John North Editor & Publisher

“Be agreeable.”

There, that makes you feel better about the idiot who just cut you off in traffic, doesn’t it?

Maybe not.

As an unreconstructed contrarian, I just might be provoked into an uncivil desire to punch out someone’s lights if I had to be subjected to the nanny-state yoke of the Howard County (Md.) Civility Project.

And that’s why I sympathize with the irritation expressed by the Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff of Kittmaqumdi Community Church at the city of Columbia’s utopian project to instill niceness in its 100,000-plus residents.

Kirk-Davidoff, whose church’s Indian name — ironically enough — means “friendly meeting place,” admits to having thrown the book that inspired the project across a room in a fit of rage when she tried reading it. And she has suggested putting up a sign saying, “You are now leaving Howard County. Feel free to act like a jerk.”

The book that got her dander up was Dr. P.M. Forni’s  “Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct,” which sold more than 100,000 copies since 2002.

A story in The Wall Street Journal last Saturday, headlined “Be nice, or what? Fans of Dr. Forni spread civility,” described Forni as “a 56-year-old Italian of elegant comportment and genteel speech” who set out a few years ago to “imbue America with ‘gracious goodness.’” He is a professor of civility — it’s true — and Italian literature at nearby Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The civility project, an initiative of Columbia’s and surrounding Howard County’s local governments, has been enthusiastically embraced by local groups such as the chamber of commerce, the police department, the hospital, the parks department and, of course, the library.

The civility movement has grown predictably to include  a Web site, a group called The Civilettes whose signature song is “Respect” and the inevitable bumper stickers emblazoned with slogans such as  “Choose Civility.”

Perhaps it is no surprise that Forni’s movement took root here, since Columbia was founded in the 1960s by a utopian developer, James W. Rouse, who built it to be a place where “hate is truly overcome by love.” (Ironically, he was a founding member of Kirk-Davidoff’s church.)

To me there is no question that rudeness in the United States is rising exponentially — often attributed to our increasing anonymity, which leads us to feel that other people are merely objects in our way. This sense of anonymity probably is fueled by an addiction to staring at televisions and computer screens and texting on cellphones — instead of taking the time to get know one’s neighbors face-to-face — and a car culture that sheathes us in steel.

Utopian experiments are often laudable in their goal — achieving an ideal society where people care about each other — but this solution strikes me as something akin to the 1970s’ “Stepford Wives.”

It’s asking people to be disingenuous to urge them, as Forni does, to “Refrain From Idle Complaints,” “Don’t Speak Ill” and “Accept and Give Praise,” — much less “Abstain From Frivolous Honking,” “Apologize Earnestly” and “Never Ask, ‘Do You Believe in God?’”

Forni’s approach seems a little too close to the New-Age mantra that you create your own reality — down to its liberal application of workshops and bumper stickers — and that everything around you is a mirror of your own volition.

Not everything or everyone is a mirror reflecting you, though, and you can’t always change the world with a smile (unless, I suppose, you’re Mary Tyler Moore).

People are complicated and, sometimes, they are downright mean and selfish. Sometimes, negativity and pure honesty (which may conflict with political correctness) are healthy human responses to a world that is often harsh and unjust in even the best of circumstances.

Ulimately, the problem for me with the Civility Project is its effort to codify and sloganize civil behavior — as exemplifed in a meeting of Forni and Kirk-Davidoff that the Journal described as “an hour-long cordial exchange on the question of civility.”

“You don’t like the fact that people should be told explicitly what is good and what is bad?” Forni asked her.

Kirk-Davidoff replied, “It’s the rules. When we learn rules without learning compassion, the rules can do the opposite. Jesus didn’t say, ‘I am the rule,’ right?”

After a pause, Forni said, “Yes. Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’ If I had met you before, probably I would have used ‘way.’ The 25 ways of being considerate and kind.”

The Journal observed that “he managed a smile. The pastor smiled back and stuck out her hand. The professor of civility shook it.”

Better than any bumper sticker is to practice what you preach, in my view. People who live in a bubble of phony niceness too often turn all the more nasty when they slip up and let their bottled-up negativity loose.

Within bounds, there is a time and place to be positive and negative, without going to the extrreme of repressing one pole of a very natural human dynamic.

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John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it