Twenty-first century Victorians

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/victorian-values-fitness-organic-wealth-parenthood

by gpvos • 8 years ago

52 42 8 years ago

As the article states, East Grand Rapids is the worst.

I'm conflicted about this article. On one hand, its central premise, that people who are successful (in societal terms) tend to ascribe that success to an inherent moral superiority, is obviously true.

On the other hand, there's nothing particularly Victorian about this attitude; people have been doing this ever since society has existed and will be doing it long after we're all dead.

On yet another hand (I have three), who is the target audience for this article? Seems like this is something that anyone who would be interested in or capable of understanding this article would already know.

good_gnu• 8 years ago

Did aristocrats in the middle ages ascribe their position in society to their individual actions or to their being born into aristocracy?

jeffreyrogers7• 8 years ago

To being born into the aristocracy. And they viewed themselves as having obligations to the lower classes.

cfadvan• 8 years ago

They mostly ascribed it to being chosen by god and descended from various noble families, and kings.

CommieBobDole2• 8 years ago

My understanding is that European royalty generally thought of their positions as being granted by divine providence. I guess it's slightly different because they didn't attain their position (they were born into it) but I think there's little question they generally considered themselves inherently morally superior to the poor.

Really, it seems like the mechanism may have changed; "I am successful because God has chosen me in my inherent superiority to be successful" vs "I am successful because of the inherent superiority of the moral code I follow", but they're really just different applications of the just-world fallacy. Which, in turn, is a natural product of the way our brains are wired.

mark2124• 8 years ago

note that the article isn't really talking about aristocrats, whatever their modern equivalent would be, but today's upper middle class. The kind of people who work for a living, highly paid for sure, but who aren't rentiers or factory owners.

As far as successful burghers or artisans in the middle ages, then yes, I think they did ascribe their financial success as resulting from God's blessing their superior morality.

noobermin2• 8 years ago

people have been doing this ever since society has existed and will be doing it long after we're all dead.

Jacobin is a leftist magazine. One of the main ideas of people on the socialist left is not just to observe how people behave and live, to merely be reactive, but to seek to change society to ameliorate its ills.

switchbak• 8 years ago

Sometimes it's painful to read someone's oversimplified judgement of socitey through their rigid ideological prism(s).

To be sure, there are some interesting dynamics at play with regards to self denial, class/hierarchical dynamics, and such, but I don't believe this article has done a particularly good job of illustrating them.

Some times the world is rather more complicated than Victorian vs Socialism/Feminism/Marxism, etc.

ChuckMcM2• 8 years ago

Feels like a lot of projection. At some point in there lives people realize that there are “groups” who seem similar. Often by dress, and attitude. Not all of these groups are conscious of the conformity.

Once you can see a group the question will come up “Am I part of that group?” Or “Do I want to be?” And sometimes the group will reject your attempts to join. How you deal with those situations seems to have an outsized effect on your life.

The author clearly sees the groups and recognizes that they have existed for a long time, and then attacks them for their shallowness. Why? For lulz? Because they want to belong but can’t? They seem to reject the idea that groups serve a purpose other than snobbery. At the end of the article I was left with a sense the author was offended but not entirely sure what they were offended by.

NeoBasilisk• 8 years ago

I think the purpose of the article was perfectly clear. Arguing against those in the upper middle class that place an inordinate amount of focus on their personal virtues as the reason for their success.

"Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers."

jeffreyrogers7• 8 years ago

"Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers."

Unfortunately for the author's argument, very few people at SoulCycle hold this view.

blackbagboys7• 8 years ago

The underlying point is that these professional-class distinctions are cast in moralistic tones and serve as an ideological justification for denigrating and ignoring the material needs of the bourgeois's class enemies. This is most clearly seen in the case of college admissions.

Of course, most bourgeois aggressively refuse to accept the idea that there is anything political about their consumption choices at all, or that they even have 'class enemies', because they refuse to acknowledge that they occupy and actively maintain a privileged position in a fundamentally unjust and exploitative system.

jeffreyrogers7• 8 years ago

College admissions is overwhelmingly biased towards the "class enemies" you're describing. The problem is there are not enough underrepresented minorities who are qualified for universities in proportion to their presence in the general population. Consequently, Asian and Jewish students are discriminated against in college admissions, partly because their cultures buy into the upper class ideals that are denigrated in this article.

ryandrake2• 8 years ago

The bourgeois are highly incentivized to convince everyone else that Wealth Signaling and Virtue Signaling are the same activities. Everything and every lifestyle choice sold to you as “virtuous”, “good for you” or “good for your kids” is, un-coincidentally, expensive.

noobermin2• 8 years ago

One of the differences of American society is that it was created with the idea that all people were "equal" unlike Victorian society which had an actual aristocracy, and therefore, explicit classes. The perspective that there are no classes is an inherently American perspective.

Of course, the left perspective is specifically that this is an illusion, people are divided into economic classes and capital is what discriminates instead of birth right. That's the point of this article, that even though capitalism pretends all people are equal, it creates a society where they are not.

jeffreyrogers7• 8 years ago

I don't like the idea that because the upper class does something we should be skeptical of it. Maybe part of the reason the upper class is the upper class is because of its commitment to good ideals: two-parent stable households, having a healthy lifestyle, preparing your kids for success.

blackbagboys7• 8 years ago

Yes, this is exactly what the upper class wants to think about itself, and sort of the point of the article.

jeffreyrogers7• 8 years ago

As far as I can tell, they're right. I don't see how adopting these habits is harmful and I can see plenty of benefits.

mark2124• 8 years ago

to be charitable to the author, it's not so much that the ideals aren't good ones, it's more the preening self-regard that the upper middle class (author's words here, and it's an important distinction) holds while engaging in this lifestyle. Not to mention the judgmentalism that they cast while doing so.

