On Trump: Elias, Civilization and Trump

Author Govert Schuller

Last  summer I read the phenomenal study “The Civilizing Process” by the eminent sociologist Norbert Elias.[1] some of his findings can be applied to understand the rise of authoritarianism in the West as embodied in the political career of President Trump. This article will present some of the theoretical underpinnings of Elias’ work, then apply them to the US Anno 2016-17, and end with some observations derived from the psychologist Julian Jaynes.

On a theoretical level there are two dualities Elias explicitly tries to overcome.

1) The duality between an alleged independent individual and an independent society standing over and against the individual as if it’s a thing. He makes the case that a) society is nothing more than the pattern of human relations, and that b) humans are, as far as their personality structures are concerned, the product and carriers of these relations.

2) The duality between a-historical psychology and a-psychological history. Elias makes the case that a) personality structures have a history inherently correlated with societal developments, and that b) historical developments are often the product of changing personality structures.

The empirical material to back up his theories are derived from the history of the West from the 12th till the 20th century, where he sees a civilizing process happening in the development of trend-setting upper class exemplars, going from knightly warriors to aristocratic courtiers to bourgeois entrepreneurs to highly educated professionals, who all displayed their own peculiar psychologies in the way their personalities were structured by an inter-connected set of a) subconscious ingrained, b) half-conscious habitual and c) conscious deliberate modes of impulse controls formative of their social behavior, speech acts and feelings of shame and pride, in short, their sense of self.

The arc of development was from relative low impulse control with its attendant violence and insensitivity towards others to increased impulse control, less violence and increased social sensitivity towards people further away in one’s chains of interconnections. At the same time, and reciprocally causal, the structure of society changes from relatively decentralized, conflictuous and arbitrary, to a centralization of political power and taxation, monopolization of violence, pacification of towns and rural areas, and increased interdependence.

The main point of Elias is that the changes in society and changes in personality structures are two sides of the same coin; that the processes of socio-genesis and psycho-genesis are to be conceptualized as one process, which he named the ‘civilizing process’ by which individuals are configured by their social relations from birth on, and subsequently also become the carriers of these configurations which they then pass on. At the same time this process is not just repetitive, but changes slowly over the centuries in spurts and counter-spurts towards increased impulse control, rationality, experientiality and sensitivity.

But the process is not without tensions and conflicts, though their nature also changes in the civilization process going from more inter-personal tensions and their resolution through violence, towards more intra-personal conflict, i.e. tension within one’s own mind-space between natural impulses and internalized control mechanisms. Unfortunately for many people this inner tension might lead to unsatisfactory lives and for some even to break-down, institutionalization, or suicide. At the same time ever larger parts of a population can live a more secure, fulfilling and civilized life.

And then there is the danger of collective regressions or civilizational ‘counter-spurts’ when substantial parts of the population, for whatever reason, deliberately reject both outer and inner impulse-control mechanisms and start railing against elites, regulations, taxes, political correctness, feminism, environmentalism and outsiders. Instead they start to extol nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, political violence, repressive security measures and censorship. When such a counter-spurt gets politically organized we are dealing with authoritarianism, and here in the US with a soft, Amero-fascist variant in the form of Trumpism. For a deeper understanding of this phenomenon one has to turn to a budding academic research program under the name of political ponerology, or the “science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes”, about which I will report later more.[3] 

Regarding ‘sense of self’ I think that most people are acculturated into one kind of ‘sense of self’ or another, one more individualized, the other more collective, but still ‘sense of self’ nevertheless.

What comes into play too is the differentiation between a) philosophical concepts of self; b) social-scientific concepts of self; c) religious concepts of self and d) ordinary ‘popular’ concepts of self which might be more implicit and tacit.

My now preferred concept of self is to bring out this semi-private, imagined, inner mind-space-time construct in which an analog ‘I’ moves around in an imagined duplicate of the world and also projects a metaphor ‘me’ into different hypothetical scenarios and spaces, all the while trying to reconcile its different parts by fitting them into our life-story narrative, and with the whole infused with self-conscious emotions of remembered and expected feelings of shame, pride, duty, repugnance, pleasure and pain.

According to Jaynes this sense of self rose out of the ‘bicameral mind’ some-when between 2,000 and 1,000 BCE in the Middle East and is still spreading through the world and qualitatively changing, which brings me back to Elias who seems to have caught sight of its changes in the West from the Middle Ages into modernity.

Naperville, 16 Oct 2016
Initially posted on Facebook

[1]. Elias, Norbert. 2000 (1939). The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. rev. edn, Oxford: Blackwell.

[2]. Jaynes, Julian 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

[3]. Schuller, Govert. “On Trump: The Aspiring Pathocrat“. Alpheus. 24 Feb 2017.