Don Eberly: The Kindness Option: Why Civility Isn't Enough

Don Eberly served as deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and acted in multiple roles as a senior civilian in support of the U.S. mission in Iraq, covering all phases from pre-war to transition to Iraqi control.

He was a former aide to Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush, is the author of numerous books on civil society, and continues as a 40- year veteran of national and international policy and diplomacy.

Eberly resides with his wife Sheryl in Lancaster County where he was raised.

• What is incivility, and where is it coming from?
• What is unique about our circumstances compared to uncivil episodes in our past?

• Declining social capital, trust, religious belief
• Diminishing agreement on national creeds and a shared historical narrative
• Rising psycho-social conditions such as alienation, loneliness, and friendless-ness
• Devastating dehumanization and radicalization through the ascendancy of social media

• Recovery of creeds such as the golden rule, the image of God in all people, love for enemies, all rooted in the Christian Gospel
• Renewal of civic and moral formation
• Adoption of a robust kind-ness focused counterculture
• Re-imagination of civil society in cultivating of habits of the heart through re-weaving civic bonds
• Development of healthy habits of deep, rich, and empathetic engagement with people of divergent views

Eberly has recently written

Electoral outcomes can easily blind us...to the deepest and most consequential challenge of our time: the loss of interest in the moral and spiritual health of our own private lives. If your definition of American greatness is military process, an expansion of wealth, and unrestrained pride in America, you have bought a very distorted vision of national health. A basic axiom is that it is impossible to have a strong nation with a weak and broken society. It’s an illusion.

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