect human dignity, uphold respect, and build communities where democracy can thrive.

In this powerful keynote from the 2025 Compassionate Action Conference, your host Diane Kalen-Sukra—author of Save Your City and founder of Kalen Academy—explores what civility really means and why it’s the key to healing toxic public life. 

Addressing thousands of changemakers gathered for the Charter for Compassion’s global summit, Diane connects the ancient wisdom of Socrates and the Athenian Oath with modern civic challenges and examples.

She issues a rallying call for courageous civility: a compassionate practice that goes beyond surface niceness to embody principled action, respect for others, and the strength to lead without dehumanizing our opponents. 

Through stories of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Robert F. Kennedy, this episode shows how restraint and moral clarity can interrupt cycles of violence and restore public trust.

You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of civility as a cultural force, a leadership practice, and a survival skill for democratic societies.

🌱 Learn more or access free resources at KalenAcademy.com
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Transcript

Welcome to Cultivating Civility, a podcast series featuring conversations with civic leaders and sages, as well as solo dispatches like this one on tackling toxicity and cultivating civility in our communities. I'm Diane Kalen-Sukra, your host and the author of Save Your City, as well as the founder of Kalen Academy.

In this special episode, I'm sharing my keynote address from the 2025 Compassionate Action Conference hosted by the Charter for Compassion. This gathering brought together thousands of change makers from across the globe. 

I had the honor of speaking on a subject close to my heart: courageous civility, the power of compassion in civic life. 

What you're about to hear is a message about what civility really means—not as niceness or politeness, but as a moral and civic practice grounded in dignity, compassion, and respect. 

In a time of rising incivility, division, and institutional breakdown, courageous civility offers us a pathway to restore public trust and heal our communities. Let's dive in.

Civility Keynote Address | Diane Kalen-Sukra

Seven years ago, I left my job as a city manager to sound the alarm on the rise of incivility and the destructive impact it was having on our communities. I could see that it was threatening more than just our ability to get along and cooperate; it was corroding local democracy itself, undermining good governance, and making it harder to come together to address the tidal wave of challenges our communities face—from rising homelessness and addiction to aging infrastructure and growing financial strain. That warning turned into a civility tour that soon went global, because unchecked toxic behavior spreads like a contagion.

Indeed, the political culture across Western democracies has sharply deteriorated. A message I have shared again and again is that incivility anywhere is a threat to civility everywhere. The good news is this: the hunger for civility, for a better, more constructive way to live and work together, is growing stronger.

We all know we're social beings and that toxic culture is making us sick. We also know we must weave back the social fabric if we're going to thrive as individuals and communities. Alongside that hunger, there's a growing temptation to abandon civility altogether—to meet rage with rage, contempt with contempt. The temptation is understandable when you're lied about, attacked, treated unfairly, or when democratic norms are undermined and due process is ignored. The impulse to lash out is a human one. But if we let destructive anger set the terms of how we treat one another, we don't just risk losing a debate or a vote, we risk unraveling the very fabric of community and democracy itself.

There are some misconceptions about what is meant by civility, and it is a term that has at times been abused to silence dissent, stifle opposition, or restrict outsiders. Let's look back in history at its etymology to recover its true meaning. The very word civility comes to us from the Latin word civitas, meaning essentially "community of citizens," and it refers to behavior and duties befitting citizens of a city toward each other and their governing institutions. At its heart, civility is the respect, consideration, and responsibility that citizens owe one another and the community they share.

Civility is the disposition of a person who understands that we live together in community to flourish together—that the well-being of our neighbor is bound to our own, and that we have a duty to one another and to the common good. Since the ancient conception of the ideal city was the just city, citizens were also called not just to live together, but to live justly with one another, to live according to the golden rule. This is why civility demands so much more than niceness or politeness, which can, after all, be feigned. Civility demands moral courage under pressure—the courage to speak out, to stand up for what's right, and to stand with others against injustice even when it's uncomfortable or costly.

In essence, it's compassion in action: the will to alleviate suffering and promote the well-being of others, to see our neighbor's dignity as inseparable from our own. The understanding that healthy communities are built on mutual respect and compassion is ancient. In Stoic philosophy, sympatheia describes the deep interconnectedness of all life—the recognition that our well-being is bound up with the well-being of others. Marcus Aurelius, the stoic emperor, often known as the philosopher king, wrote that we are made for cooperation like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature.

