The Civilizing Process

...not merely the public realm but the NHaven in a Heartless World, Christ- Culprits and malefactors abound in darkest corners of private life, formerly opher L4sch, a distinguished observer Haven in a Heartless World...

...As the heartless public world But target in seeing essential links between is Lasch convincing-is his increasingly invades our private and applied policy sciences, the so-called most hallowed havens they, too, are "scientific study of society," and new rendered heartless or survive as pitifully JOHN F. KENNEDY and more sophisticated forms of inadequate atavisms, futile as bulwarks Catholic and humanist technological control...

...Perhaps Lasch de- John F. Kennedy, Mr...

...not Jean Bettike Ellshtain ings in every sphere and walk of life...

...all self-righteous and priggish forces historical insight to realize that he was ognize their significance, something in- of organized virtue...

...By pointing to the history of our ture...

...In volume II, are no less rational, we can easily fall century manual of etiquette observes, it, scheduled to appear in translation later prey to a facile relativism which denies is unseemly to blow one's nose into the this year, Elias explains the mechanism that there are qualitative differences tablecloth...

...for a book dealing with writers in loyal to his church and patient with his we have learned to be embarrassed and America...

...But the result of all -Andrew M. Greeley those post-Freudian revisionists who the hyperbole is that Lasch's characteri- $12.95 bowdlerized psychoanalytic theory in zation of the present represents too order to make it more palatable or comwholesale a condemnation and too bitter patible with a number of political HUMANHOOD a denunciation to be fully convincing...

...Lasch is a bold school whose commitment to a superfi- "Albert Menendez explores thinker who is willing to walk to the edge with skill, insight, and sympacial brand of environmental determinism of the abyss and peer over, a journey thy the religious dimension of and learning theory which led to a stress John F. Kennedy...

...more than a by-product of social condiculture is the result of an unregulated But "good behavior" is not naturally tioning...

...ConUnder the Lasch fronted with this roll call of horrors Lasch could not go on to proffer any hope that BAYER I N A HEARTLESS WORLD: place...

...schools and social welfare socialization or subjected the family to weak holdout against the total victory of increasingly effective control," one is agencies...

...now been subjected to social direction...

...He finds in the family a last, feminism...

...179) Not much has been left out...

...insidious modes of social control force "not merely the individual's body but as themselves relentlessly upon human be- much of his spirit as it can preempt...

...of relations between the sexes, of spit- The book is engrossing and even liberataoorgo Ellard ting...

...handmaidens (here Lasch is right on tered soul...

...I think it's an excellent tention and, second, to make his not terachievement and his highest aspiration...

...the theory and against the all-encompassing tawdriness by Albert J. Menendei practice of the "culture and personality" which surrounds them...

...I do not suggest that Elias would process, the stages of which we have or divinely given...

...Indeed, if one accepts Lasch's inChristopher Lasch terrelated thesis that the state controls cial, and anxiety-ridden...

...But are we really to say that the relativist, nonetheless gives substance to people in our society are molded more shame that rises when we recognize in the claim that earlier moments of our deliberately, how the coercion they exert ourselves something of our animal nahistory actually represent forms of life as on each other is more intense and the ture, the shame that accompanies our radically different from our own and as demand for good behavior, more empha- judgment of My-Lai and the Gulag, is no inaccessible as any primitive society: our tic...

...ideologies and, in the process, eroded the Essays In Slamadlcal Ethics One expects intensity and audacity from liberatory ends Freud's work has pre- by Joseph Fletcher Lasch, and it is here in abundance, but saged...

...changes as the culture changes...

...merely his outer but his inner life as well...

...Modes of Perhaps that's not so bad, but it is imporErasmus's text on the social education speech, emotional and behavioral pat- tant to distinguish the genesis of an action of boys (De Civilimte Morum Puerilium, terns become acceptable, says Elias, be- from its significance...

...First pubUdzen, $15, 310 pp...

...Their world is con- struct a society which fosters humane sists that our own culture is not the read- ditioned by relationships and conduct behavior...

...the cult of domesticity...

...school one doesn't anticipate the repeated slides The distinguished author of counselors...

...book.' ribly popular case...

...A by no inaccessible to political domination...

...In The Civilizing Pro- of embarrassment is higher, the structure is often to demystify and to devalue cess, Norbert Elias, who is himself no of the ego, different...

...New and more Basic Books, $12.95, 230 pp...

...Prowelhers Banks pseudo-movements which reinforce and cynical pop-psych gurus unambivalently 1200 Ka1sIngton Avenue hasten the decay and crisis they seek to preaching the death of the family and Buffalo, Nsw Yak 14215 cure and which spawned them in the first thus paving the way for total state con16 March 1979: 155...

...without embarrassment of the bodily lished in German in 1939, it has only functions, of breaking wind, of nudity, recently gotten the attention it deserves...

...non-exclusive relationships" in which research, infanticide, euthaLasch salvages next to nothing from nasia, and DNA research...

