"All of civility depends on being able to contain the rage of individuals"
About this Quote
Civility, in Lederberg's framing, isn't a warm vibe or a set of manners; it's a piece of social technology built to handle a volatile input: human rage. Coming from a scientist who spent his life thinking in systems, constraints, and failure modes, the line reads like a hypothesis about what makes societies stable. Strip away the niceties and you get a blunt model: individuals generate anger; civilization survives only if it can keep that anger from becoming action.
The phrasing does two smart things at once. First, it demystifies civility. "All of" is deliberately totalizing, almost provocatively so, as if to say everything we romanticize about culture - law, etiquette, institutions, the thin rituals of coexistence - is downstream of a single capacity for restraint. Second, it shifts the focus from moral purity to containment. Not "eliminate rage" or "heal rage", but contain it: a word that carries the logic of quarantine and control. That's Lederberg's world, and the subtext is chilly but clarifying. People will get furious; the question is whether a society has buffers, outlets, and rules sturdy enough to prevent rage from becoming contagious.
Context matters here: a 20th-century scientist living through world war, nuclear anxiety, and mass politics has seen how quickly "individual" rage scales into collective catastrophe. The quote warns that when institutions corrode and norms soften, what's unleashed isn't merely incivility. It's the raw energy civility was designed to keep from igniting everything else.
The phrasing does two smart things at once. First, it demystifies civility. "All of" is deliberately totalizing, almost provocatively so, as if to say everything we romanticize about culture - law, etiquette, institutions, the thin rituals of coexistence - is downstream of a single capacity for restraint. Second, it shifts the focus from moral purity to containment. Not "eliminate rage" or "heal rage", but contain it: a word that carries the logic of quarantine and control. That's Lederberg's world, and the subtext is chilly but clarifying. People will get furious; the question is whether a society has buffers, outlets, and rules sturdy enough to prevent rage from becoming contagious.
Context matters here: a 20th-century scientist living through world war, nuclear anxiety, and mass politics has seen how quickly "individual" rage scales into collective catastrophe. The quote warns that when institutions corrode and norms soften, what's unleashed isn't merely incivility. It's the raw energy civility was designed to keep from igniting everything else.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
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