https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XtwyK0rjh-c
I have two very different questions. The first is that 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 favor in very minor ways, one of which apparently was syphilis. And so there was a real twist in sexual mores that characterized the Victorian period in part because syphilis was such a terror. I think the AIDS 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 conceptualization 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 characterized 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. Now 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. 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 Outrages which addresses this, the book 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 these prostitutes or women who look like prostitutes or vectors of disease, they have to be managed and controlled and 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, it scales 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. Yeah, yeah. So it’s a very powerful motivational system when it gets activated. Absolutely no question. You know, 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 and cholera epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s, which were devastating, just wiped out. You know, 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 kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases, certainly using that element of disgust and contamination and existential threat as a pretext for what authoritarian 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, you know, certainly Hitler and, you know, 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. So that was a fantastic argument for the state to say, look, individuals can’t do this. You know, the individual home with its cesspit, with its, you know, 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 the like the internet, right? You know, 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. Did you notice that big tech companies today are masquerading as privacy companies? Just fix your privacy settings, turn off app tracking and you’re all good. Right. Are we supposed to believe that the big bad tech wolf has now turned into our sweet grandma? Sure. Maybe they’ll release a feature now and then that does some good. But collecting and selling off your data is in big tech’s nature. To protect myself against big tech’s prying eyes, I use ExpressVPN. When you use the ExpressVPN app on your computer or phone, you’re hiding your unique IP address. Which means websites can’t use that address to find out your real location or track what you do online. On top of that, ExpressVPN encrypts and reroutes 100% of your online activity. So your internet provider, wifi admin and hackers can’t see it. The best part though is how easy it is to use. It just takes one click to protect all of your devices. One ExpressVPN subscription covers up to five devices at the same time, so you can protect your entire family too. That’s why ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET, Wired, TechRadar and countless others. Protect your data with the number one rated VPN provider today. Visit expressvpn.com slash JordanYT. That’s EXPRESSVPN.com slash JordanYT and get three extra months free. ExpressVPN.com slash JordanYT. 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. It went viral. Right, right. Well, and there’s a real tension in human discourse that seems to be key to the distinction between conservatives and liberals is the conservatives tend to be more disgust sensitive and they’re more prone to react negatively to the potentially contaminating effects of interpersonal interaction. And that could be sexual or intellectual. The liberal types are, it’s as if the liberals bet that the advantage to free exchange will outperform the disadvantage of contamination, whereas the conservatives tend to make the opposite bet. And the technical complexity of that is that sometimes the conservatives are right and sometimes the liberals are right. Right? Because the conservatives tend to be more correct, let’s say, when multiple epidemics are raging out of control, whereas the liberals tend to be more correct when, for whatever reason, the probability of genuine contagion is relatively low and you can take advantage of cross-border freedom and movement of information and people. But it’s a continual battle because, and you know, this also complicates the sexual realm to an immense degree because, of course, sexual intercourse is an excellent vector for disease transmission and that throws people into an existential quandary constantly because obviously the drive towards reproduction and the drive towards sexual pleasure opens up the danger on the epidemic front. We certainly saw that with the rise of AIDS, for example. I mean, there’s no doubt, biologically speaking, that the AIDS virus mutated to take advantage of certain forms of promiscuity. And so that’s an absolute bloody catastrophe and could have been, well, an apocalyptic catastrophe, although we seem to have got more or less on top of it. There’s always that specter of large-scale contamination lurking in the background on the ideational and the physical front. And people certainly differ widely in their instinctive reactions to that too. And so IQ is actually associated with disgust sensitivity, as it turns out. So the lower your IQ, the more disgust sensitive you are. Now the effect isn’t walloping, but it’s not negative. Well, you can also understand that, Abe, because imagine this, is that the smarter you are, the more useful the free exchange of information is because you can take advantage of it. Well, if you can’t take advantage of it, you’re differentially exposed to the threat of contamination. And so that makes things as if things aren’t complicated enough already. That adds an additional dimension of complexity. One of the things that I learned that was truly horrifying, by the way, was the degree to which the progressive campaign towards ethnic extermination in Germany was driven by public health concerns and a hypothetical compassion that underlay that. If you examine that developmentally, it’s actually quite terrifying because the Nazis actually started what eventually became their extermination campaigns with public health campaigns that were quite effective at eliminating tuberculosis. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So a thousand percent. So to move up to the 20th century.