Many modern intellectuals of the secular mold don't much care for the mores of the Victorian era. "Victorian" is common parlance for stuffy or prudish, and many people not in specialized and intellectual fields share the same general mindset. After all (one may imagine them generalizing), not only were the Victorians prudes who repressed matters of sex, but they were also snooty white supremacists who, even if they didn't have slavery outright, as Britain did not after the 1830s, certainly thought of Africans, Chinese, American Indians, and the like as 'inferior' races. And they whip out something like Kipling's "White Man's Burden" to prove it. A huge amount of effort over the past 40 years or so has gone into eradicating any hint of racism or what one might call monoculturalism from thought, writing, and practice. Some of this has been misguided, some of it likely more politically than morally influenced, and some of it outright ridiculous, but the point of my post is not to delve into that, especially since I'm in no wise prepared to argue about it in depth, should anyone want to. Of course I believe that treating fellow men and women with one sort of physical characteristics as inferior to men and women with a different set is simply ludicrous. In principle, trying to free a culture that was once highly prejudiced from that prejudice is a good and needed thing. I also freely admit that the Victorians had a big blind spot here. Kipling was probably really sincere about the white man's burden, which may prevent one from accusing him of sheer arrogance, but it does not make his position all right.
It's oversimplifying a lot to take the Victorian era alone to task, as if it were the only age to endorse slavery, but it's plain to just about everyone that the majority opinion of the time had a blind spot; a big blind spot that caused injustices and even atrocities to be perpetrated against non-whites.
But a kind of irony emerges when we consider the subject of sex. As much as intellectuals like to repudiate the racism and prejudice of the 19th century, they may even more enjoy rolling their eyes at the lack of "frankness" about sex in a pre-Freud world, and, most of all, finding Freudian elements in a pre-Freud world. I haven't taken the trouble to look at any curricula of the "gender and sexuality" majors at several of the various colleges who've sent me mail, but I don't doubt that many of them involve digging up hidden sexual repressions and veiled references in Austen, Dickens, and the rest.
The Victorians had their Wickhams (whom I realize dwells locked in the Regency era, but had he been real and lived to a ripe old age, he would have died a Victorian) and other unscrupulous types, of course, but even the generalized and caricatured view of this era indicates something that was really there, that is, a general moral sense and reticence that dominated civilized society during that time.
The ironic thing is that modern society, while so vigorously scrubbing out racism, is not only ignoring but encouraging the creeping stain of promiscuity. 
In shredding one of the great blind spots of the Victorian era, we have welcomed the destruction of one of its great virtues. We have exchanged one blind spot for another. We applaud both the abolitionists and anyone who subverted or even seemed to perhaps subvert sexual taboos.
I have already said that racism and prejudice are bad things. But the new blind spot is just as bad, if not worse. Racism is a mindset--an arrogant, misguided mindset, but a private one that can be shelved in public. Shattering barriers around the public discussion and depiction of sex on a graphic level, however, and reinterpreting old art or infusing new art with a kind of frenzied obsession with sex, is more open and immediate in its ill effects. Unhealthy sexuality spawns feminism even as women are more and more being made objects of. It shatters families. It ruins childhoods. It encourages violence, selfishness, dissipation, and inconstancy. It makes a mockery of covenant faithfulness.
Racism may not be gone (although there's far more of it in other countries than here), but there are enough people monitoring it with eagle's eyes that the chance of it breaking out in force any time soon is pretty slim. But promiscuity is with us everywhere: on our billboards, in our magazines, our movies, our books, our operas, our musicals, our plays, our streets, our homes. We need to take some energy away from redressing an old blind spot and start paying attention to the new one that's eating away at our society as we speak. In my mind, it doesn't matter quite so much if a college frat party hires one stripper as opposed to another because of her race. What matters is that we have strippers.
6 comments:
I completely agree with you that promiscuity in a culture isn't something to be celebrated at all, and I do believe it has more than only private consequences (i.e. hardcore porn can lead to rape, etc.). However, it probably tends, more than racism, to hurt only the practitioners, which is why (consenting) promiscuity comes in for less of a bad rap than racism, which can keep huge groups of people from full citizenship for centuries. I think that non-consensual sex is very strongly condemned; you know about the registration of sex offenders and such like, right? It's no light thing.
I have a theory about Victorian vs. Modern/Postmodern views of sexuality. Not an unconventional or original one, but I find it helpful. So, I think that sexual mores tend to swing in a pendulum motion -- if you look at Chaucer and the Elizabethans, they're fairly frank (Chaucer's work contains some of our most "filthy" language -- even I, in the postmodern age, refrain from quoting here); the Neoclassical age was more reticent; the Romantics swung back to greater looseness, then the Victorians to strictness, and now the 20th/21st century is quite frank. I honestly don't think that we are more frank than Chaucer was, in general (though film raises new questions, since reading sex is a different experience from watching it).
I personally think that either extreme is unhealthy -- too much frankness can lead us to devalue the special position of sexuality, and how much more powerful it is when restricted to the right context, while too much repression leads to excessive fascination and bizarre underworld expressions of sex (viz. Sir Richard Burton, Oscar Wilde, Swinburne). I think a healthy willingness to discuss sexuality (you've expressed that right here, to some extent) and even include some bawdiness, as Shakespeare and Chaucer did, helps guard against this; but too much wanton display is just as destructive.
What do you think of that?
Well-said, sir. I agree with Robert almost completely, so there's little point in being long-winded merely to rehash his comment in my own words. I would simply add that, from a theological standpoint, sexual immmorality is worse or at very least equal to racism.
Somehow the rest of what I meant to say was cut off. My intention was to say that sexual immorality is worse than or equal to racism, and as a result we have, as a culture traded in one evil for another no less despicable.
David -- why "worse?" I'll go with all biblically defined sins being equal, but I don't see why sexual sins are almost *always* considered "more sinful" than many of the sins that actually stem from malice or a desire to hurt others. I think that is why Dante, for instance, put the lustful in a much less severe circle of hell than, say, the betrayers or wrathful.
First of all, I don't think racism, in general, stems from "malice or a desire to hurt others". Those are the side effects rather than the cause, and can be just as easily bred by sexual immorality. Racism, at least as we are discussing it in the context of the Victorian Era, is usually born of ignorance and/or misunderstandings. Sexual promiscuity, by its very nature, necessarily defiles what is sacred. By engaging in it, a person veritably plunders Creation. Racism, while it usually breeds malice, scorn, pride and the like, is not in itself necessarily any of these things. In itself it is nothing more than a theological error, and therefore I would contend that strictly speaking it is a lesser crime than sexual immorality.
Now, the external crimes to which racism usually leads are in many cases arguably worse than most sexual sins. Nevertheless, as they exist independent of racism, they cannot be identified with it as proof that racism is inherently lesser or greater than another evil.
I suppose I categorize racism as a branch of envy -- namely, resentment of another person's or group's status combined with a wish that the person will be dragged down to your own advantage. That is, I believe, pretty close to the classical definition. So there is always a personal malice involved in envy, a desire that somebody's propserity be ruined so that yours can somehow be improved or stand out more advantageously. Whereas promiscuity is, I suppose, desiring more from a person than he or she is morally permitted to give. So both are selfish, but I just don't see the *desire* to harm in the latter (even if harm is often a function of it, it's unintended -- which I find less culpable).
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