In his landmark 2001 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker offered some surprising observations about societal progress.
Despite a widespread nostalgia for a simple past that we’ve lost, life is actually much better today—more peaceful, more prosperous. The chance of dying by homicide has decreased by a hundredfold from some of those “simpler times” that we romanticize. The reality is that it was every man and woman and child for himself or herself.
And the development of manners, Pinker and other experts have argued, had something to do with a widespread increase in peace and prosperity.
As European kings consolidated their power in medieval times, warring knights and nobles had to curry favor with them. Writes Pinker:
A man’s ticket to fortune was no longer being the baddest knight in the area but making a pilgrimage to the king’s court and currying favor with him and his entourage. The court, basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons, but sought responsible custodians to run its provinces. The nobles had to change their marketing. They had to cultivate their manners, so as not to offend the king’s minions, and their empathy, to understand what they wanted. The manners appropriate for the court came to be called “courtly” manners or “courtesy.” The etiquette guides, with their advice on where to place one’s nasal mucus, originated as manuals for how to behave in the king’s court.
Much of this theory of manners was formulated by the sociologist Norbert Elias in his book, The Civilizing Process. Pinker notes that Elias traced the manner in which courtesy “percolated down from aristocrats dealing with the court to the elite bourgeoisie dealing with the aristocrats, and from them to the rest of the middle class.”
Elias, historian Barbara Tuchman and others note that medieval culture initially gave even powerful men the ability to act like children—to impulsively lash out, to live without any physical or psychic restraints.
As Pinker notes, Elias “proposed that over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor— the readiness to take revenge— gave way to a culture of dignity— the readiness to control one’s emotions.
The great Erasmus and other leading lights penned etiquette manuals that gained wide circulation. The rules included such gems as, Don’t urinate in the hallway, Don’t use the tablecloth to blow your nose, Don’t use your handy personal knife to pop food into your mouth, and so on.
Pinker notes that those rules were underpinned by some timeless principles:
“Control your appetites; Delay gratification; Consider the sensibilities of others; Don’t act like a peasant; Distance yourself from your animal nature. And the penalty for these infractions was assumed to be internal: a sense of shame.”
Intriguingly, those rules had less to do with good hygiene than we might imagine. “An understanding of microbes and infection did not arrive until well into the 19th century,” Pinker says. “The only explicit rationales stated in the etiquette books are to avoid acting like a peasant or an animal and to avoid offending others.”
This civilizing process was long, slow and awkward. As author and cultural historian Henry Hitchings has noted, King David I of Scotland proposed citizens who learned to eat more properly should get a tax rebate. “Disappointingly,” Hitchings says, “that idea never caught on.”
The much-traveled Thomas Coryat introduced the table fork to Britain. “When he returned from Italy in 1608 with this fancy novelty,” Hitchings says, “he met with a torrent of ridicule.” But that idea did eventually catch on. And a quarter of a century later, he notes, the table fork reached America.
So what’s the 21st century equivalent of blowing one’s nose in the tablecloth or eating mashed potatoes with one’s hands? In a related post, I propose 27 rules of etiquette that can re-civilize us in our own time.
