The Ghosts of Puritanism

Animals: Give and Take

Long shadows fall across the English speaking world, the ghosts of Christmases Cancelled.

Puritanism runs deep, there is a culture out there that is anti-hedonistic, censorious, self-righteous and intolerant. Rarely these days does it bubble to the surface in its pure form, instead it contaminates the thinking of a huge swathe of people and disparate movements.

Puritanism exists in its purest forms these days in the right wing lower class Protestantism of middle America. Take a dirt-poor French peasant and squeeze out all his joie de vivre, beat him about the head with a Bible and scare the bejesus out of him with Red Menace fairy tales and you've got an American. Well, maybe not, but that's not far off. The combination of a belief in a right to pursue happiness until you run it down and kill it and a fundamental distrust of anything that is likely to actually make somebody happy is a powerful and poisonous brew.

In Britain puritan values are most often confronted among either the reactionary working class or the earnest left whingers. One good thing that can be said of true blue Tories is that they have little truck with puritanism.

The debate on fox hunting shows the mixed up course of puritan thinking. The puritans of old detested blood sports, not principally because there was animal cruelty involved but because there was pleasure obtained from the sport. Pleasure was sinful. In the days of Cromwell many kinds of traditional country pastimes of casual cruelty were suppressed but the primary motive was saving the souls of the damned people not saving animals from suffering. The evil was the pleasure and the encouragement of the vices of gambling, drinking and enjoying life. There was far too much bear baiting, beer and skittles, so they tried to ban it. Ten pin bowling is an invention designed to get around a puritan prohibition. Skittles is a traditional game involving nine pins and a wooden ball. A Connecticut law of 1841 prohibited the playing of the evil game of nine pins, so instead of stopping having fun the people added an extra pin and carried on playing, inventing ten pin bowling.

Of course the greatest ever act of Puritan prohibition, the prohibition with the capital P, comes from the land of the Puritans, the sanctuary of the sanctimonious.

There are very many reasons to oppose fox hunting. Respectable reasons centre on the needless and gratuitous cruelty that is involved. My grandfather was a farmer who needed to control vermin on his land. He kept poultry at times either indoors in a barn system or outdoors in a free range system. In either case foxes represented a severe danger to his profitability. When a fox gets into a roost of birds he fears detection, the birds give an alarm call and try to escape, his instincts tell him to kill birds giving alarm calls. In the wild this is behaviour which works well. As farmed poultry cannot escape this instinctive behaviour is a recipe for disaster, the fox gets into a killing frenzy killing far more birds than he could possibly eat, many birds can die of fright, the farmer is rightly bloody furious and sees the fox as a ruthless deranged serial killer killing for kicks that needs to be exterminated. The fox can't be bargained with, the farmer can't let him take one bird every now and again because the fox's instincts won't allow for that, there is no way to get along. Foxes have to be controlled. Now you can do it efficiently or you can do it on horseback charging about the countryside as if you owned it all and have fun feeling superior to everybody you meet because you're on a horse whose entire reason for existing is to give you that feeling of superiority.

I had two grandfathers (most people outside the Appalachians do) one knew his place and the other owned his place. My little grandad didn't come from a traditional rural community and he didn't hold with forelock tugging. When the master of the hunt rode up one day and called him “my good man” he left rather quickly and the hunt never came back.

“I am nobody's good man. You're on my farm. Get off it and don't come back.”

They haven't come back in seventy years. I am proud of my grandad. If he had a troublesome fox he would sort it out himself, it wasn't sport it was pest control. That objection to hunting, that it is gallivanting about the country with not enough respect for the small farmer and land owner still remains valid.

The other respectable reason to oppose hunting is the animal cruelty angle. Chasing an animal until it is exhausted and then tearing it to pieces is cruel and it is knowingly cruel and deliberately inflicted.

Then we come to the less respectable reasons. For some people opposing hunting is about class warfare. Huntsmen represent the privileged classes, even if many of them these days are middle class.

Many of the people who oppose fox hunting don't oppose culling of foxes, they oppose enjoying doing it. That is a puritan urge.

Puritanism is petty-minded, sanctimonious and judgemental. The whole point of being a Puritan is to be better than than those who are not, to be morally superior. It is a form of competitive morality, oneupmanship of the conscience, and it is sickening. Puritan urges also seem to underlie a lot of “politically correct” thinking. There is a politically correct stance on every issue, if you hold it, against logic many times, you score brownie points.

Of course all politics is about an interpretation of the moral course of action, your political opponents are almost always bound to be driven by a sense of morality and a sense of doing the right thing which is as strong as yours, it is just based on a different philosophy and a different idea of what the right thing is. Some people see reducing inequality as a moral imperative, for example Bill Gates and his foundation are working towards giving many poorer Americans the chance to get an education as good as the one he dropped out of. Other people see reducing inequality as morally evil because it is against nature and the competitive struggle, as if somehow scoring the maximum possible score against nature is some sort of Good Thing that benefits humanity, God or whatever it is these misguided people care about and that having winners, whoever they may be, is somehow A Thing of Great Importance. Only the height of the peaks matters to these people. People don't matter. Greatness matters. Any kind of greatness.

