Many people look at technology,  economics and similar phenomena as the core of civilisation. That is a misunderstanding. Central to the status and character of civilisation is the behaviour of people towards each other, their behaviour in every kind of situation, be it private or public, in everyday life and on special occasions. That is the touchstone for the stage a people has reached on the long road of civilisation. The forms of behaviour and of feeling that prevail in the relations between people do not only differ between from society (Volk) to society, but also change with a society in the course of history. But this change in human behaviour,the civilising process,is not a straightforward process; it is not necessarily,as was formerly often believed, a characteristic of continuous progress. In our own lifetime we have experienced a decline in forms of behaviour, a brutalisation and hardening of feelings in the relations between individuals, which may prove to be more  enduring in their effects than the temporary economic decline or the destruction of houses and machines.

In my book Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation I investigated such changes in behaviour and their causes on a larger scale. The following excerpt gives a little picture of the state of the behaviour and affects of a stratum of German lords at the end of the Middle Ages. Looking at this warrior stratum of late medieval knights, some see primarily their greatness, their passionate life as adventurers; they prefer to look at the ‘nobleman’. Others speak of the wild, brute and barbaric life of these people; they can only see the tough feudal class, the oppressors of the peasants. But the behaviour of this warrior class, the atmosphere of their life and their position on the road to civilisation cannot be understood very well, if one views them only through the glasses of one ’s own antipathy or sympathy. I have tried to give the reader an unprejudiced picture by describing a series of drawings made in the knightly age; I think,they will give a more vivid and true picture of the feelings and behaviour of these people than the written word.

Some of the pictures are reproduced here in a miniaturised form. The whole series became famous under the title of Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch. The name of the artist is unknown. But it must have been a man, familiar with the life of the knights of his time, who unlike his artisan fellows saw the world through the eyes of a knight and identified himself with their social values. The drawings are from the late epoch of the knights, from the time of Charles the Bold and Maximilian, the ‘last knight’. The people we see in the drawings are individuals of an epoch of transition, in which a courtly aristocracy was replacing the knightly aristocracy. Despite that,they convey a good impression of the typical forms of the behaviour of the knight, of the way he spent his days, and of the people and things he saw around him. And about the way he saw them.

Neue Auslese, 2 Jg. Febr. 1947, p. 66–78 (sic !)

[Translation by Reinhard Blomert and Stephen Mennell]

Source:

Figurations. Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation, no. 16 (Nov. 2001), pp. 5-6

http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/social/elias/fig/fig16.pdf