https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pkXwKRrtP68
Syphilis really became a widespread public health concern amongst the Victorians, and it was a very dreadful disease and took a very large number of forms, and also was transmissible from mother to child. And interestingly enough, the Europeans, when they hit the Western Hemisphere, brought a whole host of extremely serious transmissible diseases with them, measles and mumps and smallpox, and that devastated the Native community, maybe up to 95% of the Native community. And the Native community returned the favour in very minor ways, one of which apparently was syphilis. And so there was a real twist in sexual mores that characterised the Victorian period, in part because syphilis was such a terror. I think the age scare was nothing compared to the syphilis scare. And so it’s hard to know exactly what the emergent fact of syphilis did to the conceptualisation of the relationships between men and women on the sexual front. It certainly made prostitution, for example, a much greater public health danger. And so that’s one question. Another question is, the Victorian era was characterised by the generation of a substantive amount of wealth. And one could argue that part of what was happening on the Victorian beauty front was the advertisement by aristocrats that they could tolerate this encumbrance in the name of beauty because they had the financial resources to sustain it. There’s an example of that biologically would be, in principle, would be the peacock’s tail, which is extraordinarily beautiful, but also quite the encumbrance. And apparently part of what it signifies, especially if it’s perfectly symmetrical and well formed and heavy, is that the male who sports that plumage has sufficient health and resources to pull that off without dying. And so now, and it seems to me that some of those Victorian excesses are reasonably understood on the biological front as manifestations of that kind of, what would you say? Well, it’s an exuberance of display on the sexual front. Now there might be all sorts of negative consequences of that in relationship to other elements of women’s, well, men and women’s lives. But so well, so those are two parallel questions. How do you think the emergence of syphilis transformed the relationships between men and women politically and socially in Victorian England in particular? And what do you think about the excess resource hypothesis on the Victorian outfitting front? People were getting quite rich at that point, and that was certainly one way of displaying it. Right. Yeah, I understand your questions. So certainly you’re absolutely right about the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea as very fundamental to social concerns around sexuality in Britain in the 19th century. Absolutely. And that was the source of the contagious diseases acts was this argument by the state. And I think my most recent book, Outrageous, which addresses this, the book before that, before my last one, is about how 19th century viral epidemics, including contagious diseases like gonorrhea, but also typhus and cholera, were used by the state as a kind of pretext for controlling people and subverting their civil liberties. So definitely the argument of the state was, you know, these prostitutes or women who look like prostitutes or vectors of disease, they have to be managed and controlled. And it’s the state’s role to step into what had been very personal spaces and mediate this for the public good. Right? We’ve seen that. There’s an emergent literature on the political biological front indicating that one of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs in any given geographical locale, so you can do this state by state or county by county or country by country. And one of the best predictors of this is the prevalence of infectious disease. The higher the prevalence of infectious disease, the higher the probability of authoritarian political attitudes. And the correlation isn’t like point one or point two. Correlation is like point six. It’s an unbelievably powerful relationship. And it seems like an extension of what’s called the behavioral immune system. And it can really get going. Well, we saw that during COVID, right? This transformation into something approximating authoritarianism and the motivational justification. What’s so interesting and horrible about this, by the way, is that that’s not a fear-based motivation. It’s a disgust-based motivation. And disgust is a lot more aggressive than fear, because if you’re afraid of something, you tend to avoid it. Whereas if you’re disgusted by something, your fundamental motivation is to eradicate it by any means necessary. If you look, for example, at the language that Hitler and his minions used when they were ramping up their public health pathology, prevention pathology, to extend out of the mental asylums and the hospitals into more broad ethnic cleansing, all the language they used was parasitism, disgust, contamination, all disease associated. Right. Right. Yeah. It’s a very powerful motivational system when it gets activated. Absolutely no question. It’s so interesting to hear your analysis from a psychological point of view. And I know there’s been important psychological work done on disgust. I would actually say it from a geopolitical perspective. What happened in the 19th century, not just with contagious diseases, but with the typhus epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s, which were devastating, just wiped out. People would be kind of sick on Sunday and dead on Wednesday. That created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to emulate the model of narrating the danger of infectious diseases, certainly using that element of disgust and contamination and existential threat as a pretext for what authoritarians always want to do, which is eradicate liberties and consolidate control. So I think it is happening on two fronts. It happens organically on the psychological front, but then the state jumps in and says, well, we can save you from this existential threat. Just hand over all your rights. And I think that looking back, certainly Hitler and then later other exploiters of this discourse either consciously or not. Referenced or remembered the effectiveness of the state stepping in in the 19th century, because what the state did, which is so fascinating, is that they created, they solved the infectious diseases threat by creating a network of sewers, Baselgette’s network of sewers under London. And the first municipal sewage system solved the problem. Largely it saved people. And so that was a fantastic argument for the state to say, look, individuals can’t do this. The individual home with its cesspit, with its miasmas is the source of contamination. One person’s private contamination affects the commons. Therefore, you need the state to mediate the commons. And the metaphor that I look at then is like the internet, right? It established this idea that there’s a commons between us that can be contaminated from one person’s private space to another person’s private space. And therefore the state needs to patrol and police the commons. But yeah, well, there’s a real analog between the spread of information and the spread of viruses, which is obviously why we say such things as it went viral.