I suppose to people whose only claim to greatness is having the same number of chromosomes and living within a couple of thousand miles of great people sharing greatness vicariously as one three hundred millionth of a great nation is better than being a good and worthwhile individual, which would be a thoroughly unrealistic aspiration. Other people have made your country great, sometimes because they were great, more often because there were a great many people of very modest attributes there. Your fair share of that glory is infinitesimal, and undeserved.

Virtue for the Puritans involves working and not enjoying yourself. If somebody has derived some fun along the way they feel soiled. Puritan nudists walk about in the nude declaring no pleasure from being seen nude nor from seeing other people nude and even being distrustful of people who actually seem to enjoy the sensation of being nude. Oh no, anything like that is sinful. The pleasure of nudism comes partly from the company of nudists but mostly from feeling morally superior to people who wear clothes. They will censure anybody who claims to enjoy seeing other nudists nude but they will never censure any nudist for declaring themselves morally superior to you simply for not wearing clothes sometimes. I could never be a nudist, I feel the need to do something worthwhile before I reward myself with a sensation of smug superiority.

Recently (February 2007) there was a debate about whether it was acceptable to send your Valentine roses flown in from Kenya, with the observation that despite the costs of air freighting them less fossil fuel inputs went into growing them than roses grown in heated greenhouses in Holland and this trade was giving the Kenyans valuable export earnings which would stimulate the Kenyan economy. This riled a New Puritan. How dare they! That land should be growing food for Kenyans! It seems the rightful place for Kenyans is working in subsistence agriculture grubbing a bare living from the soil not being part of world trade, earning a better living. Being part of a trade which brought prosperity to Africa was morally repugnant to them. It seems virtue involves growing your food, working hard and not getting too much pleasure from your food. The new left Puritans favour a rigidly bland vegetarian diet high in moral fibre.

Of course the label Puritanism is not strictly accurate, that suggests a way of thinking that began in England in the sixteenth century. There are roots of moral-driven anti-hedonism that go way back. Ascetic hermits lived in caves or in barrels or out in the desert long before John the Baptist's time. Self denial was seen as a way to gain favour of gods or the respect of people. Abstinence from sex, meat, wine, comfortable clothing and human company have been seen as being some kind of indication of moral rectitude in many cultures through the ages. Fasting, genital mutilation and accepting the pain of tattoos or undergoing pointless demonstrations of bearing up to pain and suffering were seen to have moral dimensions as if suffering deprivation or pain actually made the person a better person. But it is all bullshit. Somebody who stood up to hardship for the sake of standing up to hardship hasn't really done anything worthy. Walking across burning coals, trudging to the South Pole because it's there without a plan for doing anything useful when you get there or sleeping in between two virgins are not actions which are worth doing and they don't deserve respect. Neither does the kissing of leprous sores or wearing a hair shirt.

Hitler was a vegetarian because he thought it helped reduce his flatulence. But to Goebbels this was a propaganda matter, he portrayed the Fuehrer as if he was Gandhi in jackboots, not for his respect for life (that would be a sick joke) but for his asceticism. Why does anybody think that denying yourself easily obtainable pleasure makes you morally superior? I'd much rather shake the hand of playboy, industrialist and hero Oskar Schindler than self-styled saint Gandhi whose claim to fame rests so strongly on the things he chose not to do to make himself seem to be a moral giant.

I would also much rather spend an evening in the company of Nigella Lawson than with any stick-thin teetotal vegan animal rights activist. Secondary moral rectitude is far more obnoxious than secondary smoking and the stench of it really clings.

The culture of despising fat people seems to be made up of a heady mix of class hatred (the educated middle class hating the education-distaining lower classes whose incidence of obesity is higher and somehow more visible and risible) and anti-hedonism. There is a very strong moral component in the violent bile shown by many, especially the young and educated. Also drugs are no longer cool with this group for similar reasons, it used to be that the lower class drug of choice was alcohol and speed, the educated class could consider themselves superior if they “experimented” with more exotic drugs which could be thought to enhance enlightenment. Now that so many of the uneducated are spaced out on skunk a life of dabbling in drugs has ceased to be something glamorous to aspire to. I remember the good old days when graffiti with drug references was legible and grammatically correct. These days cannabis is as glamorous as ten Embassy Regal and cocaine is as exotic as Liebfraumilch.

The whole world needs to be given a good slap. There is nothing morally superior in denying yourself a pleasure in and of itself. Yes, resisting greed and avoiding excess is good behaviour, but good as in well advised and reasonable, not good as in achievement of moral superiority. You can't equate saying no to a cream cake with helping somebody in distress.

“Gloomy saints who abstained from all pleasures of sense, who lived in solitude in the desert, denying themselves meat and wine and the society of women, were, nevertheless, not obliged to abstain from all pleasures. The pleasures of the mind were considered to be superior to those of the body, and a high place among the pleasures of the mind was assigned to the contemplation of the eternal tortures to which the pagans and heretics would hereafter be subjected. It is one of the drawbacks to asceticism that it sees no harm in pleasures other than those of sense, and yet, in fact, not only the best pleasures, but also the very worst, are purely mental...On the contrary when a man tortures himself he feels that it gives him a right to torture others, and inclines him to accept any system of dogma by which this right is fortified.”

Bertrand Russell

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