Photograph by Ian Berry / Magnum

In the mid-nineties, Pier Massimo Forni, a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University, embarked upon an unlikely second career: he wanted people to be nicer to one another. As the story goes, an epiphany struck him one day, while he was in class, that the most valuable lesson he could ever teach his students was to treat each other with respect. Forni, heretofore a specialist in Renaissance literature, turned his attention to a range of everyday interactions, from the treatment of strangers to the importance of etiquette. He bundled these various concerns together under the sign of “civility.” In 1997, he founded the Civility Institute, a network of research and outreach centers at Johns Hopkins that proselytized for politeness, in the name of not just personal dignity but organizational efficiency as well. Five years later, he published a best-seller, “Choosing Civility,” which became a staple of management seminars and of the talk-show circuit. He even appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” for a discussion on rudeness.

Forni was hardly our first professional champion of civility. But the arc of his career, from a gentlemanly scholar to a kindness consultant, indicates the extent to which the term is circulated today. The language of civility has always been a code of sorts, a way of holding life’s quotidian messiness up against lofty, sometimes elitist ideals of proper behavior. Perhaps, in the most practical sense, we might agree that some basic understanding of civility is what compels us to hold doors open for strangers or to avoid cussing out the elderly. Over the past decade, however, civility has come to assume a more prescriptive dimension. At a time when our ideological divides feel wild and extreme, civility has become our polite-sounding call to fall back in line. Nowhere has this charge been sounded more forcefully than on college campuses. The most remarkable example is the ongoing case of Steven Salaita, a scholar of colonialism and indigeneity, whose job offer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was rescinded because of a series of “uncivil” tweets he posted in response to a firefight between Israelis and a Palestinian in late July. Few dispute the fact that Salaita’s dispatches luxuriated in social media’s penchant for shock and grandstanding. (In one tweet, he wondered if anyone would be surprised if the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children.”) But debates have raged over whether his perceived “incivility” was legitimate grounds for him losing his job.

There is no tidy history of the civility movement, only moments that illustrate the word’s meandering evolution. For example, civility has been debated within the legal world since the early seventies, when judges and lawyers grew concerned with unruly courtrooms and popular impressions that their profession was stocked with crass, win-at-all-cost opportunists. Beginning in the eighties, many colleges adopted codes of civility in order to protect a diversity of viewpoints and insure that campus conversations honored academic freedom. On a more ambient level, the 1987 elimination of broadcasting’s Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to honor multiple political perspectives, forever altered our expectations about hearing both sides of a story. Henceforth, “fair and balanced” could mean anything, a condition that has intensified during the Obama Presidency. After all, have there been any moments of incivility quite as public as the Republican congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst during Obama’s 2009 State of the Union address?

As political debate has grown more polarized, civility advocates like Forni have emerged to reverse the perceived “coarsening” of our culture by helping campuses, corporations, and even cities develop strategies for weaving civility into the practice of everyday life. (Sometimes, the aims are more direct, as with the title of the Stanford professor Robert Sutton’s influential 2007 civility manual, “The No Asshole Rule.”)

Civility, then, means two things. For the individual, it is about not being an asshole. But for the institution, invoking civility is about isolating and controlling those assholes. Or, as evidenced by a meeting I once attended about swearing at work, it is about insuring that nobody ever says the word “asshole” aloud. Civility is invoked as a method of discipline, as a way of sanding down the edges of a conversation. In a letter to the campus community commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the University of California at Berkeley chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, remarked that “free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin”—a peculiarly sanitized revision of how people understand the sixties.

At its worst, concern for civility is a way to avoid having difficult conversations at all. Today, the greatest structural driver of the civility wars is the Internet, where these two versions of the word collide. In the comparatively decentralized space, we have become compelled to take everyone’s grievances seriously, even when those claims for civility and courteous debate have been made in bad faith. And, as the common ground between us seems to dwindle, it has become easier to fixate on incivility than to reckon with whatever ideas rude language might describe. Interestingly, the new civility troubles those across the political spectrum. For those on the right, civility is political correctness by a different name, while those on the left tend to see it as a way of silencing dissent. What unites these interpretations is a shared suspicion that the rules of civility exist to preserve our hierarchies.

Thanks to the Internet, we have become expert parsers of language, meaning, and authorial intent. We have grown obsessed with subtext. In other words, we live in very discursive times, when language seems to matter more than ever. Perhaps the return of civility, as those on the right and left have both argued, constitutes a renewal of the culture wars, where taste became an object of national debate. But it also seems like a natural result of the sheer amount of time we spend engaged in the textual worlds of the Internet. There is more to say and share than ever before. As we dive headlong into this world made of words, the temptation will always be to shout above the din.

This is why the University of Illinois’s treatment of Salaita has gained so much attention with the academic world. Despite the careful deliberation that went into his hiring, the school rescinded his job offer once a series of inflammatory tweets about Israel began circulating among powerful donors and trustees. He was charged with incivility. Should the informal channels of Twitter be admissible evidence of a scholar’s record? Was it the words that were uncivil or the ideas they described? Even those who found his tweets vulgar believed that he was being held to a disturbingly vague and arbitrary standard. The school claimed that its case was self-consciously not an abridgement of free speech. In practice, though, it had essentially set out a series of cynical guidelines for how to exercise that right. Two weeks ago, Salaita filed a lawsuit against the university. Among the various charges, many of which involve procedure, Salaita and his attorneys allege that the university denied their request to view administration e-mails detailing their deliberations—specifically, those containing keywords such as “Palestine,” “Jewish,” and “uncivil.”

Over the past five years, the public relations firm Weber Shandwick has published “Civility in America,” an annual report indexing American attitudes on politics, the Internet, and our collective spiritual health. With each passing year, the surveys show, our incivility problem worsens. The evidence is everywhere: road rage, professional basketball players caught cussing on camera, cable news pundits, personal friendships disintegrating over a Facebook post on Obamacare.

These results should be unsurprising: there was a greatest generation but not a politest, a Gilded Age but no Era of Total Kindness. The problem with civility is the presumption that we were ever civil in the first place. This is why calls for genteel discourse from on high always feel like deeply nostalgic fantasies offered in bad faith. There should be nothing controversial about everyday kindness; civility as a kind of individual moral compass should remain a virtue. But civility as a type of discourse—as a high road that nobody ever actually walks—is the opposite. It is bullshit.