I do not expect to obtain any medals for originality, but as we have noted before around these parts, this is a puritanical age we are living in, at least in respect of certain lifestyle aspects (with the possible exception of sex).
“Sir Stuart Rose, the executive chairman of Marks & Spencer, has attacked the idea of minimum pricing for alcohol as “insane”. His comments have emerged just a few days after his rival Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, wrote in The Daily Telegraph that it might help solve binge drinking and called on the Government to investigate introducing it. Sir Stuart said: “Artificially fixing a base price to stop people drinking wine is insane. As an extreme example, if you go back to 1930s America, prohibition doesn’t work.”
Of course, there is – as some commenters occasionally point out – a long-standing puritanical streak in the English-speaking world, which varies in intensity and in the object of its obsessions. In the last few decades, it has tended to focus on health and the environment. Before then, it was about sex. There is a distant, now deceased, old relative of mine who was brought up in a Methodist household where dancing was frowned upon, and so on.
This mindset is, I suppose, ineradicable. But what is not inevitable is allowing this mindset to win.
The problem is not really puritanism itself but that it has been installed in our corridors of power and they have the means to inflict it on everyone else. It is no different from ecomentalism and coporatism in that respect.
It isn’t helped by our politicans’ slavish attention to the media. The knees jerk higher and higher despite many of them being far from puritans themselves.
The effects of puritanism were minor when we were reasonably free to go about our lives without state interference. Those days are long gone.
Gareth, of course, increased state power has meant that puritan ideas can have wider effects than say, in the era of Cromwell.
Puritanism was part of the motivational force of growing state power. And there were pressure groups, often highly influential ones, in the 19th Century, with names such as Society for The Suppression of Vice”.
The word “censor” used to mean a Roman official with a duty to oversee public morality, but now it just refers to freedom of speech. I suggest we reclaim this word and apply it in the proper way — what we are seeing is an attempt at “alcohol censorship”. Just a thought.
I find it ironic that puritanism in various forms has infected the UK so badly. Surely England rejected it once before and booted them out. Cromwell and his fun-killing hordes would love it these days.
Ah, my favourite subject. Heh. I’m trying to get a series of articles together for Counting Cats to get it all down properly. You see I don’t think there’s a “puritan streak” or, “we’re a bit puritanical”. I make the bold claim that statism in the Anglosphere, particularly the USA and UK, is puritanism. It dallied awhile with marxism, but marxism couldn’t win because Puritanism got there first.
When we discuss puritanism, we tend to mean one of two things; either some specific 17th century protestants, or anybody a bit square. But looked at properly, Puritanism- literally the search for spiritual purity; initially in religious worship but which rapidly expanded out to an entire lifestyle “sharia”- is simply absolutist Protestant fundamentalism. It is our Muslim Brotherhood. Just as the Muzzies seek a “return” to an imagined pure Islam, so the Puritans sought a “return” to an imagined pure Christianity- defined, as the Muzzies do- by a very strict definition indeed which encompasses not just worship but every act from waking to sleeping (and indeed sleeping itself), a religion which literally sits on the poor worshipper’s shoulders 24/7, affecting their every act. DIgreessing a little further about the Muzzies, we then see that what is going on in the Middle East, and spilling out into the West is there Reformation (and indeed Counter-Reformation).
The Muzzies are a violent bunch who’ll stop at nothing to impose purity, and the Puritans were the same (and still are). Of interest to us, they launched two great wars- both Civil Wars- for hegemony. The first was in England, and the second in the USA. In both cases they won. In both cases they are explained away as supposedly secular wars- the first about the power of the King, the second about slaves. Neither explanation holds water. Taking the English example, it is apparent that the nasty little tyrant Cromwell gave not a tinker’s cuss for democracy or parliament, sitting there in his ermine appointing puritan gauleiters and, like so many dictators, sheltering under a mock-humble title instead of the honest one of monarch. This was a regime that banned all the pleasure that it could; it was illegal to even go outside on a sunday without a cause justifiable to the State. It was a state whose agents would drag women caught wearing makeup or gay clothes away for “correction”. Ring a bell? It should do.
And people think New Labour invented the authoritarian nanny state? Pah! I say. Pah!
Of course this ghastly bunch of mullahs were thrown out at the first opportunity. Some of them went to the USA, and sadly their boat didn’t sink on the way. But the idea remained and resurged a century later, with the development of new tactics that we now know as “community organising” and advocacy. They didn’t have a war in England this time. They didn’t need one; the puritan ideology was of great use to the ruling class as a way to control the population for the new industrial revolution. The Puritan revival had entirely won by the mid 19th century. It was a true cultural revolution, which eradicated the past itself (as all proper cultural revolutions do). Within a couple of generations, raucous, bawdy, individualist Old England had been stuffed down the memory hole and the population were wandering around with their thumbs up their backsides convinced they had always been this way.
