5 ms·

Victorian Values: Conclusions (2021)

26 points by aqsalose 5y ago

aqsalose 5y ago
I linked to part III in a series. There is also part I https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-a-practical-guide?s=r https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-a-practical-g... and part II https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-victorian-values?s=r 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 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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    [deleted]
- tomrod 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 5y ago
    > 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-declining-and-likely-deepening-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/upshot/make-your-own-mobility-animation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/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-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 5y ago
(2021)
- dang 5y ago
  Added. Thanks!
dash2 5y ago
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 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-part?s=w https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-end-of-victorian-culture-p...), part 2 (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-end-of-victorian-culture-part-149?s=w 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 https://www.wyclifsdust.com.

26 points by aqsalose 5y ago

I linked to part III in a series. There is also part I https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-a-practical-guide?s=r https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-a-practical-g... and part II https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-victorian-values?s=r 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 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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  [deleted]
tomrod 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 5y ago
  > 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-declining-and-likely-deepening-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/upshot/make-your-own-mobility-animation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/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-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 5y ago

(2021)

dang 5y ago
Added. Thanks!

dash2 5y ago

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 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-part?s=w https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-end-of-victorian-culture-p...), part 2 (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-end-of-victorian-culture-part-149?s=w 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 https://www.wyclifsdust.com.