And even that number turned out to be a high-water mark, not a regular occurrence or a sign of things to come. In 1992 a strange thing happened. The homicide rate went down by almost 10 percent from the year before, and it continued to sink for another seven years, hitting 5.7 in 1999, the lowest it had been since 1966. Even more shockingly, the rate stayed put for another seven years and then drooped even further, from 5.7 in 2006 to 4.8 in 2010. The upper line in figure 3-18 plots the American homicide trend since 1950, including the new lowland we have reached in the 21st century.

It would be a mistake to think of the 1960s crime boom as undoing the decline of violence in the West, or as a sign that historical trends in violence are cyclical, yo-yoing up and down from one era to the next. The annual homicide rate in the United States at its recent worst --10.2 per 100,000 in 1980-- was a quarter of the rate for Western Europe in 1450, a tenth of the rate of the traditional Inuit, and a fiftieth of the average rate in nonstate societies (see figure 3-4).

The parallel trajectory of Canada and the United States is one of many surprises in the great crime decline of the 1990s. The two countries differed in their economic trends and in their policies of criminal justice, yet they enjoyed similar drops in violence. So did most of the countries of Western Europe. Figure 3-19 plots the homicide rates of five major European countries over the past century, showing the historical trajectory we have been tracking: a long-term decline that lasted until the 1960s, an uptick that began in that tumultuous decade, and the recent return to more peaceable rates. Every major Western European country showed a decline, and though it looked for a while as if England and Ireland would be the exceptions, in the 2000s their rates dropped as well.

The graph also shows the trend for Canada since 1961. Canadians kill at less than a third of the rate of Americans, partly because in the 19th century the Mounties got to the western frontier before the settlers and spared them from having to cultivate a violent code of honor. Despite this difference, the ups and downs of the Canadian homicide rate parallel those of their neighbor to the south (with a correlation coefficient between 1961 and 2009 of 0.85), and it sank almost as much in the 1990s: 35 percent, compared to the American decline of 42 percent.

Sources: Data for United States are from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1950-2010: U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009; U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010b, 2011; Fox & Zawitz, 2007. Data for Canada, 1961-2007: Statistics Canada, 2008. Data for Canada, 2008: Statistics Canada, 2010. Data for Canada, 2009: K. Harris, "Canada's crime rate falls," Toronto Sun, Jul. 20, 2010.

FIGURE 3-18: Homicide rates in the United States, 1950-2010, and Canada, 1961-2009

Not only did people cut down on killing, but they refrained from inflicting other kinds of harm. In the United States the rates of every category of major crime dropped by about half, including rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and even auto theft. The effects were visible not just in the statistics but in the fabric of everyday life. Tourists and young urban professionals recolonized American downtowns, and crime receded as a major issue from presidential campaigns.

Sources: Data from Eisner, 2008, except England, 2009, which is from Walker et al., 2009; population estimate from U. K. Office for National Statistics, 2009.

None of the experts had predicted it. Even as the decline was under way, the standard opinion was that the rise in crime that had begun in the 1960s would even get worse. In a 1995 essay James Q. Wilson wrote:

The cloud beyond the horizon was joined by purple prose from other talking heads on crime. James Alan Fox predicted a "blood bath" by 2005, a crime wave that would "get so bad that it [would] make 1995 look like the good old days." John DiIulio warned of more than a quarter of a million new "super-predators on the streets' by 2010 who would make "the Bloods and the Crips look tame by comparison." In 1991 the former editor of the Times of London predicted that "by the year 2000, New York could be a Gotham City without Batman."

Just beyond the horizon, there lurks a cloud that the winds will soon bring over us. The population will start getting younger again. By the end of this decade there will be a million more people between the ages of fourteen and seventeen than there are now. This extra million will be half male. Six percent of them will become high-rate, repeat offenders --30,000 more young muggers, killers, and thieves than we have now. Get ready.

