More on the Puritan Mind

In the Anglo-American experience there were three bloody civil wars--the one in England led by Cromwell, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Each was a phase in a long-term struggle of the Puritan “moderns” to defeat the Tory “premoderns.”  I have come to think of the American Revolution as the Puritans' finishing a job in America that their British cousins could not.  The English slid backwards when they brought the King back after Cromwell. And then the American Civil War was about the Northeastern Puritans finishing off the last remnants of medievalism as it lingered in the manorial plantation system of the south.
   
These struggles have always been framed by the Anglo-American Calvinist mentality as a struggle for democracy and freedom over autocracy and tyranny. Now obviously there is no argument about whether democracy and freedom is superior to autocracy and tyranny, but there should be an argument about the means by which the former asserts itself. The Puritan way is by violence, and this violence is justified by a demonization of the premodern whether it be the Jacobite subversives, Catholics in Ireland, witches in Salem, King George on his throne, the slaveholders in the South, communists in Moscow, or now the Islamic fundamentalists throughout the Middle East. 
   
Puritans don’t work things out with enemies like these because there is no negotiating with the irrational. The Puritan mind reasons: “Well of course the witch doesn’t want to be saved from her own evil. That’s why we must save her from herself by burning her at the stake.”  Sounds absurd, but that American major said after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."  A true Puritan there. And now look what we're doing in Iraq.  Think Fallujah. We're burning the country at the stake.  It's a form of mental illness, but it's a sickness we all accept as normal.

Terrorism is the latest encounter of the Puritan mind with the irrational, and the traditional Islamic culture that promotes it will just have to be destroyed to save it. World politics will be so much more hygienic once we exterminate the vermin. I wasn't all that surprized to learn that Tom Delay had been an exterminator before he entered politics.  He's the poster child for this tragic illness. Would that Jerry Lewis have a telethon to raise money for its cure.
   
A key element in understanding the Calvinist mentality is its need for control and its willingness to use whatever level of violence necessary to repress the “irrational” elements in human experience, and the premodern in the Puritan demonology is full of irrational images triggering fears in need of suppression—magic, witches, Catholic ritual, shifty Jews, hot-tempered Italians, voodoo practicing Africans, the savage Indian.  J.K. Rowling’s “muggles” and  their fear of magic is a kind of sendup of this mentality.  Theirs is a tight, priggish, white-bread, control-obsessed world, sterilized of anything that suggests mystery, transcendence, or the non-rational in general. 
   
The Puritans and their Calvinist cousins the Scotch Irish, of course, didn’t  invent priggishness, nor are they, obviously, the only ones in the history of humanity who have justified the violent repression of their enemies for religious reasons.  But theirs is the peculiarly modern form for the religious persecution of the enemy, and it lingers in Anglo-American culture, and is so much in the cultural air we breathe that we cannot see it clearly.  At the very heart of modern “religiosity,” whether in its Calvinist or its more secular versions, is fear of the uncontrollable non-rational. 
   
The American right's fear of communism/socialism is more akin to the Islamic fear of modernity, which is the fear of an uncontrollable future.  If fascism derives its mystique from a mythological past, communism derives it from a mythologized future.  Progressives look to the future.  Conservatives look to the past.  Progressives distrust the past and its premodern irrationality; conservatives distrust those who look to the future with an irrational utopianism.

Progressivism is experiencing hard times these days because during a culturally decadent period like the one we're currently suffering through, we don't know what to hope for.  We have only the weakest sense of plausible future possibility.  We are capable of seeing the future only as a variation on 'more of the same', and that is not a vision that inspires concerted action. 

That will change someday, but for now it's the conservatives' time because when our imagination of the future is weak, we fall back on the past for want of something better.  And we find ourselves voting for mediocrities like George Bush rather than mediocrities like John Kerry for the same reason.  The first represents the solidity of the past; the second a fuzzy future for which we can muster little hope.

But we’ll come back to this lack-of-a-future theme another time.  I’m more interested in this post to talk about our American fears as they relate to what haunts us from the past.  That’s what this encounter now with Islamic terrorists signifies.  As traditionalism Muslims fear the future, we American Puritans fear the past.  Muslims are to us Americans what the papists like Guy Fawkes and his gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament were to the 17th Century English. In the Puritan mind there is always such treachery lurking in the shadows. And our fear of it creates the conditions that  make such threats grow and become real.   Fear is the enemy.  All we have to fear is fear itself.  Never a truer word was said by an American public figure.  Too bad so many Americans seem so incapable of taking it to heart.
   
