The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,68

to grow up with television. And television, especially in the three-network era, allowed them to know that other baby boomers were sharing their experiences, and to know that the others knew that they knew. This common knowledge, as economists and logicians call it, gave rise to a horizontal web of solidarity that cut across the vertical ties to parents and authorities that had formerly isolated young people from one another and forced them to kowtow to their elders.115 Much like a disaffected population that feels its strength only when it assembles at a rally, baby boomers saw other young people like themselves in the audience of The Ed Sullivan Show grooving on the Rolling Stones and knew that every other young person in America was grooving at the same time, and knew that the others knew that they knew.

The baby boomers were bonded by another new technology of solidarity, first marketed by an obscure Japanese company called Sony: the transistor radio. The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios. I can still remember the thrill of tuning in to signals from New York radio stations bouncing off the late-night ionosphere into my bedroom in Montreal, listening to Motown and Dylan and the British invasion and psychedelia and feeling that something was happening here, but Mr. Jones didn’t know what it was.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times. But this decivilizing process was magnified by a trend that had been gathering momentum throughout the 20th century. The sociologist Cas Wouters, a translator and intellectual heir of Elias, has argued that after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process. The Civilizing Process had been a flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward. But as Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were leveled. The informalization affected the way people dressed, as they abandoned hats, gloves, ties, and dresses for casual sportswear. It affected the language, as people started to address their friends with first names instead of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss. And it could be seen in countless other ways in which speech and demeanor became less mannered and more spontaneous. 116 The stuffy high-society lady, like the Margaret Dumont character in the Marx Brothers movies, became a target of ridicule rather than emulation.

After having been steadily beaten down by the informalizing process, the elites then suffered a second hit to their legitimacy. The civil rights movement had exposed a moral blot on the American establishment, and as critics shone a light on other parts of society, more stains came into view. Among them were the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the pervasiveness of poverty, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the many illiberal military interventions, particularly the Vietnam War, and later the despoliation of the environment and the oppression of women and homosexuals. The stated enemy of the Western establishment, Marxism, gained prestige as it made inroads in third-world “liberation” movements, and it was increasingly embraced by bohemians and fashionable intellectuals. Surveys of popular opinion from the 1960s through the 1990s showed a plummeting of trust in every social institution.117

The leveling of hierarchies and the harsh scrutiny of the power structure were unstoppable and in many ways desirable. But one of the side effects was to undermine the prestige of aristocratic and bourgeois lifestyles that had, over the course of several centuries, become less violent than those of the working class and underclass. Instead of values trickling down from the court, they bubbled up from the street, a process that was later called “proletarianization” and “defining deviancy down.”118

These currents pushed against the civilizing tide in ways that were celebrated in the era’s popular culture. The backsliding, to be sure, did not originate in the two prime movers of Elias’s Civilizing Process. Government control did not retreat into anarchy, as it had in the American West and in newly independent third-world countries, nor did an economy based on commerce and specialization give way to feudalism and barter. But the next step in Elias’s sequence—the psychological change toward greater self-control and interdependence—came under steady assault in the counterculture of the generation that came of age in the 1960s.

A prime target