[HN Gopher] Victorian Values: Conclusions (2021)
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Victorian Values: Conclusions (2021)
Author : aqsalose
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-04-06 07:34 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wyclif.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wyclif.substack.com)
| dash2 wrote:
| Hey, I just found myself on the front of HN!
|
| Comments welcome, ask me anything, etc.
|
| I'll take the opportunity to self-advertise:
|
| * Join my substack at https://wyclif.substack.com, obviously.
|
| In particular, you might like the posts on the end of Victorian
| culture: part 1 (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-end-of-
| victorian-culture-p...), part 2
| (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-end-of-victorian-
| culture-p...).
|
| * The material in this post comes from a book I'm writing. You
| can get a free chapter and sign up for a _very_ low-volume
| mailing list at https://www.wyclifsdust.com.
| aqsalose wrote:
| I linked to part III in a series. There is also part I
| https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-a-practical-g...
| and part II https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-
| victorian... .
|
| For ontext, I was quite disappointed by this other recently
| posted article about Vicotrian values:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30894353 . It was short, not
| very analytical, and more than a bit moralizing in tone, with
| many unstated assumptions never made clear. (It rejects the
| claims of prude Victorian life as a fiction invented by the post-
| WW2 generations who have not truly got past prudery themselves.
| But there was a distinctively Victorian spirit for betterment of
| morals. Why again the Victorian moral project and supposed
| "prudery" was in the wrong, in the first place?)
| zasdffaa wrote:
| > Why again the Victorian moral project and supposed "prudery"
| was in the wrong, in the first place?
|
| Not sure I understand. From wiktionary, for 'prude': "A person
| who is or tries to be excessively proper, especially one who is
| easily offended by matters of a sexual nature"
|
| That doesn't sound like a good thing. Is its?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The sentence is a little garbled. My reading of it is "Why
| [is] the Victorian moral project and supposed 'prudery' [not
| an accurate assessment of Victorian attitudes] in the first
| place?"
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Alternately, they could be arguing that "prudery" that
| originates from a project of improving societal morality is
| not necessarily a bad thing.
|
| The definition you propose applies a modern, negative
| connotation to "prude" that is certainly present in the
| English language, but there could also be more sympathetic
| interpretations of the same characteristic ("innocent" and
| "straight-laced" and "proper" come to mind).
| [deleted]
| tomrod wrote:
| > Why again the Victorian moral project and supposed "prudery"
| was in the wrong, in the first place?
|
| Because it was a social sledgehammer used to punish people's
| existence (homosexuals, for example) rather than encouraging
| socially positive behavior (like teaching your kids to read).
| dash2 wrote:
| It's more complicated than that. Victorian morality was also
| about (for example) discouraging child prostitution, of which
| Victorian society had quite a lot. Middle-class moralizers
| eventually morphed into social reformers when they discovered
| it was hard to be a good person in tough social conditions.
| And so on. The good and bad are not very easy to disentangle.
| bashmelek wrote:
| A related element is that apparently there was a large
| surplus of women at the time. The imbalance contributed to
| an increase prostitution and women getting stuck in unhappy
| marriages.
| [deleted]
| rayiner wrote:
| > Because it was a social sledgehammer used to punish
| people's existence (homosexuals, for example) rather than
| encouraging socially positive behavior (like teaching your
| kids to read).
|
| But that's not the only thing, right? For example it strongly
| discouraged out of wedlock childbirth and divorce, which in
| retrospect seem like pretty good things. Coming from an
| Islamic society where both are strongly taboo, it's been eye-
| opening to me to see the social dysfunction in the working
| class American area my wife's family is from. My mother in
| law's house is full of random teenagers who are drawn to the
| fact that she offers a relatively stable household compared
| to the instability in these kids' home lives. It's great that
| we got same-sex marriage, but it seems to me like that's the
| only kind of marriage some folks care about these days.
|
| It's not just "prudes" looking at these moral trends with
| concern. Even center-left Brookings Institution has observed
| the collapse in marriage rates among the lower class, and how
| that's exacerbating income inequality:
| https://www.brookings.edu/research/middle-class-marriage-
| is-... (marriage rates for the top quantile have hardly
| changed since 1980, at 80%+, but have dropped from 60% to
| under 40% for the bottom quantile). Studies show that Asian
| Americans enjoy much higher income mobility than white
| Americans: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/ups
| hot/make-y.... An Asian American kid born in the bottom 20%
| of income has a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20% of
| income as an adult. For a white American kid that number is
| just 10%. I strongly suspect that an important factor is that
| Asian Americans continue to have "Victorian values." We don't
| tolerate divorce and we ostracize people who don't get
| married. Many Asians come here very poor, but the kids have
| two parents and the families don't have to deal with the
| massive loss of income and upward mobility caused by divorce:
| https://www.nber.org/digest/jul02/income-declines-after-
| divo...
|
| Whenever we talk about "progress" we fixate on improvements
| for relatively small minorities. While that's not
| unimportant, it gives us a false sense that progress happens
| in a single direction. But our progress has resulted not only
| from breaking down specific possibly obsolete taboos, but
| breaking down the general framework for enforcing moral
| norms. That's been replaced by the elevation of individualism
| and self determination to a religion. And it appears that
| this change has had costs. We have lost the ability to use
| social pressures to keep people from making poor and selfish
| decisions. The burdens of that progress of that are being
| borne by kids, especially kids from lower income households.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| (2021)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
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