7 - Civilizing Processes at the Level of Humanity as a Whole

Summary

The previous three chapters discussed the transition from the age in which the outlines of a world civilization based on European valuepreferences seemed to be emerging to the current era in which support for a global order based on European or Western standards of civilized arrangements is in retreat. Elias's reflections on civilizing processes that affect humanity as whole have particular relevance for analyzing the relevant shifting power relations. His focus represented a widening of an inquiry into long-term patterns of change which had been initially confined to the European continent (Mennell 1998: ch 9). The driving force was a conception of sociology as a global social science that promoted ‘education and knowledge-transfer’ and that was not limited by the short-term preoccupations of particular societies but regarded ‘humanity as its horizon’ in the ‘emerging world society’ (Elias 2008d: 268).

The reality of lengthening and deepening webs of interconnectedness rather than any particular normative vision prompted the enlargement of the scope of process-sociological investigation. Elias observed that those who sought to understand those changes might hope to be comforted by reflections on the more ‘pleasant and hopeful’ features of ‘humankind's development’ but such partiality was the ‘true meaning of the “trahison des clercs” ‘. Whether or not we ‘welcome the increasing integration of humankind’, Elias (2010c: 149) maintained, there is no doubt that greater global interconnectedness ‘increases the impotence of the individual in relation to what is happening at the top level of humanity’. Those comments about the powerlessness of the individual in contemporary conditions highlighted the subjection of humans to forces they cannot control (an observation with clear contemporary relevance given the global COVID-19 crisis). They warned against assuming that future global integration will lead to higher levels of emotional identification between peoples. Indeed the opposite could turn out to be the case. Centrifugal national loyalties retained the capacity to constrain, if not reverse, international experiments in dealing with the consequences of rising global interconnections. The pertinence of that theme for understanding the rise of nationalpopulist revolt against economic globalization will be considered later in this chapter.