0 comment Monday, September 8, 2014 | admin
Several posts ago, I mentioned that I had been reading a book called Saints and Strangers, by George F. Willison. As I said, it's about the Pilgrim fathers, those who were the original Massachusetts colonists.
Before I go on, let me reiterate that I am not a descendant of that group of people, but I'm descended on the maternal side from the later Puritan colonists who arrived with Winthrop's fleet around 1630. So though the Pilgrim fathers were not my ancestors, I feel a connection with them.
The pop-culture view of history which is accepted by most people, unfortunately, envisions these Puritans as being grim-faced, overly pious, joyless, ''repressed'' (to use Freudian jargon) people, who were nothing but a blight on the development of our American society.
Willison addresses this biased image of Puritans in the first chapter of his book.
"The Pilgrims were not nineteenth-century pietists, or quietists. They were not pale plaster saints, hollow and bloodless. They were men -- and women, too -- of courage and conviction, strong and positive in their attitudes, prepared to sacrifice much for their principles, even their very lives. Far from being Victorians, they were children of another and a greater age, the Elizabethan, and in their lives reflected many of the qualities of that amazing age -- its restlessness and impatience with old ways, its passionate enthusiasms, its eager curiosity and daring speculation in all fields, its boldness in action, its abounding and apparently inexhaustible energies.
Never did the pilgrims quietly resign themselves to defeat, no matter what the odds against them. They launched themselves upon the most hazardous ventures not once but many times, and no obstacle or untoward circumstance could stay them or divert them from their course. Far from being humble and soft-spoken, they were quick in their own defense, fond of controversy, and sharp of tongue, engaging in many a high-pitched quarrel with their friends and foes alike, even among themselves. Given to speaking their minds plainly, they expressed themselves in the language of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in the torrential and often rafter-shaking rhetoric of Elizabethan England, with no slightest regard for the proprieties and politic circumlocutions of a later day.
[...]
The Pilgrims were Elizabethan, too, in their acceptance of the simpler joys of life. They practised no macerations of the flesh, no tortures of self-denial. They appreciated the pleasures of the table and the bottle, liking both ''strong waters'' and beer, especially the latter, never complaining more loudly of their hardships than when necessity reduced them to drinking water, which they always regarded with suspicion as a prolific source of human ills. They were not monks or nuns in their intimate relations as their usually numerous families and more than occasional irregularities attest. Fond of the comforts of connubial bed and board, they married early and often and late, sometimes within a few weeks of losing a mate. Only on the Sabbath did they go about in funereal blacks and grays. Ordinarily they wore the russet browns and Lincoln green common among the English lower classes from which they sprang."
A few years ago, I think I wrote about this false image of Puritans and Pilgrims in a blog entry. However, it doesn't matter that occasionally, rarely, very rarely, somebody offers a defense of the much-defamed Puritans, people will still go on believing their cartoon image of the Puritans as the ultimate killjoys, and the source of everything that is wrong with America today.
This, to me, is bizarre in the extreme, given that we live in one of the most libertine ages in Western history.
That eternally bitter cynic and misanthrope, H.L. Mencken (who occasionally said something true, by accident) conducted a one-man war against the Puritan fathers, and has since been quoted endlessly, usually by the secular cynics, hedonists, and Anglophobics.
In his 1917 book of Essays, he wrote of the Puritan influence:
But perhaps the most important, and certainly the most outspoken essay was entitled "Puritanism as a Literary Force," during which he alleged that William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain were victims of the Puritan spirit.
'The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution-- these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States.'
Mencken had criticized Puritanism for many years, famously characterizing it as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," but through World War I his criticism became increasingly outspoken, in part due to the rising tide of Prohibition.''
There you go: he was unhappy that his favorite substance was illegal. In the Prohibition days, when Mencken wrote the above, America was hardly a puritanical country: think the flappers, ''flaming youth'', short skirts, cocaine usage, bathtub gin.
