Should you be Afraid of your Inner Puritan?
“NOBODY IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN HE WHO IMAGINES HIMSELF PURE IN HEART, FOR HIS PURITY, BY DEFINITION, IS UNASSAILABLE.”
– James Baldwin
Katrin Redfern & Richard Whatmore
26 Aug. 2020
T
here’s a feeling in the air, borne aloft by the left. Increasingly, questions that were once treated as complicated inquiries requiring scrutiny and nuance are being reduced to moral absolutes, especially as far as progressives are concerned. There is an ongoing struggle in our culture between those who value principles such as free speech and inquiry and those who prefer the intolerance of ideological mobs. Things that should be debated are being treated as irrefutable truths by a prosecutorial culture that becomes dedicated more to signalling purity and virtue than to substantive positive change. When this comes from the left it is particularly unsettling. The left sees itself as championing liberty and liberation.
It follows a now dismally familiar pattern: two camps are identified, the acceptable ‘for’ and the demonized ‘against’. The latter are cast beyond the pale, cancelled and trolled. The former glory in their unanimity. Indeed, unity of opinion, publicly stated, is required. Even social justice-oriented celebrities conclude it is no longer enough just to avoid the fray. Only oft-repeated positive affirmations of support—delivered in the correct tone—can save you. The Twitter storms are more deadly for those who express a non-woke view but should have known better than for those outside of the faith altogether. The identity politics wing of progressivism has become a secular religion, and like many strict sects, it punishes its apostates most severely. Even minor infractions are punished to send the message that dissent won’t be tolerated. When justified campaigns for social justice adopt this pattern, they end up undermining important causes and fueling the very forces they set out to oppose.
Often this dynamic takes the shape of a purity spiral, where a culture of moral one-upmanship takes on a life of its own. A community becomes fixated on enforcing a value or creed that has no upper limit, in a self-enforcing spiral where the more extreme opinion is the more rewarded. This leads to inevitable escalation, with nuance and debate the casualties, and the result is a kind of moral feeding frenzy. Recent examples abound: J.K. Rowling has fallen afoul of the gender identity police and been “cancelled” for affirming the reality of biological sex. The YA fiction world, despite employing new “sensitivity readers”, has seen books pulled before publishing in a purity spiral fomented by other authors seeking praise for the "courage" of their "call outs", in a process resembling a sort of moral beauty pageant. A BBC Radio 4 documentary charts a purity spiral which embroiled the online knitting world. Anti-racism, with its expanded definition driven by critical race theory which sees all dissent as itself a sign of racism, has taken on religious overtones.
A purity spiral privileges an abstraction of the world over the ambiguities of reality. It can come to resemble a leaderless cult. People become obsessed with a sense of mission which sets them apart from the world and derive social status from being holier than the next acolyte. They focus on how right they are, and a tone of preachy moralizing, piety and self-righteousness quickly spirals into denunciation, shaming, accusation, heresy-hunting, inquisition, and censorship. The social media element is especially important in fanning flames and dividing parties – the narcotic we’re all addicted to now does double duty as an outrage amplifier and disseminator of half-truths spoken by well-meaning but unreliable narrators.
Are purity spirals inevitable? We know that it seems natural for humans to form ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups. Identifying a common enemy is often the key to group solidarity. Nationalist politicians and the marketing teams who serve them know how effective such strategies can be with gullible and ill-informed electorates. Equally, if an individual is able to manifest virtues valued by the group this fosters a sense of self-worth and belonging.
Unsurprisingly, we have been here before. History demonstrates the ease with which ordinary people to commit atrocious acts, particularly during times of crisis. When you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything. Take the example of one of the most consequential purity spirals, the Puritan Revolution in seventeenth-century England.
The Execution of Charles I of England. Unknown artist (c. 1649). Scottish National Gallery.
The Puritans were certain that the godly majority supported them in toppling the tyranny of King Charles I. In their eyes the monarch and his bishops were challenging the true word of God. The Puritans established an English Republic and killed the King. They abolished episcopacy and ‘democratic’ presbyteries instead formed the national church. Families were divided and fought each other during a bloody civil war across England, Scotland and Ireland. Soon a purity spiral was underway. Dress became simple. Luxury was forbidden. Children were given first names such as “Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned”. The ‘saints’ began to compete with one another to show their godliness. At the same time the head of the Republic, Oliver Cromwell, certain that God was at his right-hand, began to be persuaded that the more power he took for himself the better he would be able to enact the will of God. A new tyranny replaced the old. After Cromwell’s death a new king returned and so did the bishops. Ordinary people breathed a sigh of relief.
Looking back from the eighteenth-century, many feared a new wave of Puritans seeking to enforce their moral codes upon unwilling society. Some philosophers, such as David Hume, argued that the Puritan purity spiral had been worth it. He called the religiously devout moral crusaders fanatics, and ridiculous. Yet he also said that their passion for liberty had played a major role in making Britain a free country with a political system of checks and balances between the populace, the nobility and the crown. Hume likened the process of the purity spiral to a wild storm. Once their passions were exhausted the fanatics could be expected to become moderates. Like the Quakers, they would begin to appreciate the benefits of peace and toleration.
