Victorian Values: Conclusions (2021)
wyclif.substack.com
wyclif.substack.com
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?)
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?
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).
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/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-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.
> We don't tolerate divorce and we ostracize people who don't get married.
Which also means high levels of domestic violence and simultaneously escalating domestic violence due to inability to leave. Up to and including domestic murders. The fact is, Islamic society does not look like society with better families to me. It seems more like society that likes to pretend that if you are not single, then all is fine, even if you just got chocked by the partner.
Being married makes the family more financially stable due to sharing of expenses either having two earners or being able to divide working and taking care of the household.
> Which also means high levels of domestic violence and simultaneously escalating domestic violence due to inability to leave. Up to and including domestic murders. The fact is, Islamic society does not look like society with better families to me.
Domestic violence is an orthogonal problem that’s common across the developing world, and unfortunately quite common in the developed world. But it doesn’t have much to do with marriage, because of course non-marital relationships can have domestic violence as well.
In the US, domestic violence isn’t especially more prevalent in communities that maintain strong taboos on divorce (Asian Americans and Muslim Americans). Meanwhile it’s unfortunately the most common in communities that also have the highest rates of divorce and out of wedlock childbearing.
This does not seem to be supported by real world. In real world, poor people marry less in the first place. And when family income goes down, people divorce more.
> Domestic violence is an orthogonal problem that’s common across the developing world,
This is not true. The ability to divorce and leave partner makes it lower. The inability to divorce and social pressure to marry makes it higher. It is primary ability to be single when you want/need to that makes it go lower. Whether you will report domestic violence or not also depends on your ability to leave - because if you report it and then stay married, punishment will follow.
And afaik, unfortunately, it is mostly common among cops.
A household with two earners sharing expenses, or dividing the load of work and childcare, is more financially stable than two separate households. This is basic arithmetic. The poverty rate of children living with two married parents is 7%. The poverty rate for children living with one parent is 33.6%. https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/population/qa01203.asp?qaDate....
> This is not true. The ability to divorce and leave partner makes it lower. The inability to divorce and social pressure to marry makes it higher. It is primary ability to be single when you want/need to that makes it go lower.
Countries with legal systems that punish domestic violence make it lower. It's certainly true that is an advantage the U.S. has over the developing world. But within the U.S., your theory does not pan out. In New York City, for example, Asians, who have by far the highest marriage rates, are less than 1/4 as likely to be involved in a domestic violence assault as Black people, who have by far the lowest marriage rates: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ocdv/downloads/pdf/ENDGBV-Inters.... And you can't chalk that up to economics because Asians also have the highest poverty rates of any ethnic group in NYC: http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/?forum-post=resear.... Nationwide, Black women are 2.5 times more likely to be the victims of domestic violence than white women, but half as likely to be married. (This is one of the many ways in which white social liberalism has hurt Black women and children.) In another example, Appalachia has always had higher rates of family instability than other parts of the country. But it also has higher rates of domestic violence.
In fact, I suspect the causality actually runs in the other direction, all else being equal. Unfortunately, men aren't less violent merely because they're a boyfriend rather than a husband. But in a traditional marriage, there is a union of families, which means that the wife's family can scrutinize and police the husband's behavior. That social framework tends to absent entirely in casual relationships.
There isn't one concrete definition of marriage, traditionally.
Family instability being a symptom rather than a cause seems unlikely, given that (1) rates have skyrocketed even as the country has gotten richer; and (2) poor countries manage to have high levels of family stability regardless. If you look at the Brookings chart I linked above, the share of kids living with a single parent in the second to bottom income quantile dropped 15 points from 1979 to today. That seems to coincide with Gen X growing up with post-1960 socially liberal values that emphasize individualism and self gratification over old fashioned values like duty, conformity, and obligation. There’s a whole bunch of negative social indicators, from non-marital birth rates to crime, that started trending sharply upwards in the 1960s and 1970s.
No doubt these communities are dysfunctional for other reasons (some of them also cultural); but that’s my point. Social liberalism hits these communities the hardest. Now not only do they have to deal with limited economic opportunities, but are deprived of the social infrastructure that allows communities to face adverse circumstances.
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