Reportedly, in Agatha Christie’s autobiography, she mentioned how "she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car - nor so poor that she wouldn’t have servants". Worth a thought.
I'm sorry, I know it makes me an awful person, but I absolutely loathe the author and her husband. There are people starving around the world, dying because of lack of basic medical care, clean water, etc. Whatever they do in their own home, they live in a society and world of the 21st century. What they are doing is like the worst form of privileged hipsterism I can imagine.
The crucial difference is that cheap disposable modern trash can be afforded by almost everyone. The purchase of a single automobile was a village-wide social event when my grandfather was young. Same with a television when my father was young.
I'm finding the article hilarious as a father. Let's see how long she maintains this production if she ever has kids. Have fun scrubbing cloth diapers out in a bucket.
I don't know.. maybe compare their carbon footprint and yours? It's easy to create an arbitrary moral high ground. Harder to notice how arbitrary they are.
> What they are doing is like the worst form of privileged hipsterism I can imagine.
Why such intense dislike? They may be odd, but they're not hurting you or anybody else. What's wrong with them doing what makes them happy? I just don't understand all the hipster hate.
> There are people starving around the world, dying because of lack of basic medical care, clean water, etc.
> What they are doing is like the worst form of privileged hipsterism I can imagine.
And yet it impedes your own way of life...how exactly? If this couple were to stop living the life they chose to live, and instead lived exactly like you or I, how in the world would that improve the lives of starving, sick people in other countries, let alone their own?
The cognitive dissonance in your comment is staggering.
To each their own. I loath your pessimism and judgement more than the author and her husband. In fact, I find their efforts ambitious, albeit peculiar and boring at times.
I understand where you're coming from, I really do, but that line of thinking, taken to the end, is dangerous.
Should anyone be justified in doing anything, just because they want to, even if there's no direct positive effects on society?
I would guess virtually nobody would say absolutely no to this, of course, but are there then thresholds of type and frequency of activities over which the answer becomes an absolute no? What then are those thresholds? If the thresholds depends on other variables, like your own personal wealth now and in the past, then what are the values of those variables? Is there an absolute cap on the level of enjoyment one deserves out of life without helping others directly before one must stop, stay still at that level, and devote any further energies to helping others? What is that cap?
I think we all have internal intuition for these thresholds and values for ourselves, but you can't force these on any other individual, and certainly not on society as a whole. Entertaining that idea that you can or should be able to is dangerous.
Doing direct harm to other people for your own enjoyment obviously should be condemned and prevented - but passively not helping others and instead using your resources and time purely on your own private entertainment, as is the case here, should have no net negative effect on the world. Live and let live.
I am sympathetic to your argument, but would take it farther.
A person has no obliation to others, whatsoever, period.
Anyone who disagrees would have to overcome the burden of proof.
(Which you can't, by the way, since I know things that would contradict a positive argument for obligation to others as it is generally conceived.)
---
Practically everybody makes moral assumptions purely based on emotions, possibly with some post-hoc rationalizations.
But our emotions didn't have to be what they were---they vary between time periods, cultures, and individuals. Emotions are the product of premises that one has accepted, rationally or (for the most part today) irrationally.
Well, if you check out some of her books, you'll find that the most helpfully ranked Amazon reviewers couldn't stand her condescending and pretentious tone.
ebbv is getting a lot of hate but while I don't loathe the author they do seem a little out there to me.
I'm a techy guy who lives at the very edge of the grid (we're the end of the line for PG&E). I feel no need to tell all of you about our PVC problems or tree problems or fire problems, etc. They strike me as someone with an agenda.
As an example of stuff I don't talk about, we just had a fire up here:
2 miles away from my house, kind of scary. I could have made a blog post about that and gotten a lot of attention (maybe) as a techy guy next to certain death. Fire is a thing where I live, it's a scary thing.
Whatever. I chose to live out here. If that comes with some problems those are my problems.
I kinda agree with ebbv that these people seem like hipsters. I have much more respect for people who make hard choices that lead to tough lives and they own it. And show how they got past those problems.
Maybe. Maybe it's just me but it seems not so much. There are tons of how to videos out there. If you go look at some of them and then go look at this, does it seem like how to?
