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January 1 - January 1, 2020
He claimed only that they toned up a mental faculty that had always been a part of human nature but which the medievals had underused.
King Henry I redefined
homicide as an offense against the state
The brilliance of the plan was that the wergild (often the offender’s entire assets, together with additional money rounded up from his family) went to the king instead of to the family of the victim.
A man’s ticket to fortune was no longer being the baddest knight in the area
The court, basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons,
Warriors to courtiers.
a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation
The two triggers of the Civilizing Process—the Leviathan and gentle commerce—are related. The positive-sum cooperation of commerce flourishes best inside a big tent presided over by a Leviathan.
The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.”
The most common motives for homicide are moralistic: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel,
These observations overturn many dogmas about violence. One is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.
many lower-status people—the poor, the uneducated, the unmarried, and members of minority groups – are effectively stateless.
The historical Civilizing Process, in other words, did not eliminate violence, but it did relegate it to the socioeconomic margins.
The overall homicide rate for the entire world, ignoring the division into countries, was estimated by the WHO in 2000 as 8.8 per 100,000 per year.67 Both estimates compare favorably to the triple-digit values for pre-state societies and the double-digit values for medieval Europe.
the governance vacuum left by instant decolonization put the Papuans through a decivilizing process that left them with neither traditional norms nor modern third-party enforcement.
a civilizing offensive is a deliberate effort by sectors of a community (often women, elders, or clergy) to tame the Rambos and Raskols and restore civilized life.
substitute an ethic of forgiveness for the ethic of revenge.
suggests that once an effective government has pacified the populace from the 100 to the 10 range, additional reductions depend on the degree to which people accept the legitimacy of the government, its laws, and the social order.
communities of lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honor (sometimes called “the code of the streets”) to defend their interests rather calling in the law.
In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms
The South’s reliance on self-help justice
the Scots-Irish brought their culture of honor with them and kept it alive when they took up herding in the South’s mountainous frontier.
The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.102 Not only are males the more competitive sex in most mammalian species, but with Homo sapiens a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood.
frontier violence
liquor.
young men are civilized by women
The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.
DECIVILIZATION IN THE 1960s
Of course, to escape the logical circle in which people are said to be violent because they live in a violent culture, it’s necessary to identify an exogenous cause for the cultural change.
not because of the absolute numbers of young people but because of their relative numbers.
A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds
after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process.
Instead of values trickling down from the court, they bubbled up from the street, a process that was later called “proletarianization”
a rolling stone.
three icons of the culture:
Do we now have to—gulp—admit they were right? Can we connect the values of 1960s popular culture to the actual rise in violent crimes that accompanied them?
contraband drugs, in which self-help justice is the only way to enforce property rights.
“Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.”)
The Great Crime Decline of the 1990s was part of a change in sensibilities that can fairly be called a recivilizing process. To start with, some of the goofier ideas of the 1960s had lost their appeal.
The recivilizing process somehow managed to reverse the tide of social dysfunction without turning the cultural clock back
(In this regard they were more sophisticated than the boomers in their youth, who treated the drivel of rock musicians as serious political philosophy.)
many members of the middle class have become “bourgeois bohemians” who affect the look of people at the fringes of society while living a thoroughly conventional lifestyle.
If our first nature consists of the evolved motives that govern life in a state of nature, and our second nature consists of the ingrained habits of a civilized society, then our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture’s norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.” Maybe the time has even come when I can use a knife to push peas onto my fork.
If the opening of this chapter has been graphic, it is only to remind you of the realities of the era that the Enlightenment put to an end.
the bloodthirsty-god hypothesis is incorrect.
more affluent and predictable life erodes people’s fatalism and elevates their valuation of other people’s lives.
A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with “Love thy neighbor” and “All men are created equal,” is the one on the bumper sticker: “Shit happens.”
The other pressure is harder to explain but just as forceful: an increased valuation of human life and happiness.