Because of this shared experience, the Stoics taught that we have a duty to live with respect, restraint, and compassion towards one another. Later, during the upheavals of the Enlightenment and Revolution, philosopher Immanuel Kant taught us that we must treat every person—not merely friends or allies, but every human being—as an end in themselves, never merely as a means to our goals. A century later, as authoritarianism rose again in Europe, Austrian-Israeli philosopher Martin Buber warned that modern life was replacing the sacred I–Thou relationship, seeing others as full human beings, with I–It thinking, where people became mere objects to use, dismiss, or destroy.

Martin Luther King Jr., drawing from that same tradition, warned us that unless we move from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society, we would descend into moral and civic collapse.

Across centuries and cultures, a common truth emerges: compassion is not weakness. Civility is the muscle of democracy—and like any muscle, it must be exercised or it will atrophy.

In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, citizens understood that freedom required more than laws or elections. It required citizens with an understanding of their civic duty to each other and to the city. It required civility. This understanding was captured in the Athenian oath, a vow every citizen made when entering public life: that we will never bring disgrace to this our city by any act of dishonesty or cowardice; that we will transmit this city not only less but greater, better, and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us. It was a promise of civic fidelity, a recognition that public life demands something of all of us.

Socrates, the wise citizen philosopher of Athens, embodied this spirit of courageous civility. As Epictetus later describes, Socrates refused to return injury for injury. He says, "Now this was the first and chief peculiarity of Socrates—never to be irritated in argument, never to utter anything abusive, anything insulting, but to bear with abusive persons and to put an end to the quarrel." He taught by his life that no greater evil can overcome a society than for its citizens to hate civil discourse itself. Because civil discourse—the ability to reason together, to listen, to deliberate—is the lifeblood of democracy. It is a practice made possible by civility, the daily discipline that allows us to live freely and flourish together. Without it, democracy dissolves into domination and community into chaos.

So why should we be civil in uncivil times? History doesn't leave us guessing. We have seen how noble beginnings can collapse into nightmares—how movements born from rightful anger can become forces of cruelty themselves. The French Revolution, for instance, began with cries for liberty and fraternity and ended with the terror of the guillotine. The Russian Revolution promised equality and delivered purges and gulags. Even in postcolonial struggles across the world, many nations that fought bravely for independence found themselves falling into corruption, repression, and new forms of injustice. They may have won the battle, but they lost the war because the real war isn't just against oppression; it was against becoming what they opposed.

That's why the movements that endure—the ones that truly bend history towards justice and democracy—are those anchored in courageous civility.

Consider the American civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. faced brutality, threats, violence, and daily indignities. Yet he refused to answer hatred with hatred. He disciplined his grief and anger not by denying them, but by channeling them into a higher, harder kind of strength: steadfast dignity and love. We often forget just how high the stakes really were. In 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott, King's home was bombed while his wife and infant daughter were inside. An angry, armed crowd gathered outside, ready for vengeance. King stood on his broken porch and said, "If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies." This was not appeasement. It was moral strength under unbearable pressure—the kind of leadership that prevents cycles of violence and opens the path to lasting change.

Think of South Africa. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, cut off from his family, his people, and his dreams. He had every reason to emerge full of bitterness. But when he walked out of prison, it was not with vengeance in his heart; it was with a vision for healing. On his first day as president, facing a room full of civil servants—many who had served under apartheid—Mandela's words have been recounted in the following way: "What is past is past. We look to the future now." He didn't purge the staff. He didn't seek to humiliate or punish. He invited them to stay, to serve a new South Africa together. He told his staff that if they can manage to work together, their country will be a shining light in the world. That spirit—the restraint, the grace, and the courage—helped steer South Africa away from the brink of civil war. That is courageous civility in action.

It doesn't mean avoiding conflict. It doesn't mean being passive. It doesn't mean pretending harm didn't happen. It means facing the grief, the fury, the loss, and still choosing to lead with humanity.

Today we live through a time when public officials are resigning under threat, schoolboard members are opting out after harassment, city workers are facing daily abuse, and citizens—especially young ones—are growing disillusioned with democracy itself. The number of people who believe violence can be justified to achieve political ends is climbing. In this climate of fear and frustration, the temptation grows louder: "They lie, we must fight dirty, too. They're ruthless, we must be ruthless, too." What if instead we paused and asked, "What are we facing today that is worse than what King and Mandela faced?" Their example shows us that courageous civility is not weakness; it's the fiercest kind of strength—the strength to protect humanity even when it would be easier to abandon it.

