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Recently, the Union Jacks hoisted in London for King’s Charles’s coronation were clumsily taken down by reluctant workers, who replaced them with Rainbow Flags, the symbol of the GloboHomo Empire. The height of the British Empire was in the late nineteenth century and the reversal in attitudes since then is mind-blowing. Why were the Victorians (1837-1901) so conservative—much more so than the Georgians (1714–1837)? What happened to ensure that cleavage was covered-up, Shakespeare and Chaucer were censored and any public discussion of sex became taboo? The Victorians would have been horrified and disgusted by Pride Month; the Georgians distinctly less so. In my new book, Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, I argue the answer is that the social turmoil resulting from the Industrial Revolution led a number of terrifying diseases becoming endemic. Conservatism was the natural, and rational, response.
When Queen Victoria’s reign began in 1837, sodomy was illegal although tolerated in practice. Lord Byron, one of the Romantic Poets, penned bestselling poetry about his homosexual exploits [Byron’s Boyfriends, Pagan Press Books]. But by the time Victoria died, in 1901, homosexuality was totally socially unacceptable and very much riskier legally. In 1885—in response to the inability to convict two flagrant homosexual men because it could not be proven that anal sex had occurred or been attempted—a new law was passed criminalizing “Gross Indecency,” meaning any form of male homosexual behavior. It was under this stringent law that the playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was successfully prosecuted in 1895 (see Homophobia: A History, by Byrne Fone, 2000).
As I have argued before, humans, being pack animals, have two sets of “moral foundations”—individually-oriented foundations of equality and harm avoidance; and group-oriented foundations of sanctity-disgust, in-group loyalty, and obedience to authority. Sanctity-disgust “sanctifies” that which is good for the group but repels that which is bad for it, including outsiders, who may well carry new diseases.
Conservatism, which strongly correlates with traditional religiosity, is associated with group-oriented moral foundations. Accordingly, conservatives score much higher in disgust, especially with contamination disgust, or concern with disease. “In two large samples … we found a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism,” the authors of a 2011 study wrote.
They added this:
Disgust sensitivity was also associated with more conservative voting in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. … [W]e replicated the disgust sensitivity–conservatism relationship in an international sample of respondents from 121 different countries. Across both samples, contamination disgust, which reflects a heightened concern with interpersonally transmitted disease and pathogens, was most strongly associated with conservatism.
[Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting, by Yoel Inbar et al., Social Psychological and Personality Science, December 6, 2011]
So the chance of catching a dread disease makes people more conservative. They become not only more group-oriented and fearful of outsiders but also more sexually conservative, a way to avoid venereal diseases.
Consider what researchers found about parasite avoidance:
Pathogens, and antipathogen behavioral strategies, affect myriad aspects of human behavior. Recent findings suggest that antipathogen strategies relate to political attitudes, with more ideologically conservative individuals reporting more disgust toward pathogen cues, and with higher parasite stress nations being, on average, more conservative.
[Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations, by Joshua Tybur et al., PNAS, 2016]
High mortality salience—awareness of one’s eventual death—makes people more religious and, so, in general, more conservative [The origin and evolution of religious pro-sociality, by A. Norenzayan and A. Shariff, Science, October 3, 2008]. Religious people are more prone to high levels of disgust [The Effect of Trait and State Disgust on Fear of God and Sin, by Patrick Stewart et al., Frontiers in Psychology, January 29, 2020].
Mindful of this, we can surmise how the Industrial Revolution would have affected everyday Victorian life. The Industrial Revolution led to large movements of people, and thus to uncertainty and feelings of exclusion in new environments, something that Norenzayan and Shariff, cited above, associated with increased religiosity. Greater contact between unrelated people in cramped and unhealthy housing also meant more disease. While inoculation dealt with various illnesses, causing decreasing child mortality and a rising population overall, there was also an increased incidence of previously rare conditions that killed people extremely quickly, including, most obviously, cholera, which causes severe vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and can kill within hours. Typhoid and tuberculosis infections also dramatically increased [A History of Population Health, by Johan P. Mackenbach, Brill | Rodopi, May 23 2020].
Venereal diseases, especially syphilis, also became a serious public-health problem toward the end of 18th century and into the 19th. Doctors began to understand that syphilis and other venereal diseases caused infertility, and its prevalence among sailors and soldiers portended national defeat in wars [Syphilis: Its Early History and Treatment until Penicillin and the Debate on its Origins, by J. Frith, JMVH, 2021]. Incurable until the mid-20th century with the invention of penicillin and other antibiotics, venereal disease was a problem that could only be addressed by controlling sexual behavior and creating taboos [Introduction, by L. Merians, in L. Merians, (Ed.), The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-century Britain and France, 1996].
Victorians knew diseases were spread by contact or food or water, but they didn’t begin to understand microbial transmission until the end of the 19th century [Epidemics and Infections in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys, Social History of Medicine, April 22, 2009].
