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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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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.

They easily could have afforded to put enough cops in the streets to massively crack down on crime. But they did not do it.

At least in London, they did do it. The Metropolitan Police is founded in 1829 and expanded in 1839 - the low crime in Victorian London was the result of effective policing. By the time Arthur Conan Doyle was writing, his readers could assume that Lestrade had ordinary crime under sufficient control that Holmes could focus on weird stuff, and it was entirely plausible that the leader of organised crime in London was a man like Professor Moriarty and not the sort of person who ends up as a gang leader in places where crime is less well controlled.

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.

And yet his most famous work, A Christmas Carol, which he described as "a sledgehammer blow for the poor," ends with the wealthy capitalist seeing the error of his ways and adopting the very traditional concept of noblesse oblige, "endeavour[ing] to assist the struggling family" of Bob Cratchit, his employee. I read him, and see very clearly the arguments of classical conservatives who opposed industrial capitalism with all the fervor of a Marxist.

George Orwell, another author with contempt for the condition of the working masses but ambivalence towards socialism, wrote of Dickens that:

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him.

If you don't think of the Shire when you read this, I don't know what to tell you.

Dickens obviously hated the Tories, but I believe he had more in common with them than he understood. He was a commoner who appealed to noblesse oblige, he was a city boy who wrote of the slow life, his happy endings revolved around domestic bliss and social calls. He may not have known much of agricultural labor, but he certainly seems to idealize the lifestyle of the rural aristocracy. His complaint, of course, was that the aristocratic lifestyle was not accessible to the common worker. Perhaps he would like our condition today -- I have never thought of Dickens as an exceptionally spiritual man.

All that to say, yeah, I think you're right and I made a mistake. But there was something I was gesturing at, some commonality between the epic dreaming of Tolkien and the saccharine dreaming of Dickens, some sort of distinctly British idealism and whimsy that unites everything from Jacob Marley to Albus Dumbledore. There is an anti-industrialism and pastoral idealism embedded in both Dickens and Tolkien, even if Dickens did not realize how pastoral his vision really was.

Perhaps the word you're looking for is gentility. The genteel life of the landed aristocracy in 19th century Britain was something of a paradise -- for them, that is. It must have exercised a powerful magnetic attraction, even for people who understood foundations of deprivation it stood on. Tolkien idealized it rather explicitly: Bilbo's party is practically something out of a countryside daydream for the Midcountry gentry.

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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