FIGURE 3-19: Homicide rates in five Western European countries, 1900-2009

As legendary New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia might have said, "When I make a mistake, it's a beaut!" (Wilson was a good sport about it, remarking, "Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.") The mistake of the murder mavens was to have put too much faith in the most recent demographic trends. The crack-fueled violence bubble of the late 1980s involved large numbers of teenagers, and the population of teenagers was set to grow in the 1990s as an echo of the baby boom. But the overall crime-prone cohort, which includes twenty-somethings as well as teenagers, actually fell in the 1990s. Even this corrected statistic, though, cannot explain the decline of crime in that decade. The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python. But in the 1990s the crime rate lurched downward for seven straight years and promptly parked itself at its new bottom for another nine. As with the takeoff of crime in the 1960s, changes in the rate of violence for each age cohort swamped the effect of the size of those cohorts.

The other usual suspect in explaining crime trends, the economy, did little better in explaining this one. Though unemployment went down in the United States in the 1990s, it went up in Canada, yet violent crime decreased in Canada as well. France and Germany also saw unemployment go up while violence went down, whereas Ireland and the U. K. saw unemployment go down while violence went up. This is not as surprising as it first appears, since criminologists have long known that unemployment rates don't correlate well with rates of violent crime. (They do correlate somewhat with rates of property crime.) Indeed, in the three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the American homicide rate fell by another 14 percent, leading the criminologist David Kennedy to explain to a reporter, "The idea that everyone has ingrained into them -- that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse -- is wrong. It was never right to begin with."

Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment. But the Gini coefficient, the standard index of income inequality, actually rose in the United States from 1990 to 2000, while crime was falling, and it had hit its low point in 1968, when crime was soaring. The problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country, possibly because the real cause of the differences is not inequality per se but stable features of a state's governance or culture that affect both inequality and violence. (For example, in unequal societies, poor neighborhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.)

Yet another false lead may be found in the kind of punditry that tries to link social trends to the "national mood" following current events. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led to enormous political, economic, and emotional turmoil, but the homicide rate did not budge in response.

The 1990s crime decline inspired one of the stranger hypotheses in the study of violence. When I told people I was writing a book on the historical decline of violence, I was repeatedly informed that the phenomenon had already been solved. Rates of violence have come down, they explained to me, because after abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade U. S. Supreme Court decision, the unwanted children who would ordinarily have grown up to be criminals were not born in the first place, because their begrudging or unfit mothers had had abortions instead. I first heard of this theory in 2001 when it was proposed by the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt, but it seemed too cute to be true. Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time. But Levitt, together with the journalist Stephen Dubner, popularized the theory in their bestseller Freakonomics, and now a large proportion of the public believes that crime went down in the 1990s because women aborted their crime-fated fetuses in the 1970s.

To be fair, Levitt went on to argue that Roe v. Wade was just one of four causes of the crime decline, and he has presented sophisticated correlational statistics in support of the connection. For example, he showed that the handful of states that legalized abortion before 1973 were the first to see their crime rates go down. But these statistics compare the two ends of a long, hypothetical, and tenuous causal chain -- the availability of legal abortion as the first link and the decline in crime two decades later as the last -- and ignore all the links in between. The links include the assumptions that legal abortion causes fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals, and that the first abortion-culled generation was the one spearheading the 1990s crime decline. But there are other explanations for the overall correlation (for example, that the large liberal states that first legalized abortion were also the first states to see the rise and fall of the crack epidemic), and the intermediate links have turned out to be fragile or nonexistent.

What about differences among individual women within a crime-prone population? Here the freakonomics theory would seem to get things backwards. Among women who are accidentally pregnant and unprepared to raise a child, the ones who terminate their pregnancies are likely to be forward-thinking, realistic, and disciplined, whereas the ones who carry the child to term are more likely to be fatalistic, disorganized, or immaturely focused on the thought of a cute baby rather than an unruly adolescent. Several studies have borne this out. Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term. The availability of abortion thus may have led to a generation that is more prone to crime because it weeded out just the children who, whether through genes or environment, were most likely to exercise maturity and self-control.

To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex. If the women conceived more unwanted children in the first place, the option of aborting more of them could leave the proportion of unwanted children the same. In fact, the proportion of unwanted children could even have increased if women were emboldened by the abortion option to have more unprotected sex in the heat of the moment, but then procrastinated or had second thoughts once they were pregnant. That may help explain why in the years since 1973 the proportion of children born to women in the most vulnerable categories -- poor, single, teenage, and African American -- did not decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by a lot.