Seems like they've written several books more in the "how-to" vein, and it seems like that's not the kind of writing Vox asked for for this particular column.
People tend to react reflexively negatively to people who live life on their own terms, and are often really good at locating the reason for their negativity outside of their own jealousy.
Why do you make the choices you make in life? What template are you following, and why? Who designed your lifestyle, and why is it better than this couple's?
And more importantly, how, exactly, is the standard of living of your amorphous blob of "people starving all over the world" affected more by people reusing centuries-old technology than the people fully invested in the constant churn of new commodities with an upgrade cycle of about 2 years?
And why level this criticism at these people? There are currently billions of dollars of capital deployed within 5 miles of where I'm sitting in San Francisco to make the lives of the richest people on Earth marginally more comfortable. The investment decisions made by the owners of that capital have a tangible impact on the direction our civilization goes in that one person wearing a different style of clothing definitely would not.
A key component of being middle class in the Victorian era was enthusiastically embracing new technology! A Victorian would kick your ass for not using a smartphone if it's available to you.
I don't know. The sheer amount of effort they put in replicating artifacts and mundanities of everyday Victorian life is admirable, but there's no way I can ignore the fact that their use of networked computers stands out like a complete blot.
It's hilarious how she notes she's never owned a cell phone, but ignores that crucial detail.
(They maintain a website at thisvictorianlife.com and Sarah A. Chrisman appears to have a Facebook page, so I'm extrapolating that they use computers.)
Looking at some of the pictures on their site is eery. Here they are dressed in Victorian attire... with a landline telephone in the background. [1]
The exercise here isn't Victorian life, it's an odd retrofuturism at best - lots of clashing between anachronistic time periods.
It's funny, but I often find myself longing for "simpler times" without the modern day distractions my life is saturated with (by my own choice/fault obviously).
Then I think about the chores I have around the house and realize that "emptying my fridge's water pan" potentially 2 or more times/day would be a giant PITA.
Of course it all comes down to free time, and I have this assumption that life was lived at a slower pace back then. I wonder how much of that is actually true though. You had a ton more little chores to maintain things, and there was less automation for sure. And a lot of it was highly dependent on your class and wealth. If you were poor, life may have been "slower paced with fewer distractions," but you were still working 12-16hr days in a factory in shitty living conditions.
Ironically enough I'm watching a UK reality series called Time Crashers right now that takes some celebs and sticks them into various time periods in different roles to see how they fare. I normally loathe reality TV and love documentaries, and this is striking an oddly pleasant middle ground.
If you like this, check out the BBC's excellent series, Victorian Farm. In the show, a historian and two archaeologists live and work on a farm for a year, using only tools and techniques of the Victorian era. Experts in period crafts and trades visit the farm to demonstrate tasks like building barrels or creating lime mortar to use in the building of stone walls. Here is a farrier creating a horseshoe in minutes from a plain metal bar: https://youtu.be/-x1hP8zisUI
Although the farm is the focus of the show, a good amount of time is given to domestic labor. I used to grumble when I had to do laundry, but now when trudging down to the basement, I can only think about how much of my day has been freed up by the washing machine.
I read two separate AMAs on reddit of +90yo German ladies. When asked what was the favorite invention of their lifetimes (telephone and electricity spreading, radio, TV, antibiotics, modern surgery/dentistry, aircraft, cheap automobiles, Internet, etc.) the answer of both was the washing machine. It was a real life changer for women everywhere.
Now go back another 150 years earlier before the era of carding/spinning machines or industrial looms, and you get even dramatically more time spent on clothing. Making cloth by hand out of raw wool or cotton is an unbelievably time-intensive process, which is why most people only had a couple sets of clothes.
It's nice to enjoy the "good ol'" things of Victorian era and bash our "hollow, heartless" society, conveniently omitting the brutal inequality that allowed wealthy Victorians to enjoy that "beautiful" lifestyle.
They see the kerosene burning, but they don't see the 5yo coal children dying lonely deaths miles underground. The workers burning their life away in 16h shifts without barely any rest, medical leave, right to strike, right to unionize, nothing but the might of their bare bodies exploited so a high class Victorian socialite could enjoy her life.
