Going up
Raymond Carr
The Civilizing Process Norbert Elias translated by Edmund Jephcolt (Blackwell £8.50) Why do we no longer look to see whether our chair has been fouled before we sit down to dinner? Why do we no longer wipe our noses in the table cloth? Unlike our mediaeval ancestors we do not fall, 'snorting like seals', on the communal dish, tearing the meat with our hands. We are civilized. We use forks, and some mediaeval habits — for instance holding our meat for the neighbour to sniff — would now be regarded as a sign of lunacy.
To Norbert Elias changes in table manners are not part of the trivia of social history but of 'a very extensive transformation of human feelings and attitudes'. To use a fork is not merely an advance in eating technology, adopted without question once the instrument has been invented. The fork-using habit was laboriously developed in western society and strenuously resisted as a dangerous social innovation. When a Greek princess tried it out in eleventhcentury Venice, she was cursed by the church and afflicted with a repulsive illness which St Bonaventure regarded as 'the punishment of God'. That people gradually ceased to grab their food out of a common dish with their hands was part of a vaster social process through which, over the centuries, a wall has been built between one human body and another. Behaviour that had been tolerated in public came to be practised only in private. Civilization has meant that we shove behind the scenes all that reminds us of our 'animal side' — sex, urination etc.
With vast learning and great insight into the relationship between changing social structures and changing manners Elias traces the civilizing process as it gathers momentum in the sixteenth century. There is a constant upward shift in the threshold of embarrassment, especially about the bodily functions. Thus Erasmus, in what became the standard work on good behaviour (that the greatest mind of the age should write on how to use the napkin is an indication of the importance of manners in a changing society) still writes openly about matters we would not care to discourse on in public. 'Replace farts by coughs' is one of his maxims. The threshold of embarrassment moves. By the eighteenth century La Salle considers it impolite to emit wind 'from either above or below'. By the nineteenth century no writer on manners would have even thought of mentioning farting and recourse to prostitutes as Erasmus did. Western man has become civilized and ashamed. All natural functions have been privatized.
Fork-using, pressing the buttocks together to silence farts are all part of a socially conditioned 'new relationship of man to man'. Men, from the sixteenth century onwards, are more aware of the effect of their conduct on others. Civilization, in this sense, was imposed from above. For courtly societies refined manners are instruments of social distinctions; they cut the courtier off from the aspiring bourgeois and the vulgar peasant. Like refined speech (remember the `U' and 'Non-U' debate?) refined manners are accepted just because that is the way the swells behave. Judgements in such matters are apodectic. Good manners are never, in their formative stage, justified on rational grounds. We have to wait for the nineteenth century before spitting is condemned on grounds of public health as opposed to its being something that well brought up people simply do not do. Yet spitting went on for a long time (it was declared permissible in sixteenthcentury manuals on manners provided the spittle was trod under foot) and Elias suggests that it has relatively recently been replaced by cigarette smoking as a reliever of tension. If government health warnings have any effect then perhaps we shall witness a revival of the spittoon industry.
Elias is at his best — and his best is very good indeed — when discussing the consequences for the relations between modern parents and their children of the civilizing process seen as the internalising of a battery of restraints and the privatizing of behaviour — particularly regarding sexual relations. Mediaeval society, violent and convulsive though it was, was in a sense as childlike and uninhibited as children are. Now inhibitions about our bodily functions have become so fiercely internalized that the practises these inhibitions restrain through shame cannot even be mentioned in public.
As Elias argues repeatedly, we adults may have forgotten the long and painful road that our society has travelled on the way to civilization. Through his parents' admonitions and behaviour the child is forced, in the family, to run through the whole process of civilization, which took his society centuries, in a few brief years. The compulsive shame of the adult is forced on the child in a series of unquestionable edicts or by discreet silences. Sexual enlightenment becomes an acute problem for parents. Shame, repression, inhibition envelops all. As the process of civilization has advanced, so the income of psychoanalysts has grown.
This extraordinary book, with its insights of genius, was conceived in the Thirties. Is the process of civilization, that process by which, in modern society, the delicatesse of court manners was finally internalised, gone into reverse? Are we going back to the uninhibited Middle Ages? That great instrument for the internalisation of the precepts of civilisation, the nuclear family, WhSopwecatnattsorno5 wAutgousimt iit: is breaking the Fifties with their cultivated cockneY twang? Were they portents of yet annth.er advance of democracy? The shame barrier s getting lower every day. Modern reader
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Erasmus embarrassing. farts 0
would, perhaps, no longer find the r
If all this means we shall need fewer Ps,...t choanalysts I can only shout 'Hoorah'. beware. De Sade, as a social scientist, e if out to discover how men would behavf the. restraints imposed by the processes ° civilization were removed. Look what 118Ppened. One last reflection. I fear the effect ef this book on budding graduate students. 1 tbre see an avalanche of theses on subjects a: diverse as the infidelity. of concubines and the decline of the button boot. Pelagic minds, floating free like Elias's, can see the profound and subtle connections betweeet the minutiae of human behaviour allies grea . shifts in social structures and Benthic minds may not rise above tbe that always threatens to engulf social his tory.
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