The titles of the chapters in the first volume of this two volume book on the civilizing process, on the process of civilization, are surprising if you expected a work of sociological theory. Let me quote the titles of chapters four to ten on behavior at table, that's the chapter that includes paragraphs dedicated to use of the fork and the knife. Changes and attitudes towards the natural functions. That is a chapter on the behavioral codes surrounding urinating and defecating. On blowing one's nose, on spitting, on behavior in the bedroom, changes in attitudes towards the relations between men and women, on changes in aggressiveness. Now in those chapters you will read about how people thought that you should blow your nose in the 16th century or in the 17th century in such a way that you wouldn't annoy other people, or how to manipulate your knife at the dinner table in a such way that it doesn't seem to be an act of aggression. Reading those chapters overloaded with anecdotical evidence that sometimes will make you blush, or giggle, or even laugh out loud is a pleasure in itself. And for some time this has in fact been the aspect of the book that received the most attention, especially when it describes changes in sexuality. For example, changes in the attitude towards the display of nudity. Some historians who studied sexual habits in the 17th and the 18th century, were very happy with this book. A book, by the way, that became popular right at the moment when the sexual revolution was getting underway. Elias used all kinds of sources apart from those etiquette books. He looks, for example, very carefully at paintings and book illustrations, noticing small details that escape an eye that is not sociologically trained. In fact, Elias is in this book a very interesting methodologist who used sources that had often been overlooked. His use, for example, of those etiquette books is an interesting innovation, but all of that is not the most important thing that the author wanted to do. First of all, he wanted to show that behind all those prescriptions, we can discern a general process, a movement into a certain direction. Now that civilizing process is, so to speak, a blind process. It's not planned by anybody, it is unforeseen, unintended, and for a long period of time, it also remained the unrecognized outcome of the actions of millions of people over a period of several centuries. And still, it has its own structure, its own dynamics. Now, Elias is an atheistic author. He cannot invoke any kind of heavenly intervention here. So we are left with, in fact, two big questions. The first one is, of course, what is the direction of this process, and the second one is, assuming that nobody plans that process, how can we then explain that it went in that direction over such a long period of time, over several centuries and composing many generations? Okay first of all, what is civilization? The process of civilization is not a process of increasing control over the urges and impulses as is often thought. It's not the process of suppressing spontaneous emotions under all circumstances. Elias says that in this process behavioral controls become more generalized, more stable, more differentiated. People learn how to manage, how to organize their emotional impulses in a wide variety of situations. For example, when you sit at the dinner table surrounded by people from the highest social strata, you discipline yourself in a certain way that is very different from how you behave when you are in a bar with your friends, or when you are in a classroom at the university, or when you are lying on the couch with the one you love. The civilizing process forces people to differentiate their behavioral possibilities more and more, to take the social circumstances into account, to make an estimation of the type of people that surround you. To judge what kind of behavior is expected in a particular situation from you, to reflexively monitor the social context you're in, and then to steer your emotions accordingly, and when you are very good at it, you will receive valuable social rewards. When you make many errors in this regard, those social prices will escape you. So it's not so much a matter of suppressing your impulses, it's a matter of organizing, streamlining, using and sometimes also hiding them, in a way that corresponds with social context. You can constantly an external pressure, an external social constraint, a [FOREIGN] in German, that forces to constrict kind of sociological definition of the situation, and to organize the manifestation of your impulses accordingly. During the civilizing process, people are more and more trained to do this, and after some generations it becomes a part of their habitus, a kind of self steering mechanism that becomes automatical, that you don't even realize when you are doing, what you are doing. That is when self constraint, [FOREIGN], begins to supplement the external constraints. The internal controls do not replace social constraints from the outside, but the external controls force you to increase control over yourself. And if you make a big mistake, you will feel ashamed. And if somebody else makes a blatant error, you will feel a kind of embarrassment, as if you were in his place. And that is why, from now on, the restroom is locked. The bathroom is locked. There is a lock on the bedroom door of the parents, because even in their domestic living arrangements, people now want to avoid anything that could lead to embarrassment, to shame and repugnance. We can observe here a tendency to push potentially unsettling behavior offstage, so to say, or behind the scenes, into the wings. Those are metaphors metaphors taken from the world of the theater. Metaphors, by the way, that became very important in the 50s in the works of the American sociologist Irving Goffman. Irving Goffman also loved to write about front stage behavior and back stage behavior. And he did that long before he had ever heard of the word of Norbit Elias.
