Robin Hanson has been puzzling over the transition from traditional to modern culture:
It happened after tech started changing a lot, when long distance trade, travel, and talk greatly increased. But with a big delay; those things had changed lots a few centuries before culture started changing fast ~1900-1920. And strangely, the new modernists were then most sure that the culture of their grandparents was not what they wanted, even though they felt quite unsure of in which new directions culture should go.
Clothing fashion had been changing for several centuries before, and there had also been slowly changing fashion in governance and morals. But suddenly art, sculpture, architecture, music fashion changed much more radically, and soon after norms and values also started changing faster.
At the key transition time, it seems that the culture of elite youth was more modern than the culture of older adults. And even today, most people most like the food, music, etc. popular when they were ~20yo, suggesting youth have a disproportionate role in cultural change. And elites have always had more influence over most everything.
All of these lead me to wonder if a key was the rise of school, which concentrated elite youths together so that they could form their own internal elite youth culture.
Look at the history of World War I and its aftermath in Great Britain. A lot of frustrated white women who would be called “Karens” and less polite terms today decided that women were going to forge the culture. Look at suffragette terrorism in Britain as well.
Then look at the dastardly duo of Freud and Bernays. This was not a natural process: this was a set of conspiracies.
Why is this strange? It’s but another expansion to the area where the competition pressure or standards (which are much the same, as being measured against the old masters) are lower, thus it’s easier to stand out and stay afloat is less.
This depends on what kind of school he is talking about.
Catholic universities go very far back. They did start their share of mess, but somehow did not end in modernism, did they? And various art fashions probably existed as long as arts, so what?
Gaikokumaniakku says:
Ascribing everything to purely hypothetical “conspiracies” is not substantially different from ascribing everything to “Providence”.
Unfortunately, it was mostly natural. As in, supply and demand. Consider the Age of Quackery in England and USA alike. At least on the level Chesterton described. Seabrook in biography of Wood mentions a lot of curious nonsense, but that quackery was about mere fraud, not power for the aspiring power-mongers.
There was crazy amount of both awesome stuff and utterly ridiculous crap generated in ?? and early ?? century. What got persistent sponsorship is anything (whether cool stuff or ridiculous crap) that:
1. could serve the potential sponsors and
2. was noticed.
Industrialization, construction techniques, mass market.
“Ascribing everything to purely hypothetical ‘conspiracies’ is not substantially different from ascribing everything to Providence.”
I do not ascribe *everything* to conspiracies; I have (over the past few years) documented a number of conspiracies, sometimes on a now-nearly-defunct wordpress blog and sometimes on a rarely-updated substack.
“Unfortunately, it was mostly natural. As in, supply and demand. Consider the Age of Quackery in England and USA alike. At least on the level Chesterton described. Seabrook in biography of Wood mentions a lot of curious nonsense, but that quackery was about mere fraud, not power for the aspiring power-mongers.”
Very well. We can agree there was an Age of Quackery, and some of those quacks were merely quacks who sought quick and easy money. But Freud was not merely a cocaine-fueled quack; Freud was a remarkably evil man who did a great deal to destroy Western Civilization — and then Bernays made it worse.
Gaikokumaniakku says:
That’s their business. The very existence of Age of Quackery shows there was a big niche for it.
The reason there was a niche is obvious. Nobody strong-armed people into buying this or that snake oil. Much less perpetuum mobile. Fashions of the influential people spread downstream, and imitating them (if only superficially) is profitable, always was. In XIX to early XX centuries this manifested as a deluge of quackery. Not that it ever stopped, but eventually got harnessed and regulated.
He was a quack whose peculiar quackery happened to be popular with both new aristocracy and the lowest common denominator sort of the crowd at the same time.
Which obviously was what mattered.
It could be phrenologists instead. Or whatever. The fashion is fickle.
That’s blowing smokes up… the statues.
