The Iranian film It Was Just an Accident has much to say about the times in which we live. Shot in guerrilla fashion by the dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi, the film emerges from a regime that has long sought to silence him, and which, as I write, appears increasingly fragile. Because Panahi is forbidden to make films without government approval, he works outside the system entirely. Scenes are captured quickly: arrive, jump out, film, and take off before authorities can intervene. The finished film was edited in France, beyond the reach of Iranian censorship.
At the center of the story is Vahid, a former political prisoner who believes he has recognized the sadistic official who oversaw his imprisonment and torture. Acting on that belief, he kidnaps the man—Eghbal—and gathers a small band of fellow former prisoners to confirm his identity. But there is a problem: during their captivity, they were always blindfolded. They must rely on fragments of memory—the cadence of a voice, the faint mechanical rhythm of an artificial leg—to determine whether this man is truly their tormentor.
What follows is a gripping morality play. How far should they go to establish the truth? And if they become convinced of his guilt, what then? Eghbal has a pregnant wife and a young daughter. Do these facts matter? Should they?
The conflict takes shape in two figures. Shiva, a wedding photographer, urges caution—even the possibility of forgiveness. Hamid, a fiery opponent of the regime, is exasperated by such restraint. To him, the answer is obvious: if this man is their torturer, he should be killed. Vahid, caught between them, embodies the group’s uncertainty, genuinely unsure what justice requires.
Both sides argue with force. Hamid is surely right about the nature of the regime. What these prisoners endured—torture, rape, beatings that left permanent injury—is monstrous. In his view, the people of Iran are at war with their rulers, and in war one kills the enemy. If Eghbal is guilty, then killing him is not murder but an act of justice within a larger struggle for liberation.
Shiva disagrees. She shares Hamid’s hatred of the regime and does not deny that a guilty man should face consequences. But she draws a line. If they become what they hate—if they inflict the same cruelty, if they kill in the same spirit—then they have not achieved justice but surrendered to corruption. That is not victory; it is defeat.
The film’s dilemma reaches well beyond its immediate context. It speaks, among other things, to our own debates about civility. Can we afford to be civil?
On one side are voices not unlike Hamid’s. We are told we are living through a kind of ideological war. Powerful figures across politics, education, media, and entertainment are said to be undermining fundamental goods such as faith, family, and country. Institutions appear too compromised to reform. Compromise itself becomes suspect, a sign of weakness or betrayal. If the stakes are this high, then any tactic that secures victory is justified. Civility, in this view, is not a virtue but a liability, a luxury for more tranquil times. After all, if the other side refuses to play by the rules, why should we? Civility, it is said, only marks you as a fool.
Or is Shiva right? Aristotle reminds us that a political community is composed of people who hold things in common. Political life indicates a kind of friendship. In this respect, the polis resembles a family: because we must live together, we must learn to get along. That means attending carefully to how we speak and how we act, cultivating virtues such as tolerance, forbearance, and self-restraint. To lose civility, then, is to lose something essential about who we are. If the only way to save a regime is through incivility, then the regime is already lost. As with Tolkien’s ring, to use incivility to “win” is to become so corrupted that such a win is worthless.
Put me down on Team Shiva. Like Vahid in Panahi’s film, I am not certain that this is the correct view, but ultimately I would rather go down with my integrity intact than “win” through the vice of incivility.
A way to think about this is through the rubric of finite versus infinite games as developed in the 1980s by James Carse. While Carse’s book, in my view, is little more than sophomoric fortune-cookie philosophy, his taxonomy of games is useful. For Carse, a finite game is one with a discernible winner. These are what we typically think of as “games.” The goal is to produce a winner. Rules and practices emerge to achieve this end. So baseball, football, checkers are finite games.
An infinite game, by contrast, is played not to win but to continue the play. Here, the goal is not victory but endurance. The rules themselves may evolve in order to sustain the game. Marriage is a helpful example: any attempt by one partner to “win” the marriage is a recipe for its destruction.
Democracy, properly understood, is an infinite game. It depends upon a network of norms, habits, and traditions that exist not to secure final victory but to keep the system functioning. A central error of the anti-civility position is to treat politics—especially democratic politics—as something one can simply win. Anyone even minimally conversant with Augustine of Hippo should be wary of expecting a “win” from political life. As Psalm 146 reminds us, we should not put our trust in princes. Also, the maintenance of procedural civility is itself one of the ends of the game. These norms make democratic life possible. Once shattered, they are not easily restored; like Humpty Dumpty, they cannot simply be put back together again.
There have always been those who delight in breaking things. In his Confessions, Augustine describes a group he calls “the Wreckers,” fellow students who took pleasure in humiliating others simply for sport. They would target newcomers, “gratuitously affronting” their sense of decency for the sake of mockery. Their learning was bent toward vanity and cruelty. As the old literature professor Faber says in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, “Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”
Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #1, warns against the release of a “torrent of angry and malignant passions.” There are those “who hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.” Hamilton concludes that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
Augustine, Bradbury, and Hamilton all agree: it is a lot more fun to break things, including “norms.” Civility is boring; calling people names is fun. It’s like choosing between Neil Diamond and the Rolling Stones. Even if you think Neil Diamond made better music—for the purpose of this essay I am agnostic on this subject—who wants to publicly align themselves with the square Neil Diamond instead of the eternally cool Stones?
We have a whole industry of politicians, media, and interest groups who encourage us to think the worst of our political opponents. They traffic in conspiracy theories and fear-mongering to keep the clicks, views, and money rolling in. Today a particularly valuable currency is that of antisemitism. Meet the new bigotry, same as the old bigotry. And as always, there’s lots of money to be made from stoking hatred of Jews.
I often am asked what can be done about political polarization and incivility. The question assumes there is a technical solution. There may indeed be institutional reforms that could promote better behavior. But the deeper answer is personal. Each of us must exercise a kind of self-policing. How much do we enjoy our anger? How often do we click on videos of someone “owning” an opponent? To what extent are we complicit in the very culture we lament?
Civility is a virtue—one that, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous description of a classic book, is widely praised and rarely practiced. If it is a virtue, then, as Aristotle would insist, it has both an excess and a defect. The defect is obvious: incivility. The excess is something like servility or obsequiousness—the vice Hamid imputes to Shiva. There are, of course, times for war. But even the United States Declaration of Independence cautions that revolution should come only after “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”
Whatever else may be said about America in 2026, it is not the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamid’s argument carries weight because his regime quite literally wages war against its own people: imprisoning, torturing, and killing them. That is not a metaphor. It is a reality.
American political life, by contrast, is structured to slow things down—to encourage deliberation and restraint through constitutional mechanisms and long-standing practices. Civility is the moral disposition that makes such a system workable. It is developed through practice and habit. It allows for disagreement without disintegration. It sustains the possibility of coexistence.
Like Hamid, those who argue against civility have some justice on their side. Still, if we wish to remain a functioning democracy, we must adhere to the virtue of civility. To reiterate, if we truly can’t afford civility with our political opponents, then the American regime is finished anyway. If this is the case then our job is to preserve as we can the memory of a decent, functioning democracy until such time as conditions allow it to thrive again. It is entirely possible this is the state in which we find ourselves.
In his First Inaugural Address, on the brink of civil war, Abraham Lincoln offered a different path:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
However strained, the bonds of affection must not be broken. If Lincoln could say this on the brink of an actual civil war, we can say it now.
We are not enemies. Now we must learn to act like it.
Image Credit: “It Was Just an Accident” (2025)