Also, the freakonomists' theory about the psychological causes of crime comes right out of "Gee, Officer Krupke," when a gang member says of his parents, "They didn't wanna have me, but somehow I was had. Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so bad!" And it is about as plausible. Though unwanted children may grow up to commit more crimes, it is more likely that women in crime-prone environments have more unwanted children than that unwantedness causes criminal behavior directly. In studies that pit the effects of parenting against the effects of the children's peer environment, holding genes constant, the peer environment almost always wins.

Finally, if easy abortion after 1973 sculpted a more crime-averse generation, the crime decline should have begun with the youngest group and then crept up the age brackets as they got older. The sixteen-year-olds of 1993, for example (who were born in 1977, when abortions were in full swing), should have committed fewer crimes than the sixteen-year-olds of 1983 (who were born in 1967, when abortion was illegal). By similar logic, the twenty-two-year-olds of 1993 should have remained violent, because they were born in pre-Roe 1971. Only in the late 1990s, when the first post-Roe generation reached their twenties, should the twenty-something age bracket have become less violent. In fact, the opposite happened. When the first post-Roe generation came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they did not tug the homicide statistics downward; they indulged in an unprecedented spree of mayhem. The crime decline began when the older cohorts, born well before Roe, laid down their guns and knives, and from them the lower homicide rates trickled down the age scale.

By the early 1990s, Americans had gotten sick of the muggers, vandals, and drive-by shootings, and the country beefed up the criminal justice system in several ways. The most effective was also the crudest: putting more men behind bars for longer stretches of time. The rate of imprisonment in the United States was pretty much flat from the 1920s to the early 1960s, and it even declined a bit until the early 1970s. But then it shot up almost fivefold, and today more than two million Americans are in jail, the highest incarceration rate on the planet. That works out to three-quarters of a percent of the entire population, and a much larger percentage of young men, especially African Americans. The American imprisonment binge was set off in the 1980s by several developments. Among them were mandatory sentencing laws (such as California's "Three Strikes and You're Out"), a prison-building boom (in which rural communities that had formerly shouted "Not in my backyard!" now welcomed the economic stimulus), and the War on Drugs (which criminalized possession of small amounts of cocaine and other controlled substances).

So how can we explain the recent crime decline? Many social scientists have tried, and the best that they can come up with is that the decline had multiple causes, and no one can be certain what they were, because too many things happened at once. Nonetheless, I think two overarching explanations are plausible. The first is that the Leviathan got bigger, smarter, and more effective. The second is that the Civilizing Process, which the counterculture had tried to reverse in the 1960s, was restored to its forward direction. Indeed, it seems to have entered a new phase.

Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts. Imprisonment physically removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them and subtracting the crimes they would have committed from the statistics. Incarceration is especially effective when a small number of individuals commit a large number of crimes. A classic study of criminal records in Philadelphia, for example, found that 6 percent of the young male population committed more than half the offenses. The people who commit the most crimes expose themselves to the most opportunities to get caught, and so they are the ones most likely to be skimmed off and sent to jail. Moreover, people who commit violent crimes get into trouble in other ways, because they tend to favor instant gratification over long-term benefits. They are more likely to drop out of school, quit work, get into accidents, provoke fights, engage in petty theft and vandalism, and abuse alcohol and drugs. A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as bycatch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets.

Incarceration can also reduce violence by the familiar but less direct route of deterrence. An ex-convict might think twice about committing another crime once he gets out of jail, and the people who know about him might think twice about following in his footsteps. But proving that incarceration deters people (as opposed to incapacitating them) is easier said than done, because the statistics at any time are inherently stacked against it. The regions with the highest rates of crime will throw the most people in jail, creating the illusion that imprisonment increases crime rather than decreasing it. But with suitable ingenuity (for example, correlating increases in imprisonment at one time with decreases in crime at a later time, or seeing if a court order to reduce the prison population leads to a subsequent increase in crime), the deterrence effect can be tested. Analyses by Levitt and other statisticians of crime suggest that deterrence works. Those who prefer real-world experiments to sophisticated statistics may take note of the Montreal police strike of 1969. Within hours of the gendarmes abandoning their posts, that famously safe city was hit with six bank robberies, twelve arsons, a hundred lootings, and two homicides before the Mounties were called in to restore order.