To turn Mencken's cynical phrase on its head, Mencken and those who follow him are afraid that somebody, somewhere, may not share their views on life. To them, even a small voice here and there disagreeing with them is intolerable. Mencken and his ilk were intolerant as well, but intolerant of different things, that's all.
Mencken was Anglophobic also, not just a hater of Puritans, and that too is hardly a recommendation, in my book. He considered Anglo-Saxons 'cowardly.' In the Baltimore Evening Sun he wrote:
This reluctance for desperate chances and hard odds, so obvious in the military record of the English-speaking nations, is also conspicuous in times of peace. What a man of another and superior stock almost always notices, living among so-called Anglo-Saxons, is (a) their incapacity for prevailing in fair rivalry, either in trade, in the fine arts or in what is called learning--in brief, their general incompetence, and (b) their invariable effort to make up for this incapacity by putting some inequitable burden upon their rivals, usually by force.
Mencken seems to have quite a following on the left and among paleoconservatives, so he seems to be an influence even today.
In connection with the popular slander of Puritans, though, I think of this passage from C.S. Lewis:
"The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding." Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism..." - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Really, in this libertine age, in which something called Lady Gaga is a household word, it's absurd to worry about ''puritans'' keeping people from indulging whatever urges they feel. Today's proponents of modesty and chastity are utterly marginalized and powerless, hardly a threat to any dedicated libertine.
We do have in our day 'puritans' on the left, who are busybodies not about sexual matters, because they believe sex in whatever form is an unqualified good, but about what we eat. Today's 'puritan' busybodies are the nannystate types who outlaw trans-fats and insist that we all conform to government guidelines for food consumption.
In any case, it's a shame that the name 'Puritan', which describes many of our forefeathers, is now a slur, and it's an even greater shame that the politically correct view of history, false as it is, is so uncritically accepted on both left and ''right.''
Before I go on, let me reiterate that I am not a descendant of that group of people, but I'm descended on the maternal side from the later Puritan colonists who arrived with Winthrop's fleet around 1630. So though the Pilgrim fathers were not my ancestors, I feel a connection with them.
The pop-culture view of history which is accepted by most people, unfortunately, envisions these Puritans as being grim-faced, overly pious, joyless, ''repressed'' (to use Freudian jargon) people, who were nothing but a blight on the development of our American society.
Willison addresses this biased image of Puritans in the first chapter of his book.
"The Pilgrims were not nineteenth-century pietists, or quietists. They were not pale plaster saints, hollow and bloodless. They were men -- and women, too -- of courage and conviction, strong and positive in their attitudes, prepared to sacrifice much for their principles, even their very lives. Far from being Victorians, they were children of another and a greater age, the Elizabethan, and in their lives reflected many of the qualities of that amazing age -- its restlessness and impatience with old ways, its passionate enthusiasms, its eager curiosity and daring speculation in all fields, its boldness in action, its abounding and apparently inexhaustible energies.
Never did the pilgrims quietly resign themselves to defeat, no matter what the odds against them. They launched themselves upon the most hazardous ventures not once but many times, and no obstacle or untoward circumstance could stay them or divert them from their course. Far from being humble and soft-spoken, they were quick in their own defense, fond of controversy, and sharp of tongue, engaging in many a high-pitched quarrel with their friends and foes alike, even among themselves. Given to speaking their minds plainly, they expressed themselves in the language of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in the torrential and often rafter-shaking rhetoric of Elizabethan England, with no slightest regard for the proprieties and politic circumlocutions of a later day.
[...]
The Pilgrims were Elizabethan, too, in their acceptance of the simpler joys of life. They practised no macerations of the flesh, no tortures of self-denial. They appreciated the pleasures of the table and the bottle, liking both ''strong waters'' and beer, especially the latter, never complaining more loudly of their hardships than when necessity reduced them to drinking water, which they always regarded with suspicion as a prolific source of human ills. They were not monks or nuns in their intimate relations as their usually numerous families and more than occasional irregularities attest. Fond of the comforts of connubial bed and board, they married early and often and late, sometimes within a few weeks of losing a mate. Only on the Sabbath did they go about in funereal blacks and grays. Ordinarily they wore the russet browns and Lincoln green common among the English lower classes from which they sprang."
