Puritans on Pyres

The problem with modern day puritanism is that it is mostly free from any religious connection, beyond the same anemic spiritual poison that motivates most hedonists. In fact, many hedonists tend to attempt some sort of balance by being puritans in some way, so they might hump anything that moves, but make their atonement by vegetarianism or jogging.

In the old days a puritan was a puritan through and through. Now, we can't just go around grabbing folks with buckles on their hats and loading them into the boxcars. I wish it were so easy, but, alas...this modern age.

One can even encounter a puritan in a Catholic church these days.

This separation of the puritans from any particular creed is not only an inconvenience for the day when we can actually prosecute these weenies, but a danger that lets puritans pretend that their puritanism is beyond simple creed, that it is SCIENCE or HEALTH or whatever crap they are peddling at the time.

Take creeps like these people. What motivates someone to be active in some initiative like this? What mental illness is at work here?

This is one of the symptoms of a land where everything is framed in the binary: one is either a teetotaler or an alcoholic, a nonsmoker or a three pack a day addict. One is either among the Elect or the Damned. Since it is difficult to draw exact and meaningful lines between use and abuse, lines that will fit every individual in every circumstance, to hell with it. We'll just go with binary categories and get to work cleaning.

Since there is an obvious resonance with simple people here (look at the recurring problems of Cathari, Calvinists, Mormons, etc.), once the viewpoint is tarted up with some junk science, to the average Joe, lacking in wit, reason, and armed only with a few sayings and deeply held emotions, it seems like something pretty normal. As it is incrementally increased (remember the folks who assured us back in the eighties that it was paranoid to think that requiring non-smoking sections would eventually lead to a complete prohibition, even in bars? Probably not, because it just seems so weird to think that smoking was ever allowed anywhere, right?), a direction is given, and if you believe in progress (which you do, right, because otherwise we would all be in the dark ages again), you want to get on board with that trajectory.

Now we add to the mix the notion that to support something means that one is obviously making money at that thing. So if someone does research that shows that second hand smoke is hardly the public health menace that is repeated over and over by the same people, all the puritans have to do is find a financial connection, however slight, between the research and the thing being defended, and the presumption is on corruption. Never mind that research done with predetermined results in support of ideology gets a pass on a regular basis.

And the other thing going against the proper views on alcohol, tobacco, and the like, is that there is no way to sanely balance lunacy, and we have a society that views balance as the goal. So you have puritan nuts out there, and there are no equally monomaniacal pro-alcohol people (except for perhaps a few that can be proven as having a financial stake in the industry), and the feeling of consensus is hammered in: see, join the bandwagon, the new Mayflower, like everyone else. Science and health are on our side.

So, what is to be done?

The obvious allies on this issue are the libertarians, but they are right on these issues for the wrong reason.

What we need is a militant anti-Puritan stream. One that keeps its hands free from any financial benefit (although the puritans are certainly not practicing poverty, it's just that their filthy lucre is sanitized by foundations), but hammers with the same insistance as the enemy.

As the obvious leader of this movement, yet lacking the time to do so, I will deputize one of you, my dear readers, to take the helm of Project Anti-Plymouth. Or maybe we can create a network of cells, thwarting these bastards whenever they rear their ugly, pointy, little heads.

Posted by erik at March 29, 2006 11:40 AM