Links to Consider, 10/9/2024
Analysis using David Hackett Fischer; Tanner Greer on what motivates folks in DC; Rob Henderson on job titles as compensation; Malcolm Gladwell on Harvard's selection of rich parents
The Puritans were determined to create an ideal moral society - they had little time for individual allegiances and tribal loyalties and in fact distrusted them - they got in the way.
Using the analytical framework of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (see my review1 from 2018), Skold says that family and tribal loyalty mattered much more outside of the Puritan parts of America. This helps to explain why the neo-Puritan social justice activist movement does not resonate with the rest of us.
Pointer from Jason Manning. In another of his pointers, also mentioning Albion’s Seed, Clyde N. Wilson wrote,
Southerners have, unlike other Americans, more than 350 years of living in a biracial society, in which Whites and African-Americans have reciprocally influenced each other's development. It should never be forgotten that the number of African-Americans outside the states of the South was statistically insignificant throughout American history up to World War I. In evidence of a distinct Southern culture, it should be pointed out that Southern blacks share with Southern Whites nearly every aspect of Southern culture except ethnic origin and political behavior, and differ from general American attitudes in the same direction as do White Southerners.
The essay is from 2006. I believe that since the 1960s, race relations on average are better in the South than in the North. As Wilson points out, whites were used to living with blacks. Once Jim Crow ended, many whites were able to re-imagine blacks as “us” rather than “them.”
In contrast, in many Northern cities, blacks and whites have continued to live in separate neighborhoods. My guess is that the social distance between the median black and the median white is higher in the North today than it is in the South. Perhaps nowhere in the United States are race relations more fraught than on elite college campuses, where bureaucracies have been created, to address/perpetuate the difficulties with diversity, equity, and inclusion.
If everyone after five years gets that title, then how do firms confer status on those whom they view as even more valuable? By adding additional terms to their job titles.
He cites Robert Frank, who argues that employers use job titles and other status perks as a substitute for monetary compensation. Why does this work?
Seventy percent of people would take a title over money.
I preferred to hire someone who is motivated by a desire to learn, not by the status of a job title. But I was never high enough in an organization to confer an impressive title.
In a Q&A with David Epstein, Malcolm Gladwell says,
So if you're going to let in tennis players, the only way you could ever get a DI or even a DIII slot on a tennis team at an exclusive school is you had to have played junior tennis. There's just no way around it. In order to play junior tennis in America right now, you need to be spending, at minimum, thousands, in some cases, well over 100-grand a year. So right there, by saying I will set aside special spots on my sports teams and give enormous admissions breaks to really good tennis players, what I'm saying is I'm going to guarantee that a certain number of rich kids will always be at Harvard. That's what it's about.
I am not a Gladwell fan, but his new book sounds interesting and well researched. You should at least read the interview.
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To remember these four cultures, I use four m’s. The Massachusetts settlers were a deeply religious society focused on morals. The Tidewater settlers wished to create an aristocratic society focused on manners. The Pennsylvania settlers were a tolerant society that encouraged merchants. The backcountry settlers were a proud society that viewed outsiders with mistrust.
My apologies but to caricature the subtle and diverse thought of the great Puritans of history, men like John Milton, John Lilburne, John Bunyan, John Dryden, John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Roger Sherman, Richard Bennett and countless others, by association with our modern “social justice activist movement,” if indeed, that which the phrase refers to is worthy of that label, might be considered a most shallow affront to historical truth and understanding. Skold’s superficial and reductionist depiction of Puritanism conflicts markedly with the nuanced pictures painted by in-depth studies like William Haller’s books The Rise of Puritanism (1938) and Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (1063), and Percy Scholes’ The Puritans and Music (1962). Scholes is perhaps worth quoting here regarding the persecution of the puritans following the restoration:
“Morally the reign of Charles II was a time of insincerity in public life and, in many quarters, of licentiousness of private conduct. In just one way the Puritan influence survived in general social life. The nation had learned to value the quiet of Sunday, and kept up the stay-at-home and church-going habits associated with it. This must have done much to give an opportunity for the rebirth of Puritanism which came with the Evangelical Revival.” (see page xx:https://archive.org/details/puritansandmusic000115mbp/page/n23/mode/2up )
Although some Puritans at times did indeed behave in less than desirable ways, the work Puritanism as a movement did to advance religious tolerance, democracy, individualism, and even solidarity, (“Puritan solidarity” someone (?) once wrote according to my notes ‘Wherever puritan thought leaned towards acceptance of the possibility of universal salvation and hence of universal priesthood, or to the Socinian idea that Christ was God-in-humanity, then Puritanism became as intensely secular and naturalistic as it was Biblical and Apocalyptic.’” the truth of which appears throughout the puritan Leveller tracts) deserves recognition and appreciation.
