How England Sees Itself

[IdleRich]

"Well, obviously I disagree, which is why I wrote all that stuff above it."

But presumably you see some improvements as well as backwards steps? I'd say that a story about how everything has got worse is no more convincing than the myth of progress

"The second thing that this rests on is taking marginal gains to some particular person or subgroup, but ignoring the whole effect. Sure, a “gaylord”, or a woman, or a poor person, might prefer to have the individual gains that they made in a straight offer, but would they take them in exchange for the total change in society over the last hundred years? I’m pretty sure that the answer for most people would be “no”. That’s simply a matter of judgement. And yes, a lot of this rests on the differences in morality and values between now and then. What else would it rest on?"

By judgment you just mean gut feeling though right? Which is fair enough, there is no metric for actually knowing that I can imagine. Not convinced though, if I'd been someone whose sexuality was criminalised and then it wasn't then it would take some pretty bad stuff happening elsewhere to make me think that society was moving in the wrong direction.
The second bit though, you misunderstand me. I'm saying that if you could transport a lot of people from 1911 to 2011 then probably a lot of the things they would list as detrimental changes would be "Woman are allowed to vote" "Hardly anyone goes to church on Sunday" "There are lots of black people and we're not allowed to treat them as sub-human". In other words, the things they might not like are often gonna be things I (and probably you) do like.
I mean, what you seem to be saying is "People from 1911 wouldn't like 2011 and so I'm right in talking about anti-progress" but the things that people from 1911 would hate aren't the same things as you are decrying now and so I'm not sure the argument is valid.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I was about to say something similar - people in 1911 had their own prejudices, just like people in all societies in all ages have their prejudices, and if society in 2011 doesn't comform to those prejudices that hardly proves that society is going "backwards".

Rather than asking "What would people from a century ago think about today's society?", perhaps a better question would be "Would most people from today willingly step through a time warp to 1911?". I think the vast majority would not.

 

[vimothy]

Sure--and equally, you could say exactly the same thing about people today.

Rather than asking "What would people from a century ago think about today's society?", perhaps a better question would be "Would most people from today willingly step through a time warp to 1911?". I think the vast majority would not.

But if the first experiment fails, so too must this.

An interesting thought experiment is, what if we'd had all of social change, and none of the technological change, or all of the technological change and none of the social change?

It seems to me that the answer is not obvious. Again, a gut feeling and not a logical derivation. Of course this isn't a real choice and you don't have to pick one or the other, buit it's worth bearing in mind when you think about what has been lost on the road to where we are now. I mean, what about the Ballardian null space of Tescos and motoway service stations. Progress, or just change?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well let's avoid going so far down the relativity path that we end up saying that no society is any better or worse to live in than any other. OK, so most people on the whole do no have an explicitly 'spiritual' dimension in their lives any more, and that is not without potentially negative consequences, granted. You have to weigh that up against the fact that we no longer criminalise a large part of the population based on their sexual orientation and that married women are no longer considered the property of their husbands.

But leaving aside things like this which will inevitably involve value judgements, I think we can say it is an objective improvement that life expectancy is far greater than it was just a few generations back, that serious infectious diseases are far less common, people generally have enough food to eat, infant mortality is a fraction of what it once was and even people with serious long-term illnesses and disabilities can lead something approaching a normal life. There's no way you can regard any of these improvements as being contingent on ephemeral social values, I think.

And yes, obviously motorway service stations are grim and soulless, but people don't actually live inside them, do they? There's still plenty of mystery and poetry and humour in the world, you just have to know where to look for it - or, perhaps, know how to make yourself open to these things when they present themselves. I think I talked a lot about this in response to zhao's "the lack of the 'mysterious'" thread a couple of years back.

You can even find numinous mystery in that most humdrum of environments, the British suburbs...

 

[IdleRich]

"But if the first experiment fails, so too must this."

Yes, I'd agree, although I think I would give slightly more weight to the second person as the direction of history means that a 2011er has more information about 1911 than vice versa.

"I mean, what about the Ballardian null space of Tescos and motoway service stations. Progress, or just change?"

Our response to these right now is conflicted, we claim to hate them and not want them to be built but we all use them when they are.

 

[vimothy]

You have to weigh that up against the fact that we no longer criminalise a large part of the population based on their sexual orientation and that married women are no longer considered the property of their husbands.

When you say criminalised, you just mean that it was illegal, right? Roughly how many people were actually imprisoned for being homosexuals? And were married women really considered property of their husbands?

