Gertrude Himmelfarb's the Demoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values

...And who are the "people" who hold this wrongheaded mix of moral convictions...

...How should we characterize this attempt to enlist "history" in the service of doctrinaire moralism and bare-faced Beltway opportunism...

...One question to ask is whether those who are trying to understand, and those who are trying to govern, the United States at the end of the twentieth century will find any especially relevant lesson in pondering on Victorian Britain more than on any other society (including, for example, nineteenthcentury America...

...Does Himmelfarb's new book suggest that something similar might be said of her...

...His remarks indicate one level of response to the book, but they are premised on the assumption that Himmelfarb's topical argument is backed by the authority of historical scholarship...

...It essentially consists of two series of statistics for the United States and Britain: figures for certain reported crimes and figures for "illegitimacy," which she calls, in a characteristic phrase, "those two powerful indexes of social pathology...

...Most of her historical writing has also been intended, implicitly or (increasingly) explicitly, to address issues in contemporary American society...

...But she also falls short of that role because her allergy to the present is too strong to allow her to give a discriminating account of it...

...In the course of the twentieth century an extensive network of such measures was constructed as the analysis of the structural forces at work deepened...

...Indeed Himmelfarb asserts, a trifle ambitiously as well as imprecisely, that it has been "conclusively demonstrated" that "the single-parent family is the most important factor associated with the 'pathology of poverty' (the imprecision lies in the phrase "factor associated with," which establishes nothing about the nature of the connection...

...in fact it turns out that we are surrounded by so-called "New Victorians" who "zealously monitor" a "code of behavior" that is "at once more permissive and more repressive than the old...

...Moreover, the Victorian period is just near enough, and can seem familiar enough, to allow the projection onto it of psychological longings and cultural fantasies that are actually expressive of the strains of social change and generational conflict in the present...

...Thus, for example, her controversial interpretation of John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill, published in 1974, contained a long concluding section in which she argued that the inadequacies of Mill's conception of liberty were most manifest in, and had perhaps contributed to, the glorification of individual self-expression, and especially sexual expression, in the present...

...And, speaking in the most schematic terms, the form taken by that response, in public debate and policy alike, was a combination of individualism and moralism...

...So, this book does not, alas, provide a heartening or edifying example of the historian as public intellectual: it is too full of resentment, tendentiousness, and closed-mindedness for that...

...And not so much the specifically Victorian virSUMMER • 1995 • 415 Books tues that we may well value today, as the importance of an ethos that does not denigrate or so thoroughly relativize values as to make them ineffectual and meaningless...

...In his essay on Coleridge, John Stuart Mill declared that "an enlightened Radical or Liberal" ought "to rejoice over such a Conservative," since the serious statement of contrary views was rare and valuable...

...A mind that comes to rest so easily, and in such a predictable place, has little to offer to anyone not already disposed to welcome the same nostalgic simplicities...

...It might more accurately be titled "Portrait of the Historian as an Old Grump...

...And this gives the clue to why this slight and oddly constituted book should be published with such accompany416 • DISSENT Books ing hype, and hence a clue to assessing her performance as public intellectual more generally...

...As it turns out, history can "remind us of a time, not so long ago, when all societies, liberal as well as conservative, affirmed values different from our own...

...Long-term variations in crime statistics often tell us as much about variations in changing sensitivity to certain forms of behavior and effectiveness in policing them as they do about any objective increase in the incidence of that behavior...

...it is anyway surely arguable that the greater availability of divorce has tended to increase rather than diminish human happiness, an argument that not even the most counter-suggestible social thinker has been tempted to make for crime...

...In other words, rates of non-nuptial childbearing are of limited value in telling us about the number of adults involved in child-rearing...

...The purpose of this longish historical detour is only made fully explicit in the Epilogue...

...0 418 • DISSENT...

...For good historical reasons, Victorian Britain can more easily be made to look like a plausible embodiment of this happy condition than most other times and places, and Himmelfarb's book is designed to exploit this availability for maximum ideological effect...