Purity spirals and the societies they create have been justified by other prominent writers. Alexis de Tocqueville, travelling around New England making notes for Democracy in America, ascribed to Puritanism the singular productivity of the women and men. Another French observer, Michel Chevalier, could not believe that in factories in Lowell, Massachusetts a thousand might be toiling together without debauchery. He found only “three cases of illicit connection.” In each case “the parties were married, several months before the birth of the child.” If the women had been French, he said, far more would have become pregnant. Due to their Calvinist morality, the North Americans lived simple, happy and productive lives. The semi-serious assertion of both Tocqueville and Chevalier was if the French were ever to compete with the United States of America economically, they would have to abandon Catholicism for Puritanism.
Two decades after Tocqueville, the German jurist Max Weber noticed that the areas of Germany that were Calvinist were much more productive than comparable communities. In his The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism Weber claimed that the obsession with godliness where people were Calvinist was akin to a mental breakdown. As no-one knew who God had chosen for the elect, because of the doctrine of pre-lapsarian predestination, everyone was nervous about their status, measured themselves against others and followed to the letter the strict moral code of frugality and labour.
Should we accept such verdicts? Are purity spirals good for us even if there are always victims of the process? Do they clear the political air and make us moderates after fanatic storms? Did they make us free? Should we credit the productivity of western capitalism to Calvinist evangelicals?
The Zenith of French Glory (1793). James Gillray. British Museum.
We shouldn’t be so sure. Nor should we take Weber and Hume at their word. Take another purity spiral during the French Revolution, perhaps the greatest in history. Few events have united a population as the Revolution did in 1789. Revolution began with iconoclasm in the form of the storming of the Bastille, the prison symbolizing absolutism whose walls were quickly reduced to rubble. Within a few months a new social and political order was established. Aristocrats gave up their land. Feudalism was abolished. A law was passed to get rid of offensive war. Empire was rejected. Hairstyles changed (no more wigs). So did fashion (no bling). The people saw the state abandon its historic reliance upon the Catholic Church. The head of state, Louis XVI, was executed for betraying the Revolution, in January 1793. France had been a monarchy for over a thousand years. Very quickly, statues and monuments of monarchy were toppled. Royal tombs were desecrated. Many aristocrats changed their names to signal their dedication to republican revolution. One of the richest noblemen in France and the cousin of the king, Louis Philippe, Monseigneur le duc d'Orléans, changed his name to Philippe Égalité.
By the end of the year, however, the revolutionaries had turned upon themselves. A law passed the governing Convention on 1 April 1793 condemning any person deemed an enemy of liberty. Although Égalité voted for the law he soon became its victim, guillotined on 6 November by the Revolutionary Tribunal. The republican church began to break up as virtue-signaling reached new heights. The leader of the Revolution was called ‘the incorruptible’, Maximilien Robespierre. Anyone showing a vestige of support for old ways had to be arrested. Wrong clothes, aristocratic demeanor, publishing or voicing criticism of government, all lead to prison. Thousands died. A true supporter of equality between the sexes, such as Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, the Marquis of Condorcet was arrested for something as simple as carrying a Latin book by Horace. As in the Puritan case, civil war broke out.
Hume was right about the fanaticism and the virtue-signaling burning themselves out. Robespierre was arrested, tried to shoot himself in the jaw, and was dragged half-alive to the execution block. The Revolution then went the way of so many democratic revolutions, descending into aristocratic rule (called The Directory) until a popular general conducted a coup. Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor and delighted the populace with his focus upon civic order and military victory. In asserting his authority, Bonaparte warned time after time that the alternative to his rule was a descent into Terror. He overran most of Europe and replaced the ruling kings and queens with members of his own family, creating his own aristocracy via the Légion d'honneur. The Catholic Church returned. Savvy followers learned the lesson, including Stalin and Mao; make the people afraid of so-called fanatics and they will follow you. Or employ fanatics yourself to better achieve your political ends.
The lesson: purity spirals can topple authoritarian regimes, but assist new authoritarians in ruining the lives of innocent people. They turn families and friends against one another. At the end of his life, Hume warned that if the lust for liberty became fanatic the damage would be incalculable. Hume’s disciples attacked the French Revolution as a return to the wars of religion. Where people in the past had killed each other to save souls, they were now doing so in the name of freedom. Violence and war broke out just the same. Fanatic politics turned religious rarely win out in democratic elections. Just as Nixon identified the silent majority in his war on anti-Vietnam campaigners and civil rights activists, so Trump is using the same language. The religious right forever seeks converts. If the left also turns itself into a religion, the result is likely to be civil war rather than democratic victory.
(A version of this article was published in The Conversation)
Katrin Redfern is a journalist and multimedia producer, who reports internationally on human rights, trafficking, and corruption. She has co-produced a touring exhibition on the Hadza tribe in Tanzania. Find out more at www.hadzaexhibit.org.
Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of many books and articles on war, democracy and empire in the long 18th century. His latest book is Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2019)
