Progressive social change and conservative anxiety: the numerous end-of-times throughout human history

One of the running threads within this project is the constant historical scare-mongering that would emanate out of the conservatively minded individuals regarding societal collapse and the end of civilization. Every historical epoch would have its particular novel social ideas as well as social changes. And at every stage of our historical development there would be backlash and resistance to such developments. In this regard our times are no different. Some of the most prominent targets today are the LGBT community, transgender people, as well as our contemporary feminists. Sometimes all of the supposed contemporary evils and dangers are framed within the so-called “woke ideology”. For others the greatest fear might be related to immigration and the loss of the “racial purity” as far as their societies are concerned.

Whatever a reactionary person today might identify as the most likely cause of the civilizational downfall, we have great news. He or she is merely one of the millions that have at specific historical moments had such anxieties. And most importantly, all of the earlier doomsday prophecies never materialized. This post will be dedicated to the constant conservative alarmism over social progress that has been accompanying human history. Here we will run through some of the historical precedents whereby our previous generations would time and time again step on the same rake.

To start off, whereas we now take for granted the fact that women can vote on an equal basis to men, this is a relatively recent social achievement. And while this historical transition was still taking place, there were those who sounded alarms over the potential negative consequences of women’s suffrage:

“If women became involved in politics, they would stop marrying, having children, and the human race would die out.”

As we can attest, after all, our human race has not died out. Another social aspect that we accept as completely normal today is racial diversity in schools, colleges and universities. But not that long ago this was not the case, for instance in the USA. And as we can now equally bear witness, our civilization has not collapsed, and the current students are totally happy living in such an inclusive environment. Nevertheless, a former US secretary of state managed to make a claim in 1954 that “the mixing of races in the schools will mark the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it”. Interestingly, at that time some also argued that “school integration was a Soviet scheme ‘to mongrelize the white race in America’”.

But racial integration is just a part of the story here. For there is also the question of gender equality in education. For instance, in the US “colleges and universities faced volatile opposition when women began attending classes with men”. It was feared back then that “the entrance of women into formerly all-male institutions would lower university standards and the university itself would become feminized”. Furthermore, “male logic was perceived to be in jeopardy, leaving the nation powerless and unable to influence the world's progress”. Finally, “in 1874 Dr. Edward Clark declared coeducation ‘a crime before God and humanity.’ He warned that American women would ruin their physical capabilities and American males would have to ‘import European women to be mothers of the race.’” Needless to say, all of this has been pure hot air.

As far as the relation between women and education is concerned, the distant antiquity is unsurprisingly as rich in such obsolete statements as the Victorian period. According to Dollie Boyd, “from ancient Greece and Rome forward, male pundits frequently equated educating women to releasing some form of evil upon the world”. It is interesting to compare such a stance from the ancient world with the much later “dire predictions of males like Professor Charles Davis of the U.S. Military Academy that the higher education of women would ‘introduce a vast social evil… a monster of social deformity’”. Apparently, our contemporary much more qualified and much more egalitarian society must be regarded as a “social evil”.

Having touched antiquity, the following is another telling historical example. While our contemporary conservatives in the so-called Western world are attempting to reclaim supposedly Christian values, both in order to halt the downfall of the “western civilization” as well as to safeguard its racial purity, Christianity itself was once viewed as the harbinger of doomsday. Its acceptance within the Roman Empire, for instance, only arrived in the 4th century AD. Before that Christianity was viewed by the Roman officialdom in a similar way as abortion is viewed today by the conservatives - as going against nature. In addition, the Roman rulers held the “belief that the pagan gods’ continued protection of the Empire could only be secured by forcing those (Christians) who had neglected them to return to their worship”. In essence, Christianity was until a certain moment considered as a threat to the Roman world order.

Fast forward to the late 19th century, and now we usually find Christianity regarded as the defensive pillar on the basis of which existential threats must be neutralized. The French case with Charles Maurass and l’Action française is a very characteristic example. The whole doctrine defended by Maurass during his lifetime was essentially an “intellectual war against modernity”. Modernity that was regarded as “decadence, degeneration, dissolution”. “Parliamentarism, human rights, individualism, industrial society, urbanisation, religious and political pluralism” - all of these novelties were considered as a “deadly” challenge against the “principles of ancestral civilization and social unity”. And without these Maurass’ beloved France would be “annihilated”. For poor Charles Maurras only monarchy could have saved his country from the “ravages of times”. Yet again, France is fully intact today with the vast majority of its population now being rather allergic to the idea of a monarch.

To be sure, the massive urbanisation experienced by the industrialising parts of the world during the 19th century had its critics outside of France as well. In the UK, for example, Charles Masterman believed that the urban society “divorced from nature and her ancient sanities”. “Richard Dennis has identified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ‘a widespread anti-urbanism in English-speaking society, a fear that the size, density and impersonality of big cities militated against civilized life’”. Inevitably, our current civilization has now become inseparable from city life. But here is some more historical context regarding the former anxieties:

“Like decadence, the word degeneration is inseparable from the period’s zeitgeist, and describes a supposed moral deviance and cultural decline, but it also has a medical aspect linking social, cultural and artistic phenomena to specific psychopathologies with a veneer of scientific rigor. [...] A few alarmist pamphlets, such as Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) and James Cantlie’s Degeneration amongst Londoners (1885) warned that the London slums were breeding a distinct race of physical and moral degenerates.”

Understandably, from the perspective of the old world the new social relations seemed foreign, unnatural, and harmful. But for the new generations this novel social reality brought fresh liberties. Clothing styles would be just one example. While we might not ever think about it today, the so-called western women were not always allowed to wear trousers. And as this social convention was being challenged in practice on the ground, the conservatives of the day were once again convinced about the upcoming social collapse:

“But those wearing them were harassed, and political cartoons mocked them, suggesting that the social order would be upended by bloomer-wearing women who proposed marriage to men or lounged while husbands did chores.”

Yet, as it could have been expected, the days when women could wear what they wanted have come and the world has not ended. Likewise, no end of the world occurred as a result of the liberalisation of divorces. And this despite all the warnings made by clergy members some hundred years ago “that divorce destroyed families and thus threatened the very fabric of American civilization”. In addition, in 1924 a prominent US justice Ernest Edgcomb even made the following statement:

“It is better that a few be made to suffer and to lie in the bed which they voluntarily made, than to break down the walls which the church and civilization has built up about the marriage contract.”

The historical examples included in this text by no means exhaust all the historically made claims over the impending civilizational collapse due to the social changes. But they suffice to demonstrate, once again, that all such claims are empty and baseless. They merely represent the personal fears and hostility as experienced by various individuals at specific historical moments. Our contemporary conservatives are now all living according to the principles that were at particular periods regarded by their predecessors as civilizational threats. But they would also all, arguably, dismiss the proposition that their future counterparts will equally have fully accepted same-sex couples, transgender individuals, racial diversity and so on.

Sources:
https://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm
https://eji.org/news/resistance-to-racial-integration/
https://mdash.mmlafleur.com/history-of-women-and-pants/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25680560?seq=1
https://www3.tusculum.edu/news/news/2019/womens-education-grew-in-the-19th-century-as-attitudes-changed-but-challenges-remained/
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ887227.pdf
https://grbs.library.duke.edu/index.php/grbs/article/view/15873/7031
https://www.lhistoire.fr/les-id%C3%A9es-politiques-de-charles-maurras
https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/155787672.pdf
https://journals.openedition.org/cve/15125
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24616589

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