It was during this transition that the fork came into common use as a table utensil, so that people no longer had to bring their knives to their mouths. Special knives were set at the table so people would not have to unsheathe their own, and they were designed with rounded rather than pointed ends. Certain foods were never to be cut with a knife, such as fish, round objects, and bread—hence the expression to break bread together.
Some of the medieval knife taboos remain with us today. Many people will not give a knife as a present unless it is accompanied by a coin, which the recipient gives back, to make the transaction a sale rather than a gift. The ostensible reason is to avoid the symbolism of “severing the friendship,” but a more likely reason is to avoid the symbolism of directing an unsolicited knife in the friend’s direction. A similar superstition makes it bad luck to hand someone a knife: one is supposed to lay it down on the table and allow the recipient to pick it up. Knives in table settings are rounded at the end and no sharper than needed: steak knives are brought out for tough meat, and blunter knives substituted for fish. And knives may be used only when they are absolutely necessary. It’s rude to use a knife to eat a piece of cake, to bring food to your mouth, to mix ingredients (“Stir with a knife, stir up strife”), or to push food onto your fork.
Aha! Elias’s theory, then, attributes the decline in European violence to a larger psychological change (the subtitle of his book is Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations). He proposed that over a span of several centuries, beginning in the 11th or 12th and maturing in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor— the readiness to take revenge—gave way to a culture of dignity—the readiness to control one’s emotions. These ideals originated in explicit instructions that cultural arbiters gave to aristocrats and noblemen, allowing them to differentiate themselves from the villains and boors. But they were then absorbed into the socialization of younger and younger children until they became second nature. The standards also trickled down from the upper classes to the bourgeoisie that strove to emulate them, and from them to the lower classes, eventually becoming a part of the culture as a whole.
Elias helped himself to Freud’s structural model of the psyche, in which children acquire a conscience (the superego) by internalizing the injunctions of their parents when they are too young to understand them. At that point the child’s ego can apply these injunctions to keep their biological impulses (the id) in check. Elias stayed away from Freud’s more exotic claims (such as the primeval parricide, the death instinct, and the oedipal complex), and his psychology is thoroughly modern. ..
Critics of Elias have pointed out that all societies have standards of propriety about sexuality and excretion which presumably grow out of innate emotions surrounding purity, disgust, and shame As we will see, the degree to which societies moralize these emotions is a major dimension of variation across cultures. Though medieval Europe certainly did not lack norms of propriety altogether, it seems to have lain at the far end of the envelope of cultural possibilities. To his credit, Elias leapfrogged academic fashion in not claiming that early modern Europeans “invented” or “constructed” self-control. He claimed only that they toned up a mental faculty that had always been a part of human nature but which the medievals had underused. He repeatedly drove the point home with the pronouncement “There is no zero point.”… One possibility is that self-control is like a muscle, so that if you exercise it with table manners it will be stronger across the board and more effective when you have to stop yourself from killing the person who just insulted you. Another possibility is that a particular setting of the self-control dial is a social norm, like how close you can stand to another person or how much of your body has to be covered in public.