We would expect this increased “infection disgust” to substantially heighten conservatism. Conversely, as society was increasingly able to deal with epidemics, we would expect society to become less conservative, just as it has: the fear of disease has evaporated.
Research has found that a component of racial animus is, partly, the activation of a disgust response, an adaptation to signal avoiding strangers who might carry novel diseases. That elevated disgust explains increased racial intolerance and segregation, as occurred latterly in British India and Singapore; fear of and dehumanization of the working class; and, of course, the imposition of controls on sexual behavior because promiscuity leads to more venereal disease. [See Neural basis of disgust perception in racial prejudice, by Yunzhe Lui et al., Human Brain Mapping, September 29, 2015; [Distrust As a Disease Avoidance Strategy: Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Regulate Generalized Social Trust, by Lene Aarøe et al., Frontiers in Psychology, July 28, 2016; Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel, by Patricia Ingham, April 4, 2002]
Gone were the days of the White Rajahs such as Lieutenant-Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick (1764-1805) of the East India Company, who married the daughter of the prime minister of Hyderabad and became a Muslim who worked as a double agent for the Hyderbadis. Race-mixing became increasingly taboo.
This hypothesis as to why Victorians, and people in the nineteenth century more broadly, were so conservative in so many ways needs to be researched more. But it would seem to make sense of the Puritanical backlash which characterized the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. It would have been set off by a combination of a genuine moral backlash against the Georgian Era and its extravagant excesses; and dramatic change leading to feelings of exclusion, rising infection disgust and rising sexual disgust.
This would then have created a kind of runaway conservatism, or runaway group-orientation, in which people would have played for status by competitively signaling their conservatism, in much the way they competitively signal their Wokeness today. The more intelligent, being better at norm-mapping and forcing themselves to adopt the current set of values for their own gain, would have led the way in shifting the entire culture. This would have continued, even as medical breakthroughs were made and the pace of change slowed.
In 1837, Victoria’s uncle and predecessor King William IV was survived by eight of the ten illegitimate children he had fathered by an actress and many people didn’t care. But as I note in Breeding the Human Herd, by the 1930s, illegitimate children would find themselves refused service in shops as many people saw them as being from “such a morally weak bloodline that they could corrupt others just by being in their presence” [A promiscuous mother and the childhood taunts that turned Cyril Smith into a twisted predator, Daily Mail, April 16, 2014]
Of course, this raises the question of whether such an enormous cultural shift could occur again. As I have discussed before, my research indicates that it most certainly could and very likely will—partly because conservatives seem to be outbreeding Leftists; and partly because, after AIDs, Monkeypox and COVID, we can no longer be so confident that disease is under control.
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Too bad conservatives, when reigning, self-sabotage their own long-term prospects by being anti-abortion…
Of course both are degenerate, vicious, and defective. In short, unwise and imprudent. I’m not exactly Christianity’s biggest fan but they weren’t basically wrong about that whole [original sin] thing – factory default humans are evil.
Were the Victorians cheating so much that the fact gays spread disease actually relevant? HIV is essentially a bathhouse-only problem. Persecuting gays is, for the most part, a waste of time since they keep to (and thus kill) themselves.
That is, unless you’re willing to persecute them so totally that even the anti-sodomy laws themselves are classified secrets.
I personally find that if your society has to make laws about homos, you already fucked up catastrophically. Nobody should be talking about it at all. Especially as it’s now been shown that the primary cause of homosexuality is child rape.
If you have a sodomite problem, that’s not your first priority. If your society isn’t a heinous war crime, you don’t have that issue.
..unless they move with all their mates, the way a vaguely rational social species would.
Hmm. Satanic.
Bastard is an insult because illegitimates really are insufferable most of the time. However, these inarticulate peasants made up excuses, which makes the excuses vulnerable to the truth. The truth is immortal, so it wins. Then folk falsely lose their protections against bastards.
All according to plan.
I understand that the idea of the right or conservatism being driven by disgust and the left being driven by envy (worse than jealousy). And the fear and disgust ti disease makes sense, But I have another take on this. There was a post Enlightenment or even a Christian idea (whichever sect) idea among Europeans that Europeans had a better social system which when picked up by other races (who are not that different from us, we are all children of God), would make a better World. But what they started finding out very soon is that, other populations do not pick up European ways to the level of intensity needed, even if the European system was better/superior (maybe not in every aspect but in most aspects). Also they soon realized that people of other races and ethnic groups have a innate tendency to behave very differently on average. Such that it was impossible to coexist until some form of barriers were put up.
The German National Socialist point of view or the South African Apartheid point of view came about by the realization of this tendency of people of different ethnic groups and races to behave differently, to have a different mentality, on average. They were basically a rejection of the White Man’s burden mentality that eventually non-Whites would become like Whites, given time and direction. Their policy was to leave people of other races alone with cultures suited for them, were against Westernizing/ Europeanizing, non Whites too much.
