Sunday, 5 March 2017
On Elite Morality
Twenty-First Century Victorians
The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie used morality to assert class dominance — something elites still do today.
Extracts:
"The word Victorian tends to evoke old-fashioned ideas: women confined in corsets, strict gender roles, and a prudishness about all things sexual. In a world where conspicuous consumerism and self-expression rule, these nineteenth-century notions of self-restraint and self-denial seem hopelessly outdated.
But the Victorian ethos is not dead, not by a long shot.
It lives on, manifesting itself in our contemporary upper middle class’s behavior. While some aspects have gone the way of the waistcoat, the belief that the bourgeoisie holds a place of moral superiority over the other classes persists.
Today, spin classes, artisanal food, and the college application process have replaced Sunday promenades, evening lectures, and weekly salons. But make no mistake, they serve the same purpose: transforming class privilege into individual virtue, thereby shoring up social dominance.
Victoria Values
Historian Peter Gay used “Victorian” to broadly describe the culture of the educated upper middle classes of Western Europe and the United States in the long nineteenth century. Of course, they held much more complicated beliefs about sex, gender, and family than we paint them to have.
Victorians may have enforced a strict moral code, but they talked about sex all the time, almost obsessively. As Gay pointed out, wealthy couples often wrote love letters with more steam than a Newcomen engine.
And despite stereotypes of stern, authoritarian fathers, this period ushered in contemporary notions of parenting. A real man not only provided for his family, but also took an active interest in his children’s emotional well-being.
Although the nineteenth-century upper middle class was not nearly as prudish and stern as we imagine, it did adhere to strict behavioral codes. These normative codes reflected the period’s shifting class structure and the ascendant bourgeoisie’s desire to assert its moral superiority over the nobility, using virtue to challenge the old aristocracy’s place at the center of political, social, and cultural life. While the sons of the gentry hunted and dined, the sons of bankers and lawyers worked, built families, and educated themselves.
In Germany, the key word is almost untranslatable: Bildung, which means education in the form of personal cultivation and improvement. That idea, expressed in different languages in different nations, tied this rising class together across national borders. Self-improvement differentiated them from the decadent 1 percent. (...)
The quest for Bildung saturated daily life as well. Wealthy young women, who could not hope for any career beyond wife and mother, learned at least one other language and took piano and singing lessons. Men often spent their evenings attending lectures or participating in civic organizations.
For this dedication to pay off, however, these enriched Victorians had to display it, making their difference from both the wealthier and the poorer obvious to all. (...)
Fitness Morality
(...) Current exercise trends, like hot yoga, spin, and CrossFit, all demonstrate a commitment to self-denial and self-discipline, values much praised by the Victorians. Marathon running has become the ultimate signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous — and not at all kinky — fashion. (...)
Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.
Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers. (...)
Nowadays, the Internet registers cross-class horror on websites like People of Wal-Mart. Instead of being repulsed by the “great unwashed,” the modern Victorians blanch at the “great overfed.”
While the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie saw full figures not as embarrassments to be eradicated, but as comforting signs of their prosperity, their spiritual descendants are obsessed with eating the right kinds of food. In the last fifteen years, organic food has gone from fringe phenomenon to absolute necessity. (...)
This food discipline is a form of virtuous self-denial that would have made the Victorians proud. If only my grandparents had lived long enough to realize that growing their own potatoes and cucumbers made them high class, not hicks.
Mommy Wars and College Apps
A similar dynamic infects family life today. Like their ancestors, today’s upper middle classes place a great deal of emphasis on the family. Although nineteenth-century authoritarianism has fallen away, this period first saw childhood as a distinct and special period in life. Parents acted accordingly, setting aside nurseries in their homes for their children.
Child-rearing practices get more onerous with each passing year, demanding that parents exercise extreme discipline and self-denial. A recent book — All Joy And No Fun — sounds like music to a Victorian’s ears. What could be more frivolous and less educational than fun? There’s no time for it amidst the demands of modern parenting.
Mothers must breast-feed for an extended period, provide only organic food to their children, and keep screen time to nil. Slip-ups indicate failure. This represents perhaps the clearest link between Victorian values then and now: both restrict women and reinforce gender hierarchy.
It is hardly coincidental that these new expectations require money and time. A working mother who has to juggle multiple service-sector jobs will find it much harder to pump breast milk at work than a woman in an office job. (Not to mention the disparity in parental leave between white- and blue-collar workers.) The moralistic imperatives now attached to breast-feeding allow working-class women — who are less likely to breast-feed — to be judged moral failures.