But leaving aside things like this which will inevitably involve value judgements, I think we can say it is an objective improvement that life expectancy is far greater than it was just a few generations back, that serious infectious diseases are far less common, people generally have enough food to eat, infant mortality is a fraction of what it once was and even people with serious long-term illnesses and disabilities can lead something approaching a normal life. There's no way you can regard any of these improvements as being contingent on ephemeral social values, I think.

Exactly, so we need to remove the confounding variable from the analysis, as it were.

And yes, obviously motorway service stations are grim and soulless, but people don't actually live inside them, do they? There's still plenty of mystery and poetry and humour in the world, you just have to know where to look for it - or, perhaps, know how to make yourself open to these things when they present themselves. I think I talked a lot about this in response to zhao's "the lack of the 'mysterious'" thread a couple of years back.

Well, I'm being a little bit ironic there. There was another thread on here recently where people were complaining about Tescos and what had happened to the character of Britain's towns. In fact, I thought it was you. Anyway, all good liberals know that supermarkets are evil and organic wholefood stores are good and true. I was just trying to work outwards from some kind of common ground.

 

[vimothy]

Anyway, it's not that people lack a "spiritual dimension"--which is not a very interesting claim. It's that people lack, essentially, eveything, except material satisfaction of their wants.

 

[baboon2004]

When you say criminalised, you just mean that it was illegal, right? Roughly how many people were actually imprisoned for being homosexuals?

"A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939" says an average of 702 per year in England in the inter-war years.

But more to the point is the huge changes that making something illegal effect in people's lives. Naturally most people became extremely good at hiding their sexuality, thus avoiding the possibility of arrest.

And the legalisation of homosexuality will inevitably mean that hate crimes will also come to be recognised (though not immediately).

As to married women, I'm not sure, but obviously there were notable women willing to die in that very period to claim their rights. Plus I'm sure pay differentials were a lot more pronounced than now, for example (though still now very much in existence).

I think there's zero argument against the fact that life has become considerably better on an individual level for members of groups historically persecuted.

But that seems to me not to be the crux of the argument here - isn't the question whether something, albeit difficult to define, has been lost in putative modernisation?

 

[baboon2004]

Anyway, it's not that people lack a "spiritual dimension"--which is not a very interesting claim. It's that people lack, essentially, everything, except material satisfaction of their wants.

What exactly do you mean, that they lack everything else? I certainly believe that some aspects within people have not progressed significantly, but I would argue that they never existed fully, and that what has been surprising in modernisation has not been a decline in people's self-knowledge etc etc, but rather that there has been no appreciable change at all, while society has gone through seemingly radical changes (though obviously the former means that the latter are not quite as radical changes as they appear).

Connected to this, what i think now is becoming ever more glaring is that this human 'project' has no-one at the steering wheel. Exterior progress is everywhere, interior progress nowhere.

 

[Mr. Tea]

When you say criminalised, you just mean that it was illegal, right? Roughly how many people were actually imprisoned for being homosexuals?

Fuck knows. Oscar Wilde is the most famous example, there must have been plenty of gay guys who got sent to prison for it (ha, as if that's going to straighten them out!) who weren't famous writers, or famous for anything. And gayness was considered a psychiatric disorder well into the 20th century, I mean look what happened to Alan Turing, jesus...

And were married women really considered property of their husbands?

Come on, now you're just being facetious. Is there really any point in questioning the assertion that huge improvements have been made with regards to equality between men and women, between straight people and gay people, and so on?

Well, I'm being a little bit ironic there. There was another thread on here recently where people were complaining about Tescos and what had happened to the character of Britain's towns. In fact, I thought it was you. Anyway, all good liberals know that supermarkets are evil and organic wholefood stores are good and true. I was just trying to work outwards from some kind of common ground.

Well I don't think Tesco is an unalloyed good for society, to put it mildly. But I think the prevalence of their stores throughout the country is probably more a symptom (of this vile, grey whatever-it-is) than a cause.

Your comment about organic wholefood stores sounds like a jab at the popular caricature of the "liberal" as a Guardian-reading Islingtonite who probably fits into the upper-middle income bracket, goes to yoga classes and thinks he's down with the kids because he smoked weed at uni and sometimes listens to Burial. Or something like that - right? I don't shop in Whole Foods or Planet Organic because I'm not a rich idiot - I often shop in Tesco because it's hard to avoid shopping in Tesco, and they do at least usually have most of the things I want - for fruit and veg I'd much rather go to a small shop with price tags hand-scrawled on bits of cardboard and dirt on the floor, staffed by people who don't speak much English, not because of any of these things makes me a better person or an impeccable liberal but because they're much cheaper than supermarkets, let alone Whole Foods.