I think it was Abraham Maslow who pointed out that “people who are good with hammers see every problem as a nail.” For Americans guns are their hammers, and the violent defeat of everything that scares them is the standard American modus operandi. If you’re a hardliner, you can argue, I suppose, that it’s a strategy that has worked in the past. But at what cost?  Paving your garden to take care of a bug and weed problem is a strategy that will work, too.   

Have Muslims in the Middle East perhaps a justified fear that our strategy is to destroy them in order to save them? I would say so. Like witches, better that they be dead and saved than alive and possessed.  Is their resistance irrational or is it the most perfectly reasonable response we should expect? This is a lesson we should have learned in Vietnam, but it's a lesson that is impossible for the fear-soaked Puritan mind to soak in.

The next time you hear some hardliner's cant about how the world is a dangerous place full of bad guys who want to do us harm, ask yourself whether he’s not talking about something that has a kernel of truth that is blown out of proportion by his fear of the irrational and his need to exterminate, Delay style, what he cannot control. 

The enraged American Indian fighting for his homeland was dangerous, and he could inflict harm, and he often did so. But was he really a significant military threat?  White Americans treated the Indian as if he were a bug problem, and clearly his military subjugation and humiliation was not the only way for the whites to deal with the threat that he posed.  If we Americans had it to do over again, who among us would endorse a similar militaristic policy toward the American Indian? Is drawing a parallel to what we did then to what we’re doing now in the Middle East so farfetched?
       
I would like to raise  a question, even if it seems somewhat naïve:  How might things  be different in America if in the 19th century white Americans had expanded more slowly, less avariciously, and with more respect for the     indigenous peoples who lived in the territories into which they moved? What if the American government rigorously enforced treaties and respect for territorial    and cultural boundaries? Would not intermarriage and the slow integration of the American Indian into a new fusion America have been inevitable?  And if the respect was there, would not the white American have benefited as well in having regained from the American Indian that part of his soul that he had been sterilized in the process of his having become a modern? 
   
I’m not talking about the regressive inclination to  “go native” here.  I’m talking about retrieving what was lost.  But for this question to make sense, you have to acknowledge that something has been lost.  If you don’t see that, then nothing I say here will make sense.  But I also want to say that merely focusing on the past   without an openness to the future can very easily become a sterile exercise  in nostalgia.  The Renaissance in Europe at the beginning of the Modern Age was both a retrieval of lost riches from the past and a stimulus to imagine a     different kind of human future.  We’re in need of such a renaissance now.

Comments

[Peter]

You have a wonderful blog. It presents insights and positions that are sorely needed today. The problem I have faced is that positions like yours often are thought by liberals to be just yet another overreaction to a changing culture -- they don't seem to be able to understand decadence at all. On the other hand, conservatives will likely interpret you as a liberal advancing a new-fangled agenda.

I am concerned, however, that your vision may lean too far with soft-power, hard-power is sometimes called for; but maybe we need more emphasis on soft-power these days. It's really a delicate balancing act. Despots won't be affected by solemn condemnations unless it is backed by military power, but on the other hand, we don't need to be bombing everything we don't like. On the whole though, I favor a more robust military response. That is, I feel we rushed into war and have a done a horrible job of running it, but if push came to shove, I would not oppose the overthrow of Saddam if all other avenues were closed to us, or if leaving him in power would merely doom the Iraqis to endless repression. It's is a difficult game of figuring out whether an intervention will do more harm than good. I still hope that the Iraqi project wll work out and that it will enable a more free Middle East.

On the cultural front, however, we are in close agreement. Godspeed.

[Jack Whelan]

Peter:

Thanks for the kind words. But some quick thoughts. I don't like the distinction between soft and hard power; I think it draws the line in the wrong place. For me it's a question of just or unjust motive, not a question of willingness to use power. And while this distinction deserves more elaborate treatment at another time, I want to say now that I simply do not trust the motives of the current administration, whatever their attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq.

I think the mistake that too many Americans made was in trusting this administration and accepting its justification for the war at face value. Never for a moment did I believe them, and never for a moment did I support this invasion.

Had another administration been in power, it's possible I would have supported the invasion for reasons similar to those maintained by Joschka Fischer in Germany. (See Pual Berman's "Power and the Idealists".) But this is not an abstract question; it's a very concrete one, and these people cannot be trusted with even a minimum exercise of power.