The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor

Slavery, Cat-Burning, and the Colonialism of Time

Bruce Fleming

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000567540
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

Drawing on the thought of Norbert Elias and using as a thread a purposely apolitical example of cruelty to animals to focus on changes in attitudes, this book explores the ways in which we deal with a past that we now abhor. As we struggle to deal with the fact that our past shapes us—indeed is us, but is not us—and cannot be changed, the modern tendency is to demand merely cosmetic rather than real changes to the world and to judge harshly the individuals with whom the past is populated, pulling down statues or re-naming institutions. An examination of our modern colonialism of time rather than place, which refuses to consider or accept the fact that without our past, we wouldn't be here at all, let alone in a position to judge, The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, cultural studies, and literature with interests in contemporary questions of race, morality, and efforts to correct the wrongs of our past.

1

Bad Manners

DOI: 10.4324/9781003229360-2

Norbert Elias’s book The Civilizing Process (in German, 1939: Űber den Prozess der Zivilisation), whose first part was published in English as The History of Manners (1969), charts the development of the contemporary conception of good manners from the Medieval world—which by our standards was considerably cruder, not to mention nasty and brutish, and where life was considerably shorter. What appears to us as the slurping, farting, fucking, violent, bad-smelling world of the Middle Ages evolved, says Elias, into the polite web of murmured please and thank you of the Modern world with the need to constantly consider others’ feelings. We Moderns (capitalized to show that this term refers to a specific time and place; Elias’s subject is Europe and its offshoots) abhor what we now see as the vulgarity and pain of the pre-Modern world: the way they ate (by our standards, grossly), pursued sex (unashamedly), defecated (far too publicly), and engaged in battle (with open delight in the torture and sufferings of their enemies).

Elias thinks we have this reaction to our ancestors because our living situation has changed. Manners, how individuals relate to each other, are (so he claims) determined by the state of their surroundings, not the reverse. We Moderns see ourselves as more “refined”—and indeed by our standards (we are the ones who are judging, after all), are so. Elias doesn’t question that the West has become more civilized over time with respect to previous times. But this is so because, he suggests—given the more complex nature of our interrelations—we police our urges more strictly. We have to, in order to get along, because the ties that bind us to others are so much tighter. We are like a lion (we might say) that has learned to restrict his activity from what it would have been in the wild to pacing back and forth in his cage. It’s the cage that’s changed us. We now think pacing is the right thing to do and that other things we did previously are not.

More and better manners nowadays sounds good, and indeed Elias as a Modern thinks it is. Yet at the same time, it’s clear that for him this is not entirely positive. Elias’s vision of raised little fingers at tea and polite understatement, based on the need to squelch our bestial urges so as to protect others, is a vision of Biedermeier Mitteleuropa that seems more than a little constraining, and his theory of manners a first cousin to Freud’s idea in Civilization and its Discontents, that civilization requires repression in order to succeed. Elias’s description of the let-it-all-hang-out Medieval world, though intended as the evocation of an earlier level of civilization to show us how far we have come, seems at least more intense, and probably more interesting.

Given that his book was written before World War II about the same Germanic Kultur that Freud thought so inevitably repressive in Vienna decades before, and that it came too soon to take account of Auschwitz, Woodstock, or the “wear baseball caps in restaurants” ethos of more contemporary times, it may seem simply out of date. Nowadays we may seem far less restrained than in the 1930s German-speaking Europe and, therefore, less well mannered. We no longer dress for dinner in evening clothes, wear a hat or gloves to walk the dog, or lay out an array of forks on linen tablecloths. After all, our lives have changed: who will polish the silver, iron the tablecloths? Nor do most of us write “bread and butter” thank you notes on stationary when a text will do, and Americans are known for putting their feet up on the furniture. Many people ask, whatever happened to manners?

Yet the societal pressure for respecting others that Elias holds to be the basis of Modern manners is clearly more intense than it was even a century ago, with the demand that we say nothing that could possibly trouble or offend those who might hear us, and that we strictly censor references to problematic aspects of the past that might upset our contemporaries. This wave of what we call “political correctness”—including the push to edit and control the way we portray our history—seems of much greater significance than baseball caps in restaurants. If repression defines the Modern Age, we have ramped that up, not down. Or perhaps if not repression, which comes from within, then oppression, or at least attacks, from without.