(...) But the capstone of the modern quest for Bildung is surely the college application process. There is no good nineteenth-century analogue for this ridiculous new ritual, although Dickens would’ve been perfectly able to satirize its inherent absurdity: Millions act as if a system weighted very heavily toward privilege is in fact some kind of meritocracy, and that a person’s worth can be judged by the prestige of the school where they have been accepted. (...)
Bildung For All!
Today’s upper middle class maintains the fiction of a meritocratic society, just as the Victorians did. This story allows them to shore up their economic position behind the backs of workers, who are taught that their health problems and dismal career prospects represent individual faults, not systemic dysfunction.
Of course, exercising, eating organic food, and pushing children to use their spare time usefully are not inherently bad things. However, they become markers of bourgeois values when they are marshaled to assert one class’s moral superiority over another and to justify social inequality. It was just as obnoxious in the nineteenth century as it is today.
We should care about health, food, and education. But instead of seeing them as ways to prop up class dominance, we should improve them for everyone. Imagine if all of the energy used to get mediocre, upper-class children into prestigious colleges was redirected into making higher education more accessible and affordable across the board. Imagine if access to healthy food for all was prioritized over attaining status through buying the most virtuous products. Imagine, in short, what our world would look like if socialist values — not Victorian ones — dominated.
By Jason Tebbe - on Jacobin
The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie used morality to assert class dominance — something elites still do today.
Extracts:
"The word Victorian tends to evoke old-fashioned ideas: women confined in corsets, strict gender roles, and a prudishness about all things sexual. In a world where conspicuous consumerism and self-expression rule, these nineteenth-century notions of self-restraint and self-denial seem hopelessly outdated.
But the Victorian ethos is not dead, not by a long shot.
It lives on, manifesting itself in our contemporary upper middle class’s behavior. While some aspects have gone the way of the waistcoat, the belief that the bourgeoisie holds a place of moral superiority over the other classes persists.
Today, spin classes, artisanal food, and the college application process have replaced Sunday promenades, evening lectures, and weekly salons. But make no mistake, they serve the same purpose: transforming class privilege into individual virtue, thereby shoring up social dominance.
Victoria Values
Historian Peter Gay used “Victorian” to broadly describe the culture of the educated upper middle classes of Western Europe and the United States in the long nineteenth century. Of course, they held much more complicated beliefs about sex, gender, and family than we paint them to have.
Victorians may have enforced a strict moral code, but they talked about sex all the time, almost obsessively. As Gay pointed out, wealthy couples often wrote love letters with more steam than a Newcomen engine.
And despite stereotypes of stern, authoritarian fathers, this period ushered in contemporary notions of parenting. A real man not only provided for his family, but also took an active interest in his children’s emotional well-being.
Although the nineteenth-century upper middle class was not nearly as prudish and stern as we imagine, it did adhere to strict behavioral codes. These normative codes reflected the period’s shifting class structure and the ascendant bourgeoisie’s desire to assert its moral superiority over the nobility, using virtue to challenge the old aristocracy’s place at the center of political, social, and cultural life. While the sons of the gentry hunted and dined, the sons of bankers and lawyers worked, built families, and educated themselves.
In Germany, the key word is almost untranslatable: Bildung, which means education in the form of personal cultivation and improvement. That idea, expressed in different languages in different nations, tied this rising class together across national borders. Self-improvement differentiated them from the decadent 1 percent. (...)
The quest for Bildung saturated daily life as well. Wealthy young women, who could not hope for any career beyond wife and mother, learned at least one other language and took piano and singing lessons. Men often spent their evenings attending lectures or participating in civic organizations.
For this dedication to pay off, however, these enriched Victorians had to display it, making their difference from both the wealthier and the poorer obvious to all. (...)
Fitness Morality
(...) Current exercise trends, like hot yoga, spin, and CrossFit, all demonstrate a commitment to self-denial and self-discipline, values much praised by the Victorians. Marathon running has become the ultimate signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous — and not at all kinky — fashion. (...)
Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.
Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers. (...)
Nowadays, the Internet registers cross-class horror on websites like People of Wal-Mart. Instead of being repulsed by the “great unwashed,” the modern Victorians blanch at the “great overfed.”
While the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie saw full figures not as embarrassments to be eradicated, but as comforting signs of their prosperity, their spiritual descendants are obsessed with eating the right kinds of food. In the last fifteen years, organic food has gone from fringe phenomenon to absolute necessity. (...)
