"Steven Pinker's great achievement is to weave these trends into a much larger pattern of reduced violence, greater empathy and, indeed, a comprehensive civilizing process," said Nils Petter Gleditsch, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway.
"It's so sudden and rapid that it seems too hard to explain with a gradual, civilizing process.
It's interesting to contrast the aftershave scene with the most famous scene from Hughes's next film, Curly Sue (1991), a near-perfect inversion: Sue, a street kid, is soaped and shampooed by her adoptive mother as part of a broader civilizing process.
A research team wondered if these documents reflect Western society's "civilizing process," a centuries-long period when violence levels plummeted and the modern justice system took shape.
Pinker sees this decline as part of the "civilizing process," a term he borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributes it to the consolidation of the power of the state above feudal loyalties, and to the effect of the spread of commerce.
The central question addressed to Islamists in particular, and to the Muslim world in general, is to know the ways in which they can come to terms with their own civilizing process because being a Muslim is more and more a lived experience in today's world.
The law was a cornerstone of the so-called civilizing process of nineteenth-century colonialism.
The civilizing process hypothesis is given a bye for this test as it is potentially credible despite the lack of evidence-based research.
Do these cities lag behind in "the civilizing process" because they're poor or educationally disadvantaged?
It's worth noting that the "native" in this civilizing process appears to be white.
Norbert Elias, author of "The Civilizing Process," used the term homo clausus, the conventional sociological image of the individual as a self-contained entity.