Mass incarceration, even if it does lower violence, introduces problems of its own. Once the most violent individuals have been locked up, imprisoning more of them rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, because each additional prisoner become less and less dangerous, and pulling them off the streets makes a smaller and smaller dent in the violence rate. Also, since people tend to get less violent as they get older, keeping men in prison beyond a certain point does little to reduce crime. For all these reasons, there is an optimum rate of incarceration. It's unlikely that the American criminal justice system will find it, because electoral politics keep ratcheting the incarceration rate upward, particularly in jurisdictions in which judges are elected rather than appointed. Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men.

But the case that the incarceration boom led to the crime decline is far from watertight. For one thing, the prison bulge began in the 1980s, but violence did not decline until a decade later. For another, Canada did not go on an imprisonment binge, but its violence rate went down too. These facts don't disprove the theory that imprisonment mattered, but they force it to make additional assumptions, such as that the effect of imprisonment builds up over time, reaches a critical mass, and spills over national borders.

A second way in which Leviathan became more effective in the 1990s was a ballooning of the police. In a stroke of political genius, President Bill Clinton undercut his conservative opponents in 1994 by supporting legislation that promised to add 100,000 officers to the nation's police forces. Additional cops not only nab more criminals but are more noticeable by their presence, deterring people from committing crimes in the first place. And many of the police earned back their old nickname flatfoots by walking a beat and keeping an eye on the neighborhood rather than sitting in cars and awaiting a radio call before speeding to a crime scene. In some cities, like Boston, the police were accompanied by parole officers who knew the worst troublemakers individually and had the power to have them rearrested for the slightest infraction. In New York, police headquarters tracked neighborhood crime reports obsessively and held captains' feet to the fire if the crime rate in their precinct started to drift upward. The visibility of the police was multiplied by a mandate to go after nuisance crimes like graffiti, littering, aggressive panhandling, drinking liquor or urinating in public, and extorting cash from drivers at stoplights after a cursory wipe of their windshield with a filthy squeegee. The rationale, originally articulated by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in their famous Broken Windows theory, was that an orderly environment serves as a reminder that police and residents are dedicated to keeping the peace, whereas a vandalized and unruly one is a signal that no one is in charge.

Did these bigger and smarter police forces actually drive down crime? Research on this question is the usual social science rat's nest of confounded variables, but the big picture suggests that the answer is "yes, in part," even if we can't pinpoint which of the innovations did the trick. Not only do several analyses suggest that something in the new policing reduced crime, but the jurisdiction that spent the most effort in perfecting its police, New York City, showed the greatest reduction of all. Once the epitome of urban rot, New York is now one of America's safest cities, having enjoyed a slide in the crime rate that was twice the national average and that continued in the 2000s after the decline in the rest of the country had run out of steam. As the criminologist Franklin Zimring put it in The Great American Crime Decline, "If the combination of more cops, more aggressive policing, and management reforms did account for as much as a 35% crime decrease (half the [U. S.] total), it would be by far the biggest crime prevention achievement in the recorded history of metropolitan policing."

What about Broken Windows policing in particular? Most academics hate the Broken Windows theory because it seems to vindicate the view of social conservatives (including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani) that violence rates are driven by law and order rather than by "root causes" such as poverty and racism. And it has been almost impossible to prove that Broken Windows works with the usual correlational methods because the cities that implemented the policy also hired a lot of police at the same time. But an ingenious set of studies, recently reported in Science, has supported the theory using the gold standard of science: an experimental manipulation and a matched control group.

Three Dutch researchers picked an alley in Groningen where Netherlanders park their bicycles and attached an advertising flyer to the handlebars of each one. The commuters had to detach the flyer before they could ride their bikes, but the researchers had removed all the wastebaskets, so they either had to carry the flyer home or toss it on the ground. Above the bicycles was a prominent sign prohibiting graffiti and a wall that the experimenters had either covered in graffiti (the experimental condition) or left clean (the control condition). When the commuters were in the presence of the illegal graffiti, twice as many of them threw the flyer on the ground -- exactly what the Broken Windows theory predicted. In other studies, people littered more when they saw unreturned shopping carts strewn about, and when they heard illegal firecrackers being set off in the distance. It wasn't just harmless infractions like littering that were affected. In another experiment, passersby were tempted by an addressed envelope protruding from a mailbox with a five-euro bill visible inside it. When the mailbox was covered in graffiti or surrounded by litter, a quarter of the passersby stole it; when the mailbox was clean, half that many did. The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules.