But even that same 19th century socialite couldn't think of voting, or being a member of the parliament. She has strange looks around the city now? Imagine the looks, the back-turning and street-crossing she would get if she wanted to exert a life independently of a man in the conservative Victorian society.
Not to speak about access to culture, education (in 1840 only about 20% of the children in London had any schooling), information, and crucially, medical care. I wonder if this couple follows medical advice, procedures and pharmacopoeia of that era as well. Toothache? Cocaine drops. Surgery? Often without anesthesia or any asepsis. Tuberculosis? Horrific slow death sentence. Small infected wound? Too bad, no antibiotics in Victorian age.
Mind that as an engineer, I marvel at the boost of technology of that era, and the early marvels of engineering and construction. But I cringe at this whitewashing articles that glorify "simpler, truer times" and bash our vastly more advanced, secular, open, just and equal society that so many lives and fights has required.
In a "Beyond Good and Evil" sort of way, if you can get all those advantages without the exploitation, there's nothing morally wrong with enjoying them.
I feel like the Victorian era already gets enough hate for being less "enlightened" than our own. (No doubt they would feel the same about us.)
Much like the 1950s, I feel like it's an era which gets a bad rap because of the way the people immediately following it reacted against it and then proceeded to write all the history books about how much better their own era was than the one that preceded it.
In any case it gets rather tedious when one can't admire something like Victorian architecture and fashion without someone butting in to tell you that the Victorians were less morally enlightened than us.
I agree, but my criticism was directed at those who write about "the old days" bashing today's society as "empty", "out of touch", "vane", "mindless", "hostile", etc.
Victorian and post-1945 were both incredible times and I have devoted so much time reading about them! But they weren't some kind of "golden days" either. My grandmother ate country rats to survive in the 40s, and only on lucky days...
Maybe now that we have had time for some perspective we can adopt the good parts of past cultural practices without having to have them supported by all the bad parts that accompanied them at that time. Let's also not get too generous about our own time, we may not have child labor in this country but we participate in a global market that does and the prices we pay for our goods are lower because of it.
I agree, we haven't achieved a good society for all. And yes, we could learn things as well (which factors allowed the scientific and technological booming, for instance?), but I don't think lifestyle mimicry and luddism are good tools to do this.
We have a tendency to romanticize the past. Not just the Victorian era; I've heard people exclaim they wished they lived in the Middle Ages. Of course you don't! I love the Middle Ages a lot, but it was a horrible time to actually live in. People managed of course, but most of what we take for granted today would be unimaginable today.
If only we could live in an age of Victorian style and/or knights in armour, but with modern rights and medicine. Well, we can play dress-up, I suppose.
It's true they're no purists - computers, and I'm sure they're glad of modern dentistry, to name two anachronisms in their Victorian construct - but I think they're doing something interesting.
On the infrequent occasions I can get off the grid and away from modernity, I become a different person. Not better or worse than my usual self, just...different.
I can follow a train of thought for a day or two to see where it might lead, rather than having to bookmark myself at email interrupt intervals. It makes a difference in how I perceive and think about the world.
I wouldn't return to Victorian times for anything, but some aspects of them seem worth preserving.
As someone who is often incorrectly seen as being like this (and looking on Facebook, the author and I seem to have no shortage of mutual friends), the article is fascinating, even if I don't agree with some of the things being said.
It's very difficult to accurately experience the life of another time period. Minor, seemingly insignificant details can have significant effects on the experience. One example I like to use was an event some friends of mine attended that was trying to recreate the experience of a Regency era country house. The hostess, not being particularly experienced in organizing such a thing, didn't think about lighting.
Yet lighting is extremely important. It dictates the hours that people keep, how people interact, and the appearance of much of what one sees after dark. My friends pointed out the problem, and had all the lighting replaced with candles and lamps. What some there thought would be a minor improvement in environment and accuracy ended up having startling effects: several guests, all adults, having always been accustomed to the constant light of electric lamps, found the ubiquitous moving shadows in a country house lit only by flames to be terrifying, and many of them became insistent that they were seeing flitting supernatural apparitions. One was reportedly unable to walk up the stairs to her room by herself.
