To the modern young person who tries to live well there is no type so
devastating and harassing as the puritan. We cannot get away from him.
In his sight we always live. We finish with justifying our new paganism
against him, but we never quite lose consciousness of his presence.
Even Theodore Dreiser, who has always revolted from the puritan clutch,
finds it necessary now and then to tilt a lance against him. If there
were no puritans we should have to invent them. And if the pagan Mr.
Dreiser has to keep on through life fighting puritans, how much more
intrigued must we be who are only reformed puritans, and feel old
dangers stirring at every aggressive gesture of righteousness? For the
puritan is the most stable and persistent of types. It is scarcely a
question of a puritanical age and a pagan age. It is only a question of
more puritans or less puritans. Even the most emancipated generation
will find that it has only broken its puritanism up into compartments,
and balances sexual freedom--or better, perhaps, a pious belief in
sexual freedom--with a cult of efficiency and personal integrity which
is far more coercive than the most sumptuary of laws. Young people who
have given up all thought of “being good” anxiously celebrate a cult of
“making good.” And a superstition like eugenics threatens to terrorize
the new intelligentsia.
Every new generation, in fact, contrives to find some new way of being
puritanical. Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice.
Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new
denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to
its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness
arises to bewilder and deflect the _essor_ towards life. Just when
convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a
sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men
coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to
the race. This means not only that our daily living is to be dampened
by the haunting thought of misery that we cannot personally prevent,
but that our thirst towards love-experience is to be discouraged and
turned aside into a concern for racial perfection. That is, we are
subtly persuaded against merely growing widely and loving intensely. We
become vague and mystified means toward nebulous and unreal ends. This
new puritanism will not let us be ends in ourselves, or let personality
be the chief value in life. It will almost let us sometimes. But it
always pulls us up somewhere. There is always a devil of inhibition to
interpose before our clean and naïve grasping of life. (You see, my
puritanism takes the form of a suspicion that there may be a personal
devil lurking in the universe.)
This is why the puritan always needs to be thoroughly explained and
exposed. We must keep him before our eyes, recognize him as the real
enemy, no matter in what ideal disguise he lurks. We must learn how he
works, and what peculiar satisfactions he gets from his activity. For
he must get satisfaction or he would not be so prevalent. I accept the
dogma that to explain anybody we have to do little more than discover
just what contentment people are getting from what they do, or from
what they are permitting to happen to them, or even from what they are
flinging their will into trying to prevent happening to them. For, if
life is anything positive, it is the sense of control. In the puritan,
of course, we have the paradox how he can get satisfaction from
ruggedly and sternly subjecting himself and renouncing the world, the
flesh and the devil. There is a popular superstition that the puritan
has an extra endowment of moral force, that he reverses the natural
current of life, that he resists the drag of carnality down towards
hell, that his energy is thrown contra-satisfaction, that this control
is a real straddling of the nefarious way. But, of course, it is just
this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the
light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan
becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal
sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously
cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are
not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful
and usually devastating channels. The puritan is just as much of a
“natural” man as you or I.
But we still have to explain how this lustful, headstrong creature
called man, spilling with greed, could so unabatedly throughout the
ages give up the primitive satisfaction of sex and food and drink and
gregariousness and act the ascetic and the glumly censorious. How could
an animal whose business was to feel powerful get power from being in
subjection and deprivation? Well, the puritan gets his sense of power
from a very cunningly organized satisfaction of two of his strongest
impulses,--the self-conscious personal impulses of being regarded and
being neglected. The puritan is no thwarted and depleted person. On the
contrary, he is rather a complete person, getting almost the maximum of
satisfaction out of these two apparently contradictory sentiments,--the
self-regarding and self-abasing. The pure autocrat would feed himself
wholly on the first, the pure slave would be only a human embodiment
of the second. But the pure puritan manages to make the most powerful
amalgam of both.
What we may call the puritan process starts with the satisfaction of
the impulse for self-abasement (an impulse as primitive as any, for
in the long struggle for survival it was often just as necessary for
life to cower as it was to fight). It is only the puritan’s prestige
that has attached moral value to self-sacrifice, for there is nothing
intrinsic in it that makes it any more praiseworthy than lust. But
its pragmatic value is immense. When the puritan announces himself
as the least worthy of men, he not only predisposes in his favor the
naturally slavish people around him, but he neutralizes the aggressive
and self-regarding who would otherwise be moved to suppress him. He
renounces, he puts on meekness, he sternly regiments himself, he makes
himself unhappy in ways that are just not quite severe enough to
excite pity and yet run no risk of arousing any envy. If the puritan
does all this unconsciously, the effect is yet the same as if he were
deliberately plotting. To give his impulses of self-abasement full
play, he must, of course, exercise a certain degree of control. This
control, however, gives him little of that sense of power that makes
for happiness. Puritan moralists have always tried to make us believe
in this virtue of self-control. They forget to point out, however, that
it does not become a virtue until it has become idealized. Control over
self gives us little sense of control. It is the dreariest of all
satisfactions of the will to power. Not until we become _proud_ of our
self-control do we get satisfaction. The puritan only begins to reap
his satisfaction when the self-regarding impulse comes into play.
