Puritanism … Not Fascism … ?

Monbiot is a smart man, but he’s wrong ;-).

Bushism coalesced around the people’s desire to get an explanation for why they should be treated like non-entities — the anomie of modernism. Bush gives them that. Clinton did too when he felt their pain as he caused it. They both enjoy popular support. The fascism of the US gives meaning to lives that are empty. It’s a friendly fascism and only gets ugly when its toys are threatened or its widdle feelings are hurt.

It’s early, and no coffee, but I have a vague sense you’re both wrong … somehow … my intuition, I guess. And besides, gotta watch myself here, ‘cuz i always yap on about all of our needs to be “right” about whatever it is we are examining or pondering thats currently in front of us. So let’s just say I have some perhaps-divergent opinion to add. Perhaps whatever it is that post-modernism has brought into the mix, which I don’t profess to understand too well.

I see this as the worst of both … a hypocritical puritanism that tolerates, if not celebrates an almost anything-goes behaviour at the individual level as long as it remains hidden, along with much violence and crudity of interpersonal exchange on television … fining JJ’s breast and Howard Stern yet making it casually acceptable to own a stash of porn

and clearly … blatant ideology-driven propaganda and misrepresentation and a not-insignificant degree of mind control through various means … whether framing a la Lakoff, cooptation of language, Homeland security, the very real “wealth bondage” of a miraginous American Dream aided and abetted by legitimized loan sharking masquerading as credit-card companies.

It’s a putrid mess, and I believe it somehow mixes the desires of Puritanism with the philosophy of post-modernism and the techniques of fascism.

Like I said, vague … and I need coffee !

An dharry, I think we ARE very much now experiencing the “paradigm shift” people like Joel Barker, the Tofflers, Schumacher, etc. etc. used to talk about 20 years ago … but people didn’t “feel” it before now.

Now we’re in the bumpy part of the plane ride, the winds are getting stronger, and Joe and Jane Average who just want a job so that they can pay the mortgage and own a couple of cars … they don’t like this plane ride so much anymore. It’s dark up ahead, and they want the plane to turn around. Bush promised to turn it around, while secretly he’s just turned on the turbo booster.

I think we’re on the same page. You’ve taken your analysis further than I did and I agree with it.

he … first thought upon reading your most recent comment … self-congratulation … in the sense of “not bad for no coffee, no shower, bad breath, crusty eyes, etc.” … all that human stuff upon waking.

Sleep is one of the most mystifying things of which I am aware … like re-charging batteries but with no plugging in … would that we could discover how the energy gets replenished.

There’s a great article on Daily Kos about the “religious right” (sic). He describes it as new age PoMo cargo cult.

Thanks, Harry. Read it …and I agree with him … and it scares the poo out of me.

This phenomenon can and will be very dangerous, I believe … and i do agree that positions of great influence, power and control are already occupied in the US government.

Where in hell (literally did this come from ? I don’t think it was around like this in the ’70’s of ’80’s ?

I think this latest manifestation of an ages old trend got started with Reagan — at least the tacky new age PoMo part of it. Back when he ascended, I remember wondering how such a degenerate phony could possibly convince conservative Murkans he had any substance. It occurred to me after a while they themselves lacked serious substance. Cults grow to embrace people with no inner resources and hysterically emotional convictions. Clinton reminded me of Reagan. Same kind of phoniness and new age poison overlaying the neoliberal agenda.

These are our MTV presidents.

Monbiot raises some interesting and illuminating points, but I think opposing Puritanism to Fascism—after all, the real referents for those terms are now gone—ends up confusing the matter.

From Monbiot’s perspective, the unity of worldly success and Godliness comes from Calvinism, which he identifies with Puritanism. Certainly Calvinist tenets were part of the original American Puritans doctrines, but two crucial things are missing here: first, the value according learning among Puritans (John Milton was a Puritan; the Mathers, while intolerant, were learned), and second, the decline of Puritanism in America precisely because it was a creed that valued intellect. What challenged it and took its place were the early evangelical preachers who distained the humanist (i.e., Latin and Greek) learning that the Puritans valued. (hat tip to Inspector Lohmann for pointing me at Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life for this history) It’s worth noting that the Puritan’s nascent or transitional capitalism still had a place for culture and learning; the early evangelicals rejected these things as a way of maintaining privlege, but–call it dialectics if you must–were increasingly accomodating of downright vulgar commerce. Hofstadter describes the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody as a “salesman of salvation,” hawking Jesus like a product: “Who’ll take Christ now? That’s all you want. With Christ you have eternal life and everything else you need. Without him you must perish. He offers himself to you. Who’ll take him?” The Puritans believed in predestination and saw success as a reward for virtue; the evangelicals believed in salvation through grace and considered grace itself to be a commodity. Only a complete sucker would miss out on a deal like this!

In a nutshell: I think Monbiot is correct to point out that our current material circumstances will provide the necessary conditions for something like the Puritan/Calvinist religion of worldly success. But it isn’t the same as that older religion, let alone continuous with it.

Contra Monbiot, Bush—or at least the Bush administration—has sitrred the population to hysterical popular excitment, and evangelicalism is not the religion of everyboard room There is an appeal to some lasped sense of America on the right, and you don’t have to be an evangelical Xtian to buy it.

Finally, there is the (rightwing) post-modernist aspect of BushCo. If memory serves, the phrase “reality-based community” as a term of devision didn’t come from a highly placed Xtian, but that doesn’t matter. The management of perspection and the use of religion by unbelievers to control the populace is the domain of the Straussian, who are to a one covert moral nilhilists, atheists, and epistemic relativists. The open cry of the caricature of the left postmodernist—”There is no such thing as truth”–is their private esoteric doctrine, and they take it very seriously.

So: we have an amalgam of Puritanism, Fascism, and Postmodernism. What to call it? Bushism. And God help us all.

Thanks, et alia. Very useful to have some of the blanks filled in.

Re: your “If memory serves, the phrase “reality-based community” as a term of devision didn’t come from a highly placed Xtian, but that doesn’t matter.” Did you mean “derision” ?

I think that, as you point out in support of Monbiot, there are now the conditions to support, elongate and widen something like the Putian/calvinist view of worldly success … comme on dit en francais, l’envergure de l’opportunite est enorme … but there’s something crass and very pourit about it all, something that feels like there is no turning back. As has been reported widely, these Bushist actors state brazenly that they are now creating reality while the rest of us are trying to figure it out, or what it should be.

Have any of you two or three of my readers ever come across a book - very heavily-written in terms of style - titled The Fourth Turning - The Cycles of History and America’s Rendez-Vous With Destiny ? I found it extremely interesting, but am loathe to recommend it, since i did once … to Dave Pollard, and hew rote on his blog that he threw it against a wall, in fury, as he found it presuming to be a prophecy.

That said, there are some provocative and all-to-familiar-in-the-sense-of-dots-connecting suggestions as to what is and might happen, set out in the book. The web site is at http://www.fourthturning.com.

Derision, yes, sorry. I’m not awake.

I’ll take a gander at the site you mentioned. And I’ll second Lohmann’s recommendation of Hofstadter’s book. It fills in a lot of the blanks.