The Civilizing Process

Hello. This is your no-frills lecture on the civilizing process. You will need the handout that I gave you on Thursday. And if you look carefully at the handout, you'll notice it's on two sides.

So, without further ado, the civilizing process. Still the most accepted explanation for the decline of violence in history. No matter how many times critics have pointed out that there are problems with Elias's notion of the civilizing process, it still offers us the best explanation for why violence has declined across history and why modern Western societies have a largely derogatory attitude toward the use of violence, and in fact, a derogatory attitude towards any human being who lacks restraint.

Now, here you see a picture of Norbert Elias and the translated edition of his text. But as you can see on your handout, Elias's text was initially published in 1939, and it was, and it was published in German as "Über den Prozess der Zivilisation." Yes, I pronounce that with a French accent. I read German just fine. I can't pronounce it for squat. Elias was not well-received in his own time. It took a long time. It took many decades, and you'll see Pinker emphasized this as well. It took him many decades to be recognized as a very, very insightful scholar, that he had come up with a concept that seemed to explain the decline of violence over time and the rise of restraint in human societies over time, and the valuation of restraint, both by the government and by your average Joe, that we value a restrained human being a lot more than they did in prior societies.

And one, and I want to cover this text with you because while Pinker's chapter 3 does provide a good summary, he is a bit slipshod with his definition of the civilizing process. And so you have on your handout here my encapsulation of the civilizing process. It's a millennia-long process to which a society increasingly values self-restraint, emotional and physical, due to cultural and political changes that encourage restrained comportment and discourage or marginalize, through social stigmatization and judicial punishment, aggressive, emotional, uncontrolled behavior.

This is a fascinating concept. As I mentioned, Elias's notion of the civilizing process has been critiqued time and time again. I even take jabs at it in my own studies, but I am very quick to admit that I believe in the notion of a process. You're perfectly willing, happy to disagree with me. As I mentioned, we're going to follow this year whether this process has occurred or not, and you're perfectly in your rights to come to the conclusion, "Well, not exactly," or "Not at all." But I believe the process, the rough idea, is just fine. It's just some, uh, Elias's elements might be a bit problematic, or when he thinks those elements began are problematic.

The inspiration for Elias was Sigmund Freud, and that shouldn't be surprising. Look again at the date of the first publication of Elias's text. The man is a German sociologist in the 1930s. Surprise, surprise, he's influenced by Freud's theories. He's a man studying and trying to figure out what are the historical forces which have caused a rise in restraint over centuries. And so he's studying a psychological concept, an emotional concept, restraint. And thus, unsurprisingly, he looked to Freud for inspiration.

And if you think about this idea of a civilizing process, right? Read that definition again. And then skim, skim the rest of the handout. Basically, Elias is cribbing, with his concept of a civilizing process, he's cribbing Freud's notion of what causes restraint in human beings with the notion of the id, the ego, and the superego. All right, this should be pretty basic review for most of you. Most of you know this con-, these concepts. Freud believed the id was what Plato would have called our appetites, our animal passions, our drive to fill our bellies with food, get as much sex as possible, get what we want, satisfy our basic animal instincts. The ego is our reason, but not in the way that Plato praised reason, where Plato thinks reason regulates everything else. The ego simply is our computer hardware up in our brain. It allows us to calculate how to satisfy our desires. So, in essence, the ego is not going to be a very good check on the id. In fact, it simply helps us to figure out more shrewdly, more intelligently, how to get what we want. All right, we've got pretty good brains, and we can use our reason to simply say, "Aha! I realized that if I steal from you, I can get that giant chocolate bar." It's the superego that teaches our ego to value restraint. Either value it because we're going to get some reward down the road, either we're going to get praise and glory and honor, or maybe a good career or something else, or value it because we know we will get punishment down the road. By something, the superego, are the, the superego is the accumulation of outside pressures on our desires. So what the state says we should do and how we should behave, what our religious leaders say we should do and how we should behave, what our teachers say, what our peers say, what our parents say, all the outside influences that tell us what's good behavior, what's bad behavior, which criminal behavior, what's honorable behavior, what's manly behavior, what's boy behavior. These forces create our superego. And so, in essence, Elias was looking at and wondering what caused the change in the cultural superego that eventually compelled the average individual to value restraint far more than he had for millennia. Because as you saw in today's lecture on our culture's prized extroversion, all right, they don't necessarily prize restraint. They very often don't prize restraint.

