[ExI] Prudes, Protestants, Progress, and Profit

[PJ Manney]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> PJ very nicely describes the roots of *American*
> high-minded disdain for fun.  Now I do have to
> take time here to emphasize that I really do mean
> *HIGH_MINDED*. All you have to consider is
> the rather horrid extravagances of "fun" as depicted
> on all too common prole-driven TV (and other
> revolting aspects of American mass culture). So
> there is certainly no "low-minded" disdain for fun here.

But let's be clear on the high vs. low: you can have the lowest
minded, most prurient fun anywhere.  Take "Girls Gone Wild":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_gone_wild  [for the uninitiated...]

The difference is "Girls Gone Wild" wouldn't exist in a European
country, except in a supervised and taxed red light district and done
by professionals, not amateurs too drunk to realize the consequences
of immortality on DVD.  It's America's repression that brings out the
aggressive, naughty swing of the pendulum.  [And let's face it, if it
wasn't shocking, most teenage girls wouldn't want to do it.]

> But my main question of interest is still:  Could it
> be that American *and* European (let's not forget
> where the Puritans and Mr. Calvin and so on
> really originated) has contributed to European/
> American world economic and military domination.
> *That* is the key question---for it seriously posits
> that a certain prudishness and seriousness is an
> historical ESS.

I will recommend again that you look at Max Weber's "The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."  Synthesize this with Diamond's
"guns, germs and steel" and I think you've got an answer that might
interest you.

> Instead, I'll take advantage of the opportunity to ask another
> question, specifically about American development. Someone
> told me that the nice new little book "The Island at the Center
> of the World" complains that early New York didn't have
> its deserved effect on American development, that instead
> it was John Adams and the Puritans who were so influential
> in the formation of American culture, or tendencies, whatever.

New York was too heterogeneous a colony for a single, dominant
cultural viewpoint to emerge.  The Dutch, while Calvinist, were always
a more tolerant lot than the English Puritans, who just loved
persecuting the smallest infraction and hated anyone who wasn't just
like them.  It was the practical Dutch sense of meritocracy that won
the day in NY society and still does -- if you had money, you were in.
 If you didn't... well, go make some money!  As Liza and Frank sing:

"If I can make it there
I'll make it anywhere
It's up to you
New York, New York"

> Whatever the veracity of my interlocutor, I declaimed on the
> idea that "demographics is destiny", pointing out that in the
> amazing decade 1630-1640 England---due to a religious
> fluctuation---disgorged tens of *thousands* of people to New
> England and a rather similar number (?) to the Virginia area.

Again, look at the overall effect of Puritanism, not just the numbers.
 Its effects were much more wide ranging than the simple population
demographics might suggest, since the sect apparently disappears.
First of all, the Puritans split into many groups, which we know now
as Congregationalist, Presbyterians, Baptists, etc. -- pretty much
most American Protestant sects that weren't Anglican/Episcopalian or
direct-from-Germany Lutherans or Anabaptist/Mennonites.  The
"children" of the Puritans brought us ideas like Manifest Destiny,
abolitionism, Transcendentalism, the "Union" (as opposed to the
Confederacy) and if I think about the lot of them, the only one who
was having any self-admitted fun was Walt Whitman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_whitman
And he was punished for it!

Indeed, American exceptionalism is a direct result of the Puritan's
belief they were literally building the New Jerusalem and if everyone
didn't tow the line, they wouldn't accomplish it.

Related to this: The first books written and published in the New
World, not including the Bible, were a uniquely American form called
the Captivity Narrative.  These were stories about "civilized" people
kidnapped by an "uncivilized" enemy or "other."  And they were written
by Puritans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captivity_narrative

New England Puritan Mary Rowlandson's memoir of surviving an Indian
attack, her and her children's abduction and her return to her shaken
community laid the groundwork for American storytelling forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rowlandson

While the white, God-fearing, frontier-busting heroes/heroines
remained, the "savages" changed with the times.  The captivity canon
of James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans), detailed the
destruction of the Indians of the Eastern frontier.  They led to the
action-adventure genre known as the "Western" which chronicles the
destruction of the Indians of the West -- a movie like "The Searchers"
is a pure captivity narrative.
When we exhausted Indians, we looked for different "savages" in
society.  For instance, we took the soft, fuzzy, genteel English
murder mystery of Agatha Christie, added the wild west captivity edge
and the purely American hardboiled detectives of Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain were born, along with Film Noir.
Race, religion and immigrant status often played a part in crafting
the image of the new savages.  Walter Mosley turned this on its head
and writes movingly of the African American detective hero viewed as
savage "other" in mid 20th C. Los Angeles.

Now think about exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny in terms of that...

> Well, okay, but did the northern Puritanism actually win
> out?

Yes.  We live in a post-industrial society that resembles the Union
North, as opposed to the agrarian South.  The North had more
resources, was more aggressive in spreading its cultural influence and
it had the greater motivation to do so.  Guns, germs and steel, baby.
Guns, germs and steel.  And Puritanism.

> Or did the nearly or approximately equal number of
> southerners do equally well in having the most influence
> on the culture America was to have?

Southerners weren't aggressive, self-righteous proselytizers early on.
 They were more tied to their land, with fewer industries and a weaker
emphasis on education and even as their religious traditions morphed
into more puritanical, "American" ones during the Great Awakenings,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening
they lost the war and lost their influence.  Ultimately, only parts of
their culture survived, more as regional relics and curiosities than
fundamental parts of a homogeneous American experience.

PJ