This food discipline is a form of virtuous self-denial that would have made the Victorians proud. If only my grandparents had lived long enough to realize that growing their own potatoes and cucumbers made them high class, not hicks.
Mommy Wars and College Apps
A similar dynamic infects family life today. Like their ancestors, today’s upper middle classes place a great deal of emphasis on the family. Although nineteenth-century authoritarianism has fallen away, this period first saw childhood as a distinct and special period in life. Parents acted accordingly, setting aside nurseries in their homes for their children.
Child-rearing practices get more onerous with each passing year, demanding that parents exercise extreme discipline and self-denial. A recent book — All Joy And No Fun — sounds like music to a Victorian’s ears. What could be more frivolous and less educational than fun? There’s no time for it amidst the demands of modern parenting.
Mothers must breast-feed for an extended period, provide only organic food to their children, and keep screen time to nil. Slip-ups indicate failure. This represents perhaps the clearest link between Victorian values then and now: both restrict women and reinforce gender hierarchy.
It is hardly coincidental that these new expectations require money and time. A working mother who has to juggle multiple service-sector jobs will find it much harder to pump breast milk at work than a woman in an office job. (Not to mention the disparity in parental leave between white- and blue-collar workers.) The moralistic imperatives now attached to breast-feeding allow working-class women — who are less likely to breast-feed — to be judged moral failures.
(...) But the capstone of the modern quest for Bildung is surely the college application process. There is no good nineteenth-century analogue for this ridiculous new ritual, although Dickens would’ve been perfectly able to satirize its inherent absurdity: Millions act as if a system weighted very heavily toward privilege is in fact some kind of meritocracy, and that a person’s worth can be judged by the prestige of the school where they have been accepted. (...)
Bildung For All!
Today’s upper middle class maintains the fiction of a meritocratic society, just as the Victorians did. This story allows them to shore up their economic position behind the backs of workers, who are taught that their health problems and dismal career prospects represent individual faults, not systemic dysfunction.
Of course, exercising, eating organic food, and pushing children to use their spare time usefully are not inherently bad things. However, they become markers of bourgeois values when they are marshaled to assert one class’s moral superiority over another and to justify social inequality. It was just as obnoxious in the nineteenth century as it is today.
We should care about health, food, and education. But instead of seeing them as ways to prop up class dominance, we should improve them for everyone. Imagine if all of the energy used to get mediocre, upper-class children into prestigious colleges was redirected into making higher education more accessible and affordable across the board. Imagine if access to healthy food for all was prioritized over attaining status through buying the most virtuous products. Imagine, in short, what our world would look like if socialist values — not Victorian ones — dominated.
By Jason Tebbe - on Jacobin
Sunday, 19 February 2017
Ainda na trilha da felicidade
Estudo de Harvard com 75 anos de duração desvenda o segredo da saúde e da felicidade
Pessoas? Dinheiro? Reconhecimento? Amor? Afinal, qual é a chave para a felicidade? Essa parece a mais difícil pergunta de nossas vidas, e foi justo ela que um estudo da Universidade de Harvard se dedicou a responder. O Estudo de Harvard sobre o Desenvolvimento Adulto procurou encontrar os fatores que podem nos levar a desenvolver a melhor saúde física e mental quando atingirmos idades avançadas. (...)
Felicidade tem receita?
O psicólogo de Harvard Dan Gilbert descarta a fórmula do casamento com dinheiro e filhos
14/07/16 - El País
O psicólogo norte-americano Dan Gilbert conhece a receita da felicidade. E ela é infalível. O pesquisador da Universidade Harvard lembra o caso de Moreese Bickham, cidadão negro de Luisiana (EUA) que, em 1958, viu dois policiais ligados ao Ku Klux Klan chegarem à entrada de sua casa e atingi-lo com uma bala no estômago. Apesar do ferimento, Bickham, aos 42 anos, conseguiu pegar uma arma e se defender. Matou os dois agentes. Agiu em legítima defesa, mas acabou sendo condenado à morte pelas instituições racistas do sul dos EUA de cinquenta anos atrás. Passou mais de 37 anos na prisão, 14 deles no corredor da morte. Trancado 23 horas por dia em total isolamento. Até que, após pressões da sociedade civil, foi solto em 1996. Ao sair da prisão, comentou da seguinte forma o tempo que passara na cadeia: “Não lamento um único minuto sequer. Foi uma experiência gloriosa”.
Gilbert sorri antes de contar um outro caso, o de Ronald Wayne. (...)
