[MD] Another parallel

[X Acto]

more quotes for Platt


 
"What distinguishes the Victorian culture from the culture of today is
 that the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of 
intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. What held the Victorian
 pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual one. They called 
it morals, but really it was just a social code. As a code it was just like 
their ornamental cast-iron furniture: expensive looking, cheaply made, brittle, 
cold and uncomfortable."

"If one realizes that the essence of the Victorian value pattern was an elevation 
of society above everything
else, then all sorts of things fall into place. What we today call Victorian 
hypocrisy was not regarded as hypocrisy. It was a virtuous effort to keep one's 
thoughts within the limits of social propriety. In the Victorian's mind quality 
and intellectuality were not related to one another in such a way that quality 
had to stand the test of intellectual meaning. The test of anything in the 
Victorian mind was, 'Does society approve?'"

"All this explains why Victorian robber barons in America aped European aristocracy 
in ways that seem so ludicrous to us today. It explains why it was so fashionable 
for Victorian nabobs to pay large sums to be included in biographies of 'distinguished
 citizens.' It explains why Victorians so despised the frontier part of the American 
personality and went to ridiculous extremes to conceal it. They wanted to strike it 
from their history, conceal it in every way possible.
It explains why the Victorians were so vehement in their loathing of Indians. The 
statement, The only good Indian is a dead Indian,' was a Victorian statement. The 
idea of extermination of all Indians was not common before the nineteenth century.
 Victorians wanted to destroy 'inferior' societies because inferior societies were 
a form of evil. Colonialism, which before that time was an economic opportunity, 
became with Victorians a moral course, a 'white man's burden' to spread their social 
patterns and thus virtue throughout the world.
Truth, knowledge, beauty, all the ideals of mankind, are passed on from generation 
to generation like a flaming torch, the headmaster said, which each generation must 
hold up high and protect with their very lives lest that torch go out. But what he 
meant by that torch was a static Victorian social value pattern. And what he either 
did not know, or found it convenient to ignore, was that the torch of Victorian 
romantic idealism had gone out long before he spoke those words in the 1930s. Perhaps 
he was just trying to relight it.

But there is no way to light that torch within a Victorian pattern of values. Once 
intellect has been let out of the bottle of social restraint, it is almost impossible
 to put it back in again. And it is immoral to try. A society that tries to restrain 
the truth for its own purposes is a lower form of evolution than a truth that restrains
 society for its own purposes.

Victorians repressed the truth whenever it seemed socially unacceptable, just as they 
repressed thoughts about the powdery horse manure dust that floated about them as they 
drove their carriages through this city. They knew it was there. They breathed it in 
and out. But they didn't consider it socially proper to talk about it. To speak plainly 
and openly was vulgar. They never did so unless forced by extreme social circumstances 
because vulgarity was a form of evil.
Because it was evil to speak the truth openly, their apparatus for social self-correction
 became atrophied and paralyzed."

"Ultimately their minds became the same way. Their language became filled with ornamental 
curlicues that never stopped proliferating until it was all but incomprehensible. And if
 you didn't understand it you dared not show it because to show it meant you were vulgar 
and ill-bred."

"With Victorian spirits atrophied and their minds hemmed in by social restraints, all 
avenues to any quality other than social quality were closed. And so this social base 
which had no intellectual meaning and no biological purpose slowly and helplessly 
drifted toward its own stupid self-destruction: toward the senseless murder of millions
 of its own children on the battlefields of the First World War."-lila ch21