We are only amused
Mar 23, 2007 O Mores!, Past is prologue
Think about the Victorians lately? They were, a generation ago, iconic for conservatives, as the quotation from Margaret Thatcher at the link to Slate indicates. But as she points out, she was raised by a Victorian grandmother, for in the 1970’s and ’80’s, people who knew actual Victorians still walked the earth. And not only that — the shuddering of the collapse of their world was still being felt.
Has a civilization ever gone from business casual to morning coats? Not without being rebuilt from the ground up in ways too painful to contemplate. We’re so far from that today that the concept of hearkening back to Victorian anything is pretty comical. We may as well speak of bringing back the Great Awakening or the good old days of Antiquity. It’s not just because of the distance in time: Our culture of slovenliness, gracelessness and, well, just about everything, er, blogging is about is so antithetical to the starched-collar and class-conscious ethos of Victorianism that it is simply impossible to imagine our civilization looking or feeling so civilized — or, of course, so stratified.
Good riddance? Well, if Mrs. Thatcher had some regrets, how can any cultural conservative — damn the historicism! — have none at all? But a century has come and gone and the Victorians, really the ones who ushered in the technological world in the West, only get further away in the rear-view mirror.
July 25th, 2007 at 11:45 am
[...] we have fallen (hat tip for that link to this fascinating blog; check out this, too). It is the Victorian in me, I know, but I am comfortable with [...]
December 5th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
[...] by Ron Coleman on December 5, 2007 I once fancied myself something of a neo-victorian. Perhaps there’s something to that. As Harvey says: The venerable Archbishop of Canterbury [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
[...] cannot be eradicated — i.e., any society, including ours, and ones far more ancient than the Victorians (though like so much they may have elevated it to a very high art!). Hypocrisy is the [...]