Last week my colleague Professor O’Brien wrote an interesting piece, The Bay State’s Dirty Secret: Puritans and Blockheads Are Alive and Well. Whenever I see the Puritans besieged I’m compelled to don my sadd colors of woolen breeches and stockings, cape, and wide brimmed hat, and defend our maligned cultural ancestors. The blockheads will have to wait their turn.
Professor O’Brien credits puritanical moralism for the slow rollout of marijuana dispensaries and highly regulated casinos. I see it differently. The sluggish movement on dispensaries is more due to managerial incompetence than puritanism. I also think the hare-like unveiling is attributable to delays forced by revelations of back room dealing, back scratching, favoritism, and cronyism – in other words, many of the mischiefs Professor O’Brien recognizes within our political culture. Those ills though are not founded in Puritan communitarian moralism but in the state’s politics-as-a-market individualistic dealing.
As to the moralism surrounding casinos, I didn’t see much of it in the referendum debate last year. Perhaps it was guilty conscience, but the casinos’ television advertising campaigns hardly ever mentioned casinos, gambling, etc. They soothed voters with tales of thousands of jobs revitalizing communities. The opponents, who never got on television, did not threaten to burn gamblers at the stake.
Instead the want of moral language impoverished the debate over casinos. America has two languages. The primary and dominant one is the language of the market. The distant second, as the late political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams argued, is that of biblical morality. Few progressives would use that language though – an important exception being Deval Patrick, who employed it when speaking of educational progress for the least among us or taking in immigrant children. But Patrick was unique.
Professor O’Brien bemoans Massachusetts’ unprogressive record of electing women and minorities, and properly so. I’d go a bit easier on the Puritans here too – one take away from historian David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed is that the Puritans were actually the feminists of their day!
As Fischer describes it gender relationships in early New England were unequal, but they were based on a partnership. Marriage was based on love and was a contractual, not religious, institution. Men and women were both capable of joining the church; there was a Christian ideal of spiritual equality. Laws offered women protection from physical or verbal abuse, and women could own property. Family members lived within a complex web of mutual obligations. Even Puritan sex was not so puritanical. (I never assign my students the passages on sex because I know they’ll read them anyway).
The Puritans had other cultural approaches that were progressive – for their time and in contrast with other cultural strains in America. But let’s not overdo it. Their city on a hill was limited to the community of true believers. For instance, two names they would never tolerate in their midst would be O’Brien and Cunningham.