Andrew Murphy proves himself, again, to be an incisive and judicious reader of texts. As he elucidates, Mere Civility is not simply (or even primarily) a work of intellectual history. It is a work of political theory addressed to what both he and I take to be among the most pressing political issues of the day.

Our contemporary “crisis of civility” has become only more critical since the book’s publication in January 2017. While I would caution still against calling it “unprecedented,” something deeply worrying (if not entirely new) is surely afoot. To understand it, however, as political theorists I think we must avoid the reductio Murphy poses. One advantage of a historical approach is the distance it affords us for critical reflection on questions that, as citizens and partisans, feel uncomfortably close.

Accordingly, I wonder whether the ancient concept of stasis—from the Greek for “standing still”—might be better suited for making sense of the comprehensive partisanship that has split our polity into two cities, not one. While stasis sometimes manifests as a crisis of civility (just ask Thucydides), in this diagnosis what we say to each other, and how we say it, is a symptom of division, rather than a cause.

Still, I stand by “mere civility”—as theorized by me and practiced by Roger Williams—as the appropriate ethical response. The “toughening up” it requires is more vaguely somatic than verbal because mere civility does not make a fetish of word choice. Rather, it requires the fortitude to remain in the room and engage with our opponents despite our distaste for them. It reminds us that responses to provocation other than outrage, invective, and exclusion are possible—and that more provocation often follows such reactions. We seem to have forgotten the hard-won early modern insight that tolerant societies demand divided selves, and that in our daily encounters with difference we must hold two thoughts at once: I hate these people and yet I have to live with them. Should we be surprised to find our leaders lacking virtues of civility and restraint that we have ceased to practice or even value ourselves?

Hence, from horizontal to vertical: in Murphy’s observation of the “almost ineluctable” move from rough language to rough treatment, a lot rests on the “almost.” The arrow often moves the other way. Cracking down on language unequally (and it will always be unequally) exacerbates the impression of ill treatment, and the appetite to suppress, in turn, when one wins the next election. I fear recent events prove that the “social disparities of power” to which Murphy alludes are infinitely more complex, and the asymmetries less stable, than the conceptual frames often employed by theorists permit.

I, like Murphy, agree with Locke’s vertical prescription: We should avoid the temptation to suppress our opponents by taking that power off the table. Still, as a counsel to social intolerance, his horizontal ethic of concordia (even stronger in the Latin Epistola than in Popple’s English) remains in tension with it. This is so especially in a polity where attachment to party has come to trump that to the Constitution.