The Institute for Civility in Government says that, while politeness is a necessary first step, civility "is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialogue about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, and teaching others to do the same” (What is civility?) But it is political, too, in the sense that it is about negotiating interpersonal power such that everyone’s voice is heard, and nobody’s is ignored.

Benedictine sister, Joan Chittister, concerned about people hearing and working with each other, recently wrote, "We live from screen to screen now. Our children 'talk' to one another on their smartphones sitting across the room from each other instead of across fences. The point now, is that life is no more a process that we think through and work out one step at a time. It is 'virtual' now, seemingly real, but not really" (The Beatitudes revisited: a template of the good life).

Many of us who communicate virtually with 'friends', have recently learned from a Facebook whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, formerly of their Civic Integrity Department, that "harms from Facebook’s business model are not an accident, but rather the inevitable result of a dangerous design." That design, surveillance capitalism, converts human experience into data and builds models to predict individuals' future behavior. Advertisers pay for those predictions, so the model is a profit maker, which facilitates manipulation of Facebook users (Facebook Will Not Fix Itself).

The Facebook's civic integrity team had believed in putting people before the bottom line. They were charged to consider Facebook’s impact on the world, keep people safe and defuse angry polarization and were "dedicated solely to Facebook’s role in political discourse, developing counter-measures against misleading and hateful content for what the company internally deems 'at risk' countries." But the team was dissolved a month after the 2020 election (How Facebook Forced a Reckoning by Shutting Down the Team That Put People Ahead of Profits). The team had suggested changes that were rejected by Facebook management, among those were to end "a 'whitelist' of political accounts that are exempt from fact-checking," and "to stop accepting political ads" (Splits Up Unit At Center of Contested Election Decisions). Writing for Time Magazine, Roger McNamee says, "Congress also needs to protect people’s privacy from relentless surveillance. My preference would be for Congress to ban surveillance capitalism just as it banned child labor in 1938" (Roger McNamee).

Sr. Joan worries that while the Senate is deadlocked in petty partisanship it "is paralyzing the advancement of the whole nation" and that "one party is out to win elections by making it cumbersome, if not egregiously difficult, for people to vote." But she still sees "an eternal reason" for hope in the Beatitudes, which, she says, are "the signs of what it means to be a good human being, an ethical government, a moral country." And that, most important "is the heart we take to politics, to the economy, to immigration, to the public figures we seek to lead us, elected or not" (Joan Chittister).

Personal integrity and civility go hand in hand in both private and public life.