Finding all these seemingly minor changes necessary to recreate an experience, knowing what impact they have, and actually being able to change them, is extremely difficult. One thing that immediately jumps out at me, for example, is that the visibility and lack of distortion through the windows in the photographs, and the pane sizes, makes me think they have panes of float glass. How important is this to the experience? I don't know. It certainly changes the way the outside world appears. Are their mirrors made with float glass? Are they looking at the photographs of them? Both would significantly change their own self-images.
And while I would love to know the tailor her husband uses, I do have to wonder about whether the reproductions are actually accurate. Fabric, for example, has changed considerably in the last hundred and fifty years. Over a century of breeding and improved techniques mean that wool today is far finer, and fine wool far cheaper, than it was in the Victorian era. Obtaining wool of the correct coarseness and weight would likely involve commissioning it. Tailoring has evolved, too: understanding of cutting and particularly fitting techniques improved considerably in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Is their tailor intentionally ignoring those advances? I doubt it.
Even beyond these visible issues, there are differences in upbringing, in culture, and in perspective. There are differences in surroundings: the building I live in may be almost 120 years old and in its original state in many ways, but the sounds here are completely different. And there are differences in the people around you. These are not things that can be changed, and they have significant impacts.
The differences in perspective are particularly visible in the article. The environmental focus, and suggestion that seeing resources being used results in an appreciation of conservation, seem to me to be essentially modern views, and I would argue are not reflected in typical Victorian perspectives. Nor do I think that the view on understanding technology is entirely accurate either: the typical Victorian, I would argue, would be unlikely to understand the cylinder process of glass pane production, for example, or methods used for metalwork, joinery, and the construction of much of what was around them. As other have pointed out, very few would know about the production of the resources they were consuming: I'd argue that people today have a much better understanding of those things, given our frequent societal discussions of them.
The idea that modern items are "trash," too, and Victorian ones are far more reliable and usable, is perhaps u...
I have found your comment so interesting and thoughtful as somewhat shallow and simplistic the article. Many, many thanks for spending the time to write it and share it with us. I really think that you should submit it to Vox as a "letter to the editor".
An unfortunate thing about Vox is that they don't appear to have normal letters to the editor or, indeed, any way of responding to their articles. Nevertheless, it's something I might consider.
61 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadThere it is, the inevitable disdain, the hallmark of the chronic hipster.
Indeed, the author has no moral authority.
...
> What they are doing is like the worst form of privileged hipsterism I can imagine.
Why such intense dislike? They may be odd, but they're not hurting you or anybody else. What's wrong with them doing what makes them happy? I just don't understand all the hipster hate.
> There are people starving around the world, dying because of lack of basic medical care, clean water, etc.
What does that have to do with this?
And yet it impedes your own way of life...how exactly? If this couple were to stop living the life they chose to live, and instead lived exactly like you or I, how in the world would that improve the lives of starving, sick people in other countries, let alone their own?
The cognitive dissonance in your comment is staggering.
Should anyone be justified in doing anything, just because they want to, even if there's no direct positive effects on society?
I would guess virtually nobody would say absolutely no to this, of course, but are there then thresholds of type and frequency of activities over which the answer becomes an absolute no? What then are those thresholds? If the thresholds depends on other variables, like your own personal wealth now and in the past, then what are the values of those variables? Is there an absolute cap on the level of enjoyment one deserves out of life without helping others directly before one must stop, stay still at that level, and devote any further energies to helping others? What is that cap?
I think we all have internal intuition for these thresholds and values for ourselves, but you can't force these on any other individual, and certainly not on society as a whole. Entertaining that idea that you can or should be able to is dangerous.
Doing direct harm to other people for your own enjoyment obviously should be condemned and prevented - but passively not helping others and instead using your resources and time purely on your own private entertainment, as is the case here, should have no net negative effect on the world. Live and let live.
A person has no obliation to others, whatsoever, period.
Anyone who disagrees would have to overcome the burden of proof.
(Which you can't, by the way, since I know things that would contradict a positive argument for obligation to others as it is generally conceived.)
---
Practically everybody makes moral assumptions purely based on emotions, possibly with some post-hoc rationalizations.