But the USA was more diverse, a huge territory where the Puritan revival flame, which had spread from England, burned brightly in some areas and barely at all in others. The South had caught the evangelical fervour, but manifested it quite differently. It had to be crushed. So, they had a war; a huge, devastating war. How can anyone believe that a nation whose citizens overwhelmingly thought that blacks were a lesser form of life would have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men to free them? Nonsense. It was a war driven by hymn-shouting fanatics, determined to create an America that sang with only one voice. And when it was over, they had what they wanted.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the USA and UK are the centre of modern statism; why our intellectuals and pressure groups dominate the moral culture of the world, and why our two countries are the greatest threat to liberty now that Communism and Fascism have been and gone. Our form of statism- of socialism, if you will- is moral socialism, forged in Puritan hearts. It is not an economic theory like Communism. Nor is it a philosophy of volk like National Socialism, or of national militarism like Fascism. It is a philosophy that demands that every citizen, every second of the day, applies a moral test to everything they do. It is a philosophy which interprets everything through that moralist filter; such that when economic disaster occurs (as it always does) the cry goes up, “this was caused by immorality! We must end greed!”
For instance- free marketeers and communists alike see the economy in terms of production; of economic inputs and economic outputs. The Puritans don’t. They interpret the economy in terms of moral inputs and moral outputs. A marketeer and a communist alike see a tractor factory as a factory that produces tractors, and argue about which system will produce more tractors. A Puritan sees it as an institution which provides work, because work is a moral good; and does not care if a single factory leaves the gates (and indeed may object to tractor production, because more tractors cause more food, which makes people fat and luxuriated).
It is only by grasping the nature of the Puritan mind that we can grasp the nature of the catastrophe engulfing us. We and they literally see different worlds. Their value system is predicated on virtues and vices, whereas ours is focussed on something they see as the greatest vice of all; the satisfaction of desires. If a cheesemaker makes more cheese, we say “Good, now cheese consumers can have more cheese”, but our opponents are very sad, because cheese may be bad for people, and surely an abundance of cheese will bring ruin, and so they will use every means they can to ruin the cheesemaker. Jesus said, “Blessed are the cheesemakers”; but then Jesus was not a Puritan, was He?
The hatred of the sex and the drugs and the rock’n’roll is the outward sign of the Puritan mind; but the effects of the Puritans is far more profound than that. We live in a society drenched in; predicated on; Puritanism. We will never be free, or even a little more free, until it is utterly eradicated and, once again, faith- in all things- becomes a matter not for “society”, but for the individual. The fight for the right to party is the fight for civilisation itself.
/soapbox rant
So we all go in Sir Stuart’s shop from now on, and don’t go in Sir Terry’s.
The idea that cheap booze = more drunks doesn’t make sense and never has.
(Incidentally, the idea of ‘minimum pricing’ suggests that well-to-do drunks are tolerable, while poor drunks are not.)
In the part of the US where I reside (where the prices of spirits are state-controlled but beer and wine are not, go figure) you can buy a 12-pack of a decent brand of pilsener beer for about $8, almost any day of the week. That’s about 7.5 UK pints for about £5.50, or 73 pence a pint – the exact price levels that are being so grieviously complained of in the UK. And those are normal, everyday prices, not some special sale price. On sale, the price can approach half that, or even less. And you can buy alcohol a lot cheaper than that – a LOT cheaper – if getting drunk is your goal. It’s not hard to buy a 70 cl bottle of perfectly-drinkable wine for $4 or $5, any day of the week – more than enough to get most people seriously drunk.
Yet for the most part, the US simply doesn’t suffer from the problems of public drunkeness that appear to be becoming the norm in the UK.
Most of those problems in the UK also seem to occur as the result of drinking in pubs and clubs – where the price of alcohol is inevitably far higher – than it does from drinking at home/off-license sales. So it would seem that the price is not the issue – people are getting s**t-faced at much higher prices than what’s being charged for off-license sales.
When I was a lad, the licensing mags looked at publicans with a beady eye, and if there was too much of a problem with drinkers at his boozer (as carefully reported by a police officer at the licensing hearings) he would be put on notice – much more of this and you lose your license. Does that system no longer apply?
