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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 Fallthe 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.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:
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.
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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:
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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