likely to get in trouble with the law—steeply discount the future, and respond more to certain and immediate punishments than to hypothetical and delayed ones.176 The other is that people conceive of their relationships with other people and institutions in moral terms, categorizing them either as contests of raw dominance or as contracts governed by reciprocity and fairness.177 Steven Alm, a judge who devised a “probation with enforcement” program, summed up the reason for the program’s success: “When the system isn’t consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn’t like me, or, Someone’s prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way.”178
The newer offensive to tamp down violence also aims to enhance the habits of empathy and self-control that are the internal enforcers of the Civilizing Process. The Boston effort was named the TenPoint Coalition after a manifesto with ten stated goals, such as to “Promote and campaign for a cultural shift to help reduce youth violence within the Black community, both physically and verbally, by initiating conversations, introspection and reflection on the thoughts and actions that hold us back as a people, individually and collectively.” One of the programs with which it has joined forces, Operation Ceasefire, was explicitly designed by David Kennedy to implement Immanuel Kant’s credo that “morality predicated on external pressures alone is never sufficient.”179 The journalist John Seabrook describes one of its empathy-building events:At the one I attended, there was a palpable, almost evangelical desire to make the experience transformative for the gangbangers. An older ex–gang member named Arthur Phelps, whom everyone called Pops, wheeled a thirty-seven-year-old woman in a wheelchair to the center of the room. Her name was Margaret Long, and she was paralyzed from the chest down. “Seventeen years ago, I shot this woman,” Phelps said, weeping. “And I live with that every day of my life.” Then Long cried out, “And I go to the bathroom in a bag,” and she snatched out the colostomy bag from inside the pocket of her wheelchair and held it up while the young men stared in horror. When the final speaker, a street worker named Aaron Pullins III, yelled, “Your house is on fire! Your building is burning! You’ve got to save yourselves! Stand up!,” three-quarters of the group jumped to their feet, as if they had been jerked up like puppets on strings.180
The 1990s civilizing offensive also sought to glorify the values of responsibility that make a life of violence less appealing. Two highly publicized rallies in the nation’s capital, one organized by black men, one by white, affirmed the obligation of men to support their children: Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March, and a march by the Promise Keepers, a conservative Christian movement. Though both movements had unsavory streaks of ethnocentrism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism, their historical significance lay in the larger recivilizing process they exemplified. In The Great Disruption, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama notes that as rates of violence went down in the 1990s, so did most other indicators of social pathology, such as divorce, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancy, dropping out of school, sexually transmitted disease, and teenage auto and gun accidents.181
The recivilizing process of the past two decades is not just a resumption of the currents that have swept the West since the Middle Ages. For one thing, unlike the original Civilizing Process, which was a by-product of the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce, the recent crime decline has largely come from civilizing offensives that were consciously designed to enhance people’s well-being. Also new is a dissociation between the superficial trappings of civilization and the habits of empathy and self-control that we care the most about.
One way in which the 1990s did not overturn the decivilization of the 1960s is in popular culture. Many of the popular musicians in recent genres such as punk, metal, goth, grunge, gangsta, and hip-hop make the Rolling Stones look like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Hollywood movies are bloodier than ever, unlimited pornography is a mouse-click away, and an entirely new form of violent entertainment, video games, has become a major pastime. Yet as these signs of decadence proliferated in the culture, violence went down in real life. The recivilizing process somehow managed to reverse the tide of social dysfunction without turning the cultural clock back to Ozzie and Harriet. The other evening I was riding a crowded Boston subway car and saw a