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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   28123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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One big thing they didn't have was antibiotics, which is pretty important.

As for higher trust and social capital, I am not sure about that. There are two separate issues there, I think:

  1. Were the middle/upper classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's middle/upper classes? Maybe, but I see no clear evidence of that. Surely there was plenty of backstabbing going on back then too.
  2. Were the lower classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's lower classes? I'm not so sure. My understanding is that the homicide rate in 1900 England was either higher than in modern England, or at best about the same as today. Part of that might be because modern policing is more effective than the policing back then - on the other hand, for the very same reason, it is possible that the England homicide rate from 1900 is under-reported. I see no evidence that the society was actually significantly higher-trust than today.

My understanding is that the homicide rate in 1900 England was either higher than in modern England, or at best about the same as today.

You have made this claim multiple times, and I have pointed out to you before that it is blatantly false. Homicide rates in Victorian and Edwardian England hovered consistently around 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, last year in the UK the murder rate was 9.7 per million people The pre-WW1 UK genuinely was a drastically safer place than the modern UK in terms of crime, despite considerably sparser and less effective policing and infinitely worse standards of medical care.

But 1 to 1.5 per 100000 is higher than 9.7 per million.

It's still not very good when we're comparing an era before antibiotics with one where gunshot wounds are 90% survivable. There needs to be a lot more violence to get a similar fatality rate under modern conditions.

When you get shot now they literally replace your blood with cryo-coolant to buy time to fix your ruptured organs and veins.
In the 1800s you died of sepsis after they went rummaging in your guts for the bullet without washing their hands.

I think this is easily overlooked, there are many aggravated assaults or attempted murders that occur nowadays in modern and prosperous societies that would have been murders or manslaughter in 1900 because the victim would have died of their injuries.

That and London being one of the most surveilled places on earth. It’s a deterrent for extreme violent action amongst the still rational violent actors but that deterrent has no relationship whatsoever with the underlying anti-social forces that propel murderous violence to bubble up from the depths of our collective depravity.

If 1900 London has a flat murder rate compared to 2024 it’s actually still rather damning.

You know what? I think I’m just gonna go marinate in my own innumeracy for a bit here. I can’t really offer an excuse; just a total brain-fart. I was really confident about it, too, which makes it so much worse.

I was mostly going off of SSCs infamous neoreactionary post, which claims it was about 100x lower back then. Maybe different sources say different things?

No worries man, I've had brain-farts of a similar level before. It happens.

Yeah, but when discussing an issue I care a lot about (crime) and comment a lot about, it’s very damaging to fuck something up like that. Justifiably tarnishes my credibility.

Well, I would hope that here on The Motte we are trying to be beyond caring about personal reputation as much as possible. Personal reputation is a very useful heuristic, but it has limits when it comes to seeking truth.

I think that some people have a rose-colored glasses view of Victorian England because it would feel nice to imagine that it was a beautiful society full of people who played violins while eloquently debating the finer points of the latest geopolitical news from the continent, while maybe overworked yet fundamentally good and noble commoners dutifully worked the machinery in the factories. I would probably be likely to fall for such a view myself, it's just that I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when I was younger, and I've read a lot about the Jack the Ripper case, so I was already predisposed to be somewhat familiar with Victorian England's criminal issues.

There's also the fact that late 19th century European industrial civilization is what gave us militant anarchism and communism, which is not proof, but is suggestive evidence, in favor of the theory that conditions for the lower classes really were pretty bad back then, and the society was not any more high-trust than ours is.

Well, I would hope that here on The Motte we are trying to be beyond caring about personal reputation as much as possible. Personal reputation is a very useful heuristic, but it has limits when it comes to seeking truth.

On the contrary, I think personal reputation is extremely important in a space like this, particularly because it helps one make a probabilistic assessment of how likely one’s interlocutor is to be telling the truth, or in this case how likely he or she is to be accidentally making a false or misleading argument without realizing it. You were fortunate that I posted links and raw numbers that could be easily used against me, but if I had made an unsourced or more unspecified claim, you’d have to either figure out a source for yourself or take my word for it. In that sense, having a written record of my own carelessness with numbers will help lower other users’ future assessment of the reliability of my claims. To that extent, personal reputation as it pertains to honesty and sound reasoning is quite useful.

There's also the fact that late 19th century European industrial civilization is what gave us militant anarchism and communism, which is not proof, but is suggestive evidence, in favor of the theory that conditions for the lower classes really were pretty bad back then

To be quite clear, I actually readily agree with this, and have made the same point before. The early Marxists were clearly not just making it all up when they spoke about the ruthless exploitation of the proletariat. Contrary to the Joo-posters’ claims that Jews were the primary drivers of communism, a great many countries - America very much included - had strong indigenous leftist movements well into the 20th century, with Jewish involvement at best sporadic and incidental. It’s precisely the work of moderate, non-Marxist Progressive reformers that reined in the rapaciousness of the robber barons enough to stave off serious revolutions. (One of these days I’m going to do a deep-dive into the abortive Revolutions of 1848, to really understand exactly what sort of people spearheaded them and exactly what they were fighting for.)

