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THIS isn鈥檛 just any election year. With half the world set to participate in democratic votes, 2024 is being called the election year.

As disagreements around issues such as immigration and climate change come to a head, societal schisms are expected to widen even further. But there is one shared ideal that still unites many people: the concept of civility.

In September 2023, a found that while US voters are increasingly pessimistic about rising levels of political division, they tend to believe very strongly in norms of manners and respect. Ninety-four per cent agreed that 鈥渞espect for each other is the first step in having a government that works鈥�, and 89 per cent agreed that 鈥渃ivility is the language of respect鈥�.

I have studied the sociology of manners for years, and it turns out that manners really do maketh humanity. While many other species engage in cooperative activities, our capacity to share and divide labour among strangers is a 鈥渞emarkable and uniquely human鈥� phenomenon, evolutionary economist Paul Seabright. The ability to place our trust in strangers became possible around 10,000 years ago through the development of shared norms designed to encourage prosocial behaviour and discourage deviance. This is when we moved from isolated groups of hunter-gatherers into complex societies built on mutual cooperation.

However, words like 鈥渃ivility鈥� and 鈥渞espect鈥� can be a double-edged sword. In Europe, the concept of civility goes back to Erasmus of Rotterdam鈥檚 1530 treatise De Civilitate Morum Puerilium. A training guide for young noblemen, it encouraged readers to be considerate of the needs of others, offering advice such as to not spit on the floor or stick dirty hands in food. In that sense, manners can be a significant force for good.

But manners have also been used to set up status hierarchies. The word 鈥渆tiquette鈥� derives from the 1600s, when King Louis XIV of France used estiquettes (small cards) around Versailles to advise visitors on the codified rules of behaviour expected in court. Rather than encouraging consideration, manners were a tool for discerning who belonged in certain social spaces.

Historians have since studied the use of 鈥溾�� for regulating behaviour. From Asia to the Americas, colonial oppressors often forced Indigenous communities into humiliating performances of deference.

In the 1930s, Norbert Elias published his sociological epic The Civilizing Process. Pointing out that calls for civility and propriety are often most forceful at times of moral conflict, Elias warned of the dangers of confusing manners with morality. A Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, he had seen how easy it can be to mistake the appearance of civilised propriety for actual ethical decency. According to Elias, the Third Reich deliberately utilised displays of dapper uniforms and cultivated mannerisms as cover for acts of unimaginable brutality.

This wasn鈥檛 the first time. In the American South, a veneer of courtesy provided cover for the racist violence of enslavement and segregation. Scholars such as Brittney C. Cooper have powerfully of how marginalised people have needed to cultivate images of 鈥渞espectability鈥� to survive a hostile public sphere.

In calling for civility again today, then, we need to heed Elias鈥檚 warning and pay attention to when a facade of mannerly propriety is used to bring about immoral ends 鈥� injustice, violence and ecocide all rendered tolerable so long as everyone speaks calmly and behaves decorously. With so much at stake in 2024, we need to reject the appearance of respectability in favour of building a genuinely respectful world in which everyone has an equal chance to thrive.

Kirsty Sedgman is the author of