Where the argument breaks down is that he connects this with some sort of oppress-the-poor policy program, when in fact the crowd that most loudly crows about its yoga practice and organic food consumption is squarely behind the policy program of living wage and universal healthcare.

captainbland• 8 years ago

This seems pretty evident in the UK where we have these attitudes proudly parading themselves around, particularly in the guise of a particular Jacob Rees-Mogg.

I think the article would be more interesting if they dove more into the history of this idea - for instance I've always been under the impression that the UK and USA suffer from this particular ailment because of the 'protestant work ethic', otherwise called 'calvinism' handed down by many generations of wealthy property owners and aristocrats attempting to motivate their workforce. While at one point those land owners would simply have cited the fact that their ancestors fought for the property that they owned, or that they had it through divine intervention at some point that got questioned.

In the secular age, the assumption that the rich worked for the property that they own is pre-supposed (and hence own it morally, and claim the rights to that moral superiority) even if it's not true - and certainly isn't true when you consider the effort that they expend vs. the efforts of others and their relative outcomes. This is then reinforced through, primarily, economic power - the ability to advertise their status, the fact that your boss will tell you about how they've been creating jobs, etc. reinforces this narrative. By this point, whether they worked for it or not is irrelevant, because their perceived ownership of the moral high-ground is so deeply ingrained until something actually goes wrong.

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

If everyone could hit nails that accurately we wouldn't have nail guns.

Jldevictoria• 8 years ago

I think the observations that the author makes are quite interesting, but his conclusions are quite a stretch.

Human society and natural law always reward meritocracy. I think he makes a mistake when he tries to suggest that all activities and lifestyles of any "class" of people are equally valuable.

Eating unhealthily is objectively bad. Smoking cigarettes is objectively bad. Its not a sign or "oppression" if you teach your kids not to get pregnant in high school or advise them against alcoholism and drug use...

ryanobjc• 8 years ago

While the central point about using things inherent to your structural position in life as a personal morality skewer is spot on, I find some of the buttressing arguments annoying.

For example, the gluten-free shaming. While yes, not everyone is celiac, I am confused by people are insistent that some kind of gluten allergy is impossible. If you are that kind of person, I have some hsCRP results that maybe you could explain?

cmiles74• 8 years ago

In my opinion, the author dies try to indicate that they are meaning people who avoid gluten yet do not suffer from celiac disease.

"Consider the gluten-free movement — those who choose to eliminate gluten from their diet, not those who have celiac disease and must eschew wheat entirely."

I do agree that a non-celiac person who chooses to avoid gluten simply to avoid gluten, without any other health concerns, is bizarre. And it's certainly on the rise: where I live restaurants actually alter behavior based on whether or not you suffer from celiac disease or simply "prefer no gluten". My partner has celiac disease and when they ask if something contains gluten (or requests a gluten-free menu, some places offer this) the server always asks: "Do you have an allergy?"

While my partner always replies "yes", this indicates to me that some people are saying "no". In those cases, apparently, the restaurant is doing something differently.

1053r• 8 years ago

While the central observation of the article is vaguely interesting, what is more interesting perhaps is the slow and gradual pivots from Victorian moral signaling to modern moral signaling, and whether modern moral signaling is more or less adaptive towards actually making one's life better than Victorian moral signaling was.

For example, life satisfaction is strongly correlated with exercise. This was true even before the general population used exercise to signal virtue. (See the Harvard longitudinal study as an example of this.)

Additionally, the modern practice of allowing (some) women to have highly successful careers seems to lead to better outcomes than the Victorian practice of locking women out of everything except teaching and nursing, and encouraging them to get out of those as soon as they could lock down a man.

Perhaps virtue signaling slowly converges on actual virtue? (This isn't to imply that all modern virtue signaling practices are virtuous. For example, I'd argue that modern virtue signaling around sleep, or lack thereof, and work, namely filling one's life entirely full of it with no breaks, at least in the USA, are terrible for health and life satisfaction.)

Edit: added clarification that modern values around female careers are better than Victorian ones, but are not yet a fully solved problem.

philipkglass• 8 years ago

From the closing paragraph: We should care about health, food, and education. But instead of seeing them as ways to prop up class dominance, we should improve them for everyone.

Sure, that's agreeable enough. But I can't tell for sure if the author understands the difference between 1) upper middle class parents having resources to confer material advantages to their own families and 2) faddish tribal markers that confer no material advantage. The two are mixed indiscriminately throughout the article. There's no benefit to enabling the lower 4 income quintiles to participate in the same fads embraced by the top quintile.

Being an overweight smoker really is bad for your health. It's not just an arbitrary tribal marker.

Breast-feeding infants is good for them.

Limiting screen time is good for young children.

Exclusively eating organic-certified food, or gluten-free food (without a supporting diagnostic test), is just a tribal marker.

Wearing exercise outfits to the grocery store is just a marker. Actually exercising isn't.

One upper-middle-class fad that is actually worse for children, omitted from the article: refusing to vaccinate.

quxbar• 8 years ago

The author of this article should read 'Vanity Fair' by Thackeray. It crystallizes the argument they're trying to make.

zengid• 8 years ago

Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's _The_Diamond_Age_. Great book!

abecedarius• 8 years ago

From the title I expected a piece about censoriousness. How did England go from the libertine Regency period to the social-policing Victorians? Is there a similar dynamic today, of course around different norms? That's something I've been wondering but haven't got to read about so far.

Twenty-first century Victorians

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