The Civilizing Process

"Elias is yet another person who also fled the Nazis! But, instead of going to America, he went to England. He developed his own sociological theories in England, which were not really recognised until the late 1960s when his book was translated. It had a profound influence on sociology, particularly in the UK and to a certain extent in the States. He studied the ways in which people were civilised according to the values and principles of ruling classes. His focus was on the 17th century and early part of the 18th century. He demonstrated that the rules and regulations which governed how people dress and eat and generally run their lives were part of a gradual evolving process which conditioned people to behave in certain ways. These rules came from the French Court and if you didn’t know them, you were considered non-civilised or illiterate, and you could not find acceptance in high society. This process continues today in very subtle ways. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It was important to me because most literary fairy tales originated during the 15th and 16th centuries, and when they came into being, there were many books written about courtly manners. There was a real vogue for fairy tales in France, and when you study them you can see to what extent writers used them to comment on the way people lived according to arbitrary rules and regulations and the types of relations they had. The fairy tales were discourses about the civilising process in Europe up until that time, and I think to a great extent that these discourses persist up until today. Fairy tales are very persistent. In fact I have just written a long essay in which I liken the genre of fairy tales to a whale that ploughs through the ocean swallowing all the little fish that are around it, and it just becomes larger and larger. And in fact, the fairy tale is very difficult to define today because the genre encompasses film, internet, opera, musicals, photography, painting, illustrations, theatre, commercials – there are all types of fairy-tale forms that essentially show to what extent fairy tales stamp our lives on a daily basis. It has something to do with the fact that we are trying metaphorically to gain distance from our lives while at the same time to achieve some kind of happiness and meaning out of life. Fairy tales have developed as means of communication that enable us to get a hold on problems that we have and ways to resolve them. I have argued in some of my books that fairy tales deal with very serious problems such as rape in Little Red Riding Hood , the abandonment of children in Hansel and Gretel , the abuse of stepchildren in Cinderella , and the self-sacrifice of women demanded by a patriarchal society in Beauty and the Beast . I recently adapted the thesis of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene . In his final chapter he develops this notion that not only are genes replicated in the world, but there are also cultural artefacts which he calls memes that latch on to our brains and are stored in our memory because they are so very relevant to our daily struggles. We replicate them because they lend meaning to our lives. Indeed, there is something about this notion that shows how important fairy tales are throughout the world. They persist in diverse forms because we live them and try to live them. Fairy tales are more real than we realise and more relevant for adapting to a rapidly changing world than we realise."