A few years ago, I think I wrote about this false image of Puritans and Pilgrims in a blog entry. However, it doesn't matter that occasionally, rarely, very rarely, somebody offers a defense of the much-defamed Puritans, people will still go on believing their cartoon image of the Puritans as the ultimate killjoys, and the source of everything that is wrong with America today.
This, to me, is bizarre in the extreme, given that we live in one of the most libertine ages in Western history.
That eternally bitter cynic and misanthrope, H.L. Mencken (who occasionally said something true, by accident) conducted a one-man war against the Puritan fathers, and has since been quoted endlessly, usually by the secular cynics, hedonists, and Anglophobics.
In his 1917 book of Essays, he wrote of the Puritan influence:
But perhaps the most important, and certainly the most outspoken essay was entitled "Puritanism as a Literary Force," during which he alleged that William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain were victims of the Puritan spirit.
'The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution-- these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States.'
Mencken had criticized Puritanism for many years, famously characterizing it as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," but through World War I his criticism became increasingly outspoken, in part due to the rising tide of Prohibition.''
There you go: he was unhappy that his favorite substance was illegal. In the Prohibition days, when Mencken wrote the above, America was hardly a puritanical country: think the flappers, ''flaming youth'', short skirts, cocaine usage, bathtub gin.
To turn Mencken's cynical phrase on its head, Mencken and those who follow him are afraid that somebody, somewhere, may not share their views on life. To them, even a small voice here and there disagreeing with them is intolerable. Mencken and his ilk were intolerant as well, but intolerant of different things, that's all.
Mencken was Anglophobic also, not just a hater of Puritans, and that too is hardly a recommendation, in my book. He considered Anglo-Saxons 'cowardly.' In the Baltimore Evening Sun he wrote:
This reluctance for desperate chances and hard odds, so obvious in the military record of the English-speaking nations, is also conspicuous in times of peace. What a man of another and superior stock almost always notices, living among so-called Anglo-Saxons, is (a) their incapacity for prevailing in fair rivalry, either in trade, in the fine arts or in what is called learning--in brief, their general incompetence, and (b) their invariable effort to make up for this incapacity by putting some inequitable burden upon their rivals, usually by force.
Mencken seems to have quite a following on the left and among paleoconservatives, so he seems to be an influence even today.
In connection with the popular slander of Puritans, though, I think of this passage from C.S. Lewis:
"The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding." Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism..." - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Really, in this libertine age, in which something called Lady Gaga is a household word, it's absurd to worry about ''puritans'' keeping people from indulging whatever urges they feel. Today's proponents of modesty and chastity are utterly marginalized and powerless, hardly a threat to any dedicated libertine.
We do have in our day 'puritans' on the left, who are busybodies not about sexual matters, because they believe sex in whatever form is an unqualified good, but about what we eat. Today's 'puritan' busybodies are the nannystate types who outlaw trans-fats and insist that we all conform to government guidelines for food consumption.
In any case, it's a shame that the name 'Puritan', which describes many of our forefeathers, is now a slur, and it's an even greater shame that the politically correct view of history, false as it is, is so uncritically accepted on both left and ''right.''
Labels: American History, Colonial Stock Americans, New England, Puritanism, Puritans
0 comment Monday, June 23, 2014 | admin
I posted the following (excerpted) article a couple of years ago, but I think it's worth re-posting, for those of you who were not reading this blog when I first posted it. It's from a magazine article of 55 years ago, and it ties in with what I've been writing about our therapeutic, pop-psychology outlook of today, vs. old American common sense.
[All emphasis in the following is mine.]
What Happened to Common Sense?
by Mary Ellen Chase, from Coronet Magazine, May, 1954
Whenever I return to the isolated Maine village where I spend every summer, I am pleasantly surprised by the way in which my neighbors there hold on to certain old terms.