Okay, we're trying to quickly get into the two components to the civilizing process. And again, look over this handout carefully. It's fairly self-explanatory. There are two elements to the civilizing process for Elias. There's a political change and there's a cultural change, or you could say an attitudinal change.

The political change entails the very slow development of modern states into what are called Leviathans. A Leviathan is a strong, centralized government capable of monopolizing and regulating the use of violence. So, although a Leviathan has something about it that allows it to truly command its citizens and tell them who can use violence, who can't. Now, throughout this year, we're going to trace when the inklings of a Leviathan are there. But true Leviathans don't really kick into gear until the 1200s CE. And there, we just have the little beginnings of the parts of the Leviathan. And it's not truly until the 1679s and 1800s CE that we get anything we could really call a Leviathan. Rome will have some inklings of a true Leviathan. Charlemagne's empire around 800 CE is also going to try to revive the concept that the king is the Leviathan. But again, both of them will fizzle out eventually. Rome's got a long run, but it fizzles out, and it's not a perfect Leviathan. Charlemagne tries to proclaim the ideas that pretty much summarize what a Leviathan is, but he never truly implements it. And then we have hurly-burly tumult on our culture being the predominant criteria for determining licit and illicit violence. And then eventually, kings start to rebound their authority, and their potency starts to rebound around 1100, 1200 CE. And slowly but surely, the kingdoms of Western Europe will claw back the right to use violence and the right to monopolize violence. But it's a slow, slow process. And there's some important elements involved in the creation of a Leviathan, which then compels the warrior class to begin to value restraint and to look for channels for honor beyond just splitting skulls on the battlefield and splitting their neighbor's skull when they disagree with them.

One of the most important elements is a standing army. A standing army is a full-time, paid, professional army. Remember, and so this is an army controlled by the central authority, not some private militia like we have throughout most of the Middle Ages. Where, for example, we're going to see around 1050 CE, the Count of Champagne, the Duke of Aquitaine, the Duke of Normandy, the Count of Anjou, they have bigger armies, they have more knights who have gotten on their knees and sworn an oath of loyalty to them, than the King of France has. And all those counts and dukes would say, "Yes, the king is my lord," but in the essence, in, in reality, the King of France better leave them the hell alone. Imagine if the Texas National Guard was bigger than the United States military. Very often in history, we have that local militias dominate, and the central authority simply has to cobble together these local militias from time to time to wage its wars or, or try to play them off against each other. Rome had a full-time standing army. That's redundant. Rome had a standing army, and thus Rome had a very close to what could be a Leviathan. But true-blue standing armies will not emerge. As we're going to see, there's a series of lectures we'll have on this because it's such an important part of the history of violence. Standing armies won't emerge until the 1400s, late 1400s CE. And thus, the warrior class has to begin to change their game. They've got to figure out new ways to compete for manly status and honor when they can't just proclaim the right to use violence when they want, how they want. The state has a bigger billy club than them. It's got more soldiers.

Finally, another ingredient in the rise of a Leviathan, of course, is a very, very efficient and powerful judicial system that the state develops. A system that can channel dispute resolution into relatively peaceful fora instead of blood feud and constant tit-for-tat violence. As two families dispute an inheritance, they now can settle that conflict in courts of law. And not only can conflicts over property be settled in courts of law, but criminals can be brought to justice in those courts of law and to have true punishments meted out upon them. And the third thing a Leviathan needs is not just a sophisticated court system and a whole array of punishments or prisons to put offenders in. It's got to be able to nab offenders on behalf of the aggrieved, so that kin and clan don't feel obliged to take up that obligation. You're going to have a lot of armed families and armed lineages if there's no police around because the average Joe has to be a policeman. So if you've got a sophisticated court system and all kinds of grotesque punishments, like we will have in 1200 CE, 1300 CE, 1400 CE, 1500 CE, without that last element of professional police, we've still got the problem of the private right to use violence in order to be, and as the law enforcement on behalf of the state. So until the state can have a veritable domestic standing army of policemen, it can't fully enforce its monopoly on violence. Once it's got a standing army, police, and a justice system, the state can loudly and effectively proclaim that it alone has the right to use violence and the right to license those who use violence.

