by Cassandra
The old gag--"A puritan is a person who is haunted by the fear that someone somewhere is having fun"--still holds. And good old-fashioned puritans still abound, those persons who thrive on trying to impose moral codes derived several millennia ago by desert dwellers eking out the most meager of existences. The Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, in spite of the bountiful goodness inherent in them, all continue to spin off a tiny percentage of adherents in every generation whose intolerance is matched only by their humorlessness. Which makes the proto-puritan immediately visible, whether spouting hatred while practicing greed on TV, or orating about freedom while writing repressive laws in congresses and legislatures. Through the smiles of vipers, they spew their poison with such unrestrained pride that nowadays only the most gullible, the most desperate, or the most greedy fall for their pitch. Which is progress, of a sort. But a new strain of puritans has appeared in the last few years, so different from the old-- primarily because they are generally thoroughly educated (notice I did not say well-educated)-- that we perhaps need to see them as an entirely new species. Let's call them "the baby puritans." How do we identify the Baby Puritans? By four characteristics: 1. Ignorance. These are of course also the defining characteristics of old-fashioned puritans. The difference is the Baby Puritans cloak their negative destructiveness in all sorts of clever ways, fooling both us and themselves about what they really are. Sad to say, the Baby Puritans, my friends, draws its membership from that bulge on the population curve which demographers call the boomers. 1. Ignorance. Swarthmore still turns out French majors like crazy, but they can do little more than re-spout Derrida with a half-way decent Paris accent. Cal Tech still turns out physicists galore, and, well, it was Cal Tech (and MIT) grads who long ago defined "nerd". Nothing new there. Educated? Of course. Well-educated? Hardly. Visit the offices of any magazine that has won national awards, chat with the editors and writers, and try turning the conversation toward 1) technology, 2) computers, 3) hypertext, or 4) digital art. You will meet a mostly confounded silence. Oh, they may know a few buzz words and even be familiar with a few Internet sites that were hip two years ago. Otherwise, nothing. Or drop in the offices of some hot Silicon Wherever firm that's going great guns on the Web and the stock market. Seek out the nerds. If you can get them to talk at all, move the focus gradually toward, say, the Taoist implications of a wired world, or maybe the Platonic Cave as precursor (so to speak) of a billion monitors glowing faintly with fuzzy images of all that's come before. Result: silence. You see my point. In mid-20th century, C.S. Lewis already pointed out the division, the chasm, between the humanities and the sciences. That abyss, across which communication has long been difficult, is still with us, but it's wider and deeper now. Mainly because the people on each side are far more narrowly focused on their own little acre of culture than ever before. Examples: I speak excitedly to an editor-friend about the patent graph we put up on Magellan's Log, wanting to talk about its implications. Response: a polite yawn. I speak excitedly to a digital-artist-friend about a show of 17th century portraits at the museum. Yawn. I speak excitedly to a writer-friend about Pedkop Bumbera's remarkable piece about car design in Magellan's Log 7. Yawn. Ignorance by any other name. . . More, it is blind ignorance. These people think they are educated, and they have the pieces of paper and the SUV's and the houses full of hi-tech toys to prove it. But the world for them is only a tiny little maze which they inhabit more or less happily. Nerds, techies, writers, artists, managers, entrepreneurs, they're all the same. No different from the proto-puritan centuries ago with his/her world narrowly, tightly defined by Bible, family, church, village. Unfortunately, it turns out the global village really is a village, complete with narrow-mindedness, unfounded gossip, and rigid thinking. Such ignorance forms the foundation, solid, impenetrable, for truly puritanical behavior. 2 & 3. Intolerance
and Hypocrisy. Ignorance builds the walls. Fear and hypocrisy defend them. Anyone different, that is, anyone not inside, is a threat. It doesn't matter what form the difference takes. Classically, in the good old days, the differences were religious, moral, and to some extent, political. And, as I noted above, we still have plenty of proto-puritans who make good livings castigating all us religious and moral and political backsliders. We come now to speak of genitals, chemicals, and skin. Sure, the new Baby Puritan says, I'm very liberal about sex. It doesn't matter to me what you do or with whom you do it. . . [Three-beat pause.] As long as you do it in the privacy of your own home. Ah, I see. And as long as you're not promiscuous. Ah. And as long as you practice safe sex. Of course. And as long as you don't put pictures of it where I can see them. Certainly. And, if you're really sexually different from me, as long as you don't expect full rights and privileges from my society. And of course never mind about the medical mutilation of the genitals of millions of baby boys every year. This person, remember, considers him/herself extremely tolerant. Sure, the Baby Puritan says, I'm very liberal about drugs. I smoke the occasional joint myself. And in a social setting, I'll even take a hit of coke now and then. And I'll admit to a certain pride in my well-stocked wine cellar. But don't light a cigarette anywhere within 20 feet of me. And don't mind if I repeatedly call attention in public to the evils of nicotine and to the guilt you surely feel about smoking. The irony, the elephant in the room here, is the little fact that the Baby Puritans are the children of the generation against whom they "rebelled" in the 1960s concerning. . . marijuana. Their level of intolerance for nicotine-use surely equals that of their parents for marijuana-use. And of course their blind "tolerance" for alcohol abuse also equals that of their parents. You bet, the Baby Puritan says, I'm very liberal about skin color. Doesn't matter to me the color of skin. As long as the person can do the job. Really, Mr./Ms. B.P.? And how many friends "of color" do you have? Which leads us into the even trickier territory of shades of color, where the Baby Puritans of Color define what is acceptable and what is not. Turn on BET and see how many really dark-skinned African-Americans you find there. Or see how many dark-skinned Hispanics you come across on Univision. 4. Denial. What's the result of such massive, hypocritical repression? You don't see much result on the smooth surface of the lives of the Baby Puritans. They've got their stock options, their swankiendas, their Range Rovers. But something deeply, wrenchingly tragic seems to be happening with their children. Nationally, globally, we're baffled by the violent acting out of the children. You want proof for my harsh analysis of the Baby Puritans? I give you Columbine High School. Children raised in a dark, cold, windowless prison--which adults persist in seeing as a comfortable, airy, well-equipped home full of "freedom" and "love"--will inevitably be driven to the most extreme possible behavior where their violent actions scream: "STOP IT! Maybe a more accurate name for these ignorant, intolerant, hypocritical, denying mommies and daddies would be FYBs: Fascist Yuppie Boomers. FYB. Pronounced "fib." Lying to themselves, lying to their children. Those who live by the fib, die by the fib. END |
Puritans we shall always have with us.
The surprise we still haven't learned is that they're not always easy to spot.