The civilizing-process myth is entrenched common sense backed by a broad intellectual coalition.
Evidence
The etiological myth deeply entrenched in the self-consciousness of our Western society is the morally elevating story of humanity emerging from pre-social barbarity. This myth lent stimulus and popularity to, and in turn was given a learned and sophisticated support by, quite a few influential sociological theories and historical narratives; the link most recently illustrated by the burst of prominence and overnight success of the Elias’s presentation of the ‘civilizing process’. … By and large, lay opinion resents all challenge to the myth. Its resistance is backed, moreover, by a broad coalition of respectable learned opinions which contains such powerful authorities as the ‘Whig view’ of history as the victorious struggle between reason and superstition; Weber’s vision of rationalization as a movement toward achieving more for less effort; psychoanalytical promise to debunk, prise off and tame the animal in man; Marx’s grand prophecy of life and history coming under full control of the human species once it is freed from the presently debilitating parochialities; Elias’s portrayal of recent history as that of eliminating violence from daily life; and, above all, the chorus of experts who assure us that human problems are matters of wrong policies, and that right policies mean elimination of problems. Behind the alliance stands fast the modern ‘gardening’ state, viewing the society it rules as an object of designing, cultivating and weed-poisoning. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 69
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘gardening state’ here is a concept the reader will carry into later Islamophobia readings on state-managed population management; it also connects to Foucault’s biopolitics vocabulary already in the module scaffolding.
- DEFINE: Defines the ‘etiological myth’ of civilizing process and names its intellectual backers — a cornerstone concept for the module.