But our emotions didn't have to be what they were---they vary between time periods, cultures, and individuals. Emotions are the product of premises that one has accepted, rationally or (for the most part today) irrationally.
http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Secrets-Corset-Taught-Presen...
I'm a techy guy who lives at the very edge of the grid (we're the end of the line for PG&E). I feel no need to tell all of you about our PVC problems or tree problems or fire problems, etc. They strike me as someone with an agenda.
As an example of stuff I don't talk about, we just had a fire up here:
http://mcvoy.com/lm/2015-fire/index.html
2 miles away from my house, kind of scary. I could have made a blog post about that and gotten a lot of attention (maybe) as a techy guy next to certain death. Fire is a thing where I live, it's a scary thing.
Whatever. I chose to live out here. If that comes with some problems those are my problems.
I kinda agree with ebbv that these people seem like hipsters. I have much more respect for people who make hard choices that lead to tough lives and they own it. And show how they got past those problems.
Isn't that exactly what they're doing with their writing?
Why do you make the choices you make in life? What template are you following, and why? Who designed your lifestyle, and why is it better than this couple's?
And more importantly, how, exactly, is the standard of living of your amorphous blob of "people starving all over the world" affected more by people reusing centuries-old technology than the people fully invested in the constant churn of new commodities with an upgrade cycle of about 2 years?
And why level this criticism at these people? There are currently billions of dollars of capital deployed within 5 miles of where I'm sitting in San Francisco to make the lives of the richest people on Earth marginally more comfortable. The investment decisions made by the owners of that capital have a tangible impact on the direction our civilization goes in that one person wearing a different style of clothing definitely would not.
tl;dr get a grip.
Hope they at least make an allowance for a carbon monoxide detector.
It's hilarious how she notes she's never owned a cell phone, but ignores that crucial detail.
(They maintain a website at thisvictorianlife.com and Sarah A. Chrisman appears to have a Facebook page, so I'm extrapolating that they use computers.)
Looking at some of the pictures on their site is eery. Here they are dressed in Victorian attire... with a landline telephone in the background. [1]
The exercise here isn't Victorian life, it's an odd retrofuturism at best - lots of clashing between anachronistic time periods.
[1] http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/leisure-activities.html
Then I think about the chores I have around the house and realize that "emptying my fridge's water pan" potentially 2 or more times/day would be a giant PITA.
Of course it all comes down to free time, and I have this assumption that life was lived at a slower pace back then. I wonder how much of that is actually true though. You had a ton more little chores to maintain things, and there was less automation for sure. And a lot of it was highly dependent on your class and wealth. If you were poor, life may have been "slower paced with fewer distractions," but you were still working 12-16hr days in a factory in shitty living conditions.
Ironically enough I'm watching a UK reality series called Time Crashers right now that takes some celebs and sticks them into various time periods in different roles to see how they fare. I normally loathe reality TV and love documentaries, and this is striking an oddly pleasant middle ground.
Although the farm is the focus of the show, a good amount of time is given to domestic labor. I used to grumble when I had to do laundry, but now when trudging down to the basement, I can only think about how much of my day has been freed up by the washing machine.
They see the kerosene burning, but they don't see the 5yo coal children dying lonely deaths miles underground. The workers burning their life away in 16h shifts without barely any rest, medical leave, right to strike, right to unionize, nothing but the might of their bare bodies exploited so a high class Victorian socialite could enjoy her life.
But even that same 19th century socialite couldn't think of voting, or being a member of the parliament. She has strange looks around the city now? Imagine the looks, the back-turning and street-crossing she would get if she wanted to exert a life independently of a man in the conservative Victorian society.
Not to speak about access to culture, education (in 1840 only about 20% of the children in London had any schooling), information, and crucially, medical care. I wonder if this couple follows medical advice, procedures and pharmacopoeia of that era as well. Toothache? Cocaine drops. Surgery? Often without anesthesia or any asepsis. Tuberculosis? Horrific slow death sentence. Small infected wound? Too bad, no antibiotics in Victorian age.
Mind that as an engineer, I marvel at the boost of technology of that era, and the early marvels of engineering and construction. But I cringe at this whitewashing articles that glorify "simpler, truer times" and bash our vastly more advanced, secular, open, just and equal society that so many lives and fights has required.