I smell rent-seeking – bars, pubs and clubs trying to discourage drinking at home (which by definition is not ‘in pub-lick’, as Ron White would say) under the guise of reducing public drunkeness. The two things don’t seem to be connected.
llater,
llamas
The recent expenses scandal in the UK Parliament is unusual for this country as financial embezzlemnet is mostly associated with Latin countries. The normal “scandals” in Anglo-Saxon countries are predominantly sexual – hetero as well as gay. Politicians in Latin countries can often enhance their reputations through sexual exploits – e.g.Berlusconi. However, these distinctions are now becoming increasingly blurred as politicians realise that there’s lots of dosh to be made through prohibitionism as any drug dealer can confirm.
*drums fingers while the old man who tends the Smite Filter snoozes on…*
Why do many people binge drink? Because their life is a horrible wasteland in which they cannot prosper no matter what they do. The answer? Meddle in their lives a little more making them even more spun out of control.
What good does it do anyway? We live in an age where people can cook up a wonderful high cheaper than intentionally jacked up booze. In the States there was a major attack on crystal meth which led to a lot of inconvenience for people and drove the supply over to Mexico which is now torn up with drug lord wars seaping back into the US side of the border.
The laws of unintended consequences. People think they can terraform the world into what they want it to be with Force. And they just end up worse off than they were before. Unfortunately they are dense and when things get worse they just try more Force.
“Binge Drinking” is a Puritan catchphrase. It is simply drinking. Just as people have always drunk, so they drink. There is no special phenomenon necessary for a phrase to describe it. No explanation of this non-phenomenon is required. If you find yourself worrying about, and discussing “binge drinking”, you’ve been had.
The term was actually coined by a Temperance Activist Researcher called Henry Wechsler, funded by Temperance foundation The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. To quote
This is how it is done.
Your Puritan thesis is eagerly awaited, IanB. Type faster.
“Why do many people binge drink?”
Because the definition of “binge drinking” is set so that more or less any visit to the pub is caught by it. The correct answer is therefore, “because of the dishonesty of temperance fanatics”.
IanB, a question I have is your interpretation of why the US Civil War took place. Is it really down to Puritanism? Sure, some of the anti-slavery campaigners drew their inspiration from the Evangelical strain of Christianity at the time, but was that the only motivator? I am not so sure.
In any event, ending slavery counts as a general net gain for the cause of freedom, surely.
Puritanism, as with other religious or quasi religious standpoints is fine until one tries to impose it upon others against their will, or, more recently, using the Fabian techniques to boil the frog, which is all the more insidious and vile.
That reminds me. I currently live in Ecuador, a country which recently adopted a new Constitution which is a monument to socialist befuddlement – and, as it happens, gamely incorporates every current bienpensant buzzword its writers could think of. One of these buzzwords is “incluyente” or “inclusive”. According to the new Constitution, everything has to be Inclusive: education, the media, housing policy, you name it. Now, it just so happens I caught Cameron in a news report the other day using this word. “Ah, so that’s where it came from” I muttered. Well, I assume not. I would like to know just what the ideological pedigree of this buzzword is, and how it is currently deployed. To me, it smells of Orwellian euphemism, Big Nurse and electroshock therapy. No, better: it is redolent of the Puritan’s nagging worry that someone, somewhere, may still be having a good time (i.e. refuses to “include” himself in the Overarching General Misery). Does anyone have chapter and verse for when this word entered the Statist lexicon?
Johnathan, in answer to your point, I think my answer is that one of my central arguments is that we need a significant (radical?) “revisionist” approach to our history, as I think the religious elements are suspiciously vastly underplayed. As I said in my post, there is this almost knee-jerk historical reaction of identifying clearly religiously motivated conflicts- as with the Civil Wars- as being secular in nature (e.g. King vs. Parliament rather than Puritans vs. Everybody Else; the central arguments that sparked that war were overwhelmingly of a religious nature, with a Puritan terror of Charles being soft on Catholics.)
So I think it’s wrong to dismiss the religious angle in the US Civil War as being “yes, well, a few were quite evangelical”. It’s a bit like saying that “some radical Mueslis are quite motivated by their Muesli Faith”. (In fact this does happen with people saying that the clearly religiously motivated conflicts in the Middern East are about Yoohooish oppression of Palpatine, and so on.)
Take a look for instance at the famous Battle Hymn of the Republic. You’d think that this hymn for a war to free the slaves would mention the slaves somewhere in it, wouldn’t you? But there’s not a dicky bird. The nearest we get is, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”, which might be taken to mean freeing the slaves, but in its context we see it is about freeing men from sin, or America from Satan, or some such rot. It’s the same ideology as expressed by, for instance, Sadie Cutup of the Muesli Brotherhood, in which the pure of faith can only be “free” in a land of religious purity.