...But the cultural authority comes in part from the reader's sense that the scholar-as-intellectual is drawing on thought and research that, on another occasion or in another idiom, have taken inquiry as far as, for the moment, it can go...

...Though specialist scholars have expressed strong reservations about her historical work, her public standing is considerable: in 1991 she was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities, then chaired by Lynne Cheney, to give the prestigious Jefferson Lecture, one of the highest honors available to a scholar in the humanities...

...And this, of course, is where the moral example of the Victorians is supposed to help...

...The counterculture of yesteryear" (that is, the poor old sixties again) is now the "dominant culture," and "one of the most effective weapons in the arsenal of the `counter-counterculture' is history...

...In principle, even for those who may suspect they will not agree with her conclusions, this might be an exemplary performance in the role of Historian as Public Intellectual...

...As a historian, she has largely concentrated on the intellectual and social history of Victorian Britain...

...From time to time these chapters try to induce a mildly revisionist frisson, in, for example, suggesting that urban conditions in Victorian England were not as bad as one might think or that many women were very happy with their "separate sphere," and so on, but neither the definition of the topics nor the level of treatment really seem to reflect the contributions of recent scholarship...

...What history teaches us, therefore, is that from, roughly, the appearance of homo erectus down to, roughly, 1962 all societies believed firmly in "morality," but since then the whole thing has gone to hell...

...Thatcher's elaboration of this picture came in the course of an interview, and so needed to be judged by the criteria appropriate to that genre...

...For example, a recent British survey has revealed that 77 percent of a sample of cohabiting women who had registered an "illegitimate" birth five years earlier were still cohabiting...

...The Prologue, "From Virtues to Values," asserts the claim that the firmly held Victorian sense of the propriety of "the virtues" has given way to the modern relativistic sense of the variability of "values...

...But in Britain and, especially, the United States, something else has become intertwined with that social or economic reaction in ways that have fueled it, given it a wider appeal, and turned it spiteful, namely a cultural reaction against a series of changes symbolized, or demonized, as "the sixties...

...And this conjunction of reactions has enlisted the support of those who feel, strongly but indistinctly, that "things have gone too far...

...Reading these chapters, one has an uneasy feeling that the agenda that has led these topics to be selected for this treatment is being determined offstage (if being determined in Washington, for such it surely is, can ever be described as "offstage...

...Suppose Himmelfarb had happened to be a scholar specializing in eighteenthcentury France or seventeenth-century Holland, or Tang China or Imperial Rome: would she then have been able to write as though her scholarly work bore directly on current concerns...

...A substantial Epilogue, "A De-Moralized Society," sets out her case for the devastating effect this change has had upon modern America and, less centrally, Britain, especially as indicated by statistics about illegitimacy and crime...

...conversely, over two-thirds of "single parent families" are the result not of "illegitimacy" but of marital breakdown...

...It isn't that complicated...

...But history is still "instructive": "The main thing the Victorians can teach us is the importance of values—or, as they would have said, ' virtues'— in our public as well as private lives...

...By contrast, one's sense with this book, as with some other examples of Himmelfarb's work, is that the ulterior polemical purpose imposed itself at too early a stage in the process and short-circuited any deeper, more sustained probing of the complexities of the issues...

...But this only underlines what some of her other remarks suggest anyway: that one reason why Himmelfarb sticks to the sociologically unrewarding category of "illegitimacy" is because she is really exercised about all that "illicit" sex...

...At another point she brackets divorce rates with crime rates, though it is hard to see them as belonging to the same category...

...This involved, above all, identifying the structural elements in the determination of individual fates, and using the power of the community as a whole to prevent or redress some of the most inefficient or unjust consequences of these structural forces...

...In recent years, she has become an increasingly prominent polemicist on behalf of right-wing causes...

...And personally, too, she is at the heart of the neoconservative establishment: Irving Kristol, long-time editor of the Public Interest, is her husband, and William Kristol, leading Republican strategist, is her son...