Having given his self-abasing impulse free rein, he is now in a
position to exploit his self-regard. He has made himself right with
the weak and slavish. He has fortified himself with their alliance.
He now satisfies his self-regard by becoming proud of his humility
and enjoining it on others. If it were self-control alone that made
the puritan, he would not be as powerful as he is. Indeed he would
be no more than the mild ascetic, who is all abnegation because his
self-regarding mechanism is weak. But in the puritan both impulses are
strong. It is control over others that yields him his satisfactions
of power. He may stamp out his sex-desire, but his impulse to shatter
ideas that he does not like will flourish wild and wanton. To the true
puritan the beauty of unselfishness lies in his being able to enforce
it on others. He loves virtue not so much for its own sake as for its
being an instrument of his terrorism.
The true puritan is at once the most unselfish and the most
self-righteous of men. There is nothing he will not do for you, give
up for you, suffer for you. But at the same time there is no cranny
of your world that he will not illuminate with the virtue of this
doing of his. His real satisfaction comes not from his action of
benevolence but from the moral of the tale. He need not boast about his
renunciation or his altruism. But in any true puritan atmosphere that
pride will be prevalent. Indeed, it is the oxygen of that atmosphere.
Wherever you come across that combination of selfless devotion with
self-righteousness, you have the essence of the puritan. Should you
come across the one without the other you would find not the puritan
but the saint.
The puritan then gets the satisfaction of his will to power through
the turning of his self-abasement into purposes of self-regard.
Renunciation is the raw material for his positive sense of power. The
puritan gets his satisfaction exactly where the most carnal of natural
men gets his, out of the stimulation of his pride. And in a world
where renunciation has to happen to us whether we want it or not, the
puritan is in the most impressive strategic position. In economy of
energy he has it all over the head that is bloody but unbowed. For
the puritan is so efficient morally that he can bow his head and yet
exact control both out of the bowing and out of the prestige which his
bowing gives him, as well as out of the bowing which he can enforce on
others. The true puritan must become an evangelist. It is not enough
to renounce the stimulus to satisfaction which is technically known as
a “temptation.” The renouncing must be made into an ideal, the ideal
must be codified, promulgated, and, in the last analysis, enforced.
In the compelling of others to abstain, you have the final glut of
puritanical power. For in getting other people to renounce a thing
you thereby get renewed justification for your own renouncing. And
so the puritan may go on inexhaustibly rolling up his satisfactions,
one impulse reinforcing the other. The simultaneous play of these two
apparently inconsistent personal impulses makes the puritan type one of
the stablest in society. While the rest of us are longing for power the
puritan is enjoying his. And because the puritan is so well integrated
he almost always rules. The person whose satisfactions of control are
more various and more refined is on the defensive against him.
The puritan gets his sense of power not in the harmless way of the
artist or the philosopher or the lover or the scientist, but in a
crude assault on that most vulnerable part of other people’s souls,
their moral sense. He is far more dangerous to those he converts than
to those he intimidates. For he first scares them into abandoning the
rich and sensuous and expressive impulses in life, and then teaches
them to be proud of having done so. We all have the potentiality of
the puritan within us. I remember suffering agonies at the age of ten
because my aunt used to bring me candy that had been wickedly purchased
on the Sabbath day. I forget whether I ate it or not, but that fact is
irrelevant. What counted was the guilt with which the whole universe
seemed to be stained. I need no other evidence of the irrational nature
of morality than this fact that children can be such dogged little
puritans, can be at the age of ten so sternly and intuitively righteous.
The puritan is a case of arrested development. Most of us do grow
beyond him and find subtler ways of satisfying our desire for
power. And we do it because we never can quite take that step from
self-abasement to self-regard. We never can quite become proud of our
humility. Renunciation remains an actual going without, sacrifice a
real thwarting. If we value an experience and deliberately surrender
it, we are too naïve to pretend that there are compensations. There
is a loss. We are left with a vacuum. There _is_ only depression and
loss of control. Our self-regard is not quite elemental enough to get
stimulation from wielding virtue over others. I never feel so degraded
as when I have renounced. I had rather beat my head rhythmically and
endlessly against an unyielding wall. For the pagan often breaks
miraculously through the wall. But the puritan at his best can only
strut outside.
Most of us, therefore, after we have had our puritan fling, sown our
puritan wild oats as it were, grow up into devout and progressing
pagans, cultivating the warmth of the sun, the deliciousness of
love-experience, the high moods of art. The puritans remain around us,
a danger and a threat. But they have value to us in keeping us acutely
self-conscious of our faith. They whet our ardor. Perhaps no one can be
really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan.