The New Puritans

As I contemplate the political psycho-drama unfolding in England, it seems to me that there are forces at play way beyond the usual semi-rational discourse of contemporary democratic politics. I mean one expects politicians to prevaricate, dodge uncomfortable truths and make outlandish claims such as Mrs May's 'carrying out the Will of the People', but since WWII we have generally managed to hang on to a semblance of rational discourse. In the case for Brexit, this seems to have evaporated. However, I must beware of the ‘Cambridge Syndrome’!

I was reminded of it on my recent trip to England, when I spent a few hours in Cambridge and briefly visited my old college there, Jesus, for the first time since I left in 1968. It is an intellectual state in which one assumes a detached and superior attitude to all those benighted people who actually believe anything at all, with the possible exception of what may be posited as scientifically proven. It being difficult enough to grasp one’s own subject properly, one should be very chary of expressing actual convictions of a more general character, and anyway, one must not give hostages to fortune when it comes to the serious matter of cakes and having them or not! At the risk of making a fool of myself, however, I am going to attempt to lay out my understanding of some of the historical factors at play in the aforementioned psycho-drama.

Let us go back to the medieval set-up, that among other things created those ancient universities and their system. The king who ruled the temporal set-up did so in the name of God, who, whether or not one actually believed in Him, was certainly the archetype behind the kingship. His Majesty claimed to rule in the light of universal and transcendent truths. In the knowledge that there was a mighty gap between the divine order and its pale earthly image, the Church tried to insure that the latter did not stray too far from the former; she spoke in the name of Christ, the door through whom alone the Creator could be approached.

With the Renaissance, the earthlings became intolerant of any such constraint; the tension between ‘grace’ and nature was strained to breaking point, and the culture began a long process of fragmentation, occasionally outright disintegration, as when England fell into civil war (which, let us recall, was precipitated by an Irish rebellion). Admittedly simplifying matters, we may say that the Cavaliers were catholics (with a small c) trying to hang on to the old alliance of nature with grace, with the puritanical Roundheads claimed to embody grace themselves, while nature could ‘go hang’.

Oliver Cromwell’s lot may have laid the foundations of English democracy, but meanwhile they disgraced themselves most viciously in Ireland and Scotland. Here in Sherkin Island we have a monument to this, in the form of the despoiled friary. While England managed to row back on his extreme puritanism, to this day it constitutes a dominant note in English and indeed perhaps more strongly in North American culture, many of whose founder members were Puritans. Somewhat similar forces erupted on the Continent with the French Revolution.

While such a culture is in theory committed to individual liberty, in practise it tends to control such liberty with savage repression; lacking a means to access divine grace, it conceives some arbitrary Deity who deals out His favours to individuals and nations alike according to his inscrutable will. Nowadays such a Deity is likely to be conceived as evolution, genes, d.n.a. or suchlike, but the principle is much the same, though there is even less point in trying to engage in a loving relationship with It! ‘Sauve qui peut!’ becomes the rule of life, - the survival of the fittest.

The notion that ‘if God wants something done, He sends for an Englishman’ was deeply ingrained in the days of Puritan ascendency; the English were the new chosen race. The Americans caught the same disease, possibly an even worse case of it, though of course 'the Anglo-Saxons' are not alone in it. If we are to seriously address the problems the whole world faces today, this attitude is a serious handicap. We can only do so on the basis of equality and partnership. The New Puritans of today have come to the conclusion it is not even worth trying, though they try to cover their tracks with spurious talk of partnership. What a nerve, when rejecting all the work that has been going on for the last 50 years! Once again, Ireland may become the first and biggest victim of their march to some New Jerusalem! Still, there may be an answer, like Spring!