Parece uma receita estapafúrdia, mas ela funcionou para os quatro protagonistas dessas histórias. Na verdade, Gilbert não fala sobre como ser feliz, nem sobre por que as pessoas não são felizes, mas sim sobre por que as pessoas não sabem o que as fará felizes. “Os seres humanos subvalorizam sua própria resiliência: não percebem como será fácil mudar a sua visão do mundo caso aconteça algo ruim. Sempre supervalorizam o quanto serão infelizes diante de alguma adversidade”, observa o psicólogo durante uma conversa com jornalistas em Madri.
O cientista compara essa capacidade de adaptação com “um sistema imunológico psicológico, semelhante ao que defende o corpo dos vírus e doenças”. Essas defesas da mente, assim como as do corpo, são mais fortes em certas pessoas do que em outras. “Minha mulher nunca fica doente, e eu pego todos os resfriados possíveis. O mesmo acontece com o sistema imunológico psicológico. Há pessoas que são resilientes diante da pior tragédia. Outras se entristecem diante de coisas mínimas. O interessante, porém, é que a imensa maioria dos seres humanos são do primeiro tipo”, afirma. “75% das pessoas voltam a ser felizes dois anos depois do pior trauma que você possa imaginar”. (...)
Ele fez a mesma palestra do que na CaixaForum, intitulada “Felicidade: o que a sua mãe não lhe disse”.
A palestra parte do princípio de que uma mãe sempre recomenda a seus filhos que se casem, que ganhem dinheiro com um bom emprego e que tenham filhos. Ao longo de sua apresentação, Gilbert derruba os pressupostos relacionados a esses três supostos ingredientes da felicidade. As pessoas casadas são, na média, mais felizes do que as solteiras, inclusive do que os casais não oficialmente casados. Mas o divórcio implica um adicional de alegria. Depois de uma ruptura, a felicidade dos homens dispara. E a das mulheres também, depois de alguns anos, segundo os seus dados.
“O dinheiro não compra a felicidade? Sim, ele compra. Não existe nenhum estudo que mostre que um euro a mais faça diminuir a felicidade”, diz Gilbert. Mas tem um porém. Quando se é pobre, um pouquinho a mais de dinheiro gera uma felicidade imensa. Já um milionário precisará de uma quantia enorme de dinheiro para ter a sua felicidade minimamente aumentada. (...)
As quatro atividades cotidianas que trazem mais felicidade são gratuitas: fazer sexo, fazer exercícios, ouvir música e conversar. A campeã, de longe, é fazer sexo. E os estudos mostram que dar uma escapadinha até Paris deixa a pessoa mais feliz do que comprar um carro esportivo”. “Investir em experiências é melhor do que investir em coisas materiais”, avalia Gilbert.
Assim, o casamento e o dinheiro têm uma relação complexa com a felicidade. O que ocorre com os filhos, o terceiro conselho da nossa hipotética mãe tradicional? O psicólogo de Harvard vai direto ao ponto: “As crianças são como a heroína”. A droga do prazer, mas que destrói todas as demais fontes de felicidade de uma pessoa, como a família e os amigos. Com os filhos, argumenta Gilbert, ocorre o mesmo. Os pais param de fazer sexo, de sair com os amigos ou assistir a concertos. “Muitas mães me dizem que seus filhos são a sua maior fonte de felicidade, e eu lhes digo que elas têm razão. Se você só tem uma fonte de felicidade, é claro que ela é a maior”, alfineta o pesquisador.
O cientista expõe, por fim, a sua verdadeira receita para ser feliz, à luz dos dados científicos. “A felicidade é uma questão de química cerebral. A genética influencia, mas as circunstâncias também. Tentar ser mais feliz é como perder peso. Não existe nenhum segredo para se perder peso: comer menos e fazer mais exercício. Com a felicidade, é a mesma coisa. Há algumas poucas coisas que se pode fazer e que, se as fazemos todos os dias, religiosamente, a média de felicidade vai aumentando”, começa.
“Por exemplo, passar mais tempo com a família e com os amigos. É um conselho meio chato, mas é bom. Somos o animal mais social do planeta, qualquer que seja o critério. Por isso, não é de espantar que a maior parte da nossa felicidade provenha dos relacionamentos sociais. Cuide da sua saúde física, faça mais exercícios. É outro conselho meio chato, mas também é certo”, continua Gilbert, gesticulando de forma a destacar que sabe que não está inventando a pólvora. “Se me dissessem que eu perderia uma perna dizendo o que nos torna felizes na vida, eu apenas diria ‘as outras pessoas’, antes de cair no chão”.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)