Print edition: 
Growing concern about incivility is one of America's more appealing trends. Increasingly, individuals and institutions are seeking ways to burnish the Golden Rule.
The concern isn't new — professor P.M. Forni started the Johns Hopkins Civility Project 12 years ago and published a book in 2002: "Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct."
Civility even has a Facebook page called "The Civility Initiative," where Forni and visitors exchange thoughts on the subject.
But recent events and trends — from rowdy town-hall meetings to sideshow rants on television to the outburst of Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C. —have brought vague unease about manners into sharper focus.
In Wilson's home state, University of South Carolina president Harris Pastides has made civility a focal point of the institution's goals. And an Atlanta public relations executive, Mark DeMoss, has organized a coalition of conservatives and liberals, religious and secular, in his own Civility Project to promote a grassroots, voluntary effort toward renewed civility.
His Web site (www.civilityproject.org) urges a voluntary pledge to be civil in discourse and behavior, and to stand against incivility.
President Obama addressed civility directly in his commencement address to the University of Notre Dame earlier this year.
That's more than enough evidence to declare a trend. But do Americans really want to be civil?
Our nostalgia for civility, some say, is misplaced or at least exaggerated by wishful thinking. Americans have never been exemplars of manners in politics. Often cited are the anti-federalists, though the federalists were hardly rearranging the doilies.
During the Andrew Jackson-John Quincy Adams election of 1828, the former general was called a murderer and a cannibal; his wife was accused of being a harlot.
Nonetheless, something has changed — and what has changed is media. I don't mean traditional media, the so-called mainstream media everyone loves to hate these days. In fact, old media have strict standards about civility and appropriate language in the public sphere.
Most crucial in the viral growth of incivility are new media — the Internet, the blogosphere and all the social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, and whatever else may have developed since I began typing this column.
Whereas in previous eras, an uncivil exchange might be confined to a room, a building or a public square, today's media technology means that it is captured, amplified, replayed and distributed — perpetually.
The real challenge for the civility-minded is that incivility is more exciting. Human beings are drawn to spectacle, as the bookers of Rome's Colosseum understood. Glenn Beck is proof of the constancy of human nature.
Susan Herbst, a public policy professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, is finishing a book on civility in politics. She insists that if we really want civility to prevail, we have to find a way to make it interesting to young people. She urges the teaching of debating skills to high school and college students.
Making debate cool is a challenge, not least because clear thinking is hard work that requires skill and discipline. Might a few Hollywood celebrities help lead the way? Civility, after all, is nothing but great acting.