The development of a standing army. Elias would note very carefully because he really focused on the 14th and 15th centuries. For Elias, the crux period of the civilizing process was the 14th, 15th centuries CE. He does contend that there is no beginning and end point of the civilizing process, but his focus is mainly on Renaissance Europe. And Elias noted that as standing armies developed, we see this change in emphasis on where warriors will gain honor. We go from Conan the Barbarian and Sir Lancelot and Sir Gawain to Sir Walter Raleigh. Increasingly, nobles are hanging around at court more than they are on the battlefield as standing armies emerge and more stable nation-states emerge in the 1500s CE. And thus, if they're hanging out at court more often, they've got to find ways to compete for honor. They've got to be literate, they've got to know art and poetry to be able to carry on a decent conversation with Queen Elizabeth, to be able to perhaps wow her with their exploits as adventurers and explorers rather than warriors. And so Elias emphasized this point that the warriors slowly become courtiers, where we find comportment, their ability to show etiquette in court becomes an important channel for honor. And thus, it's not surprising that almost at the exact same time that standing armies are emerging in the 1500s CE, we see a massive boom in the rise of handbooks on table manners, in handbooks on etiquette. And some of these handbooks are written by some of the brightest men in Europe, the smartest men in Europe in the 1500s. Desiderius Erasmus. All right, he gets the Brazilian soccer player, uh, it's often known just as Erasmus. Erasmus, he wrote works on free will, he wrote works on the notion of knowledge, the liberal arts, he wrote treatises against Luther when the Reformation started. And oh yeah, he wrote a handbook on table manners. Many a writer in this age put their quill to paper and proceeded to write a handbook on table manners because there was demand for this among the nobility. They wanted rules of the game. And so these handbooks on manners provided etiquette rules for them that they then, then they could then judge their peers. They could then look at them and say, "They're following the right guide to courtly behavior."

And thus, we have that second component. We have an attitudinal change. As the criteria for an honorable man shift in order of importance, it's not as if the honor culture went away. Okay? The civilizing process starts long before the Industrial Revolution. The honor culture remains. It's just that all the criteria I just taught you about what makes an honorable man, they simply shift in importance. And martial prowess gets knocked down a number of pegs.

Now, if you look at that image of a courtier again, you pop back to it, you would notice he does carry a sword at his side. And you know full well, if you can picture even aristocrats, they love to march around in their military uniforms and swords at their side. It was a sign of their class and status. In fact, there's a Latin term for anyone who was of that special status, "armigeri," arms-bearing status, arms-bearing man. And so while they might hold on to that vestige of looking like the tough guy, that I still have a sword at my side, nevertheless, actual martial prowess went farther down on the list of important channels for honor. Now, it was restrained comportment, fine comportment, successful litigation, certainly, because that shows you are wise and intellectual, you can fight your enemies in law or in the court of law, keeping your oath and keeping your word. These things continued to be important. But notice, we're seeing restraint rise up the list. And it was very non-existent beforehand. In, in essence, what you're getting as the civilizing process kicks into gear, or high gear, we should say, around the 1500s CE and onward, is the triumph of merchant class values. The merchant class, which had rebounded in Western Europe after the fall of Rome. There weren't many, there wasn't anything we could really call a merchant class until cities rebounded in Western Europe around 1100 CE. When cities rebounded, a whole new class developed that lived in cities, made their money from trade and loans and craftsmanship, rather than from landholding like the warrior class did. The warrior class made their money by having many manors, manors with many peasants who gave them lots of goods, and they made their glory and honor from fighting on the battlefield. The merchant class weren't usually going to fight on the battlefield. And so for them, as early as 1200 CE, being literate was important and honorable. Keeping your oath and keeping your word in business transactions was important and honorable. And being restrained, of course, was important. Because when you're trying to hash out a trade deal for a whole set of silks that you're going to bring to a local fair and then sell, well, you probably want to be restrained when you're talking to that other person. Trade generally encourages restraint because you have to be calm enough to think through what the other person wants out of you and what you can do to make them happy to get what you want. It's a two-way street instead of an "I club you over the head and hopefully put you in the street." So, short end of the story, the merchants, middle class, had different priorities when it came to the criteria for an honorable man, and those priorities emerged triumphant in the 1500s. The warrior class basically had to adopt them and embrace them. And so by the 1600s CE, we have the entire upper class, whether it's the wealthy merchants and bankers like the Medici of Florence, or it's your old nobility like the Habsburg family, they all are embracing this code of behaviors that, yes, martial prowess is still there on the list for an honorable man, but restrained comportment, learning, literacy, refined manners, and etiquette are gaining prominence. And so bombastic bravado is increasingly seen as something that the lower classes still embrace, something the peasants, the illiterate, the unrefined embrace.