Because when we forsake civility, we're not just fighting our opponents; we're fighting our own better angels. To quote Abraham Lincoln, "We risk repeating the oldest tragedy of all—the liberator who becomes oppressor, the revolution that devours its own, and the righteous rage that rots into cruelty. We forget the true aim was to rebuild justice, to restore dignity." That is why courageous civility is not a luxury for better times. It is the foundation for civic renewal.

So where do we go from here? If courageous civility is the foundation of civic life, how do we renew it, especially at a time when it feels so battered and so fragile? It starts by appreciating that courageous civility is not about soft words or surface gestures. It's not about smiling through gritted teeth. It's not about hiding conflict or pretending everything is fine. It is compassion applied to public life. It is clarity without cruelty, conviction without contempt. It is the conscious choice to remain principled when fear, anger, and cynicism tempt us to betray our values.

Without courageous civility, democracy doesn't just weaken, it hollows out. We don't just lose elections, we lose trust. We don't just suffer disagreements, we lose direction, and slowly the ability to live and work together withers away. When civility collapses, the adversarial process meant to sharpen ideas and come to conclusions becomes the goal itself. Winning becomes everything, and governance becomes impossible—especially at the local level, where trust, cooperation, and neighborliness are not luxuries; they're survival skills.

Because culture isn't something that just happens to us; it's shaped by the behaviors that we allow, what we model, what we promote, and what we build right where we live—in our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our school boards, our city councils, our libraries, and our coffee shops. It's in places like these where the fight for civic life is won or lost.

We do live in a culture right now that too often rewards cunning over wisdom, outrage over deliberation, and dominance over care. But every wisdom tradition and every era of rebuilding teaches the same truths: do not gain the world only to lose your soul. Because when the soul is lost, everything else unravels. And what do we get in return? Toxic workplaces, toxic neighborhoods, toxic politics, and then the ensuing loneliness, isolation, and despair.

Courageous civility is the antidote. It's the daily muscle of democracy. Allow me to remind you just how powerful that muscle can be—how courageous civility, even in the darkest hour, can save a city.

April 4th, 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. That night, Robert F. Kennedy was scheduled to speak at a campaign rally in Indianapolis. His advisers urged him to cancel. The city was tense. The crowd, mostly black, had not yet heard the news. It wasn't safe, they said. But Kennedy went anyway. He arrived to a cold night sky, standing on the back of a flatbed truck with no prepared speech, no advisers, no PR team whispering in his ear. He broke the news gently, painfully to the stunned crowd. Then, instead of fanning their grief into rage, he did something extraordinary. He spoke of his own heartbreak—the assassination of his brother, John F. Kennedy. He spoke of the danger of bitterness and called for something greater: love, wisdom, and compassion. He said, "What we need is not division. What we need is not hatred. What we need is not violence and lawlessness, but love, wisdom, and compassion towards one another." That night, while over 100 American cities erupted in flames, Indianapolis did not. The people went home in peace, and the city was spared—not because their grief was any less, not because their anger was unjustified, but because one leader stood in the gap and called a grieving people back to their better angels.

That is the power we all hold—the power to interrupt the cycle of despair, to meet injustice not with retaliation, but with repair. It is why, after witnessing so much civic pain across cities for years, I wrote Save Your City. Because we stand at a similar crossroads today. We can either let fear and fury consume our civic life, or we can model another way. And although it may not make headlines, a quiet civic culture revival is already underway. In communities across the world, individuals, organizations, and civic leaders are standing up and turning the cultural tide, rebuilding the habits of the heart and mind that allow democracy to endure. They include a revival of local civics and civility initiatives in communities everywhere. International organizations like the Charter for Compassion, national organizations like Braver Angels, Citizen University, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, among countless more.

They're not starting from scratch. We have the legacy of so many who came before us. Today, I'm inviting you to join the growing community of civic leaders and citizens who are rebuilding civic life from the ground up using the roadmap to renewing civic culture. This model, drawn from the lessons of history—from classical antiquity to today—captures both the patterns of civic decay and the proven pathways to civic culture renewal. You can find it in my book, Save Your City, but you can also access a complimentary copy as well as support along the way through my newsletter and civic wisdom community at kalinacademy.com/newsletter.

Finally, courageous civility isn't just how we heal divisions. It's how we save our cities and leave them greater, better, and more beautiful than we found them.

 Thank you.

DianeKalenSukra.com