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“Three Victorian Questions” by Geoffrey Miller




"Here’s a 2001 Edge.com essay by Geoffrey Miller, author of the upcoming Spent, answering literary agent John Brockman’s question: “What questions have disappeared, and why?”

“Three Victorian questions about potential sexual partners: ‘Are
they from a good family?’; ‘What are their accomplishments?’; ‘Was
their money and status acquired ethically?’ ”

To our “Sex and the City” generation, these three questions sound
shamefully Victorian and bourgeois. Yet they were not unique to 19th
century England: they obsessed the families of eligible young men and
women in every agricultural and industrial civilization. Only with our
socially-atomized, late-capitalist society have these questions become
tasteless, if not taboo. Worried parents ask them only in the privacy
of their own consciences, in the sleepless nights before a son or
daughter’s ill-considered marriage.

The “good family” question always concerned genetic inheritance as
much as financial inheritance. Since humans evolved in bands of
closely-related kin, we probably evolved an intuitive appreciation of
the genetics relevant to mate choice ‹ taking into account the
heritable strengths and weakness that we could observe in each
potential mate’s relatives, as well as their own qualities. Recent
findings in medical genetics and behavior genetics demonstrate the
wisdom of taking a keen interest in such relatives: one can tell a lot
about a young person’s likely future personality, achievements,
beliefs, parenting style, and mental and physical health by observing
their parents, siblings, uncles, and aunts. Yet the current American
anti-genetic ideology demands that we ignore such cues of genetic
quality ‹ God forbid anyone should accuse us of eugenics. Consider the
possible reactions a woman might have to hearing that a potential
husband was beaten as a child by parents who were alcoholic,
aggressive religious fundamentalists. Twin and adoption studies show
that alcoholism, aggressiveness, and religiousity are moderately
heritable, so such a man is likely to become a rather unpleasant
father. Yet our therapy cures-all culture says the woman should offer
only non-judgmental sympathy to the man, ignoring the inner warning
bells that may be going off about his family and thus his genes.
Arguably, our culture alienates women and men from their own genetic
intuitions, and thereby puts their children at risk.

The question “What are their accomplishments?” refers not to
career success, but to the constellation of hobbies, interests, and
skills that would have adorned most educated young people in previous
centuries. Things like playing pianos, painting portraits, singing
hymns, riding horses, and planning dinner parties. Such
accomplishments have been lost through time pressures, squeezed out
between the hyper-competitive domain of school and work, and the
narcissistic domain of leisure and entertainment. It is rare to find a
young person who does anything in the evening that requires practice
(as opposed to study or work) ‹ anything that builds skills and self-
esteem, anything that creates a satisfying, productive “flow” state,
anything that can be displayed with pride in public. Parental hot-
housing of young children is not the same: after the child’s
resentment builds throughout the French and ballet lessons, the
budding skills are abandoned with the rebelliousness of puberty ‹ or
continued perfunctorily only because they will look good on college
applications. The result is a cohort of young people whose only
possible source of self-esteem is the school/work domain ‹ an
increasingly winner-take-all contest where only the brightest and most
motivated feel good about themselves. (And we wonder why suicidal
depression among adolescents has doubled in one generation.) This
situation is convenient for corporate recruiting ‹ it channels human
instincts for self-display and status into an extremely narrow range
of economically productive activities. Yet it denies young people the
breadth of skills that would make their own lives more fulfilling, and
their potential lovers more impressed. Their identities grow one-
dimensionally, shooting straight up towards career success without
branching out into the variegated skill sets which could soak up the
sunlight of respect from flirtations and friendships, and which could
offer shelter, and alternative directions for growth, should the
central shoot snap.

The question “Was their money and status acquired ethically?”
sounds even quainter, but its loss is even more insidious. As the
maximization of share-holder value guides every decision in
contemporary business, individual moral principles are exiled to the
leisure realm. They can be manifest only in the Greenpeace membership
that reduces one’s guilt about working for Starbucks or Nike. Just as
hip young consumers justify the purchase of immorally manufactured
products as “ironic” consumption, they justify working for immoral
businesses as “ironic” careerism. They aren’t “really” working in an
ad agency that handles the Phillip Morris account for China; they’re
just interning for the experience, or they’re really an aspiring
screen-writer or dot-com entrepreneur. The explosion in part-time,
underpaid, high-turnover service industry jobs encourages this sort of
amoral, ironic detachment on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder.
At the upper end, most executives assume that shareholder value trumps
their own personal values. And in the middle, managers dare not raise
issues of corporate ethics for fear of being down-sized. The dating
scene is complicit in this corporate amorality. The idea that Carrie
Bradshaw or Ally McBeal would stop seeing a guy just because he works
for an unethical company doesn’t even compute. The only relevant
morality is personal ‹ whether he is kind, honest, and faithful to
them. Who cares about the effect his company is having on the
Phillipino girls working for his sub-contractors? “Sisterhood” is so
Seventies. Conversely, men who question the ethics of a woman’s career
choice risk sounding sexist: how dare he ask her to handicap herself
with a conscience, when her gender is already enough of a handicap in
getting past the glass ceiling?

In place of these biologically, psychologically, ethically
grounded questions, marketers encourage young people to ask questions
only about each other’s branded identities. Armani or J. Crew clothes?
Stanford or U.C.L.A. degree? Democrat or Republican? Prefer “The
Matrix” or “You’ve Got Mail’? Eminem or Sophie B. Hawkins? Been to
Ibiza or Cool Britannia? Taking Prozac or Wellbutrin for the
depression? Any taste that doesn’t lead to a purchase, any skill that
doesn’t require equipment, any belief that doesn’t lead to supporting
a non-profit group with an aggressive P.R. department, doesn’t make
any sense in current mating market. We are supposed to consume our way
into an identity, and into our most intimate relationships. But after
all the shopping is done, we have to face, for the rest of our lives,
the answers that the Victorians sought: what genetic propensities,
fulfilling skills, and moral values do our sexual partners have? We
might not have bothered to ask, but our children will find out sooner
or later."

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2009/...offrey-miller/

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On 30 Apr, 21:15, wrote:
“Three Victorian Questions” by Geoffrey Miller

"Here’s a 2001 Edge.com essay by Geoffrey Miller, author of the upcoming Spent, answering literary agent John Brockman’s question: “What questions have disappeared, and why?”

* * “Three Victorian questions about potential sexual partners: ‘Are
they from a good family?’; ‘What are their accomplishments?’; ‘Was
their money and status acquired ethically?’ ”


They stole it fair and square.