This conservatism of the Victorian period is true, in India, there was more social mixing in between Europeans and Indians before the mutiny but after the mutiny of 1857 and the coming of the Victorian age, we start seeing more social distance in between the British and Indians. But what is also forgotten is that non Europeans were conservative too, in more cases, even more conservative than European conservatives and the non-Europeans themselves did not want to socially mix with Europeans or other non-Europeans. The rejection came from the other side too, something which is ignored by the left. Even poor primitive people can be very racist against more richer advanced populations and often are.
One interesting thing about fundamentalist Hindu conservatives is the difference in the emotions driving their anti-West hate vs their anti-Muslim hatred. Conservative Hindus do look at Whites with some amount of disgust (other non Whites do too), but Hindutva anti-Westernism is driven primarily by envy, envy of the success of the West as well as the sophistication of Western culture versus their ancient Hindu culture while on the other hand, Hindutva anti-muslim attitudes are driven purely by disgust. There is zero envy towards Muslims (except maybe the ability of Muslim men being polygamous) among Hindutvas.
I read a memoir by a man who lived through this time period, and he claimed that society became more conservative because of the long Napoleonic wars. A great many British families had a son or other male family member killed in the fighting, and their families became somber and more religious in response.
The classic Georgian rake became a figure of disgust instead of a figure of admiration. Everyone shifted their admiration towards the man who could control himself and control other men, such as the Duke of Wellington. Conservative military men were figures who won society’s respect. Rakes and other self-indulgent types were sneered at instead of secretly admired.
The emotional damage of the Napoleonic wars, which went on for an entire generation, was far greater than modern people realize.
Given how terrifying the ravages of syphilis – “the French disease” – could be, I’m astonished that so many illustrious men consorted with prostitutes before the discovery of penicillin. But needs must when the devil drives . . .
Modern authorities are divided on how effective the infamous mercury cure was, but as the alternative might be ending your days in an asylum – a Victorian asylum! – it might have been worth the risks involved.
I do wonder if the peadophile, drag queen, trans, monkey pox, aids issues, as well as an increasing general awareness of homosexual degeneracy, will lead to a backlash. I have seen a poll showing a decline in approval of same sex relationships.
The post Napoleonic Wars period also saw a rise in the wealth and influence of the middle class and their attitudes towards sex and marriage are significantly more conservative than the aristocrats.
But didn’t the Victorians de facto abolish the death penalty for sodomy?
As far as I know, men were being hanged in Georgian times if caught practising sodomy.
Much of the backlash is little more than people who have never felt comfortable with the LGBT movement in the first place.
Remember when two dozen states changed their state constitution so as to explicitedly ban homosexual marriage by stating that marriage is between a man and a woman? This all happened between 2007-2013. Even liberal California passed such a proposition back in 2008.
There’s also been a recent backlash in regards to race relations with many people from all different ethnic groups openly advocating for segregation.
At the start of the Thatcher years in the UK there was a well-known soccer chant, sung (to ‘Clementine’) fron every terrace in the land when a dubious refereeing decision went against your team.
By the Blair years the chant had vanished, because so many of the young guys on the terraces were themselves bastards.
A constant in human history is every generation’s often over-reactive rejection of the manners and mores of the generation that preceded it. In England, the reigns of George’s sons had been a time of rapid social and economic upheaval, great war and the aftermath of war, and a scandal-plagued royalty that makes the peccadilloes of their modern descendants seem merely quaint. The noble ideals of the Enlightenment seemed to have failed; the loss of this faith created a yearning for a return to the stability of tradition. And an anxious, untested teenage girl ascended to the throne at that moment, and there you have the ingredients for what predictably followed.
A similar phenomenon took place here, as Americans, panicked by the responsibility of thinking for themselves, retreated back into the seductive comfort of faith in the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s. This is when it became a cottage industry to reinvent the Founders as pious Christians rather than the Deists and freethinkers they had mostly been.
More stupidity.
All WASP ‘conservatism’ is merely the slightly less radical form WASP culture that any given stage. WASP culture is inherently Liberal – and that includes Libertarian.
This article is a good example of my assertion. The author has no idea how perverted, and liberal Victorians were. He looks at what he thinks of as the ‘conservative’ Victorians and assumes that something really strange occurred to make them less conservative than their Edwardian children and grandchildren. The Liberal half of Edwardians were simony the leaders in that stage of WASP culture taking another inherent leap toward being less ‘hypocritical’ in their expressions of the culture’s war to replace Christendom.
The number of very liberal people that I’ve known who are insufferable germophobes leads me to question the conservative disgust theory.
I also question drawing too many conclusions from the conservative religiosity connection, given that ‘wokism’ has so many aspects of a puritanical religious movement…
“The number of very liberal people that I’ve known who are insufferable germophobes leads me to question the conservative disgust theory.”
Their kids end up with all kinds of allergies because they weren’t allowed to play in the mud as toddlers.