...Their fairly extensive footnotes might suggest that they also aspire to be taken as contributions to scholarship, though it is hard to imagine most professional historians of nineteenth-century Britain finding anything here that they would regard as both new and true...

...So, this irritable dismissal of so much of contemporary culture, this desperate wish that the sixties had never happened and that one could return to the apparent certainties of the era of one's own early adulthood, is the negation of any genuinely historical response to contemporary issues...

...It is worth considering how far that assumption is justified...

...It is a backhanded tribute to the importance that conservatives like Himmelfarb attach to the influence of liberal intellectuals and academics that in the United States of 1995 she can still believe that the urgent task is to prosecute this kind ofKulturkampf...

...This produces a yearning for an Edenic state before the corrosive forces of collectivism and the counterculture did their deadly work...

...These are the upholders of "moral correctness...

...But, wait, wasn't it supposed to be distinctive of the present age that we didn't really hold any moral values seriously...

...equally, the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s was indeed, in Himmelfarb's view, "revolutionary," and so on...

...The "Victorian values" celebrated by Thatcher looked much more like an idealized version of the norms of the SUMMER • 1995 • 417 Books English lower-middle class between the wars...

...But Gertrude Himmelfarb is self-consciously aspiring to the role of scholar-as-intellectual, where different standards apply...

...Again, we find a kind of unsteadiness: these misguided moralists are described as constituting the "dominant" or "reigning" culture in the contemporary United States, though they are also accused of disdaining "the mundane values of everyday life as experienced by ordinary people...

...Nobody, I should think, could be untroubled by the incidence of crime, especially violent crime, in the contemporary United States, though the matter of the alleged rate of increase over the past century or more is bedeviled by questions of definition, under-reporting, and so on...

...So, for example, "the kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and normal" is now seen, apparently, as "pathological...

...One need not go back to the Victorian age...

...These measures were, of course, developed in response to particular circumstances, and as some of those circumstances changed—with, for instance, the decline of the traditional manufacturing industries and the transformation of the old urban working class—there was inevitably a reaction against some of these measures and the ideas they were based on...

...More than one claim is in play here...

...One, equally schematic, way to characterize the political thought and policy-making of the century between, roughly, 1880 and 1980 might be to say that they exhibited a sustained, if uneven and often inconsistent, attempt to remedy the inadequacies of this individualistic approach...

...Questions of social and economic policy tended to be discussed in terms which accorded priority to individual character and duty operating in an environment that was largely taken as given or otherwise beyond analysis...

...Probably the single greatest cultural force predetermining the nature of that response was the legacy of Protestant Christianity, especially in the form of the "Evangelical revival" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...

...Seen in historical perspective, "it appears that the present, not the past, is the anomaly, the aberration...

...But, even supposing there were such "conclusive" evidence for this claim, the figures for "illegitimacy" in contemporary society would not actually isolate the key element...

...British historians were pretty unanimous in finding only the most tenuous or superficial links between the world conjured up by Tory politicians and the realities of Victorian society...

...Certainly, Gingrich's summary of The Demoralization of Society could not, as reported, be called "complicated...

...This is Gertrude Himmelfarb's tenth book...

...This is one reason why, one is forced to conclude, she is not a modern version of that kind of intelligent conservative opponent Mill urged radicals to be grateful for...

...But quite why "illegitimacy" is supposed to be such a powerful indicator of"social pathology" is less clear...

...several decades will suffice...

...Contemporary society is, we are told, in a desperate state, and only a return to something like the moral certainties of the Victorians can save it...

...We have long been familiar with the concept of "left paranoia," but at present we are surely seeing a recurring pattern of "right paranoia": it is former Vice President Dan Quayle's "cultural elite" who are once again the target here, and it is their views that are alleged to dominate government and what Himmelfarb calls "the educational establishment," although they are out of step with the beliefs of "ordinary people...

...In particular, there is some unsteadiness between asserting that history acquaints us with societies that held values different from our own (which is, surely, true and beyond dispute), and asserting that all earlier periods held firmly to their values, but that ours, uniquely, does not (which is highly disputable and, surely, false...

