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It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. -- Sigmund Freud

For as long as I have known how to eat with utensils, I have struggled with the rule of table manners that says that you may not guide food onto your fork with your knife. To be sure, I have the dexterity to capture chunks of food that have enough mass to stay put as I scoot my fork under them. But my feeble cerebellum is no match for finely diced cubes or slippery little spheres that ricochet and roll at the touch of the tines. I chase them around the plate, desperately seeking a ridge or a slope that will give me the needed purchase, hoping they will not reach escape velocity and come to rest on the tablecloth. On occasion I have seized the moment when my dining companion glances away and have placed my knife to block their getaway before she turns back to catch me in this faux pas. Anything to avoid the ignominy, the boorishness, the intolerable uncouthness of using a knife for some purpose other than cutting. Give me a lever long enough, said Archimedes, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. But if he knew his table manners, he could not have moved some peas onto his fork with his knife!

Elias was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroctaw, Poland), and studied sociology and the history of science. He fled Germany in 1933 because he was Jewish, was detained in a British camp in 1940 because he was German, and lost both parents to the Holocaust. On top of these tragedies, Nazism brought one more into his life: his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, was published in Germany in 1939, a time when the very idea seemed like a bad joke. Elias vagabonded from one university to another, mostly teaching night school, and retrained as a psychotherapist before settling down at the University of Leicester, where he taught until his retirement in 1962. He emerged from obscurity in 1969 when The Civilizing Process was published in English translation, and he was recognized as a major figure only in the last decade of his life, when an astonishing fact came to light. The discovery was not about the rationale behind table manners but about the history of homicide.

I remember, as a child, questioning this pointless prohibition. What is so terrible, I asked, about using your silverware in an efficient and perfectly sanitary way? It's not as if I were asking to eat mashed potatoes with my hands. I lost the argument, as all children do, when faced with the rejoinder "Because I said so," and for decades I silently grumbled about the unintelligibility of the rules of etiquette. Then one day, while doing research for this book, the scales fell from my eyes, the enigma evaporated, and I forever put aside my resentment of the no-knife rule. I owe this epiphany to the most important thinker you have never heard of, Norbert Elias (1897-1990).

The graph stunned almost everyone who saw it (including me -- as I mentioned in the preface, it was the seed that grew into this book). The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present. When I surveyed perceptions of violence in an Internet questionnaire, people guessed that 20th-century England was about 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England. In fact it was 95 percent less violent.

In 1981 the political scientist Ted Robert Gurr, using old court and county records, calculated thirty estimates of homicide rates at various times in English history, combined them with modern records from London, and plotted them on a graph. I've reproduced it in figure 3-1, using a logarithmic scale in which the same vertical distance separates 1 from 10, 10 from 100, and 100 from 1000. The rate is calculated in the same way as in the preceding chapter, namely the number of killings per 100,000 people per year. The log scale is necessary because the homicide rate declined so precipitously. The graph shows that from the 13th century to the 20th, homicide in various parts of England plummeted by a factor of ten, fifty, and in some cases a hundred -- for example, from 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year in 14th-century Oxford to less than 1 homicide per 100,000 in mid-20th-century London.

FIGURE 3-1: Homicide rates in England, 1200-2000: Gurr's 1981 estimates

This chapter is about the decline of homicide in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, and its counterparts and counterexamples in other times and places. I have borrowed the title of the chapter from Elias because he was the only major social thinker with a theory that could explain it.

Source: Data from Gurr, 1981, pp. 303-4, 313.