One of these is grit, with its companion, gumption; another is get up and get, which in Maine means to depend on oneself; yet another is common sense. These words describe the human qualities which my neighbors, fishermen and their wives, extoll above all others. For fishing is a hard calling. It demands gumption, or in more polite terms, self-reliance, the power of decision and the determination not to be downed by adverse circumstances.
My neighbors are frankly suspicious of anyone who lacks these old American virtues. They voiced their common judgment of a man who had lost his lobster traps in a northeast gale and had been bewailing his fate with too little reserve.
"Why don't he shut his mouth and pick up his feet?" they said, "You can't set sail straight by takin' time to bawl about bad luck."
They and I stem from the same rural background. In the country school of my childhood, precepts were written on the blackboard, each Monday morning by our "old-fashioned" teachers who knew it to be their duty to instill iron in our souls as well as common fractions in our minds. Through the years those precepts have proved salutary to me in moments of indecision and anxiety. Usually they were in terse prose:
"It takes a live fish to swim upstream, but any old log can float down."
Don't expect others to bear your troubles; they have their own.
Life isn't all you want, but it's all you have; so have it."
Occasionally a rhyme enlivened us. One I recall as a favorite.
The mind of man has no defense
To equal plain, old common sense.
This homely virtue don't despise,
If you would be happy as well as wise.
Parents, too, 50 years ago dealt out such robust aphorisms liberally, sometimes even sternly, in the upbringing of children. I was taught early by both precept and example that a job once undertaken has to be completed whatever the cost, and that no one but the maker of them ought to be expected to pay for mistakes.
[...]During my life as a teacher I have often questioned whether we have discovered any worthy substitutes for those precepts and teachings which, outmoded as they seem, are rooted deeply in our history and our ways of life.
In place of the old sayings we use today new words and terms to describe our states of mind and our meetings of those difficulties and questions which will always beset us. We are now insecure, or ill-adjusted, or frustrated, or made ineffective by a sense of inferiority. These new words lack the optimism of the old. Implicit in them is the notion that we are surrounded by foes difficult to defeat.
The new vocabulary comes into use early. We hesitate to look upon our children as simply ill-mannered or spoiled. We fear that they are problem children who need expert care lest they become neurotics or uncontributive members of society.
In high school and college they are surrounded by advisers on what they would best study, what work in life they are best fitted for. They are too seldom encouraged to face problems by themselves, to make their own decisions and to pay the consequences of their own mistakes.
Nor are adults free from waves of anxiety. Too many of us are looking about for some panacea which will ease the burdens of our past and present errors in judgment and lighten our fears of the future. Something, we feel, is wrong somewhere, and without making any stout attempts on our own to discover what it is, we turn to professional advice which guarantees to show us how to understand ourselves.
Even a cursory reading of such books reveals nothing but what we used to call plain old common sense. They urge upon us a calm and objective weighing of ourselves; a frank and even merciless recognition of our weaknesses and failures, a determination to oust at any cost oversensitiveness, which is but a form of self-indulgence; a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of our families and communities; a fresh start; in short, reliance on our own powers of self-discipline.
No one in his senses would suggest that such books are not often helpful to the anxious mind. But the assumption that most of us have somehow acquired emotional conflicts which we cannot cope with by ourselves surely has its dangers.
We Americans have since our beginnings been known for our self-reliance, for our gumption and common sense. We are, or at least we were, adventurers and our history is the story of a game played against tremendous odds and gloriously won. Why not recall the tough moral fiber which made the winning possible? Isn't it about time that we return as individuals to those values and practices which we have not forgotten so much as neglected?
[...]Life may not be all we want, but it's all we have, as my old school precept said, and it's high time that we have it. We shall not find its secrets or its possible riches in the advice of others, however wise, unless we complete that counsel with our own grit, gumption, and common sense."
[All emphasis in the following is mine.]
What Happened to Common Sense?
by Mary Ellen Chase, from Coronet Magazine, May, 1954
Whenever I return to the isolated Maine village where I spend every summer, I am pleasantly surprised by the way in which my neighbors there hold on to certain old terms.