...It is some version of this latter claim that Himmelfarb returns to most frequently...

...Here, after all, is a senior, widely published scholar seeking to bring some of her extensive knowledge of the past to bear on problems of contemporary culture and society...

...The most plausible case has to be that the presence of two parents makes it less likely that children will grow up delinquent...

...This is a bizarre position for a historian, of all people, to uphold, but it is made all the odder when juxtaposed to another of Himmelfarb's repeated claims about the present: "Today's moralists" have a "fanatical glint in their eye...

...Speaking generally, what distinguishes the most successful practitioners of this role—those whom it is worth reading even when one does not agree with them, perhaps especially when one does not agree with them—is the ability to suggest that, though any single piece of writing may be occasional, accessible, and brief, it embodies some of the fruits of a genuine attempt to pursue a line of inquiry to its limits...

...Quite how it helps is not so clear, and at this point some interesting issues about the role of history in social criticism begin to make themselves felt...

...This was made embarrassingly clear in the course of the "return to Victorian values" episode as it played itself out in British politics and culture in the mid-1980s, an episode that seems about to be re-staged under American conditions (Himmelfarb begins her book with Margaret Thatcher's invocation of "Victorian values" in the election campaign of 1983...

...Himmelfarb disclaims any intention of urging us to "emulate" Victorian society: there can be no going back to a "different stage of economic, technological, social, political, and cultural development...

...The historical chapters are cast in a form that makes them easily accessible to the non-expert 414 • DISSENT Books reader...

...her earlier books dealt with the thought of such leading figures as Acton, Darwin, and Mill, while her more recent work has tended to focus on the analysis and treatment of poverty...

...The evidence presented to support the claim that we face this desperate and, in the strict sense, historically unique plight is, by any standards, slight...

...A particular essay or book by such a figure may be passionate and partisan, and all the better for that...

...Read Himmelfarb's book...

...tit at ain't that hard to understand," Newt Gingrich said recently, referring to the idea of using "shame" to stamp out undesirable behavior...

...Though largely devoted to an exegesis of Mill's writings, the book's animating purpose was in fact a restatement of the case for convention, tradition, and inherited order...

...Victorian Britain was the first society to attempt to come to terms with the social consequences of industrialism...

...Several portions of her new book have already appeared in periodical form over the past seven years, their provenance constituting a roll call of influential conservative journals: the American Scholar, Commentary, Forbes Magazine, the Public Interest, the Wall Street Journal...

...The beginnings of this response are evident in the Victorian period itself, and although Himmelfarb's picture of the age involves no mention of these developments, those in search of the contemporary "relevance" of Victorian England might reflect that it was in this period that we find the beginnings of legal protection of trade union activity, collective provision of essential services, regulation of working hours and conditions, publicly funded schools, libraries, and museums, death duties on inherited wealth, taxes on higher incomes, and so on...

...Although she occasionally writes as though historical perspective per se were all that mattered, it soon becomes clear that it is certain features characteristic of Victorian Britain, as opposed to any other historical time and place, that are supposed to be vitally relevant to the United States now...

...Some of those who now denounce "welfare" believe that they could have sympathized with their parents' enthusiasm for New Deal welfare policies because those policies did not disturb what now, as part of an anxious, nostalgic reaction to the speed and scope of social and cultural change, get represented as the sexual, domestic, racial, and aesthetic verities...

...In fact, even to speak of "combination" understates the extent to which, as historians have been recently coming to recognize, the individualism was always and already moralized, just as the moralism was fundamentally and pervasively individualistic...

...Although she more than once says that that is what is distinctive of the present, the real charge, as the above passages (which are actually far more numerous) indicate, is that people hold the wrong values: "casual sexual intercourse is condoned, while a flirtatious remark may be grounds for legal action...

...Still, one does not have to accept Himmelfarb's end-is-nigh-ism to feel that there is something to worry about here...

...The Demoralization of Society contains seven chapters on aspects of Victorian society, concentrating largely on questions of poverty and charity and of sexuality and domestic life...