The emphasis on political correctness, censoring our speech and actions, frequently comes from outside the group being admonished, whereas manners come typically from within. Adults teach children the rules of their group: put your napkin in your lap, wait until others are served, don’t wolf your food (to stay only with etiquette at meals). Don’t be rude, consider your advantages/position: noblesse oblige. Don’t say what you think, say what the other person needs to hear: don’t say that someone is fat or over-made up or vulgar, just smile pleasantly and carry on. Nowadays the far more evident set of corrections comes from without. Micro-aggressions, so-called, are offenses so ingrained that the person committing them is almost by definition going to deny that they are intentional. Racism is “systemic.” The people who used to be in the driver’s seat, we hear, need to shut up and listen.

Yet it’s no longer just outsiders to the group that demand this; self-policing within groups is now more frequent, as on college campuses where an army of institutional enforcers are at work. In any case, the goal of good manners and political correctness is the same: adapt to others, curb your impulses, check your actions and words and body language for the possibility that they could give others offense. The fear of, or at least castigation for, doing wrong is, if anything, far stronger now than before.

Elias is clearly not wrong in his central perception of the present as a less threatening version of the world five centuries ago, at least in normal everyday life. The world wars of the twentieth century now seem horrible exceptions to an ongoing development past the Renaissance and Enlightenment (as we call these beginnings of Modernity). In Medieval Europe, Elias reminds us, wars ravaged the countryside crawling with rampaging soldiers, those accused of crimes were tortured until they “confessed” before being killed in bloody rituals of even more extreme public agony, and rulers wrought their will on the people with few curbs on their power.

Make you molder chained up in a dungeon forever just because the king doesn’t like you? Sure, we can do that. Standard Operating Procedure for the pre-Modern Age, in fact. Torture you to death for your religious beliefs? Absolutely kosher, everyday, perfectly normal. And then this world was gone. We might say the bottom dropped out with the dawning Industrial Age, but it had started badly sagging long before, with the humanistic revival of the Renaissance. Why? we ought to wonder. And rejecting people who were unlike us as individuals won’t give us any answers as to why they were different.

People in the West nowadays are on the other side of this great divide, the birth of the Modern Age. We are generally allowed to live our lives without fear of the abrupt reversals of fortune that marked the Middle Ages; rights to personal inviolability and protection of property are written into our laws. Violence is illegal, if not nonexistent, wars are far away from us and to some degree regulated, and we have recourse against arbitrary rulers, that in fact aren’t supposed to occupy seats of power in the West at all. Everyday life in the Medieval world was simply far more violent and threatening to more people more of the time than everyday life in our own contemporary Western democracies, with their rule of law and their constitutions (though not, to be sure, in Somalia, Rwanda of the 1990s, Yugoslavia during its civil war years, or eastern Congo in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). And now people are to check their speech, their comments, and even their Halloween costumes to make sure they might not possibly be construed as giving offense to someone else. Clearly we are more thin-skinned than people were even in Elias’s pre-World War II world, and certainly more thin-skinned than people in the Middle Ages. We’re all about not causing even the slightest tremor of discomfort to others.

At the same time, events in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century in the US and European countries require us to ask whether this net of good manners isn’t in the process of being torn or even shredded. The possibility exists that this is the real beginning of the end for manners. The owl of Minerva, as Hegel observes, flies at night—and it’s still morning in the possibly fissured world of manners. Will things get worse or better? We can’t say, but we can at least articulate the fact of threat. This threat is the increasing willingness of extremes of left and right to make their demands absolute rather than to negotiate, and to use violence, rather than acting within the social order. The events of 2020 in the leftist Black Lives Matter movement led to violence and looting, first in American cities, then in echo form in Europe. Right-wing violence of a more organized sort erupted in the USA in the January 6, 2021 attack by supporters of then-President Donald Trump on the US Capitol, in an attempt to overturn the results of the November 2020 election, following earlier marches in cities like Charlottesville, Virginia.

