Why I'm Glad I'm Not a Puritan
Or a bit about the early years of U.S. capitalism.
I’ve been obsessing about Puritans.
I read a book called The Ruin of All Witches, which was less about witches and more about how unbearably difficult and psychologically fucked up the 1600s were in New England. They worked — hard, in the fields and homes, planting, chopping wood, sewing, cooking, and birthing children that had a good chance of dying in their first couple years of life — 18 hours a day. Then, they ate dinner and fell into bed before waking up and doing it all over again.
They had Sunday off as the Sabbath and spent a lot of that day in church hearing how people (women especially) were innately sinful and if bad things happened, if harvests were ruined by drought or flood or insects, if babies died, it was because God was displeased with them. They were then implored to search their inner thoughts for their transgressions, which may be only mental. Couple that with early capitalism in which only a few men in town were actually getting ahead, and life was indeed nasty, brutish and short, as the Puritan’s contemporary Thomas Hobbes noted.
This setup led to people feeling guilty about everything and discontented with all that hard work that never seemed to get them anywhere. They borrowed on credit from the big men in town and were forever working just to pay that debt down. Accusing people of witchcraft was a vent — for the anger they felt, to project their own guilty feelings onto someone else. And in no small way, it was relief from mind-numbing boredom.
Puritans did not believe in holidays.
There was never a break from the constant weekly cycle. Witch trials were exciting. And if you were the accuser and were deemed int the right, you might just benefit by receiving part of the accused’s assets. This was a good way to put uppity unmarried women who owned their own property in their rightful places under the thumb of the community’s men.
Side note: Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato once argued against women having equal rights to gold and other goods in ancient Rome with, “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors!” A comment that begs the question, “Why are you so worried about that, Marc? Hmmm?”
Oftentimes, though, it was women accusing other women.
Perhaps it was because this was one of the only ways for women to have power in the community. And it is the nature of people to want answers for the bad things that happen to them. In a society who knew nothing of germ theory or scientific weather patterns, a people who were eager to throw off the idea that disease and drought were deserved punishments from God, making it a witch’s fault was very appealing.
The book was pretty good — definitely informative.
It dragged in places but since the author mostly had account books from the general store and blandly recorded court testimony notes, I get it. I finished it Sunday and then had all sorts of questions:
Why DID the indigenous peoples of America help the pilgrims at first?
How did the Protestant work ethic and Puritan ideals influence the founding of our country?
How did those same ideas evolve between 1650 and the drafting of the Constitution of the United States?
Where was feminism in all this?
And so I googled and read and googled and read. And then I had a hard time letting it go. I had basically reached the end of the answers to my questions, but still I let Puritans run around working their asses off in my brain. And then I wondered something I could not find on the internet:
Where were my personal ancestors in all of this?
I don’t have concrete stories of my own family history beyond the great grandparents, though there are family ideas that float around. Ancestors that arrived in the US in the mid-1800s as indentured servants. Refugees from the Irish Potato Famine, from France and Germany and England. Maybe some Finnish in there, according to Mom’s 23 and Me results. Some possible Comanche ancestors. These are just vague things I’ve heard over the years and have no idea how true they are.
Side note: While the Irish Potato Famine was partially caused by a blight on the potato crop, it was exacerbated by those in power, many of whom believed in divine providence — that the Irish lacked moral character, which prompted God to curse the potato crop. This kind of thinking in the “New World” had roots in the old.
Is there a line going back in my heritage to those Puritans who held themselves to such strict rules, they often fell into some degree of mental illness? How am I connected to a time when admitting you were a witch, even if you weren’t, was sometimes appealing to receive, finally, mercy from the community, acceptance, forgiveness, and reprieve from interrogation, even if it meant death?
Either way, our country was founded on Protestant work ethic.
Protestant work ethic got a lot of things done in the early years of the United States. I would definitely argue that perhaps they should’ve asked not IF these things could be done but if they SHOULD. If massacring a whole continent of indigenous people was really so great. But I do have to admit, the things I enjoy today - the organized government, the air conditioned buildings, the infrastructure as a whole — is all based on protestant work ethic combined with capitalism. As is the morality we all still attach to hard work, cleanliness, etc., even if that morality is a vague unarticulated concept (that we need to let go of).
Side note: I’m using “Protestant” and “Puritan” interchangeably. The former is a religious designation and the latter, more of a life philosophy, but in practice, in their early communities they overlapped more than they didn’t.
These were my thoughts for the past two days — pondering the heritage, both personal and structural — of those Puritan times.
And then I realized I was stuck.
I had come to the end of my productive thoughts on the matter and began cycling through the same thoughts over and over again. I recognize this. I do this when I am avoiding the real, current world, avoiding my own worries.
Like the Puritans and their witch trials, I was distracting myself with the fantastical, the faraway, something other than my mundane everyday life. Because even someone else’s mundane everyday life is more exciting than your own by the very nature that you aren’t living that one. You can marvel at the drudgery instead of actually experiencing it.
So this morning, I let the other thoughts in that I had been avoiding. They weren’t earth shattering. Perhaps that’s why I was avoiding them. I am worried about…
My kids. Are they getting a fair shake in soccer, do they need to be more social, will they choose a path in which they can thrive after high school, what’s with the yet-another hamstring injury and all the sneezing do they need different allergy meds?
What Jason and I will do when they are gone. A part of me is excited for that new chapter and a part of me is worried about the feelings of loss. Nothing to do but wait and see.
Jason and his back injury. It keeps flaring up and interfering with his enjoyment of life.
The house. We have lived here for thirteen years now, and shit keeps breaking — things leak. A lot.
My mom.
My writing career.
My job security.
Retirement.
These are all little “w” worries.
They aren’t the high-stakes worries one has about a mortally ill family member or an impending eviction. But they are there, and while most of the time I can keep them in perspective as just the background of everyday living, occasionally, I want to escape from them.
So I do. I find escape in reading stories that feels far away from where I am now. Unlike accusing someone of witchcraft in the 1600s, my reading doesn’t ruin anyone else’s life.
The Puritans worried about feeding their families, keeping their kids alive. These were real, close at hand, non-existential problems. Kids died all the time. Whole harvests were ruined constantly. So another thing, besides distraction and a better understanding of the ideas upon which the United States was founded, I get from studying them is empathy for them and an appreciation of where I am now, sitting here warm and cozy under a blanket in a soft recliner in my climate-controlled living room with food I bought at the grocery store and stocked in my refrigerator that will preserve it until we are ready to eat.
My little “w” worries are worth noting.
They are not nothing. So I want to acknowledge them. But I also want to keep them in perspective. All in all, my life is pretty damned good. And that goodness is partly my doing, my own work ethic and commitment to creating a satisfying life, but only partly. The rest arises from those same Puritans and, as they would say, Providence.*
*I use providence very loosely here. Basically, I mean luck.