When thinking of Puritanism it might be helpful to place it in historical context, arising to prominence as part of the reaction against Charles I’s revolution in which he attempted to impose an absolutism similar to that which is sought by today’s anti-populist activists. Charles sought to centralize power and diminish democratic and local powers, an unconstrained ability to tax, control over the Church of England whose bishops he would appoint and who would act as his servants, and the unconstrained ability to suppress dissent via censorship or prison. Puritanism offered an alternative. Our modern activist movements, both left and right, do not. Unfortunately, to quote Scholes again “It seems as though we English-speaking people delight to vilify some of the noblest of our ancestors.”
I have complained about this before, but you cannot blame Puritans for wokism. It is not a Neo-Puritan movement. It's like blaming Kant for Communist Russia—yeah, Kant’s thought was the impetus for Hegel who influenced Feuerbach who influenced Marx, but there’s no proximate cause (in the legal sense). In other words, the chain of causation is simply way too long.
My longer version of this take is as follows. I am a genealogical descendant of Puritans. Family reunions on that side make it clear to me that mostly everyone votes Republican. I took a class on critical race theory in law school, meanwhile, and everyone we read was either black or Jewish. Remember, places like Vermont voted solidly Republican until demographic change made it liberal. Old stock Yankee Americans did not change their voting habits. Wisconsin voted for socialists in the early 20th c. because of German immigrants--not because of Yankees.
If you can prove that genealogical descendants of Puritans vote for/adopt progressive ideas more than the typical American, then I am wrong. But I would bet if you investigated it, you would find that the 10 million or so descendants of the Puritans tend to vote Republican and are generally more conservative than the typical American. In fact, I would bet they are a lot more conservative than the typical American. This is borne out by the data presented by Noah Carl in this post: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/who-are-the-most-right-wing-americans. Americans of English descent are among the most right-wing groups in the United States.
A response I have heard from what I stated above is that while the genetic descendants of Yankees may be conservative, their cultural descendants are not. This is nuts. Plenty of Americans actually take the ideas of the Puritans seriously: we call them Christians (of the Calvinist/Evangelical variety). For example, Jonathan Edwards's books are still read by Evangelical and Reformed Christians. You could read his sermons in many churches, and, aside from the language differences, they would fit right in. We're talking about at least tens of millions of people--the true ideological/cultural descendants of Yankeedom. Jonathan Edwards is especially an interesting example, since he defended emotional reactions in the First Great Awakening--the kind of stuff you only encounter in Evangelical churches today. I guess my simple point would be that Jonathan Edwards was a Christian minister and theologian. He continues to be read by Protestant ministers to this day. Edwards's primary contributions/ideas related to specific branches of Christianity, and tens of millions of people still practice in this tradition. His ideas did not give rise to racialist-Marxists (i.e., wokism)--unless you squint really hard and make the influence extremely indirect.
Attributing wokism to Puritanism and their descendants in any significant sense seems silly. Having said that, it is true (from what I have heard) that Unitarian churches (~150,000 old people) still organize themselves like Congregationalist churches. A couple of the Supreme Court justices whose rulings helped aid the rise of the present non-sense--looking at you Earl Warren and William Douglas--did grow up Presbyterian in Yankeedom... But they rejected the faith of their fathers. Most of the justices of that era appear to be Episcopalian. Blaming Puritans for the actions of Episcopalians seems unfair to say the least!