One Utah

I’m currently reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map.  Johnson is doing social history of Victorian London, focusing on a very specific incident (a cholera outbreak) and it’s impact on how we manage our cities (in terms of waste management).  However, it’s impossible to do any Victorian history without coming into contact with the paradox of Victorianism. 

Victorianism has a bad reputation - it comes by its reputation honestly but it’s not completely deserved.  It’s easy to rail against it for its staid sexual conservatism, retrograde attitudes on race and gender, it’s repressive class relationships.  At the same time, the Victorians were restless intellectuals and social reformers, in love with the potential of science to transform human life.  In vast areas of life, the Victorians easily embraced technological and scientific advances and integrated them into daily life with ease - electricity, telegraphs, telephones, steam power, railroads, medicines and medical treatments, the full scope of the industrial revolution in terms of means and products.  One need look no further than the theory of evolution to see the full paradox of Victorian thought - embraced and celebrated on the one hand, with both professional and amateur scientists seeking out the evidence while on the other hand rejected absolutely as a threat to humanity’s status in the Universe; evolution threatened an intellectual dogma upon which a great many people had built their lives.  Victorian cities were a complex mix of the grand, glorious and gleaming and the fetid, festering and teeming.  Millions of people packed into cities, crowded into slums and run down buildings lived cheek and jowl with luxurious mansions of stinking rich industrialists.  These paradoxical, contradictory attitudes and experiences coexisted within the Victorian intellectual milieu.

Thinking about the paradox of  Victorianism has started me thinking about our own paradoxical culture.  We live in a culture that dashes after every scientific breakthrough in terms of consumer goods but which places research science into things like stem-cells under the most retrograde of moral constraints (don’t use those cells -that blastocyst might someday magically become a person!).  We have people who use the most up to date technology to argue that evolution couldn’t have happened.  People use cells phones and airplanes and computers to plot to advance medieval morality.

The contradictions and paradoxes abound. 

During a period following World War Two, the US enjoyed a brief time of consensus - when it at least appeared we shared a consensus - underneath the apparently placid surface American life was bubbling and churning, massive changes were happening largely out of sight.  The Civil Rights movement was really starting.  Women’s dissatisfaction with their lives was preparing the soil for feminism.  GLBT persons, who had experienced a brief window of liberation during the war, were laying the foundations for what would become today’s glbt movement.  Early marriages - durings the 1950s and 60s  the average age at first marriage was as low as it has ever been among people born in the US - set the stage for the torrent of divorces that would occur in the 1970s and 80s.  The Beatniks were a predule to the counterculture that would emerge in the 60s.  But these changes were in the future.  For a brief, shining moment, Americans believed we had achieved a domestic equilibrium - we were broadly speaking at peace domestically.

Looking back, the undercurrents of American society hadn’t been banished - they were buiding strength.  By the 1960s, these forces began to be unleashed, to grow stronger and more prevalent.  The consensus was shattered.

Since then, Americans have faced dramatic changes - attitudes, behaviors, family patterns, technology and industry.  Like our Victorian forebears we are awash in a sea of change and we have clung to certain apparently unchanging dogma in the face these changes.  Like our Victorian ancestors, we are paradoxical, contradictory mix of attitudes and behaviors.  New technology is eagerly anticipated and consumed.  We can’t wait for the latest device, the latest gadget.  At the same time, so many of us feel unmoored.  Those folks grasp for the illusory certainties of yesterday - unchanging faith, belief that yesterday’s values were the values of forever and ever.  It’s nothing more than a disguise though - a stage set of certainty that makes all the change feel manageable.

This entry was posted Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under American History, American People, People Are Nuts, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.