Much like the 1950s, I feel like it's an era which gets a bad rap because of the way the people immediately following it reacted against it and then proceeded to write all the history books about how much better their own era was than the one that preceded it.
In any case it gets rather tedious when one can't admire something like Victorian architecture and fashion without someone butting in to tell you that the Victorians were less morally enlightened than us.
Victorian and post-1945 were both incredible times and I have devoted so much time reading about them! But they weren't some kind of "golden days" either. My grandmother ate country rats to survive in the 40s, and only on lucky days...
Also which is "this country"? :P
If only we could live in an age of Victorian style and/or knights in armour, but with modern rights and medicine. Well, we can play dress-up, I suppose.
They'd probably like going to a science fiction convention. People at DragonCon are very accepting of weirdos in all sorts of funny costumes.
They'd even find a fair number of people in Victorian garb, though admittedly with fanciful steampunk gadgets attached.
It's true they're no purists - computers, and I'm sure they're glad of modern dentistry, to name two anachronisms in their Victorian construct - but I think they're doing something interesting.
On the infrequent occasions I can get off the grid and away from modernity, I become a different person. Not better or worse than my usual self, just...different.
I can follow a train of thought for a day or two to see where it might lead, rather than having to bookmark myself at email interrupt intervals. It makes a difference in how I perceive and think about the world.
I wouldn't return to Victorian times for anything, but some aspects of them seem worth preserving.
It's very difficult to accurately experience the life of another time period. Minor, seemingly insignificant details can have significant effects on the experience. One example I like to use was an event some friends of mine attended that was trying to recreate the experience of a Regency era country house. The hostess, not being particularly experienced in organizing such a thing, didn't think about lighting.
Yet lighting is extremely important. It dictates the hours that people keep, how people interact, and the appearance of much of what one sees after dark. My friends pointed out the problem, and had all the lighting replaced with candles and lamps. What some there thought would be a minor improvement in environment and accuracy ended up having startling effects: several guests, all adults, having always been accustomed to the constant light of electric lamps, found the ubiquitous moving shadows in a country house lit only by flames to be terrifying, and many of them became insistent that they were seeing flitting supernatural apparitions. One was reportedly unable to walk up the stairs to her room by herself.
Finding all these seemingly minor changes necessary to recreate an experience, knowing what impact they have, and actually being able to change them, is extremely difficult. One thing that immediately jumps out at me, for example, is that the visibility and lack of distortion through the windows in the photographs, and the pane sizes, makes me think they have panes of float glass. How important is this to the experience? I don't know. It certainly changes the way the outside world appears. Are their mirrors made with float glass? Are they looking at the photographs of them? Both would significantly change their own self-images.
And while I would love to know the tailor her husband uses, I do have to wonder about whether the reproductions are actually accurate. Fabric, for example, has changed considerably in the last hundred and fifty years. Over a century of breeding and improved techniques mean that wool today is far finer, and fine wool far cheaper, than it was in the Victorian era. Obtaining wool of the correct coarseness and weight would likely involve commissioning it. Tailoring has evolved, too: understanding of cutting and particularly fitting techniques improved considerably in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Is their tailor intentionally ignoring those advances? I doubt it.
Even beyond these visible issues, there are differences in upbringing, in culture, and in perspective. There are differences in surroundings: the building I live in may be almost 120 years old and in its original state in many ways, but the sounds here are completely different. And there are differences in the people around you. These are not things that can be changed, and they have significant impacts.
The differences in perspective are particularly visible in the article. The environmental focus, and suggestion that seeing resources being used results in an appreciation of conservation, seem to me to be essentially modern views, and I would argue are not reflected in typical Victorian perspectives. Nor do I think that the view on understanding technology is entirely accurate either: the typical Victorian, I would argue, would be unlikely to understand the cylinder process of glass pane production, for example, or methods used for metalwork, joinery, and the construction of much of what was around them. As other have pointed out, very few would know about the production of the resources they were consuming: I'd argue that people today have a much better understanding of those things, given our frequent societal discussions of them.
The idea that modern items are "trash," too, and Victorian ones are far more reliable and usable, is perhaps u...