Our Puritan Legacy

While reading Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline, I began to realize something startling: Puritanism is alive and well in America. It takes many forms today, but the essential spirit of it is preserved. It allows various groups to attach themselves to beliefs so rigid and adamant that no facts or contrary information need apply. These groups are posited on the right and the left of any issue and inevitably suffer the hubris of certainty. In all cases they are truly anti-scientific in process and instead begin with self-appointed truths rather than hypotheses. Hypotheses are for pragmatists and other promoters of relativism.
On the left there are puritanical environmentalists who would rather see people starve than introduce genetically engineered crops because they are “unnatural” or who would ban nuclear energy in favor of renewable sources such as solar and wind even though solar and wind will assure a continued gap-filling dependence on burning coal that will kill tens of thousands more people than nuclear energy ever has or will.
On the right we have “Gospel of Wealth” true believers who insist that the Market will solve all economic problems and continue us down the road to progress if we can only free it from intervention by evil government. And we have true believer religious fanatics who are certain what God wants us to do and not do who are perhaps the most direct descendants of Puritanism. Finally, there are those who refuse to believe in climate change because Al Gore does.
In either case, the trial and error shiftiness of science with its hypotheses and murky data are not to be trusted. Science is just too full of doubt and uncertainty to warrant serious consideration, unless it reinforces one of our existing beliefs. Then its evidence is selectively plucked from the tree of knowledge, polished until it gules, and presented as an additional commandment, even when additional data and syntheses suggest that the original hypothesis was wrong.
For example, genetic engineering, the process of which actually does occur in nature, is considered evil by the puritan strain of environmentalists who insist that hybridization or cross breeding is the only natural way to develop pest resistant crops. They are so married to their idea of organic, they cannot entertain the notion that genetic engineered food is safer and less risky scientifically and rationally than hybridization is. Hybridization is the equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun approach to advancement as opposed to engineering which is more the rifle and scope approach. (Brand uses the analogy of marrying a whole village as opposed to marrying a spouse without in-laws)
On this 4th of July, as we celebrate our independence from the British, perhaps we can consider gaining independence from the certainty of belief and submit to the slow, deliberate process of science. Just as we get frustrated with democracy at times because we have to put up with all kinds of theories and notions that get bandied about in the general discourse of our nation, we get frustrated with science’s grinding, deliberate method. And yet it is the best tool we have yet developed to move away from ignorance and toward truth. If it does not produce ready answers to everything, we should still listen to what it has to offer, which is far better than some undocumented, untested belief that we latch on to at our probable peril.
The loudest voices preach; the quiet ones consider.

God in America

While watching the second part of the PBS special God in America last night, I was struck by how blindly drawn to certainty a large segment of the country has always been. Better to be dead right than maybe wrong. Both sides of the Civil War believed God was on their side, but as Lincoln concluded, both could not be right and possibly neither was. Then Lincoln went from being Deist (God set in motion this mechanism called life) to Evangelical (God told me what to do) in a sudden revelation which resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation, the just cause the North needed to win the war.
America pretends to have one God but in practice has many. There are personal gods, sectarian gods, and secular gods. What the people who believe in them all have in common is a faith that their god will deliver “the good” and sometimes the goods.
For many the belief starts with absolute trust in a text. The trust is so absolute that every word in the text is sacred. Even though the text has been translated and modernized over time, every word somehow remains sacred to those who buy into fundamentalist teaching. This tendency to see certain texts as sacred (Bible, Torah, Koran) helps explain how some also view The Constitution as a static document to be preserved at any cost as opposed to a living document that is subject to adjustment according to the needs of the people and the times. Literal interpretation of texts, it is assumed, requires no interpretation. It is simply ingesting. You swallow whole, never chew.
This tendency or proclivity to absorb wholly and directly is carried into our economic lives as well. There are those believe in the Market as if it were a god. Just trust in the Market to take care of business. We need not any tinkerers or adjusters or certainly not any government bureaucrats messing with our god. In God We Trust to these purists means In Market We Trust.
America has had an element that wants to purify or sanctify something ever since the Puritans landed in 1620. It also has had an element that has always felt uncomfortable in the stiff clothes of doctrinaire thinking and texts. Printed words and human institutions are not chiseled in stone. They are created by man, not dictated by God to man. God has never exclusively endorsed a specific text as his word and has never left a note to say he had.
Belief is a “time out” from thinking. It is the product of the anti-intellectual’s unwillingness to venture into the arduous world of reason. It is the surrender to assumption and blind belief, not the victory of truth.
True believers are inevitably skeptical of science because science is so skeptical. Science has hypotheses and theories, probability and statistics, not absolute truths. It is the very uncertainty of science that horrifies the true believer. We can’t trust science to give us truth on a platter, only carcasses of old ideas left on the dissecting table and new theories tentatively offered in their place. How messy and unsatisfying it all is.
On the other hand, moderately religious people who focus on service and helping the needy are good to have around. They keep their religion to themselves and simply do good deeds. There are no strings attached to their efforts.
However, our nation suffers from an inordinate lack of faith in the power of reason to sort out our difficulties. Instead, we have our centers of power polluted by a preoccupation with preponderant principle over pragmatic progress. Some true believers are paralyzed with fear because they consume the fast food of facile belief containing empty spiritual calories rather than exercise their mental capacities toward solutions. Thinking is hard work, but a certain portion of America has always shunned it because it might disturb the literal narrative it has always blindly trusted.
However, the chief reason Americans hang onto their beliefs is the ever broadening heterogeneity of the country. We have always been a nation of immigrants and continue to be so. We are also the most religiously diverse nation in the world, but unlike the foods we bring to the American table, we do not embrace each other’s religions the way we enjoy each other’s ethnic dishes. New foods are a lot more digestible; new beliefs are not.
True believers see other beliefs as a threat to their own, not a complement. It leaves them “thinking” that they must reinforce their own beliefs rather than question them. The notion of turning to reason simply does not occur. It’s in a different realm of being.
Meanwhile, absolutist belief will continue to be the sacred cow that wanders through and disrupts American progress such as stem cell research while engineers of growth elsewhere in the world (China, India, for example) will pass us on their freshly constructed by-passes and freeways. Their de facto separation of church and state will trump our de jure separation any day now.