Posted on 11/27/2008 7:52:22 AM PST by Alex Murphy
Who should we thank on Thanksgiving, as we count our blessings? A complete list, beginning with God Himself, is far above my pay grade. But if we begin at least very near the beginning, we should thank those who gave us Thanksgiving — the Pilgrims or Puritans — for all they have given us.
There's little less fashionable today than thanking the Puritans, especially for our egalitarian political idealism, our love of genuinely humane and liberating learning, and our human enjoyment and happiness. Praising the Puritans is especially difficult, of course, because even our Protestants — even our Calvinists — have abandoned them. When some European calls us Puritanical, we don't say "Yes, thanks a lot, you're right." We either deny it, saying we've progressed far beyond those dark days. Or we admit it, saying, "Yes, we should be less capitalistic, less repressed, and more free thinking, just like you."
Still, we can remember that the best book ever written on America and the best book ever written on democracy — Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America — almost begins by showing us how much our democracy owes our pilgrim Puritans. They, Tocqueville tells us, established colonies without lords — without, in fact, even economic classes. Those founders differed from those of Virginia by not being solitary, mercenary adventurers. They weren't out to get rich or even improve their economic condition. Their lives were structured by morality; they came to our continent as family men — bringing their wives and children. They were also extremely educated men — on the cutting edge, in many ways, of European enlightenment. They were, Tocqueville observes, animated by a "purely intellectual need." Their goal was "to make an idea triumph" in this world.
That idea was fundamentally Biblical. And it had radically egalitarian and idealistic political consequences. Tocqueville even says that the Puritans were completely free from the political prejudices that governed their and almost every other age. A democracy beyond the wildest dreams of antiquity "sprang up fully grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society." Puritan practice was, in some ways, even better than the Socratic city in speech, because the "air of antiquity" was improved by "a sort of biblical perfume." The result was that "bold theories of the human mind" actually directed real political communities. For the Puritans, the theory of equality was the source of real political duties that correspond to the truth about who we are.
That meant, Tocqueville explains, that the Puritans had "a more elevated and complete view" of our social duties than the Europeans of that time. They took care of the poor, maintained their highways, kept careful records and registries, secured law and order, and, most of all, provided education for everyone — through high school. The purpose of universal education was that everyone should be able to read the Bible to know what's most important — his or her duties to their Creator — for themselves. Everyone must read in order that no one be deceived or suckered by others. This noncondescending egalitarianism was the first source of the American popular enlightenment that had so many practical benefits. "Puritan civilization in North American," our outstanding novelist/essayist Marilynne Robinson observes, "quickly achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, longevity, and mass prosperity, or happiness, as it was called in those days."
Robinson — the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Gilead and Home — has devoted much of her life to showing the ways in which our egalitarian idealism or "leftism" has come from the Calvinist Puritans. To the extent that we believe that our liberty is for doing moral good for the whole community, we remain Puritans. Our Calvinism, contrary to Max Weber, has been less the spirit of our capitalism than one of the main ways of curbing its selfish excesses. Our religion, Tocqueville and Robinson both show us, saves us from degrading self-absorption and for the free and dignified performance of common moral duties. The spirit of political liberty — the ennobling activity of citizens — largely depends, the Puritans taught us, on the spirit of religion.
Robinson has worked hard to add to Tocqueville's story (written in the 1830s) by getting us to remember what he couldn't have known. There was a revival of something like Puritan (or Calvinist) enthusiasm in the East as a result of the Second Great Awakening. The radically egalitarian political enthusiasm — particularly the insistent abolitionism — that sprang from that revived piety made those neo-Puritans (most Congregationalists) so hated in their native states that the Puritans once again had to become pilgrims. They relocated to the Middle West in the early nineteenth century, where they started America's first racially- and gender-integrated colleges (like Oberlin).
At these colleges, everyone did manual labor, including the faculty. That way, the educated class would be more useful, and there would be no economic barriers to higher education. The egalitarian, transformational goal was to create the classless, humanely, and spiritually educated world of the original Puritans. Those colleges, Robinson emphasizes, were "real liberal arts colleges," where "the humanities in a very broad sense" were generously studied. They didn't confine themselves to the middle-class purpose of learning a trade or skill. They were educating beings with souls, who were only incidentally beings with interests. Liberal education — beginning but not ending with the Bible — was understood to be a vehicle for the liberation of every human being.
We're no longer serious about liberal education, Robinson claims, because we are no longer Puritanical enough. We're so dead serious about our materialism and our survivalism that we really believe there's no time to enjoy who we are. We're no longer serious, she complains, about the virtues or acts of discipline, that are "the graces of personal and public life." There's way too little use, today, for words like generosity and liberality, the social virtues characteristic of those who use their freedom for the benefit of others.
In Robinson's Calvinist view, generosity, liberality, and nobility are all synonyms in the Bible, and they express even better than charity the virtue that distinguishes who we are. What's left our culture, with our surrender of the common celebration of Sunday — what impressed Tocqueville as our most precious inheritance from the Puritans — is the respect, and so the time, for the disciplined reading and reflection required for us to practice the social, civilized virtues that are the truest source of our happiness.
Anyone, Robinson observes, who looks at our country from the outside right now should wonder "why we make so little of so much." One reason is that we're not nearly as Puritanical as we used to be — and should be.
But we still have the common celebration of Thanksgiving. So let's not only give thanks to the Puritans, but reflect on not only what we've gained — but what we've lost — as we've moved over time from Puritanical equality to individualistic liberty.
....In Robinson's Calvinist view, generosity, liberality, and nobility are all synonyms in the Bible, and they express even better than charity the virtue that distinguishes who we are. What's left our culture, with our surrender of the common celebration of Sunday — what impressed Tocqueville as our most precious inheritance from the Puritans — is the respect, and so the time, for the disciplined reading and reflection required for us to practice the social, civilized virtues that are the truest source of our happiness.
Just saw a local news blurb yesterday repeating the lie that the Indians fed the starving Puritans and they all had a Thanksgiving dinner . . . Can’t wait for today’s news this eve when they go to a hunger center instead of a home where the father earned the money for the family food . . . much better to show how awful this country is that we have to feed them at shelters . . . It’s an annual event on TV . . . plus when they say, “Today’s the day we give thanks,” they never say to WHOM we give thanks . . . waiting for them to say, “Today’s the day we give thanks to GOD.”
Next year we’ll say, “Today’s the day we give thanks to the Almighty Most Meriful Baby-Killing (but only if the mother wants them dead) Illegal Alien (who has yet to apply for a Selective Service number) Obama!” Can’t wait.
Think of the things that you Thank God for every day of the year: "My Family, the food we eat, the means of making a living or surviving thanks to the goodness of others."
Fond memories: Deer season...finally...steak instead of chicken.
My grandfather showing me how to dig up potatoes.
My mother teaching me to can and store for the winter.
My brother for teaching me to be an entrepeneur: "Picking and selling worms, making potholders "to order", delivering newspapers.
So I thank God for all that he put before, the gifts of conservative and kind parents, my children and grandchildren and the wonderful people along the way.
This country has so many gifts. What it needs again is a strong moral resolution by the people to "stand up" for the basic values of LIFE, LIBERTY and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
bump
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