One of these is grit, with its companion, gumption; another is get up and get, which in Maine means to depend on oneself; yet another is common sense. These words describe the human qualities which my neighbors, fishermen and their wives, extoll above all others. For fishing is a hard calling. It demands gumption, or in more polite terms, self-reliance, the power of decision and the determination not to be downed by adverse circumstances.
My neighbors are frankly suspicious of anyone who lacks these old American virtues. They voiced their common judgment of a man who had lost his lobster traps in a northeast gale and had been bewailing his fate with too little reserve.
"Why don't he shut his mouth and pick up his feet?" they said, "You can't set sail straight by takin' time to bawl about bad luck."
They and I stem from the same rural background. In the country school of my childhood, precepts were written on the blackboard, each Monday morning by our "old-fashioned" teachers who knew it to be their duty to instill iron in our souls as well as common fractions in our minds. Through the years those precepts have proved salutary to me in moments of indecision and anxiety. Usually they were in terse prose:
"It takes a live fish to swim upstream, but any old log can float down."
Don't expect others to bear your troubles; they have their own.
Life isn't all you want, but it's all you have; so have it."
Occasionally a rhyme enlivened us. One I recall as a favorite.
The mind of man has no defense
To equal plain, old common sense.
This homely virtue don't despise,
If you would be happy as well as wise.
Parents, too, 50 years ago dealt out such robust aphorisms liberally, sometimes even sternly, in the upbringing of children. I was taught early by both precept and example that a job once undertaken has to be completed whatever the cost, and that no one but the maker of them ought to be expected to pay for mistakes.
[...]During my life as a teacher I have often questioned whether we have discovered any worthy substitutes for those precepts and teachings which, outmoded as they seem, are rooted deeply in our history and our ways of life.
In place of the old sayings we use today new words and terms to describe our states of mind and our meetings of those difficulties and questions which will always beset us. We are now insecure, or ill-adjusted, or frustrated, or made ineffective by a sense of inferiority. These new words lack the optimism of the old. Implicit in them is the notion that we are surrounded by foes difficult to defeat.
The new vocabulary comes into use early. We hesitate to look upon our children as simply ill-mannered or spoiled. We fear that they are problem children who need expert care lest they become neurotics or uncontributive members of society.
In high school and college they are surrounded by advisers on what they would best study, what work in life they are best fitted for. They are too seldom encouraged to face problems by themselves, to make their own decisions and to pay the consequences of their own mistakes.
Nor are adults free from waves of anxiety. Too many of us are looking about for some panacea which will ease the burdens of our past and present errors in judgment and lighten our fears of the future. Something, we feel, is wrong somewhere, and without making any stout attempts on our own to discover what it is, we turn to professional advice which guarantees to show us how to understand ourselves.
Even a cursory reading of such books reveals nothing but what we used to call plain old common sense. They urge upon us a calm and objective weighing of ourselves; a frank and even merciless recognition of our weaknesses and failures, a determination to oust at any cost oversensitiveness, which is but a form of self-indulgence; a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of our families and communities; a fresh start; in short, reliance on our own powers of self-discipline.
No one in his senses would suggest that such books are not often helpful to the anxious mind. But the assumption that most of us have somehow acquired emotional conflicts which we cannot cope with by ourselves surely has its dangers.
We Americans have since our beginnings been known for our self-reliance, for our gumption and common sense. We are, or at least we were, adventurers and our history is the story of a game played against tremendous odds and gloriously won. Why not recall the tough moral fiber which made the winning possible? Isn't it about time that we return as individuals to those values and practices which we have not forgotten so much as neglected?
[...]Life may not be all we want, but it's all we have, as my old school precept said, and it's high time that we have it. We shall not find its secrets or its possible riches in the advice of others, however wise, unless we complete that counsel with our own grit, gumption, and common sense."
Labels: American Character, Aphorisms, Common Sense, New England, Old America, Proverbs, Self-Help, Self-Reliance, Vanishing America