What we can’t say until the owl of Minerva has flown is whether these are the beginnings of more powerful waves of violence that will put an end to the social order and civility, or merely some of the continual occasional flare-ups with which the Modern Age is dotted. Indeed, some of these events may serve to release steam, and possibly even effect change. For consider that we have institutionalized a number of steam escape valves that, if looked at by themselves, seem to contradict the vision of civility I am advancing here, but that actually serve to shore it up. The problem is that these can become so large that they are no longer merely holes in the system from which steam escapes, but rather what blows it wide open.

The military has always provided such an escape valve, usually for young men who feel constrained by the compromises and frustrations of daily life; perhaps the riots served something of the same function as well. The military, at least until recently when technology has replaced all but the most hard-core combat units, provides a set of circumstances where the normal rules not only do not hold, but where violence and slaughter, albeit with their own set of rules for “moral” wars (that many soldiers feel too strict and confining) are the very nature of the game. You leave your peaceful town in, say, Tennessee, and find yourself in Afghanistan where you are told to kill—or perhaps rather, get to kill, indeed are ordered and encouraged to kill. When you return to Tennessee, assuming you do, you may find yourself like the main character in the movie The Hurt Locker, collapsed in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, overwhelmed not just by the choices of breakfast products but by the incomprehensible contrast between here and there—or perhaps rather, there and here. Which is real? PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is only one form of the fact that combat is an exception that shores up the rule.

Violent movies and video games may provide the same thrill to younger (or even older) versions of these people, giving them the rush of mayhem that contemporary society denies us—or perhaps most tellingly, denies young men. For yes, it’s young men that these manners seem to constrain the most, just as Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel named after his adventures found too constraining the attempts of the “dismal regular and decent” Widow Douglas to “civilize” him in her house as if he were her son, so that he “lit out” to find freedom—and this in Chapter One. The adventures (that he would not otherwise have had) are the result.

Yet violence can take over. Most researchers agree that street violence among young men increases to the extent that the men are denied more productive uses of their energy, constrained by poverty that seems inescapable, by their living situations, perhaps by skin color, or by their own bad decisions. In some countries, these gangs have become the norm, not the exception, in what seems a return to a pre-Modern Age.

That this is a possibility everywhere—that the march to manners is neither inevitable nor always successful—is something I consider below. For in fact, our contemporary Western democracies, to which there are a number of world-wide autocratic alternatives, are constantly threatened with dissolution, given that they are based not on the primacy of the collective, as the pre-Modern world was, but on the primacy of the individual.

That’s the paradox of democracy, the quintessential expression of the Modern Age—expressed best in the language of the US Declaration of Independence. The “We” for whom its author Thomas Jefferson wrote held as “self-evident” truths that “all men” (=humans? that’s the later issue) had the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—and asserted that governments (in a confusing use of passive voice) were instituted (by whom? All governments? Just this one?) to ensure these rights. Thus the individual is primary; governments—here a stand-in for what glues people together—are a means to an end. It therefore follows, as the Declaration goes on to note, that the people can alter and change governments that fail to give or guarantee them these rights. The individual comes first, which means the collective is always on probation.

The individual and the collective are united, therefore, only if each “I” respects everyone else’s individuality as much as each “I” demands respect. If I simply demand that only my rights—my pursuit of happiness—be respected and guaranteed, then so can all the others. The result is that things fall apart. Are we at this point nowadays? Probably not, but both the left and the right have given examples of people making this demand. The respect of others’ differences is logically necessary to keep the collective of democracy together, but it is irrelevant to the single-minded pursuit of my own goals/happiness. This respect is the basis of the consensus that, if it holds, keeps together modern democracies. But it need not hold—and it may be that we are now seeing how close to its dissolution we actually are. If exceptions become the rule—and this seems merely a matter of degree, not nature—we are plunged into Hobbes’s war of all against all.

The thinker perhaps most acutely aware of the paradox at the heart of the Modern world—namely that individuals have to agree to tolerate differences—was Émile Durkheim, considered below. Realizing that France of over a century ago was already in danger of fragmenting, he developed the optimistic view of “the cult of the individual” to replace the more absolute glue of pre-Modern Church and monarch, and to explain why things would hold together after all. This is the respect of each person for the individuality of all others, so that everyone accepts that differences will not only abound, but are actually the point of the system.

