I've been watching Series 2 of the Brit Victoria TV show, starring Jenna Coleman as the young Queen Victoria, and I have to say that my overwhelming takeaway is this.
Queen Victoria and her husband Albert, Prince Consort, are represented, in episode after episode, as celebrating faithful, companionate bourgeois marriage, and that this is a Good Thing.
Over and over, we see the older generation -- from Albert's father, Duke of Coburg, to King Leopold of the Belgians, to King Louis-Philippe of France -- as immoral cynical corrupt immoralists. And the young generation -- Victoria, Albert, Prince Ernest -- as earnest, if human, moral improvers. They exemplify, in other words, the bourgeois ethos, that I suppose we may think to have dominated western Europe culturally in the mid 19th century.
And this is clearly represented on the screen as good and noble, a cleaning of the Augean stables of all the old feudal culture of power and corruption and droit de seigneur.
So, does this mean that the worm has turned and that the Victorian era, excoriated for the last century as stuffy and narrow-minded and bigoted, and patriarchal, is now to experience a re-evaluation and celebration as an era of high moral purpose?
I must say that I hope so. In my view the 19th century was a century of wonders and miracles, starting with the industrial revolution that rescued from starvation the free proletarians that had been "hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers" 200 years previously, as Marx so eloquently put it. You have the phenomenon of young entrepreneurs and adventurers from out of northwest Europe spreading out all over the world. And in the unprecedented Great Enrichment all kinds of flowers bloomed, from the rising working class to the middle class to emancipated women to earnest young aristocrats like Victoria and Albert. To represent the Victorian age as hide-bound and regressive, as our lefty friends like to do, is an epic mischaracterization. And the Victoria production is right there with its show and tell.
It is remarkable, is it not, that "Victorian Age" is made to stand for the whole global phenomenon of the rising bourgeoisie, whether nor not it happened in Britain, or North America, or elsewhere.
Now I, of course, am biased on this, because my two grandfathers were small businessmen at the end of the Victorian era in the years just before World War I: one of them in Russia and one in Japan. And the Great Reaction to the capitalist expansion that we saw in the two World Wars and socialist experiments was not kind to my family.
On the other hand we may perhaps seriously indict these TV programs, from Downton Abbey to Victoria to the constant redos of Pride and Prejudice as shameless nostaglia for an era of hierarchy and manners and camera-friendly sets and clothing.
Here's my take. I think that our modern women are going to be taking a serious look at what the iconoclasts, the critics of the middle class, have pushed over the last century. The emancipation of women, the normalization of divorce, the sexual revolution, the cult of career, the notion of the "independent woman" have tumbled over one another over the last century in a narrative of women's liberation and emancipation.
But the question remains, as it is bound to do, as to what is the meaning of life for a woman, as compared to men and to humanity in general. We are now far enough down the road to wonder whether easy divorce is a liberation or an enslavement for women, whether the sexual revolution frees women or enslaves them to the male appetite, whether career opens up opportunity for women or warps them to the wage slavery of corporate cubicle-hood. And over all is the question of the protection of women from sexual and other predation.
Here's my take. The idolization of political power promoted by the left is a problem for women and other living things. The justification for political power is that the world is full of pirates and plunderers, and that human communities need protection from aggression.
But the left has taken this common-sense and built an idol to political power, building a faith on the notion that political power can deliver a world free of aggressions, political, economic, social, cultural, and sexual. This, I would argue, is a lie. We know that it is a lie in the political and economic sector, as political regimes and economies inspired by the left's power worship have delivered nothing but death and misery.
Now, I think, we are going to be digesting the next stage in this process, that the use of political power to enforce women's equality is just as cruel and unjust as the use of political power to enforce political and economy equality.
And it seems perfectly natural to me that the first step in this process is a revaluation of the Victorian Era, to discover what has really going on 100-200 years ago and to discover what golden nuggets might be recovered from the tailings of that revolutionary era to benefit us here today.
Queen Victoria and her husband Albert, Prince Consort, are represented, in episode after episode, as celebrating faithful, companionate bourgeois marriage, and that this is a Good Thing.
Over and over, we see the older generation -- from Albert's father, Duke of Coburg, to King Leopold of the Belgians, to King Louis-Philippe of France -- as immoral cynical corrupt immoralists. And the young generation -- Victoria, Albert, Prince Ernest -- as earnest, if human, moral improvers. They exemplify, in other words, the bourgeois ethos, that I suppose we may think to have dominated western Europe culturally in the mid 19th century.
And this is clearly represented on the screen as good and noble, a cleaning of the Augean stables of all the old feudal culture of power and corruption and droit de seigneur.
So, does this mean that the worm has turned and that the Victorian era, excoriated for the last century as stuffy and narrow-minded and bigoted, and patriarchal, is now to experience a re-evaluation and celebration as an era of high moral purpose?
I must say that I hope so. In my view the 19th century was a century of wonders and miracles, starting with the industrial revolution that rescued from starvation the free proletarians that had been "hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers" 200 years previously, as Marx so eloquently put it. You have the phenomenon of young entrepreneurs and adventurers from out of northwest Europe spreading out all over the world. And in the unprecedented Great Enrichment all kinds of flowers bloomed, from the rising working class to the middle class to emancipated women to earnest young aristocrats like Victoria and Albert. To represent the Victorian age as hide-bound and regressive, as our lefty friends like to do, is an epic mischaracterization. And the Victoria production is right there with its show and tell.
It is remarkable, is it not, that "Victorian Age" is made to stand for the whole global phenomenon of the rising bourgeoisie, whether nor not it happened in Britain, or North America, or elsewhere.
Now I, of course, am biased on this, because my two grandfathers were small businessmen at the end of the Victorian era in the years just before World War I: one of them in Russia and one in Japan. And the Great Reaction to the capitalist expansion that we saw in the two World Wars and socialist experiments was not kind to my family.
On the other hand we may perhaps seriously indict these TV programs, from Downton Abbey to Victoria to the constant redos of Pride and Prejudice as shameless nostaglia for an era of hierarchy and manners and camera-friendly sets and clothing.
Here's my take. I think that our modern women are going to be taking a serious look at what the iconoclasts, the critics of the middle class, have pushed over the last century. The emancipation of women, the normalization of divorce, the sexual revolution, the cult of career, the notion of the "independent woman" have tumbled over one another over the last century in a narrative of women's liberation and emancipation.
But the question remains, as it is bound to do, as to what is the meaning of life for a woman, as compared to men and to humanity in general. We are now far enough down the road to wonder whether easy divorce is a liberation or an enslavement for women, whether the sexual revolution frees women or enslaves them to the male appetite, whether career opens up opportunity for women or warps them to the wage slavery of corporate cubicle-hood. And over all is the question of the protection of women from sexual and other predation.
Here's my take. The idolization of political power promoted by the left is a problem for women and other living things. The justification for political power is that the world is full of pirates and plunderers, and that human communities need protection from aggression.
But the left has taken this common-sense and built an idol to political power, building a faith on the notion that political power can deliver a world free of aggressions, political, economic, social, cultural, and sexual. This, I would argue, is a lie. We know that it is a lie in the political and economic sector, as political regimes and economies inspired by the left's power worship have delivered nothing but death and misery.
Now, I think, we are going to be digesting the next stage in this process, that the use of political power to enforce women's equality is just as cruel and unjust as the use of political power to enforce political and economy equality.
And it seems perfectly natural to me that the first step in this process is a revaluation of the Victorian Era, to discover what has really going on 100-200 years ago and to discover what golden nuggets might be recovered from the tailings of that revolutionary era to benefit us here today.
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