In Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, one of the near-future cultures is Neo-Victorian, and it is rooted in a mix of ironic-but-not-really theater and a self-aware embrace of hypocrisy as a civilizational virtue. I’ve been thinking about whether that future is reasonable post-Covid.

It is a pretty reasonable extrapolation of pre-Weirding Anglo-Saxon elite culture (US/UK). If you ask, “what might the best features of the 20th century US/UK culture look like if projected out 100 years with a mix of reactionary and futurist evolution?” Neo-Victorian looks solid

The theater part of the future is an elite larp that’s like kayfabe pro-wrestling for educated people. And since elite futures shape mass futures as I’ve argued, neo-Victorian should be taken seriously. The question is, does it survive the Covid test? https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-next-experiments-in-elitism

The attributes that made “Victorian” (19th c) virtues the foundation of Anglo success (economic laissez-faire, winning 2 world wars and a civil war using free market forces, 30 years boom, neoliberal success) are arguably also the vices driving Anglo failures with Covid.

Near the top of the list of these vices is attachment to a very theatrical understanding of freedom and liberty, performed primarily through identity-anchoring symbols both red and blue. In the US: guns, cars, pickup trucks, masks, mansions, nerdy hobbies, prestige degrees.

To be “free” in the US or UK is to be seen to be free on a stage playing an idealized version of yourself armed with an arsenal of identity props supplied by an endlessly inventive engine of commerce. This theatrical way of being civilized is essentially Victorian.

Details have changed. It’s cars instead of butlers, easygoing cultures instead of strait-laced. But the essential structure of a society with a theatrical front-end to stage free identity expression and a utilitarian commerce-based backend remains.

This I think has made society vulnerable to coordination problems that require curbing “free identity” expression. Being “forced” to wear masks and curb your free association with distancing are not anti-viral tactics to the Victorian-descended mind. It is Actual Communism.

The strengths that win world wars against totalitarian regimes turn into weaknesses against a bug that rides coughs.

The extreme theater is pretty unique to Anglo cultures, and to some extent coincides with the modern industrial middle class as first evolved in Anglo regions.

All cultures have a layer of ceremonialized and theatrical elite performance that drive them, but the unique aspects of the Anglo version are:

1. Sheer scale of participation (almost everybody is onstage)
2. The focus on freedom as the performance theme
3. The extra kayfabiness

To contrast another culture I know well, India has only a subset of the upper castes “on stage” (maybe 30% instead of 80%), the performance theme is historical identity rather than freedom identity, and most importantly, it is not very kayfabe. The theater is seen as theater.

It’s that last point that requires turning hypocrisy into a virtue. If you’re going to pretend the theater is real, you’re going to have to do a lot of pragmatic shit on the DL to keep up the pretense. If the backstage isn’t acknowledged as real, you have to be hypocritical.

Aside: this is one reason a long-running theme of my writing since the 2009 Gervais Principle is simply pointing out “err... this is theater.” And Anglo-native people are surprised every time and act like a veil has been lifted and red pill enlightenment achieved.

This is anecdotal, but non-Anglo people tend to be generally less surprised by my “X is theater” shtick. Because their suspension of theater awareness is less complete.

Another way to think of it. If you strip away the front end theater elements of Anglo life, there is no there there culturally to backstage life. Just an industrial backend with functional activities. This is not true of most cultures.

In most cultures it makes sense to say “real life happens at home” (== “life as visibly performed is theater and everybody gets that”). It doesn’t in the US. The tiniest aspects of domestic life turn into theater fodder.

Like take cuisine. In the US “home made” versions of classic dishes (chili, barbecue, apple pie) are first-class members of public identity theater. If you have a great chili recipe you’ll likely enter contests or otherwise become known for it.

In India, sure every family tends to have a recipe for say sambar or garam masala and part of invisible life is passing these around etc backstage. There is a clear distinction between “restaurant” versions of recipes and home-made ones. And the latter are not “on stage” as much.

Okay, but long-winded point of this. Covid is a weirdly hard challenge for such kayfabe cultures because the logic of tackling them lies backstage and doesn’t lend itself to on-stage performance scripting. I mean the best Trump could Do was weakly aim for “masks are patriotic”

OTOH you can’t tackle them backstage either because

a) you won’t admit there IS a backstage

b) the backstage is a barren cultural desert, with everything making it lovable culturally strip-mined for theatrical use

And here’s the funny thing. The US tends to solve it’s “backstage” problems that require human culture by filling roles with non-anglo immigrants. But the moment these immigrants get acculturated they want to get on-stage too. Because they recognize that’s where the power is.

So the “Victorian” mindset of pretending the theater is the whole thing is contagious. It’s a virus in its own right. A pretty powerful one. For a century the Anglo-middle-class victorian-roots virus spread across the world, creating hypocritical kayfabe middle classes everywhere

But nowhere did it get as strong as in its native lands, and nowhere did it exterminate the backstage as a cultural zone as completely as in the US/UK. And nowhere else did the theatrical frontfalse consciousness become the *only* available consciousness to inhabit.

Now let’s ask: does Stephenson’s original extrapolation still work?

I think it doesn’t. Covid is the first of many systemic backstage challenges to come, and they’ll only get trickier. The frontstage/backstage cultural architecture with front denying the back is untenable.

The backstage is where many complex coordination problems in a high-tech civilizational stack emerge. The pretense that they can all be solved with a theater of individualist freedom cornering all political power, with all else labeled Actual Communism and Gulags is doomed.

The backstage is a complex, varied space. It is not a space where nature takes kindly to attempts to solve The Mask Question via a calculus of theatrical freedom calculations. It punishes attempts to do so with 10s of 1000s dead.

If you can’t feel human unless you’re in the spotlight of the Great Neo-Victorian Dream Type 32a, being acknowledged and validated as exactly the kind of Free Cog in the System you think you are, the future will be a very uncomfortable place for you.

To the extent that we’re all Victorian now, especially in the middle classes around the world, it’s going to be a challenge for all of us, adapting to a world where front-stage public theaters is no longer the essence of civilization.

The idea that we all belong in a universal “story of humanity” is peculiarly Victorian I think. I see few signs of it in other times/places. The closest is evangelical religions, which act like everyone will eventually either be part of their one true faith or condemned to hell.

Addendum: I think a big part of the Great Theatricalization of Victorian-descended middle-class societies is that they started seeing their lives reflected in TV and movies. For most of the world, movies and TV, even local rather than global-Hollywood, is Not About Us.

Which incidentally gets at why representation in movies/tv (the mirror of the theatrical society) is such a flashpoint. You’re not a real free human until you’re represented on screen as a fictional free human, and you can’t access political power until you are.