As you can see on the handout, Elias argues quite strongly, and even though, and to this day, those who accept Elias's argument have to pretty much accept, accept this point, and I'm about to mention. Elias argues quite strongly that this movement is top-down. It's the upper middle classes embrace it first, and then the lower classes slowly embrace it. And before that seems a little bit unequal, there's something wrong. It seems like there's something wrong with it. Don't forget that the upper middle classes are the ones that dominate the entire bureaucracy of this developing early modern state with its judicial systems and its standing armies and eventually its policemen. And so they are going to place priority on enforcing their norms of behavior. And thus, while the peasant class, the artisan class, might not embrace these norms because they have no need to, they still go by the old traditional honor culture, and they're still more extroverted than the upper-middle class. They're still much more comfortable farting in public, blowing snot in public, belching in public, sexuality in public. The fact of the matter is, the state is going to increasingly label these things as problematic and see them as disorderly and as backward. We still to this day, to some extent, see that if you look at where, as Pinker points out, the civilizing process tends to show up in regions where society, the mainstream society, is still not trusted, or the government is still not trusted, and so traditional extroverted behavior dominates.

Now, if you flip over, you'll see some concerns, questions, and critiques. One, scholars, while many scholars will agree with the concept of a civilizing process, most have refined the notion of when it began. You're going to see Pinker bend over backwards to emphasize that Elias says the civilizing process has no beginning and no end date. But to the fact of the matter is, if you read the text in, Lordy, I've read it both in English and in German, God help me, it pretty much appears that Elias thinks the civilizing process began in the Renaissance. He depicts the Middle Ages, he just makes a thousand years of history as pretty much uninhibited id and emotional whirlwind, medieval folk swirling back and forth between joy and despair, anger and love. You know, just from the anthropology lecture, even societies that don't have a strong state have regulatory mechanisms that do teach people to, uh, sometimes think twice. It's not alright. And so, in fact, that's mainly what I argued in my own study, that Elias's concept, that if we look at medieval Christianity, it's clearly teaching restraint long before the state is a strong entity. The church is teaching people, "Be restrained during the Mass. Think of others. They are your fellow Christians. Think about what God can see. So you can't hold vengeance in your heart because God's going to burn you in hell for being wrathful." The church is teaching people to reconsider the honor culture and value restraint more often, long before the state. And so I argued there are other elements to the civilizing process, and thus the process is okay. The concept is fine. It just begins earlier. And indeed, there's been scholarship studying Greek history and Roman history who have said, "Look, we can see elements of the civilizing process all the way back here." And thus, the big question, when did it begin? It truly might, it really has no beginning or end date. And you can look for these elements. You look for parts of political development and cultural attitudinal development that encourage restraint. Any aspects of society that encourage restraint, politics or culture. If you find them, you've got a little inkling of the civilizing process in that era.

As mentioned, number two is my critique. As I mentioned, medievalists, not just me, any medievalist, work, medieval historian, or medieval literary scholar worth their salt has absolutely pinned Elias's ears back, at least the ghost of Elias's ears back, and noted that his depiction of the Middle Ages is pure nonsense. Nevertheless, as I say in my book, and I should say actually, as Oren Focke, Mark Morrison, and I said in our book, "Great Effusion of Blood," no matter how much scholars have refined or redacted the concept of the civilizing process, it still appears to be the best ex- for the differences in views on violence between our own time and the medieval period. And that's not a direct quote, by the way. And we wrote it much more eloquently in the introduction than I'm just paraphrasing it to you.

Third thing, as I mentioned, Elias tends to discount religion. He has a direct quote where he says, "Religion is no more civilized than the society that holds it and has never been a civilizing force." Now, this is classic Freudianism. Freud didn't have much time for religion either. But the fact of the matter is, when you look at anthropology and you look at history, religions do promote restraint. It's just like many belief systems, they hit a brick wall at some point. There's always someone on the outside who is a legitimate target of violence, while those on the inside are not.