The Modern Age takes societal form in a liberal over-structure defined by tolerance of differences, a structure that is meant to contain countless conservative sub-groups. It offers a framework for the many different pursuits that compose it, rather like a sports park with pitches for the different games of soccer/football, American football, tennis, baseball, and track. But the problem is that the conservative point of view, such as any of these games within the framework expresses, does not necessarily accept as inevitable and certainly not as desirable a panoply of viewpoints: it holds that one viewpoint alone is legitimate. It’s just that it is not powerful enough to compel all others to that viewpoint. And it has to respect the whole. This is an additional component, not intrinsic to the individual game. Each particular viewpoint has to agree to not even try to use power to gain control, but to defer to the whole.

If these viewpoints are kept local enough, they do not threaten the over-structure, and indeed need its protection to continue to do what they do, say Jews or Quakers who only want to be left alone to worship as they choose. But what if they get big and powerful? This was James Madison’s fear in the Federalist Papers, Number 10, where he called them “cabals” and “factions.” He wanted to guard against any one of them growing powerful enough to try and take over the over-structure, as the Ayatollah Khomeini, who found refuge from the Shah in the liberal democracy of France, did when he returned to Iran. In France he laid low, as one of many, but his dream—which he realized in Iran—was to be the only one. Many factions are probably tempted to have the same dream, and not for elsewhere, but for right here. A liberal over-structure can tolerate a conservative sub-view (indeed the over-structure exists to make the sub-view possible) so long as it remains relatively small and one of many. If large and powerful, and if its members do not agree to their subordinate status with respect to the whole, it can take down the over-structure. In the US today, for example, an increasingly vocal minority wants to turn the country into a Christian theocracy, much as the Ayatollah wanted Iran to be a Muslim theocracy, and actualized his desire.

As I have argued in Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash, conservative ethics are expressed in terms of actions that all must take; for this reason, lists of absolutes such as the versions of the Mosaic Commandments are often conservative favorites.¹ They say what not to do, a limited number of things, not what to do, a much larger and open-ended group of actions. Moreover, it’s clear that their rules apply to everyone; the individual has only to avoid wrong actions. No discussion is possible. Liberal ethics, by contrast, are expressed in terms of actors: What is right for this person? Thus liberal ethics lead to discussion, because right actions are defined by specific circumstances: not “thou shalt not steal” but rather, Am I justified in stealing this bread to feed my family if I take it from people who won’t miss it? Conservative ethics lead to (the same) action or lack of action. Just do it. Or not. It’s clear, and discussion is just hot air and relativistic nonsense.

Thus the possibility has always existed in a democracy, the quintessential government form of the Modern Age, that absolutist (conservative) groups would attempt to take on the relativist (liberal) over-structure. What’s new in the USA, and in the West more generally, is that liberalism has now produced its own form of absolutism. We are now in the strange situation where not only conservative sub-groups, but liberal ones as well, have drifted from the notion of fealty to the collective toward the demand for absolute realization of their individual viewpoints. For liberal absolutisms, this means the demand that there be no tolerance for absolutist sub-groups at all. Relativism is the new absolute; if you hold to a set of other beliefs, you’re wrong and must be re-educated. We have lost, at least to some degree, the collective sense of the game that all must play; and instead emphasize, at least in extreme groups, the qualities that differentiate each of these from the other. Extreme left pulls down statues and demands action against “micro-aggressions” (because I am offended, you will change); extreme right attacks the US Capitol based on false claims of election fraud: they want their man in, not the one who actually won. Thus the extremes meet and join hands.

How seriously do these threaten the collective? Answers range from dismissive to alarmist. Western democracy hasn’t fallen apart. Of course the worst can happen: we have only to look at countries on the fringes of the West to see this, at Latin America, and to some d...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Problem
• 1. Bad Manners
• 2. Woody
• 3. Past Produces Present
• 4. Slavery
• 5. Explanations
• 6. Rituals
• 7. The Modern Age
• 8. Democracy
• 9. Durkheim
• 10. Groupthink
• 11. The Polyglot West
• 12. Changes
• 13. People and Pets
• 14. Reparations
• 15. Forty Years in the Wilderness
• Works Cited
• Index