In which we see there are few things more powerful, or dangerous, than the force of an idea
—So what are we doing today, Mr. K?
I thought we’d spend some more time among the
wackos of Massachusetts Bay, Chris.
—Them again? Why?
I find them interesting.
—Aren’t there other people who are
interesting?
Sure there are. But I think the Puritans are
important to what the United States eventually became. That’s not an especially
fashionable view these days, but I still believe it’s true.
—But aren’t there other people we could talk
about?
Again: sure there are. And we will talk about
them, just as I’ve asked you to read about them. But I’m going to exercise my
teacher’s prerogative here and go a little deeper with the Puritans not only
because I believe they’re important, but also because I happen to like them.
—You like them?
Yup.
—Why?
Well, Chris, what I think it comes down to is
that the Puritans really dramatize what it means to try to live a life grounded
in ideas, which, you won’t be surprised, is a notion a guy like me would have a
soft spot for.
—You? Ideas? Go figure.
I know, Emily: shocking. As we’ve discussed—as
I think you would know even if we never did discuss it—most people live
most of their lives most of the time based on their interests, as
they understand them. We have to. Even people who want to live
their lives by the force of an idea have to reckon with all kinds of realities;
the Puritans certainly did, with often fascinating results. Take, for example,
Roger Williams.
—Who’s he?
—He was in the reading, Jonah, you idiot.
As you know (or, should I say, as you know,
Ethan) the Puritans were dissidents. But Williams was a dissident of the
dissidents. Which, in a way, was probably inevitable—once you start telling
people they don’t have to go along with the majority, they’re likely to
splinter in different directions, as the history of the Reformation shows.
Dissidents (and, especially, dissidents of dissents) tend to be disagreeable
people, almost by definition. And yet even people who disagreed with Williams
tended to admire him even as they worried about the implications of his ideas.
For example, he Williams had a somewhat unpleasant opinion that New Englanders
should not occupy territory without the permission of local Indians. Even more
controversial was were his reservations about having to worship among those who
whose souls he regarded as insufficiently committed to Christ. After generating
arguments in Boston, Plymouth and the northern settlement of Salem, he
fled—warned by the very governor whose job it was to prosecute him that he
better get of of Massachusetts—Williams founded the new settlement of Rhode
Island. You have a question, Kylie?
—I don’t really understand what the problem was
with Williams.
—Isn’t it obvious? If they had
to ask the Indians’ opinion they’d have to leave. They couldn’t afford to
ask.
Well, there is something to that, Ethan. But
asking for the Indians opinion was a notion that was probably considered a
little too ridiculous to take seriously. The bigger problem with Williams was
that he in effect was more Puritan than the Puritans. Actually, the word
“Puritan” began as something of a slur: “We call you Puritans, not because you
are purer, but because you think yourselves purer,” a critic
once said of them. Which brings us to what is surely the greatest Puritan
paradox of all: their strangely disciplined fervor, coupled with an insistent
refusal to accept the notion that one could be an agent of one’s own salvation.
The Puritans were one of a number of Protestant sects who
believed individuals could not know if they were among the few souls
who would be saved and go to heaven. They lived lives of existential doubt,
hoping they would be among the elect. This uncertainty could cut two ways: the
seemingly saintly minister could be damned, while the town drunk might in fact
be among the Chosen. This is part of what worried Williams so much: he didn’t
want to worship with people who might be contaminated. He belonged, in effect,
to a congregation of one.
—We studied this a little last year. But it
still seems crazy to me.
How so, Kylie?
—Well, if you don’t know whether you’re saved
or damned, then why try at all? Why not just say, ‘I’ll do what I want, since
it won’t make any difference?’
A fair question. The thing you have to
understand is that very thought—“I’ll do what I want”—is not something
you do want to think about yourself. You’re hoping you’re
among the saved. Saying you don’t care is not what saved people typically
think.
—Who knows what saved people
think?
You’ve got a point there. But consider this as
a matter of logic: if you’re fretting about your fate, does “Party Hearty”
strike you as a hopeful life philosophy?
—I guess. But why did they ever make the
trip? I understand not wanting to think bad thoughts, even if you have them.
But why go through all this trouble when it might all be for nothing?
Another fair question, and the very reason why
I say the Puritans were a people of paradoxes and that this is the greatest
paradox of all. But in a sense, you’ve got nothing better to do. Here you are
living your life in constant anxiety while you wait to learn your fate.
Doing something feels better than doing nothing. It’s here we
have the roots of what the German sociologist Max Weber later described as the
Puritan Work Ethic. There’s an old saying: “Idle hands are the devil’s
workshop.”
—Sounds pretty grim to me.
Well, a lot of people would agree with you.
But the thing about the Puritans was that they were living by the force of an
idea. It gave a drama to their lives.
Let me give you another example of a dissident
among the dissidents—though she would say that the Puritans authorities were
the real dissidents, the betrayers of the cause. Her name was
Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson was even more insistent that Williams, and she
gathered people at her house on Sunday afternoons talking about how you
couldn’t really trust authority figures, because for all you knew any one of
them could be Satan himself. She was hauled into a hearing to talk about
it, and amid some close questioning was asked why anyone should trust her.
Hutchinson replied that God himself had spoken to her. A real no-no. Tried for
her heretical views, she was banished from the colony.
—Probably because she was a woman.
Well, Emily, that surely had something to
do with it. Williams got off more lightly than Hutchinson did. A of people have
seen her as an early feminist martyr. But her theological doctrines were
dangerously anarchic in a colony whose stability, even survival, was very much
in question. Encouraging people to defy authority at a time when you’re a
fragile colony surrounded by Indians who really wish you would just go
away doesn’t seem like an especially good strategy for survival. After a
sojourn in Rhode Island, Hutchinson ended up among the Dutch in New York, where
she was killed by Indians near the site of a highway, built during the
heritage-minded 1930s, that now bears her name. Some people surely thought she
got her just desserts.
—I still think it was because she was a woman.
A reasonable conclusion. But here I’ll note
that the majority of church members in New England—subject to an often intense
vetting process—were women. Hutchinson may have been persecuted because she was
a woman, but that persecution was also a function of her considerable
following: where else were the opinions of women taken so seriously? Fifty-five
years later, the Salem Witch Trials would be triggered because men actually
listened to agitated girls.
—That does sound amazing.
Touché, Em. But allow me to now that while
Hutchinson was a victim of Puritanism, but she was a product of it, too. And
she also demonstrated its practical limits, frightening the authorities into
tacking back toward their instinctive pragmatism. Ideas are great. But there
are only so many you can take.
—I couldn’t agree more, Mr. K. Look at the
clock.
Touché, Chris.
Next: (Female) rebel with a clause