The fourth thing, can the civilizing process occur? This is certainly one to keep your eye on as we trace the idea of a civilizing process this year. Keep asking yourself, what might unravel the ball of yarn? There are so many important little elements that build up our modern notion of the, our modern notion of why it's important to value restraint. It doesn't take much to unravel that ball of yarn. In so little things like being civil with each other, being restrained, being mannerly, not having rage fits on Twitter or Facebook or via email or directly to someone. Little elements that over time have, that over time can civilize a society. Now, it takes a whole state breakdown. But bear in mind, the civilizing process is cultural and political, and there are so many small elements that on their own, we might think a big deal, that's just people being uptight. At the end of the day, if you pull them away, if you strip away civility, it becomes very hard to have a functional government, for example. All right, so these things play off each other. Pinker's going to take pains to, to emphasize the de-civilizing process can occur. All right, it's no surprise if the process can go in one direction, it can also go backwards.

Is the process top-down? As I mentioned, some scholars are very uncomfortable with the idea that it's a top-down process. And even when they believe the process has occurred, would argue that the average Joe also had a tremendous concern for restraint, and they worked to build up that valuation of restraint as well. It wasn't just the upper classes saying, "Follow me, imitate me."

Six thing, is the process exclusive to Western civilization? It's another classic one. Elias is just studying Western societies, and so one wonders whether we can find inklings of this process in other societies.

Seventh thing, is mentioned, does economic inequality affect the direction or rate of the civilizing process? So, is there any, and I'm not sure there's been a good study of this yet, but it's a classic question of when a society is relatively egalitarian, or there isn't much economic inequality, is there a greater valuation of restraint, or is there less? Or is it pretty much the same as when there's tremendous gaps in economic inequality? Does this affect how fast the rate of valuation of restraint is?

Finally, I'd like to mention to you, one could add an eighth question, that is, did the civilizing process occur at all? Have attitudinal changes actually occurred? Because remember, it's not just about political changes, Elias's. It's an overall change in attitude in which society has grown to value restraint. I can think of at least one highly intelligent colleague, my companion Oren Focke, helped write "Great Effusion of Blood" with me. He's a brilliant scholar of the Viking Age and Anglo-Saxon England. Oren is Israeli. He's one of the most intelligent people I ever met. When I met him in grad school, it was like being a runner and realizing when you meet someone who runs a sub, a sub four-minute mile, that no matter how hard I run, I'm not going to be as fast as you. No matter how hard I train, not going to be as fast as you. At the end of the day, there are some people who are at a different level. And Oren was one of those people. When I met him in grad school, I thought, dear Lord in heaven and earth, your insights are incredible, and I'm not sure I can ever get to that level. It was wonderful writing our book with him. And the fact of the matter is, while Mark Meyerson and I, two of the authors of the book, believe a civilizing process has occurred, Oren's perspective, and you can see that growing up in Israel, how it might have affected his perspective, is that the attitudinal change is not there. He believes largely our valuation of restraint is simply due to politics, that the states are strong enough to make us respect restraint. But if those states are gone, we'll quickly devolve back to our Beowulf-ian Vikings. Vikings form. Others would argue that the civilizing process, the ball has rolled so long, the civilizing process, it's got such momentum, it's become a boulder. And so even if the state was weak, we have come to value restraint so much that it would still be a priority in most people's lives.

Okay, well, obviously, you know, Elias influences Pinker's text. Okay. Pinker believes that the civilizing process is the best explanation for the decline of violence in history as well. He also influenced two other important modern scholars of violence. One was a direct disciple of him. I've mentioned this guy's name before, Peter Spierberg. He's the preeminent criminologist when it comes to the study of homicide and the study of, excuse me, and the study of violence in Western societies. And they're famous scholars, the French scholar Robert Muchembled, who wrote, this is his translated edition, a lot of his works on French. But he recently came out with his overarching study of violence. It's a bit Freudian, or he cribs a bit of a bit too much of Freud for my liking. I generally liked his previous studies. But Robert Muchembled and Spierberg both wholeheartedly buy into the concept of the civilizing process. So, Oren Fox's ideas notwithstanding, as I've said, or as we can see, many scholars, many preeminent scholars, far smarter than yours truly, believe in the notion of a civilizing process, even if, again, they will argue over the elements and the timing of it.

Okay, go forth and try not to hit anyone over the head or call them names or talk too closely, too closely to them.