Twenty-first century Victorians
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
But Jacobin likes to pretend that anyone that even thought of voting for Hilary in the last election is basically a fascist sellout.
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.
Note especially the conflation of 'minorities' with 'poor people'; this lets those members of the bourgeois who miss out on their exact institution of choice (and might have to attend UC Santa Cruz instead of Stanford, the horror) reconcile their own sense of self-worth with the class myth that failure to get admission to college denotes inferiority: they did meet all the fair, objective, meritocratic criteria, but the university gave their rightful slot to an undeserving black / hispanic person instead.
There are very few people actively trying to prevent lower class people from getting into the upper class, but it's competitive to be in the upper class and there are only so many spots. You don't get to be prestigious by letting everyone in.
The plus side is that if you are from a lower class background and somehow overcome your environment, the admissions committees are tripping over themselves to let you in.
Yes, again, that's the point. The entire paradigm exists to justify the unjust concentration of power and wealth in a small upper class. It doesn't require an active conspiracy, it just requires people to accept that there is something objectively 'right' or naturally ordained about this state of affairs, as you apparently do.
I don't necessarily disagree with your points but it doesn't matter. It's a medium-is-the-message thing: when the medium is ideological rhetoric, the message is the death of this forum. What the ideology actually is is secondary.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
Why those adherents feel morally superior is a separate question.
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.