At the time, if you asked anyone using phrases like “Western Civilization” about who represents that, the answer would point at the very people who endorsed Freud.
Chesterton’s depictions of the new British aristocracy show the crowd very much into both “modernism” and various pseudoscience.
This does not seem too much of an exaggerated caricature. I mean, if you need a real-life poster girl for these fancy ghouls, consider Marie Stopes, fangirl of tuberculosis and Hitler. With her club of friends, and the influence thereof. Including Shaw and Wells (the latter had rather famous misgivings, however).
I apologize for being thick, but I get the sense you’re making a good argument and I’m not up to speed on the basic info I need to understand it.
a.
>Consider the Age of Quackery in England and USA alike. At least on the level Chesterton described.
I did some web searching and I couldn’t find any Chesterton writing about quackery.
b.
>Seabrook in biography of Wood mentions a lot of curious nonsense, but that quackery was about mere fraud, not power for the aspiring power-mongers.
okay, here the search engines pointed me at ” 1941 biography Doctor Wood: Modern Wizard of the Laboratory,” which is probably a book I should have read, but I had been totally ignorant of it until you alluded to it.
c.
>There was crazy amount of both awesome stuff and utterly ridiculous crap generated in ?? and early ?? century.
You probably meant “19th” and “20th” but the text editor glitched, I guess. Later you wrote “In XIX to early XX centuries this manifested as a deluge of quackery. Not that it ever stopped, but eventually got harnessed and regulated.”
d.
>”That’s blowing smokes up… the statues.”
I’m sorry, my grasp of English idioms is not sufficient. I gather that my use of “Western Civilization” was a faux pas.
e.
>At the time, if you asked anyone using phrases like “Western Civilization” about who represents that, the answer would point at the very people who endorsed Freud.
Very probably that’s true, but I’m not sure I’m following.
P.S. Sorry for the late reply — this last week has been a bit hectic.
Gaikokumaniakku says:
Well, he does not use the word. But. There are no outright rants, but it’s a major recurring theme of Chesterton.
As Scott Alexander put it in review of Seeing Like a State, «the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature.»
Chesterton did many stabs at the (new) upper classes and their modernist fashion (what James C Scott mocked as “evenly-spaced rectangular grids”). And how they like to play “mad scientist” with their hapless peasants and tenants as guinea pigs, testing the latest stupid idea of a diet or whatnot.
And then there are “certain doctors”, quite accommodating with those types while otherwise acting tough, waving loosely justified control freakery and/or outright pseudoscience.
In the essays it’s relatively tame, but to the point, e.g. “What’s Wrong With The World”:
Etc., etc.
In the novels it’s… less modest. Try “Manalive”:
Etc., etc.
However, Chesterton was careful to not throw the baby out with the water and go full “fly lovers, human haters!!1″ like Lewis did.
Yes. A fun book, and good inoculation vs. MiniTru grade trash history, “Smithsonian” or otherwise. Seabrook’s macabre bias shows (for one, Blondlot did not commit suicide, he basically sighed, said «mistaeks were maed» and remained quiet afterwards), but not much.
My bad, Compose button habit.
Now our host replaced those U+2168 and U+2169 with ASCII.
Using the old slogans to accuse their former owners is much like complaining from within the frame of Overton Window about where it was moved lately.
This oversized umbrella is used by the sort of people who appreciate its all-consuming nature. The Catholics would say “Christendom” (with understanding that all those heretics usually don’t count), so this narrows down to “secular” Protestants.
What it used to mean was: «we cannot jolly well say that this was made by The True-Born Englishman, so just avoid saying French or Germans and credit the vague blob of equals (but some more equal than others)».
It’s still like this, but with the Good and Great of Brits 2.0 and a larger umbrella, so the old umbrella was left for scavengers. Do you really want to touch it?
“Now our host replaced those U+2168 and U+2169 with ASCII.”
I’m afraid the blog software eats unusual characters before I ever see them.