What a skewed view on "civil"

Yesterday, in response to "Leaf be Niggle", we entertained a discussion surrounding Tolkien's civility and how that was portrayed within his works. One of the central ideas discussed was basically that his background didn't make him a civil person, I felt. More specifically his involvement in the war. However, I feel that we discussed the wrong parts of his involvement. A point was made saying that when he was with his buddies from the war, that he was a less civilized person than after war. Furthermore, a comment was made about high society, of which I don't fully remember. However, I understood the comment to be intertwining civility and higher society. I found both of these points to be problematic and depreciative.
On the first point, I find that as a societal collective, we tend to believe that there is only one way in which a person can act in order to be considered civil. This, however, is a naive way of thinking. If we just look at differences between countries as a whole we can see that every country has a different method of being civil. Not to mention all the differences that arise between different regions of every country. In my experience, which is significantly more recent than that of Tolkien, I have found that service members have an immensely different method of being civil, both with each other and with other.  Continuing onto the second point, societal conditioning has forced us to classify people who don't follow our perceptions of civil actions as degenerates. This idea is an inherent quality of classism. Now, while this may not exactly be our fault; We, as a societal whole, should hold ourselves to higher level of understanding. We need to understand that we cannot put all of our "truths" on all sectors of human interactions. Society itself is a immense living and breathing organism that is capable of adapting and changing in order to meet the needs of its parts. Thus, norms of any individual sector cannot possibly apply to all others.