Measuring Progress

These sad and sorry days, it’s hard to remember how far some areas of civilization have come. It’s also easy to see how far we have to go, of course.

At the recommendation of a very smart and well-travelled man, I recently read Roads to Ruin: the Shocking History of Social Reform a 1966 book by E.S. Turner about the long, slow path to correcting some incredibly obvious abuses and vicious behavior; mostly be the British 1%’ers of their time. Of course, American history is well-decorated with similar atrocities, but . . . damn! the Brits were oblivious to some incredibly awful behavior. Some of the more shocking chapter titles (and subjects) are “Spring Guns Set Here,” “Little Boys for Small Flues,” “A Treatment for Treason,” “Plimsol Rules the Waves,” and “A Flourish of Strumpets.” The associated subjects were:

• “Spring Guns” are traps set by the elite landowners to kill or maim anyone who might wander onto their property. Everything from trip-wired guns to pits lined with sharp stakes which often as not “caught” employees, neighboring farmers and their pets, and people out enjoying a breath of fresh air.
• Those “Little Boys” were as young as 4 to 6 and they were used as chimney sweeps and their short miserable lives were some of the worst examples of human slavery in our miserable history. Often by 10, they were used up and discarded with less thought than a farmer might get rid of an injured plow horse.
• The “treatment for treason” was pretty much the process William Wallace enjoyed in Braveheart: “. . . that the offender be dragged to the gallows; that he be hanged by the neck and then cut down alive; that his entrails be taken out and burned while he is yet alive; that his head be cut off; that his body be divided into four parts and that his head and quarters be at the King’s disposal.” I imagine Trump would be drooling at the opportunity to swap this punishment for “lock her up.”
• Plimsol was a British legislator who thought that sailors and officers deserved some assurance that the assholes who owned the ships they sailed cared, at least a little, if those ships were sea-worthy and likely to arrive at their destinations. A side issue in this chapter was about the fact that British sailors were more slaves than employees. They could be jailed for refusing to sail on a decrepit, unsafe ship. Worse, they could be marhed on to that ship and forced to sea where there almost always drowned.
• Obviously, “Strumpets” were hookers of the day; from call girls to street walkers.

One of the many interesting insights Roads to Ruin provides is that the way to the public’s heart is not through logical, ethical discussion, but through some sort of bullshit and insignificant (in context to the injustices) “morals” approach. In the Preface, Turner writes, “Notoriously, in the Victorian Age, a reformer stood a better chance of success if he could present his reform in such a way as to show that the victims of injustice were in moral danger: and even today this is by no means the weakest card to play. What shocked the middle classes who read the reports on conditions in the mines, a little more than a century ago, was not so much the system under which children crawled on all fours dragging sleds behind them, or in which me ruptured themselves lifting loads on to their daughters’ backs; it was the revelation that lightly clad young women working in proximity to naked men at the coalface made no strenuous efforts to save their honour when molested, which was fairly often.”

Something to keep in mind. Injustice is inconsequential compared to unmarried sex in a coal mine. I try, but humans are such disgustingly vicious animals, it’s hard to me to not hope that planet-killing asterioid gets here pretty damn soon.