Modern civility is the codified displacement of raw violence into regulated social order.

Evidence

Respect for rules, censorship of feelings, and control of spontaneous impulses marked dominant Enlightenment conceptions of rationality (or at least one of its dominant strains). As Norbert Elias has long pointed out, Enlightenment rationality thus constituted – and took itself to be constituting – a dramatic shift from the affective states promoted first by religious and then by absolutist states. Civility, Elias emphasizes, is inseparable from, really a complex product of, the transformation of warrior (and I would add church-dominated) into court society with the attendant shifts and persisting postulations in morals and manners, sensitivities and sensibilities. … As modern “enlightened” European states accordingly solidified under bourgeois control and direction, refinement, urbanity, sociability and courtesy – in short, civility – became standards of civil behavior in “imitation of the manners of court nobility,” as Mbembe puts it. Increasingly codified in moral and legal arrangements and orders, these central social virtues (refinement, urbanity, sociability, courtesy) became linked to conceptions of the social contract taking hold of the popular political imagination about this time. They became synonymous with – or at least characteristic descriptions or elaborations of – respect for private property legally mandated, and so of the grounds of a civil society. Policing, schooling, and emphasis on legality as modes of social order came to displace raw physical violence as principal modes of civil and state control by the latter half of the nineteenth century. Civil society thus becomes the codification, the socialization, of violence rendered invisible, its “displacement,” to use Homi Bhabha’s sly phrase. The architecture of states of embedded violence (individualized and institutionalized) rendered standardized relations and modes of violence regular even as they become regulated, structurally embedded, in a word, civil. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in institutionalized violence and Elias’s civilizing process; also parallels the moral-panic work on class-coded social norms.
• DEFINE: Defines civility as a product of warrior-to-court society transformation, not as natural good manners.