Anyway, this thread isn't meant to be about my shopping habits, sorry. I'd certainly agree that homogenisation of towns leads to a general cultural impoverishment. I'm not sure what to do about - looking abroad at other developed countries that have managed to avoid this fate, or where the malaise is at least less advanced, would be a start, I guess.

Edit: baboon, I think the income difference between men and women is rather overplayed. These days it's illegal to pay your staff different wages for doing the same job, so the income disparity comes from the fact that far more women than men work part-time, and secondarily that women are much more likely than men to take a career break of several years when they have kids. I'm sure there's room for improvement in this area but the bare fact that median income is higher for men than for women is not, as it's sometimes made out to be, evidence of a grand conspiracy to pay women less than men.

 

[baboon2004]

Well to be honest, I don't know. Where I've worked, women's pay has been on equal footing with men, but then I have worked in pretty OK places.

In retrospect I'm not sure why I picked on unequal pay per se. Maybe i read something recently, but as yous ay, it is technically illegal. More the issue I should have focussed on is that women have to work harder to get that same job in the first place, especially in the upper tiers of management, and endure a lot of sexist shit. And maternity can become an excuse for treating women badly etc - again, not worked in these places, but the evidence seems manifold

Edit: to continue the shopping theme, as discussed in another thread, Britain seems particularly bad for homogenisation in this regard, particualrly outside 3 or 4 major cities.

 

[IdleRich]

"When you say criminalised, you just mean that it was illegal, right? Roughly how many people were actually imprisoned for being homosexuals?"

Presmably a lot fewer than those who were fined, or lived their life in fear of being caught and stigmatised or those that just lied to themselves and got unhappily married. I know this is a digression but that seems a strange question.

"Anyway, all good liberals know that supermarkets are evil and organic wholefood stores are good and true."

Of course but what I meant is, everyone complains about them and yet uses them. If people are capable of that double-think (kinda) then how much more will they be able to say "life was better before supermarkets and the car existed" while driving down to Waitrose? It's not that they're lying exactly, or even mistaken, it's just that I take their words with a pinch of salt.

 

[hucks]

Your comment about organic wholefood stores sounds like a jab at the popular caricature of the "liberal" as a Guardian-reading Islingtonite who probably fits into the upper-middle income bracket, goes to yoga classes and thinks he's down with the kids because he smoked weed at uni and sometimes listens to Burial.

Actually I live in Hackney.

 

[IdleRich]

That post (my last one) was actually a bit pointless cos by the time I remembered to press submit Tea and Baboon had already said the first bit.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, it's not really a matter of working in an "OK place" or not, because whether we're talking about a nice right-on public-sector body or Evil Corporate Cunts plc., it's illegal to pay men and women who are doing the same job different salaries, end of story.

I think probably the one employment sector were there still is serious active discrimination is in the upper eschelons of the City, where obviously the whole place still runs along the lines of old-boy networks in a way that has largely disappeared in other areas. Differences in salaries or bonuses here are going to have a dramatic effect on the average (mean) figures because the amounts involved are so stupendous, even though the number of people affected is actually pretty small. So if a hedge fund awards bonuses of 2m quid to its male employees but only a piffling 1m to its female employees, even though they've been equally productive over the FY, that has a big impact on the 'average' male and female earnings in the country, although it's neither here nor there for the vast majority of men and women who earn nothing like that in the first place. Probably a good example of a situation in which it's more useful to talk about the median rather than the mean.

Edit: another, oddly enough, is academia, particularly with regard to maternity. Apparently women academics on maternity leave are still expected to produce papers at the same rate while nursing their baby! Can't imagine it's too much fun to be frantically typing away with one hand while clutching a sprog to your tit with the other, alternately checking references and cleaning up sick. Ridiculous.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Actually I live in Hackney.

Get back to the kitchen, you don't want to oversteam your tofu.

 

[baboon2004]

reading further around some of the points being raised, i'm smacked in the face as to how fucking radical in their actions the suffragettes were.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Reckon the St. Paul's protesters would have more success if one of them threw themselves under a galloping horse ridden by a major establishment figure?

 

[baboon2004]

Yes, probably.

I reckon they'd have even more of a chance if more of the British population gave a shit about anything important.

 

[Mr. Tea]

That makes me but I guess you're right. You only have to look at the crap that passes for 'news' that 90% of people read...