{"id":1641,"date":"2018-10-03T15:10:31","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T15:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2018-10-03T15:11:34","modified_gmt":"2018-10-03T15:11:34","slug":"the-de-civilising-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/2018\/10\/03\/the-de-civilising-process\/","title":{"rendered":"The de-civilising process"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reading recommended by Romano Pisciotti<\/div>\n
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RELUCTANT GLOBAL CITIZEN<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The de-civilising process<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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Adrian Wooldridge laments the collapse of manners<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In his new book, \u201cIn Pursuit of Civility\u201d, British historian Keith Thomas tells the story of the most benign developments of the past 500 years: the spread of civilised manners. In the 16th and 17th centuries many people behaved like barbarians. They delighted in public hangings and torture. They stank to high heaven. Samuel Pepys defecated in a chimney. Josiah Pullen, vice-principal of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, urinated while showing a lady around his college, \u201cstill holding the lady fast by the hand\u201d. It took centuries of painstaking effort \u2013 sermons, etiquette manuals and stern lectures \u2013 to convert them into civilised human beings.<\/p>\n

Reading Thomas\u2019s book on a train recently I was gripped by a terrible realisation: everything our forebears worked so hard to achieve is now reversing. A process that took centuries has been undone in just a few decades.<\/p>\n

There is no better place to observe the collapse of manners than on mass transport. The most basic move in the civilising process was to make a distinction between the public and the private: persuading people to defecate in lavatories rather than chimneys and eat at regular times in designated places, not whenever or wherever the mood took them. Yet today city streets reek of urine and trains smell of fast food. I recently had the misfortune to sit next to a quivering man-mountain on a train who proceeded to slurp a Coke, demolish a Big Mac, munch fries and spill ketchup onto his beard while giggling at a film on his super-sized iPad. His only concession to the fact that he wasn\u2019t in his own sitting room was to wear headphones.<\/p>\n

Overnight flights are worse. I\u2019ve never witnessed anybody urinating on the back of an airline seat, as apparently happened on a Frontier Airlines plane this May. But I\u2019ve watched a man next to me floss his teeth and then carefully place the thread on the tray table, another do a vigorous push-up routine in the corridor, and a modern-day Henry VIII discard his chicken bones on the floor.<\/p>\n

Enlightenment philosophers were convinced that the great engines of modernity \u2013 urbanisation, commerce and travel \u2013 would also spread civilisation. Commerce was supposed to polish people\u2019s manners as well as fill their pockets. The closer association of people with each other would allow the masses to learn refinement. Today those very engines are turning against the civilising process. San Francisco is at the centre of the biggest creation of wealth on the planet, yet its streets are often littered with faeces, garbage and syringes.<\/p>\n

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The people who were supposed to act as guardians of high culture have collectively turned against it. Psychotherapists disparage self-restraint as a sign of unhealthy hang-ups. Academics are now so keen to denounce bourgeois civilisation as a tool of exploitation, patriarchy and\/or misogyny that it can only be a matter of time before they start behaving like Josiah Pullen. One Cambridge economist, Victoria Bateman, turned up to a faculty meeting naked in protest at Britain\u2019s vote to leave the EU<\/small>. No wonder that today\u2019s young, the most educated generation in history, are more likely to model their style on the urban underclass than on yesterday\u2019s educated elite \u2013 hence the spread of tattoos, piercings and beards.<\/p>\n

Civilisational decline is contagious: however hard you try to preserve your own manners you can\u2019t resist the general trend. Make way for someone in a queue at Starbucks and you\u2019ll have to wait ages as they order some ridiculously convoluted drink and then take the only free table. Keep the seat next to you clear on a train and you\u2019ll find yourself sitting next to somebody who decides to treat it like their own sofa.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever give in to the fashion for beards and tattoos, let alone turning up to meetings naked. But I\u2019ve noticed that I increasingly circumvent the normal rules of politeness in a desperate attempt to keep going. I carry a pair of headphones with me at all times to insulate myself from the noise of my neighbours. I sprint ahead if I see any possible competitors approaching the queue for coffee. And I\u2019ve graduated from putting my bag on the seat next to me on a train to a more cunning technique: I leave a copy of Jack Rosewood\u2019s \u201cThe Big Book of Serial Killers\u201d on the chair and smile manically at anyone who comes anywhere near. So far the serial-killer strategy has worked remarkably well.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Adrian Wooldridge<\/a><\/strong>is political editor and Bagehot columnist at\u00a0The Economist<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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THE ECONOMIST<\/a><\/p>\n

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Reading recommended by Romano Pisciotti RELUCTANT GLOBAL CITIZEN The de-civilising process Adrian Wooldridge laments the collapse of manners In his new book, \u201cIn Pursuit of Civility\u201d, British historian Keith Thomas tells the story of the most benign developments of the past 500 years: the spread of civilised manners. In the 16th and 17th centuries many … Continua a leggere The de-civilising process<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1643,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[621,1],"tags":[1197,5,41],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pisciotti","category-uncategorized","tag-de-civilising-process","tag-pisciotti","tag-romano-pisciotti"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1647,"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/1647"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romanopisciotti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}