It’s a song of fervent religious war, of jim-lad, and we don’t quite get that because this is our own religious nutters, and we’re used to them, and we don’t see them in the same way as turban-clad foreign types. Try transpposing that song into Muesli terms, and you see it for what it is.
So okay, that’s just one song. What does it prove? Nothing, by itself. But I suggest that history shows that the Yankees were fervent religionists to a man and woman, that this was what they started the war for and what they believed they were fighting for; the purification of America. The religious angle is not a side-show. It’s not the only cause of the War either (no event in history has a single cause). But it is vitally important to understand, I believe, that this was a religious law fought for souls, not slaves. Freeing the slaves was an ideological goal to free America from a stain of sin, in the same manner that such people often struggle to eradicate prostitution, not because they care about prostitutes as such, but to erase the sin from their Shining City On The Hill.
With slavery as a casus beli, the consequence of the war was the puritan political and cultural domination of the USA that continues to this day.
/munged in the hope of not awakening the Smite Imp.
Endivio, I had an idea a while which (like all my ideas I’ve done nothing about) for a “Buzzword Wiki”. I think it’s worthwhile to trace these terms to source, and I’ve done a handful; “Binge Drinking”, “Is***ophobia”, “Three Planet Living”, for instance, and it would be useful to us all to know where they come from. I read something recently where a journo had tracked down “Five A Day” and found it started off as basically a Californian publicity campaign for their fruit and veg. These words are deliberately inserted into our language, and once inserted people start treating them as gospel.
But I’ve no skils for building a wiki, and no money either, and no time to run one probably either, and it’d get clogged up with spam and nonsense and constant attacks by The Enemy. Would be nice to have though, I think. Then we could all just look up where some phrase that is now ubiquitous started off.
IanB, you make a very interesting argument, one worth pondering. But as a starting observation, let me dissect your sentence: “But I suggest that history shows that the Yankees were fervent religionists to a man and woman, that this was what they started the war for and what they believed they were fighting for; the purification of America.”
Whether or not the Yankees were “fervent religionists”,* to the extent that they were all Americans were, too. The vast majority on both sides shared a common religion. This was no war to convert the heathen, much less one to “save souls”. As you already noted, most Americans then considered blacks inferior, and I don’t think too many people were overly concerned with their (putative) souls. Yes, there were some “evangelical” abolitionists, and a noisy group they were, but nowhere near a majority in the north and not, I think, a significant factor in the maintenance of the war.
And of course, it wasn’t the North who “started” the US Civil War; the precipitating cause was South Carolina’s opening fire on Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor. (You can, of course, argue that they were goaded into it, but that doesn’t change the stark facts.)
The clear purpose of North’s prosecution of the war was to “preserve the union”. Lincoln was explicit about that; he clearly stated that if that goal could be achieved without freeing any slaves he would do so. From the Southern perspective the war was about keeping their slaves due to a fear that the march of history (the admission of new non-slave states) would eventually doom that institution as the south lost its ability to hold off anti-slavery laws. But from the Northern perspective the abolition of slavery was a by-product; “purification” of the nation’s soul didn’t enter into it. (If the Yankees were all that concerned about being associated with the “sin” of slavery they could simply have allowed the South to seceed and divorced themselves from the problem.)
This is not to deny that the American character contains a strong streak of Puritanism, or that religious ferver could have been the animating cause of some Union participants in our Civil War. But on the whole I think your analysis is flawed, and your argument that religious fervor was a large animating factor behind the war is seriously overwrought.
* And I don’t think that’s really true. Today, at least, the South is distinctly more overtly religious than the north (I’ve lived in both and am now in the Bible Belt; there are more churches here than gas stations). I have my doubts that this dichotomy was substantially different, and certainly not reversed, 150 years ago.
A brilliant idea Ian, and Orwell should figure in the name somehow.
Thanks Alisa.
“The NewSpeak Dictionary”?
My favourite fuddy duddyism is the replacement of the word sex to refer to female and male by gender. In English personal pronouns have gender – people have sex in all its variations!
Ian: yes!
Yes, but what we’re interested in here is what type of religionists. All christians are not the same.
Only in the sense of being Christians, and mostly Protestants. The Yankees had developed into a particular type; specifically post-millennialists who believed that God’s Kingdom had to be created on Earth before Christ would return.
It depends how you define “heathen”. As with the current Muesli Puritans, it’s not about atheists or non-Mueslis, it’s about converting co-religionists to your own type of the religion. That is, in the American case, the Yankees needed to reform those nominal Christians who didn’t believe their way.
As I tried to describe, the key understanding is that Puritans are literally those who desire purity; of worship and all other things. They were determined to save America en masse from spiritual corruption; by the practise of slavery, sexual license, the demon rum, Catholicism, etc etc.
