{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has never read Perry Miller’s seminal ‘Errand into the Wilderness’. However, he recently chanced upon a related lecture by Miller, from which he has mined a few relevant nuggets.}
“Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, Puritans were left alone with America.” (Perry Miller)
When did it all start to go wrong, the promise of American greatness? According to Perry Miller, the great historian whose focus was early New England and the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness,” it went wrong almost from the start:
In the 166os and 1670s, all the jeremiads were castigations of the people for having defaulted on [the Covenant]. They recited the long list of afflictions an angry God had rained upon them, surely enough to prove how abysmally they had deserted the covenant: crop failures, epidemics, grasshoppers, caterpillars, torrid summers, arctic winters, Indian wars, hurricanes, shipwrecks, accidents, and (most grievous of all) unsatisfactory children.
In 1679, assembled clergy and lay elders met at Boston in a formal Synod, under the leadership of Increase Mather, and there prepared a report on why the land suffered. The result of their deliberation, published under the title The Necessity of Reformation, was the first in what has proved to be a distressingly long succession of investigations into the civic health of Americans, and it is probably the most pessimistic. The land was afflicted, it said, because corruption had proceeded apace; assuredly, if the people did not quickly reform, the last blow would fall and nothing but desolation be left. Into what a moral quagmire this dedicated community had sunk, the Synod did not leave to imagination; it published a long and detailed inventory of sins, crimes, misdemeanors, and nasty habits, which makes, to say the least, interesting reading.
By about 1680, it did in truth seem that shortly no stone would be left upon another, that history would record of New England that the founders had been great men, but that their children and grandchildren progressively deteriorated.
Miller injected a wry remark about modern Americans’ inability even to denounce themselves properly:
We hear much talk nowadays about corruption, most of it couched in generalized terms. If we ask our current Jeremiahs to descend to particulars, they tell us that the Republic is going on the rocks, or to the dogs, because the wives of politicians aspire to wear mink coats and their husbands take a moderate five-percent cut on certain deals to pay for the garments. 1
Being more methodical, our Puritan forebearers instead produced “a staggering compendium of iniquity, organized into twelve headings,” which Miller helpfully summarized:
First, there was a great and visible decay of godliness. Second, there were several manifestations of pride — contention in the churches, insubordination of inferiors toward superiors, particularly of those inferiors who had, unaccountably, acquired more wealth than their betters, and, finally, a shocking extravagance in attire, especially on the part of these of the meaner sort, who persisted in dressing beyond their means. Third, there were heretics, especially Quakers and Anabaptists. Fourth, a notable increase in swearing and a spreading disposition to sleep at sermons (these two phenomena seemed basically connected). Fifth, the Sabbath was wantonly violated. Sixth, family government had decayed, and fathers no longer kept their sons and daughters from prowling at night. Seventh, instead of the people being knit together as one man in mutual love, they were full of contention, so that lawsuits were on the increase and lawyers were thriving. Under the eighth head, the Synod described the sins of sex and alcohol, thus producing some of the juiciest prose of the period: militia days had become orgies, taverns were crowded; women threw temptation in the way of befuddled men by wearing false locks and displaying naked necks and arms “or, which is more abominable, naked Breasts”; there was “mixed Dancings” along with light behavior and “Company-keeping” with vain persons, wherefore the bastardy rate was rising. In 1672, there was actually an attempt to supply Boston with a brothel (it was suppressed, but the Synod was bearish about the future). Ninth, New Englanders were betraying a marked disposition to tell lies, especially when selling anything. In the tenth place, the business morality of even the most righteous left everything to be desired: the wealthy speculated in land and raised prices excessively; “Day-Laborers and Mechanicks are unreasonable in their demands.” In the eleventh place, the people showed no disposition to reform, and in the twelfth, they seemed utterly destitute of civic spirit. 2
Perry Miller admitted to being impressed by the Puritans’ “staggering compendium of iniquity”: “I suppose that in the whole literature of the world, including the satirists of imperial Rome, there is hardly such another uninhibited and unrelenting documentation of a people’s descent into corruption.” He also argued that the jeremiads had a paradoxical effect: “If you read them all through, the total effect, curiously enough, is not at all depressing: you come to the paradoxical realization that they do not bespeak a despairing frame of mind. There is something of a ritualistic incantation about them; whatever they may signify in the realm of theology, in that of psychology they are purgations of soul; they do not discourage but actually encourage the community to persist in its heinous conduct.” And, to this day, the American community has done exactly that: “Under the guise of this mounting wail of sinfulness, this incessant and never successful cry for repentance, the Puritans launched themselves upon the process of Americanization.”
For centuries now, accusations of corruption, claims of generational decline, and warnings of impending doom have gone hand in hand with the fighting of wars (aka genocide of natives), the harvesting of natural resources (aka rape of the land), the accumulation of unprecedented wealth, and proclamations of “American exceptionalism”. Is there any reason to think this pattern—guilt and self-flagellation accompanied by business as usual—won’t continue indefinitely?
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1 Miller’s original “Errand into the Wilderness” lecture was given in 1953, though the book of the same title did not appear until 1957. Given the timing, it seems not implausible that his references to mink coats and “five-percent cuts” had to do with Richard Nixon’s so-called “Checkers” scandal, which nearly cost him his spot on Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential ticket.
2 Perhaps our national slogan should be, “America: Slouching Toward Gomorrah Since 1660”.
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