Ultimately, we must look to a change in norms to understand the 1990s crime bust, just as it was a change in norms that helped explain the boom three decades earlier. Though policing reforms almost certainly contributed to the headlong decline in American violence, particularly in New York, remember that Canada and Western Europe saw declines as well (albeit not by the same amount), and they did not bulk up their prisons or police to nearly the same degree. Even some of the hardest-headed crime statisticians have thrown up their hands and concluded that much of the explanation must lie in difficult-to-quantify cultural and psychological changes.

The Great Crime Decline of the 1990s was part of a change in sensibilities that can fairly be called a recivilizing process. To start with, some of the goofier ideas of the 1960s had lost their appeal. The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun. A greater awareness of rape and sexual abuse made the ethos "If it feels good, do it" seem repugnant rather than liberating. And the sheer depravity of inner-city violence -- toddlers struck by bullets in drive-by shootings, church funerals of teenagers invaded by knife-wielding gangs -- could no longer be explained away as an understandable response to racism or poverty.

The result was a wave of civilizing offensives. As we will see in chapter 7, one positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist "Take Back the Night" protests) made these environments safer for everyone.

One of the most impressive civilizing offensives of the 1990s came from African American communities, who set themselves the task of recivilizing their young men. As with the pacifying of the American West a century before, much of the moral energy came from women and the church. In Boston a team of clergymen led by Ray Hammond, Eugene Rivers, and Jeffrey Brown worked in partnership with the police and social service agencies to clamp down on gang violence. They leveraged their knowledge of local communities to identify the most dangerous gang members and put them on notice that the police and community were watching them, sometimes in meetings with their gangs, sometimes in meetings with their mothers and grandmothers. Community leaders also disrupted cycles of revenge by converging on any gang member who had recently been aggrieved and leaning on him to forswear vengeance. The interventions were effective not just because of the threat of an arrest but because the external pressure provided the men with an "out" that allowed them to back off without losing face, much as two brawling men may accede to being pulled apart by weaker interceders. These efforts contributed to the "Boston Miracle" of the 1990s in which the homicide rate dropped fivefold; it has remained low, with some fluctuations, ever since.

The police and courts, for their part, have been redirecting their use of criminal punishment from brute deterrence and incapacitation to the second stage of a civilizing process, enhancing the perceived legitimacy of government force. When a criminal justice system works properly, it's not because rational actors know that Big Brother is watching them 24/7 and will swoop down and impose a cost that will cancel any ill-gotten gain. No democracy has the resources or the will to turn society into that kind of Skinner box. Only a sample of criminal behavior can ever be detected and punished, and the sampling should be fair enough that citizens perceive the entire regime to be legitimate. A key legitimator is the perception that the system is set up in such a way that a person, and more importantly the person's adversaries, face a constant chance of being punished if they break the law, so that they all may internalize inhibitions against predation, preemptive attack, and vigilante retribution. But in many American jurisdictions, the punishments had been so capricious as to appear like misfortunes coming out of the blue rather than predictable consequences of proscribed behavior. Offenders skipped probation hearings or failed drug tests with impunity, and they saw their peers get away with it as well, but then one day, in what they experienced as a stroke of bad luck, they were suddenly sent away for years.

But now judges, working with police and community leaders, are broadening their crime-fighting strategy from draconian yet unpredictable punishments for big crimes to small yet reliable punishments for smaller ones -- a guarantee, for example, that missing a probation hearing will net the offender a few days in jail. The shift exploits two features of our psychology (which will be explored in the chapter on our better angels). One is that people -- especially the people who are likely to get in trouble with the law -- steeply discount the future, and respond more to certain and immediate punishments than to hypothetical and delayed ones. The other is that people conceive of their relationships with other people and institutions in moral terms, categorizing them either as contests of raw dominance or as contracts governed by reciprocity and fairness. Steven Alm, a judge who devised a "probation with enforcement" program, summed up the reason for the program's success: "When the system isn't consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn't like me, or, Someone's prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way."

The newer offensive to tamp down violence also aims to enhance the habits of empathy and self-control that are the internal enforcers of the Civilizing Process. The Boston effort was named the TenPoint Coalition after a manifesto with ten stated goals, such as to "Promote and campaign for a cultural shift to help reduce youth violence within the Black community, both physically and verbally, by initiating conversations, introspection and reflection on the thoughts and actions that hold us back as a people, individually and collectively." One of the programs with which it has joined forces, Operation Ceasefire, was explicitly designed by David Kennedy to implement Immanuel Kant's credo that "morality predicated on external pressures alone is never sufficient." The journalist John Seabrook describes one of its empathy-building events:

At the one I attended, there was a palpable, almost evangelical desire to make the experience transformative for the gangbangers. An older ex-gang member named Arthur Phelps, whom everyone called Pops, wheeled a thirty-seven-year-old woman in a wheelchair to the center of the room. Her name was Margaret Long, and she was paralyzed from the chest down. "Seventeen years ago, I shot this woman," Phelps said, weeping. "And I live with that every day of my life." Then Long cried out, "And I go to the bathroom in a bag," and she snatched out the colostomy bag from inside the pocket of her wheelchair and held it up while the young men stared in horror. When the final speaker, a street worker named Aaron Pullins III, yelled, "Your house is on fire! Your building is burning! You've got to save yourselves! Stand up!," three-quarters of the group jumped to their feet, as if they had been jerked up like puppets on strings.

The 1990s civilizing offensive also sought to glorify the values of responsibility that make a life of violence less appealing. Two highly publicized rallies in the nation's capital, one organized by black men, one by white, affirmed the obligation of men to support their children: Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, and a march by the Promise Keepers, a conservative Christian movement. Though both movements had unsavory streaks of ethnocentrism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism, their historical significance lay in the larger recivilizing process they exemplified. In The Great Disruption, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama notes that as rates of violence went down in the 1990s, so did most other indicators of social pathology, such as divorce, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancy, dropping out of school, sexually transmitted disease, and teenage auto and gun accidents.

The recivilizing process of the past two decades is not just a resumption of the currents that have swept the West since the Middle Ages. For one thing, unlike the original Civilizing Process, which was a by-product of the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce, the recent crime decline has largely come from civilizing offensives that were consciously designed to enhance people's well-being. Also new is a dissociation between the superficial trappings of civilization and the habits of empathy and self-control that we care the most about.

One way in which the 1990s did not overturn the decivilization of the 1960s is in popular culture. Many of the popular musicians in recent genres such as punk, metal, goth, grunge, gangsta, and hip-hop make the Rolling Stones look like the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Hollywood movies are bloodier than ever, unlimited pornography is a mouse-click away, and an entirely new form of violent entertainment, video games, has become a major pastime. Yet as these signs of decadence proliferated in the culture, violence went down in real life. The recivilizing process somehow managed to reverse the tide of social dysfunction without turning the cultural clock back to Ozzie and Harriet. The other evening I was riding a crowded Boston subway car and saw a fearsome-looking young man clad in black leather, shod in jackboots, painted with tattoos, and pierced by rings and studs. The other passengers were giving him a wide berth when he bellowed, "Isn't anyone going to give up his seat for this old woman? She could be your grandmother!"

The cliché about Generation X, who came of age in the 1990s, was that they were media-savvy, ironic, postmodern. They could adopt poses, try on styles, and immerse themselves in seedy cultural genres without taking any of them too seriously. (In this regard they were more sophisticated than the boomers in their youth, who treated the drivel of rock musicians as serious political philosophy.) Today this discernment is exercised by much of Western society. In his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, the journalist David Brooks observed that many members of the middle class have become "bourgeois bohemians" who affect the look of people at the fringes of society while living a thoroughly conventional lifestyle.

Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the Civilizing Process. This is the long-term trend of informalization I mentioned earlier, and it leads to what Elias called a "controlled decontrolling of emotional controls" and what Wouters calls third nature. If our first nature consists of the evolved motives that govern life in a state of nature, and our second nature consists of the ingrained habits of a civilized society, then our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture's norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness. Centuries ago our ancestors may have had to squelch all signs of spontaneity and individuality in order to civilize themselves, but now that norms of nonviolence are entrenched, we can let up on particular inhibitions that may be obsolete. In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response. As the novelist Robert Howard put it, "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split." Maybe the time has even come when I can use a knife to push peas onto my fork.