that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race.
— John Milton, Areopagitica
There are seasons in political life when moderation, thoughtfulness, and elementary respect are front and centre. There are also seasons when conflicts breed contempt, when barking rhetoric and crude polarisation drown out dialogue, when mindless ideologues trash those they differ with. Meaningful citizenship requires a civic mind; when perspectives collide, civility should win the day.
What happens, though, when people retreat into cynicism or enter with ideological guns blazing?
In civic life, this cave is where curiosity dies, empathy is blind, and dialogue is devoured. The challenge before us is to step back into the open, where many perspectives can meet, and where our vision—restored to two eyes—can guide us toward a saner, more just, more dialogical public life.
Her book Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community & What to Do About It sounded a ram’s-horn wake-up call to those denying the problem, hiding behind gates, or pandering to it. The fact that toxic culture and the culture wars have only quickened since then makes that book a needed manifesto. I might add, one and all with a minimal public conscience should read and inwardly digest this classical beauty.
Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times is, therefore, a phoenix-like rising from the ashes of what must die so that meaningful public community and discourse might be reborn. In the myth, the phoenix’s tears bring healing to those it touches.
This book threads together, wisely and well, many of her time-tested insights and practices with laudable reflections from men and women who know its costs and challenges well—certainly no cloistered virtues or slinking from the race.
The front cover, harkening back to the classical age of Greek political philosophy as embodied and articulated by Plato and Aristotle, is a fit and fine icon of sorts, and the “Lead with Civility Creed” is worth meditating upon and internalising. The book is filled with thoughtful synthesis of both theory and practice, or in the classical sense, theoria and praxis.
The fact that Stoicism, as a type of public and political philosophy, is enjoying renewed interest—the Greek version more sophisticated and nuanced than the more applied Roman ethos—is worth noting. For Diane, it is the application of the essence of this classical ethos that can, if thoughtfully updated and applied, do much to restore the meaning of citizenship, civic virtues, and civility.
The obstinate fact that we live in a culture dominated by memoricide—a cultural amnesia that forgets the best of our civic inheritance—means many are ill-equipped to heed the centuries of political wisdom on civility in the public square and the cost of silencing dialogue across differences.
As Diane reminds us, this is not the first time a culture has lost its bearings. Seven centuries ago, Dante opened the Divine Comedy not with triumph but with disorientation, “midway in the journey of our life” in a dark wood. Leaders know the feeling: the path obscured, landmarks gone. Dante’s point is not despair but direction. There is a way through if we recover sight, courage, and companions for the road. May this book help you find all three.
“Cassandra, the truth-teller no one believes, and Tiresias, the seer of unwelcome truths, still stand at the city gate.”
Diane has the deftness that comes from years in the fray, at the level of thought and action. She knows that frozen ideological postures, whether liberal–progressive or reactionary–conservative, are cul-de-sacs that undermine mature citizenship. Dante placed Satan at the lowest circle of the Inferno: ice-bound, wings flapping, going nowhere. It is an image of congealed thinking that she rightly opposes.
Professor of Classics, St. Stephen’s University