It actually does change the facts rather a lot. Who started a war is a complex matter that doesn’t reduce down to who fired the first shot. We’re looking at who precipitated a conflict. They were determined to have a war, and they got one.
That’s not how the Puritan mind works; it doesn’t wash its hands of the sinners. It is determined to save them whether they want saving or not. Of course they were fighting to preserve “the Union”. They wanted hegemonic power over the whole USA (as they now want it over the world), the last thing they wanted was the slave states going off on their own. This is the missionary mindset we’re talking about here, Laird.
Then I can only reply that I think your attitude rather bizarre; in a land drenched in religiosity- the most religious of the Western democracies by a considerable length, these days- you want to discount religiosity as a motivating force for conflict without further consideration?
I think this comes down to the familiarity problem I mentioned above. It’s easy to see the extremities of alien societies; far harder to see them on home turf, because we’re used to them. When we watch historical dramas full of vicars and preachers and priests wandering about, we treat that as normal and fail to grasp the profound religious element in our societies both currently and historically.
If you look through the history of the progressive reform movement, you find that it grew out of religiosity, and its founders were all profoundly, fanatically religious. We need to understand that to understand how we got here. I agree that my analysis is not a common one, but I’m not alone in it; Rothbard wrote a great deal on the subject, and on the other side of the spectrum Bertrand Russel describned the US Civil War as a continuation of the English one, waged by the Puritans. The threads are out there, I’m just trying to pull them together.
Libertarians seem to have a bit of a blind spot, perhaps because of this unfortunate association with American “Conservatism” which is itself intensely religious. So we bang on about Communists and Marxists and try to pretend that Statism is all a foreign invasion, and that is wrong. The drive for the Big State began two centuries ago, well before Marx, and it was driven by religious fervour. The marxism came later, and never took root (though the Proggies stole a lot of ideas from it).
I stand by my previous contention; the English and American Civil Wars were religious wars and should be analysed on that basis.
Glory, Glory Hallelujah!
(As I implied to Johnathan, run through that lyric replacing that phrase with what sounds like Alarakbar and it becomes a lot clearer).
Laird, just to let you know. A comment from me will eventually appear here in reply to yours, but I’ve decided not to continue with this conversation, interesting as it is, as the ridiculously broken anti-spam code just makes it impossible. Your comment arrived out of sequence (presumably held up the same way), now mine’s in the buffer. Again.
Just ain’t worth it. So thanks for your observations and hopefully I’ll get a proper post up at Cats on this subject at some point or something and we can discuss it if you’re interested there in meaningfully real time.
Sounds good, IanB. My post was caught up in the smitebot, too. Must be something about this topic which gets its knickers in a knot.
I think that Ian is on to something here. Keep in mind also that an ideology does not need a deity (in its common sense) to qualify as religion, at least not for the purpose of this discussion.
i think you miss an angle (or i am tired and didn’t read carefully). both parties in america are puritans, but the left has largely rejected the christian god. the right, however, remains down with the christian god. its interesting that the left in america has rejected the christian god and yet has become more fervent in its moral crusades. i do think it is in a sense the latest schism within christianity: christian morals with no god v. christian morals with christian god.
the left will use god as a prop here and there, but its fairly transparent.
Nice to see that god has deigned to grace us with a comment! Apparently this blog has more reach than I realized.
Often businessmen are dominated by leftist ideology – after all, as children, they went to school and they have mostly been to university and both most schools (including many private ones) and universities are dominate by unquestioned leftist assumptions.
However, there is another factor – even when a businessman knows that various “Progressive” ideas are total nonsense he may fear to say so.
For example, I suspect that the senior mangers of Walmart know that both Obamacare (the health care Bill – now Act of Congress) and Cap and Trade are crack brained nonsense – they also know that the vasty majority of their customers oppose these things.
However, the people who support the statism are POWERFUL – they are the people who organize violent “protests” and endless law cases.
So to appease the leftists Walmart managers pretend (at least I hope it is a pretense) to support all sorts of leftist causes.
To find a businessman who both knows that a leftist fad (such as minumum price for booze) is nonsense and is prepared to SAY it is nonsense – that is rare.
So hats off to Sir Stuart Rose of Marks and Spenser.
By the way (before anyone asks) – M&S is no relation of mine.
The Tesco top man is retiring (although it will not be till next March).
But he is being replaced by people who are committed to expanding Tesco’s operations in the United States.
When British companies go into the American market they almost always end up losing money – sometimes vast amounts of money (although things can look fine at first).
Time to dump Tesco shares?