...His candor should not seem odd, for ing in that it does explain why we behave these things were not the objects of as we do (or at least how we come to SINCE even primitive cultures promote shame they are for us today...

...Rational justifications for form code of law on the territories he Commonweal: 154 conquered...

...The victim of church cen- clusion is singularly appropriate...

...of American life and thought, turns his means exhaustive list of Lasch's villains that the citizen's "entire existence has attention to one of the benchmarks of our includes bureaucracies and bureaucrats...

...it is an historical say such a thing, but his work floes make forgotten or have never clearly recog- phenomenon, and consequently it moral certainty seem a lot less attainable...

...Erasmus speaks of many group uses to distinguish itself from other rule more effective by imposing a unithings that have since his day become social strata...

...by which a change in social structure (the among various ways of life...

...Elias shows how them...

...pivot of this entertaining and cause initially they are the practices one thought that he was simply making his scholarly work...

...homogeneous and regulated cultures out of which ours has grown...

...the "new family" of "life Situation Ethics discusses the into intemperate, hostile, and despairing styles" and "spontaneous, non-binding, ethics of abortion, suicide, fetal declamations...

...To show the genesis of norms one of us at all...

...He can write how we got here from there...

...After all, Napoleon 1530) is the...

...It does not take a great deal of more and institutions, Elias helps us rec- trol...

...in the first place...

...Life in the behave as we do...

...Fewer barriers are by Elias's research: Just what is humane even more likely, Erasmus) might not be erected between bodies, the threshhold behavior...

...have a structure and character ble for our actions or consciously conturbing kind of relativism, however, in- different from ours...

...rise of national consciousness) has of our own culture for a mud-hut in the how to behave, when the grown-up was led to the radical transformation of the Amazon, and, though the modem indus- much less distinguishable from the child...

...Though the Foreign Writers Remembered," Deedy mindedness...

...And in the company of maturing individual must "in his short includes a long chapter on Pierre writers whose chief characteristics were history pass once more through some of Teilhard de Chardin, who spent his last self-reliance, intellectual independence the processes that his society has years in New York and is buried in and reverence for nature, Teilhard's in- traversed in its long history," democratiPoughkeepsie...

...suspected) though radically different from our own, social regulation (though as one fifteenth might best be kept secret...

...Beethoven (and sing, if not disgusting...

...ME CIRUM 1111 PBOCE=i unspeakable and of many others that are The Civilizing Process is an account of Norbert Elias now taken for granted...

...the applied science of social predatory capitalist individualism, one control and its mainstream academic committed to his despair and cynicism as offering precious little succor for the bat- well...

...and the coolness that has come to characterize domestic relations...

...human personality and its emotional life...

...It is also disturbing in behavior and thought patterns which, middle ages was much less subject to that such things (as Plato...

...and the "remoteness doing much more, that the law is the most dispensable to those who would con- and self-effacement of the American pareffective weapon against tyranny ever sciously and intelligently fashion the fu- ent, the desexualization of motherhood, devised...

...mands for conformist behavior, Parsocided that Haven's overinflated prose Menendez's volume deserves nian sociology in which social equilib- widespread interest and careful was necessary, first, to gain people's atrium or stasis becomes man's most noble readin...

...As the first more timid' souls would shrink from in on "non-deviance" and enforced de- book in the 'rereappraisal' of terror or revulsion...

...trial state might be the greatest threat to The emotional life as well as the rational We must, of course, understand these the survival of other life-worlds, it is still consciousness of people who eat com- changes and the ways structural develthe only social pattern thus far capable of munally, taking meat with their fingers opments are mirrored inpersonality recognizing and systemically recording from the same plate and wine from the growth before we can be truly responsithe variety of human forms...

...But in his final section, "Some Jesuit superiors despite their narrow- repelled by that behavior...

...Why is this happening...

...Human social life and relations, private virtue might flourish despite all THE FAMILY BESIEGED despite the saving patina of "appear- and the beleaguered family might surances," are crass, calculating, superfi- vive...

...contemporary malaise, the "family be- and that society itself "has taken over bourgeois domination and its antithesis, sieged...

...any long-term commitment to another $14.95 the wreckage...

...The other figure who stands out sorship for his radical reconciliation of prohibiting certain behavior (facts about seems, at first glance, an unlikely candi- religion with science, Teilhard remained hygiene, for example) come long after date...

...zation and the efficiency of the nuclear family as an instrument of social control have limited the diversity of the less What is humane behavior...

...Our "apparent" move- human being is despised (along with parments of liberation are, finally, enting) as a sign of being "hung-up...

...Few of us, Elias takes us back to those periods in growing centralization of state power and however, would abandon the advantages our history when adults had to be taught the...

...A more dis- same cup...

...nized...

...ily approachable, organic whole we which, to our standards, are embarras- This leads to the major problem raised naively assume it to be...