Social change, conservative anxiety, and the Big City Life: Part 2

In the previous post we have looked into the anxieties among the conservatively-minded individuals from the 19th and early 20th centuries over the decline of the rural social values as a result of the rural-to-urban migration. We have noted that merely just because there is a social norm that one believes in does not turn this norm into universal truth. Particular historical socio-economic conditions create particular historical social consciousness. As the former is in constant historical development, so is the latter. As is apparently the case with each and every generation, the Victorian anti-urbanists likewise imagined to have achieved the ahistorical and universally correct way of life. And this way of perfect human existence was threatened by the big city.

But the grief due to the death of what at a particular historical moment has become established as “natural” and “traditional” values is also regularly accompanied by fear-mongering over the upcoming end of the world. The following quotation represents quite well the conservative mindset of the late 19th century:

“In The Time Machine, Wells’s narrator saw amid the apparent progress of modern civilisation ‘only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end’. The forces of urban growth and change seemed to be acquiring a momentum of their own, in which the energies of progress had turned towards destruction.”

Our social history is full of proclamations regarding societal collapse, downfall of civilization, social decadence and so on. The fact that history never stops in its tracks - and that humans never seem to learn from it - is proven by similar claims made in our times regarding same-sex marriage, transgender people, sexual liberties, or child-free couples, to name just a few. To return to the issue of the modern rise of the cities, here are a few more examples of the now completely obsolete 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. Under the influence of evolutionary theories, there developed the idea that the masses, ‘townified’ in defiance of Nature’s laws (Cantlie 45), carried a transmittable hereditary taint, and were dragging the nation back, especially as Social Darwinist interpretations of natural selection maintained that, under the new conditions of philanthropy, democracy and socialism, the unfit were no longer eliminated by the fit.”

“The argument that in the 1880s and 1890s the ‘English race’ was degenerating morally and physically seemed to certain intellectuals and politicians to be supported by the facts, figures and observations provided by the great inquiries on the condition of England as well as by statistics on the rise of insanity and the physical conditions of military recruits during the second Boer War (1899‒1902).”

One can easily find contemporary parallels to the attack upon “the new conditions of philanthropy, democracy and socialism” quoted above. Remember when Elon Musk stated that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”? Or when Kemi Badenoch argued that the UK “and all of western civilisation will be lost” if the efforts to “drive forward rightwing ideas globally fail”? According to her, “pronouns, diversity policies and climate activism” are a “poison”. The “townified” masses, “in defiance of Nature’s laws”, have now been replaced by gay and transgender people. But there are always those “in defiance of Nature’s laws”. And they are whatever the outgoing generations define them to be.

Moreover, whereas Imperial Britain at the age of scientific racism was worried about the fitness and supremacy of its race, today we have theories to the tune of the Great Replacement. To be sure, the origins of this theory - which “argues that Jews and some Western elites are conspiring to replace white Americans and Europeans with people of non-European descent” - “date back to the late 19th century”. Hence, to the very same historical period of our anti-urbanism. However, by now eugenics has died its natural death. Our contemporary racism, as awful as it is, is content-wise different from the one that dominated in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, as the author of the 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement” would argue, “ethnic French and white Europeans were being replaced physically, culturally and politically by nonwhite people. He believed that liberal immigration policies and the dramatic decline in white birth rates were threatening European civilization and traditions.”

Hence, while the Victorian rural-to-urban migration had created the conditions for the imagined racial downgrading of the times, our contemporary waves of migration constitute a somewhat conscious attempt by the elites to replace the whites. And just as the cities back in the day, these “liberal immigration policies” now are also “threatening European civilization and traditions”. The irony here, of course, is that much of this “European civilization and traditions” that we are supposed to defend is the historical result of the urban milieu. Namely, the conservatives of today have become emotionally and politically attached to what their conservative predecessors would have once militated against. Our modern civilization and culture within the so-called developed world has been essentially built upon the ruins of the pre-capitalism rural social values. But it would have been impossible to prove to those resisting urbanisation that people like them would later on be quite happy with the results:

“Charles Masterman wrote that ‘At the commencement of the twentieth century […] in a world-wide disenchantment, the most progressive races of our western civilisation stand as if paralysed before a problem apparently beyond human solution – seeing human action vanishing in a kind of wide and barren marshland.’ Western civilisation protested ‘a kind of cosmic human weariness. Society which had started on its mechanical advance and the aggrandisement of material goods with the buoyancy of an impetuous life confronts a poverty [both physical and spiritual] which it can neither ameliorate nor destroy’.”

“Masterman lamented the fractured nature of experience in the modern city: ‘a world where the one single system of a traditional hierarchy has fissured into a thousand diversified channels, with eddies and breakwaters, whirlpools and sullen marches, and every variety of vigour, somnolence and decay.’”

One final historical parallel. There are people today, to a large extent representing the outgoing generations, who feel nostalgic about the times when Europe, for instance, was much less racially diverse. Some of them even come from the still very white societies, such as within the Eastern European states. And one should not be surprised that the element of nostalgia was also to be found among the anti-urbanism of the “late Victorian and Edwardian culture”. It simply “abounded in imaginative retreats into the pre-modern rural past (to name just a few: Arts-and-Crafts medievalism, the folk song revival, Edwardian ‘simple-lifers’, back-to-the-land movements)”. Just as certain conservative European politicians still cherish imaginative retreats into the all-white all-Christian times of the Crusaders.

But once again, human history is a never-ending continuum of social change. And when there is change, the natural reaction of resistance must be expected. The science of history, however, is the tool that allows the open-minded individuals to appreciate the irrationality of the conservative panic over historical progress. Panic, which is to be found at every historical intersection.

Sources:
https://journals.openedition.org/cve/15125
https://inkstickmedia.com/elon-musk-said-empathy-is-the-wests-weakness-he-is-half-right/
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/17/kemi-badenoch-western-civilisation-will-be-lost-tory-party-fails
https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-great-replacement-theory-a-scholar-of-race-relations-explains-224835
https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/155787672.pdf

Image by Freepik.com