I would probably be likely to fall for such a view myself, it's just that I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when I was younger, and I've read a lot about the Jack the Ripper case, so I was already predisposed to be somewhat familiar with Victorian England's criminal issues.

Now, while my claim was less correct than it should have been due to my poor mathematical reasoning, it is also still fair to point out that Victorian England’s homicide rates were comparable to today’s, but with far worse policing and medical care. If you took the same society and added modern forensic technology, surveillance technology, and the medical care needed to turn what would have been a murder in 1850 into a mere assault, you would be looking at a very low-murder-rate society.

A quick bit of Googling and comparing modern UK homicide numbers compared to modern UK attempted homicide numbers shows that about 69% of the reported attempted homicides end up with actual homicides, which I think indicates that in this context the difference made by better medical technology is not that large. It is possible that Victorian England was a bit less homicidal than modern England, but that would not demonstrate that Victorian England was necessarily more high-trust than modern England. As for the improvement in policing between then and now, sure, but this has implications both ways. To what extent can we really call a society high-trust if the people in charge of it do not care to provide the lower classes with adequate policing? Sure, the Victorians did not have modern forensic and surveillance technology, but they were perfectly capable of flooding the slums with cops if they had wished to do it. They easily could have afforded to put enough cops in the streets to massively crack down on crime. But they did not do it. Well, we have a similar situation now in the West, don't we. Maybe things have not changed that much after all. I am still not convinced that their society was significantly higher-trust than ours, if you look at their society as a whole and not just selected elements of it.

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I think that some people have a rose-colored glasses view of Victorian England because it would feel nice to imagine that it was a beautiful society full of people who played violins while eloquently debating the finer points of the latest geopolitical news from the continent, while maybe overworked yet fundamentally good and noble commoners dutifully worked the machinery in the factories.

What's interesting is that I've long held the opposite intuition -- but that certainly comes from having read the works of classical opponents of Industrial Britain like Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, who valorized rural, pre-industrial ways of living. No one can read Hard Times and come away with a positive impression of Victorian factory labor.

Not that farming in pre-modern times was very nice either. Wistful conservatives, even Anabaptists, often forget that agricultural labor was considered to be a curse.

The unique gift of contemporary liberalism is the extinction of the material threats that have plagued our existence since the Fall the Agricultural Revolution. But this gift comes with a curse: the extinction of the spiritual means that unite people and enable them to endure hardship. Nietzsche once wrote, "he who has a why to live can bear almost any how," and though we have fixed a great deal of the hows we find ourselves increasingly befuddled as to the whys. And a house of cards built upon the how instead of the why is liable to catastrophic collapse.

What's interesting is that I've long held the opposite intuition -- but that certainly comes from having read the works of classical opponents of Industrial Britain like Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, who valorized rural, pre-industrial ways of living. No one can read Hard Times and come away with a positive impression of Victorian factory labor.

I was about to mention Dickens (he certainly did not think Victorian England was a "high trust, low crime" society), but I don't think he valorized some golden pre-industrial pastoral age like Tolkien did. Tolkien was reacting to the world wars; Dickens was reacting to his personal experience as a child laborer with a father in debtors' prison.

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Even in Medieval times, when the average person believed devoutly in Christianity, which one might think would suffice to provide a why, nonetheless there arose a notion of supplementing it by devotion to an individual human being,.

Dante Alighieri wrote in La Vita Nuova, around 1290:

Nine times, the heaven of the light had returned to where it was at my birth, almost to the very same point of its orbit, when the glorious lady of my mind first appeared before my eyes—she whom many called Beatrice without even knowing that was her name. She had already been in this life long enough for the heaven of the fixed stars to have moved toward the east a twelfth of a degree since she was born, so that she was at the beginning of her ninth year when she appeared to me, and I saw her when I was almost at the end of my ninth. She appeared, dressed in a very stately color, a subdued and dignified crimson, girdled and adorned in a manner that was fitting for her young age.

At that time, truly, I say, the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of the heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the slightest of my pulses. And trembling it spoke these words: "Here is a god stronger than I, who comes to rule me."

Granted, Dante Alighieri was unusual for his time. But there is a reason why the notion of fervent romantic love became such a prominent feature of those times' literature. I really do wonder if back then, they really fundamentally had any more of a strong sense of why in their hearts than we do. They probably did, but I am not sure that they had it a great deal more than we do.

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