[Mb-civic] Puritanism of the rich

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

This essay, sent by Ed Pearl (thanks Ed) puts forth a different dimesnion to 
the Bush hordes that might help broaden our understanding...


"If the Christian life, as idealised by
both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of 
the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and
protected by the medieval church, becomes redundant. "Individualism in
religion led ... to an individualist morality, and an individualist
morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric."


Puritanism of the rich

Bush's ideology has its roots in 17th century preaching that the world
exists to be conquered
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1346767,00.html George 
Monbiot
Tuesday November 9, 2004
 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/> The Guardian

If Bush wins," the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before
the election, "fascism is possible in the United States." Blind faith in a
leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a
political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.

She's wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security state as
"soft fascism" in the Guardian last month. So is the endless traffic on
the internet.


In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as "...
a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults 
of
unity, energy and purity". It is hard to read Republican politics in these
terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It
relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could
accuse George Bush of provoking.


But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in
fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don't understand it,
we have no hope of confronting it.


Puritanism is perhaps the least understood of any political movement in
European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of
self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a
perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous
consumption of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an
economic transformation.


In England in the first half of the 17th century, the remnants of the
feudal state performed a role analogous to that of social democracy in the
second half of the 20th. It was run, of course, in the interests of the
monarchy and clergy. But it also regulated the economic exploitation of
the lower orders. As RH Tawney observed in Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism (1926), Charles I sought to nationalise industries, control
foreign exchange and prosecute lords who evicted peasants from the land,
employers who refused to pay the full wage, and magistrates who failed to
give relief to the poor.

But this model was no longer viable. Over the preceding 150 years, "the
rise of commercial companies, no longer local, but international" led in
Europe to "a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before"
and "the subjection of the collegiate industrial organisation of the
Middle Ages to a new money-power". The economy was "swept forward 
by an
immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry". The
kings and princes of Europe had become "puppets dancing on wires" held 
by
the financiers.

In England the dissolution of the monasteries had catalysed a massive
seizure of wealth by a new commercial class. They began by grabbing
("enclosing") the land and shaking out its inhabitants. This generated a
mania for land speculation, which in turn led to the creation of
sophisticated financial markets, experimenting in futures, arbitrage and
almost all the vices we now associate with the Age of Enron.


All this was furiously denounced by the early theologists of the English
Reformation. The first Puritans preached that men should be charitable,
encourage justice and punish exploitation. This character persisted
through the 17th century among the settlers of New England. But in the old
country it didn't stand a chance.


Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It
attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had
given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of
commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be
used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual
purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology.


At its heart was an "idealisation of personal responsibility" before
God. This rapidly turned into "a theory of individual rights" in which
"the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed".
By the mid-17th century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a
misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned,
and in riches, not an object of suspicion ... but the blessing which
rewards the triumph of energy and will".


This leap wasn't hard to make. If the Christian life, as idealised by both
Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the
individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and
protected by the medieval church, becomes redundant. "Individualism in
religion led ... to an individualist morality, and an individualist
morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric."


To this the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their
religious calling with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his
soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care
and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it
will go." Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace:  providing
proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele's words, that "God has blessed his
trade". The next step follows automatically. The Puritan minister Joseph
Lee anticipated Adam Smith's invisible hand by more than a century, when
he claimed that "the advancement of private persons will be the advantage
of the public". By private persons, of course, he meant the men of
property, who were busily destroying the advancement of everyone else.


Tawney describes the Puritans as early converts to "administrative
nihilism": the doctrine we now call the minimal state. "Business
affairs," they believed, "should be left to be settled by business men,
unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality." They owed 
nothing
to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social
obligation, which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and
spiritual dissolution, divorcing them from God.


Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush's people in that they
worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different
symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as
people who believed that "the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be
conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian."


There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained
true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently
suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal
distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.


Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, Havoc in its Third Year, about a
Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable. An obsession
with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual
licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of
public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the
characters could have walked out of Bush's America.


So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The
enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a
justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the US this ideology has
to be a religious one. Bush's government is forced back to the doctrines
of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what
it's up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.


------


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