The Civilizing Process

State and civil society thus engaged in a pas de deux. Over the past four millennia, the state's role has expanded enormously—as we have seen here in the single sphere of crime control.

Though they are strikingly clever, no other primates could cooper­ate sufficiently to form a state. Humans are not happy cheek by jowl on long-haul flights, but three hundred chimps crowded together in similar circumstances would tear each other apart.⁴⁴ Elias's civi­lizing process is arguably but the tip of a massive evolutionary iceberg of behavioral adjustment that has brought forth today's ultrasociable humans.

This has not been a simple trade-off across the board. From the state's perspective, some forms of antisocial behavior were best tackled through voluntary means. Others required a bit of steel. One could in theory mandate healthy living to achieve public­health goals, and to some extent we still do. Public smoking is banned today in the most liberal societies, as it once was in auto­cratic eighteenth-century Prussia. But on the whole states seek to convince citizens to adopt healthy habits. They do not mandate daily push-ups or muesli for breakfast.

Yet not every public good can be achieved by jollying along wor­thy habits. Vaccination has to be required and enforced, lest free riders undermine herd immunity. Even the most law-abiding soci­eties, with few citizens in jail, have kept their police departments. The better its policing, the less the state has to rely on prison. Yet on the whole the relationship between authority and citizen has become less enforced and more voluntarily compliant. Today, taxes are deducted at source or via bank transfer and not wrested in kind from barns and lofts by collectors' thugs. Military recruits muster up; they are no longer dragged off at bayonet point.⁴⁵ The triumph of informal behavioral molding is confirmed more than one hun­dred thousand times daily in each airplane safety briefing. Passen­gers politely ignore the stewards' demonstrations, idly wondering, “Where be this mythical creature who in this day boards a plane actually ignorant of how to buckle a safety belt?”

Today we are nearly all socialized into the conduct that makes dense metropolitan life tolerable and safe.

Spitting, too, was once regarded as an irrepressible natural instinct, like breathing or urinating. In the 1890s, Chicago streets could be walked only gingerly, picking one's way among the expectorations. The trams were even worse.⁵² Nineteenth-century public-health offi­cials, rightly fearing that public spitting spread tuberculosis, cam­paigned against it.

In other aspects of personal hygiene, we have come far from even our recent forbears. Asians have long adopted modern habits, but among Europeans washing and cleanliness were until recently con­sidered enervating and debilitating.⁵⁴ Oral hygiene today is a $40 billion industry. But cleansing teeth—except perhaps using urine, as the Dutch thought was practiced among the Spanish in the 1500s—was uncommon before the twentieth century.⁵⁵ Today, any­one as dirty as many Europeans were even in the 1950s would be ostracized. In those days, an English landlady could eject an Ameri­can tenant who bathed daily—not so much for wasting water but for the contagious dermatological disease self-evidently betrayed by such peculiar behavior. Even English toffs, who self-identify by scorning bourgeois propriety, are reasonably clean these days. Prin­cess Margaret once humiliated one of her ladies in waiting by giving her a loo brush for Christmas, having noticed the absence of one while visiting her home.⁵⁶ In fact, the mortified lady—as posh of course as the princess herself—had merely hidden it while Margaret was staying, too embarrassed to leave it out in the open because of the implied suggestion that a royal might be expected—Gandhi- like—to scrub her own toilet.

To epater les bourgeois, hippies of the 1960s made a virtue of being smelly. More recently, habits have become so squeakily clean that our children's asthmas and allergies are likely aggravated because their immune systems simply lack practice on now banished micro­organisms.

Belching, farting, and urinating in public, once commonplace, are now frowned upon or illegal. Kibbutzniks in postwar Israel delib­erately upended the dining rituals of the shtetl. To signal rejection of their proper upbringing, they ate communally, unceremoniously, and each at their own pace.⁵⁸ While eating habits are informalizing everywhere, the purely bodily aspects have tightened up. We may eat dinner off paper plates, supine on the couch before the television, but we have also coined a word, misophonia, for the agony of dis­gust that others' open-mouthed chewing now inflicts. Something as biologically unremarkable as mouth breathing is today lambasted as uncouth and evolutionarily harmful.⁵⁹ Drinking to oblivion on Sat­urday nights used to be commonplace in the northern and eastern European countryside, accompanied by swaggering and fisticuffs. In those nations that drink, alcohol consumption remains high, but some binge-drinking cultures are shifting to more Mediterranean habits, favoring beer or wine over spirits and consuming more mod­erately with meals.⁶⁰ Seatbelts were installed in cars beginning in the late 1960s, and their use was required globally as of the mid-1980s. Thirty years later, compliance (front-seat use) has become largely universal.

Gay sexuality has been normalized over the past several decades. In the 1970s, in the first flush of gay liberation but before the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s, male homosexuals celebrated their new­found erotic freedoms with festive abandon—their polymorphous hookups and unabashed promiscuity. The gay bathhouse culture of San Francisco and New York, with its pansexual anonymous delights, explicitly challenged the bodily restrictions of monoga­mous heteronormative society. As a visiting professor at Berkeley, Foucault may have consciously risked a va banque wager between prudently avoiding HIV infection and the Dionysian delights of

San Francisco's bathhouses.⁶² This was the world of John Rechy and his vision of gays as erotic outlaws, defiantly upending convention­ality. Promiscuity was then seen as the core of gay male sexual prac­tice, the “righteous form of revolution.”⁶³

This revolution was, alas, an ambition cruelly dashed by AIDS and the gradual realization that unprotected promiscuity was epide- miologically risky.⁶⁴ Forty years on, the hot topics of debate are no longer glory holes, doors on bathhouse cubicles, or condom use but gay marriage. Safe sex has gone from being regarded as the public­health authorities' attempt to squelch gay self-expression to the price of admission for intercourse. Once resisted as a plot hatched by sexual Quislings to bring homosexuals to heel, gay marriage is now considered a major rights victory for formerly shunned out­siders. By abandoning the riskiest sexual practices, male gays were able to stave off coercive public-health interventions during the AIDS epidemic. They won broad social acceptance as a group distin­guished by the object of their sexual desire but no longer meaning­fully by their erotic practices. Heteronormatized, gaydom became accepted precisely because it had domesticated itself.

Besides producing ever cleaner and more circumspect citizens, the interaction of law and socialization in the civilizing process also led to behavioral shifts more closely related to our theme here and ultimately more important. We have followed the process by which law's adjudication and enforcement became the state's man­date, removing such functions from the hands of kin and commu­nity. For most of history, civil society was crime's primary punisher. Once the state began playing a role, too, civil society did not of course vanish, but the division of labor between the two parties changed. Formal detection, adjudication, and enforcement fell to the authorities. Civil society was relegated to socializing humans into citizenship—in effect ensuring that they would intersect with formal sanctions only rarely. Meeting the state halfway, civil society's ability to regulate itself meant the modern state grew less repressive and interventionist. Political freedom was arguably the reward for self-discipline.