I was reading a piece today by ZMan about "Puritans and Progressives" and how similar they are.
What is going on here? I think that the way to understand it is to use Rodney Stark's concepts of "informal social control" and "formal social control" from his book Why God?
Stark argues that the appearance of monotheistic religions in the Axial Age occurred because people were starting to live in communities that were too big to be regulated by the face-to-face informal social control of the village. In the village everyone knows everyone else and the community of women determine who is naughty or nice, as in my immortal catchphrase: "I can't believe she said/did that."
But when the world gets too big you need the impersonal authority of formal social control with governments for the external control of people's acts and monotheistic gods that can peer into your soul to control your mental acts.
But the thing is that we are all programmed for the intimate world of the village and informal social control. So we are outraged, outraged that there are people out there actually allowed to write stuff that we know is evil and opposed to everything we believe. The nerve! And so we get the Puritan witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts, of which everyone has heard tell. And we get the Reign of Terror witch hunts of the French Revolution, of which everyone has also heard tell, but with which some of our lefty friends fail to make the connection. Oh and the Great Purge of 1930s Soviet Union, and the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, and the Maoist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Today we are having a similar experience with the postmodernists and "political correctness." And this witch-hunt was specifically recommended by left Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay on "Repressive Tolerance."
Our Big Problem, I think, is that there is another social control concept that has taken hold in the last 200 years. It is what we might call the "indirect social control" of the market economy. The market economy does not directly say: "Thou Shalt" and "Thou Shalt Not." It only gives you a nudge.
In my view there is a problem with the indirect social control of the market. It does not have enough valence, enough moral drama of good against evil. People want to live in the moral drama of the battle of good against evil, and they think something is missing in their lives if the moral drama is missing.
Against this appetite for moral drama is the opinion of Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. In his view humans cannot handle the heightened drama of a witch-hunt or a Reign of Terror for too long. And so there is always a return to normalcy, what the left calls "Thermidorean Reaction" because the French Reign of Terror ended in the revolutionary month of Thermidor.
There is also a theory that witch-hunts stop when the hunters start coming for respectable women that are wives of local notables. It is one thing to sweep up witches on the margins of society, but quite another when high-born women are involved, darling. So does Prof. Amy Wax count as a high-born notable? Does the reign of microaggressions stop with her?
We shall see.
But I think that the key to the whole matter is to understand the interplay of the cultures of "informal social control," "formal social control," and "indirect social control."
And remember what Harry Hotspur said about the claim of Henry IV to be the King of England.
Because that is what the left has been doing in respect of the market economy for a century and a half: prying out the title of capitalism, which they find too indirect, too lacking in moral drama, for long continuance.
[Just like the Puritans] [t]he modern Left is consumed with defining who is inside and who is outside their thing. The people inside are the righteous, while the people outside are all evil.And it happens that today David French is reporting on the liberal rage at the idea -- the idea! -- of hiring National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson to write for The Atlantic. And then there is John Derbyshire writing about the travails of Amy Wax, a law professor who is getting in trouble for suggesting that “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half” at the law school at the University of Pennsylvania.
What is going on here? I think that the way to understand it is to use Rodney Stark's concepts of "informal social control" and "formal social control" from his book Why God?
Stark argues that the appearance of monotheistic religions in the Axial Age occurred because people were starting to live in communities that were too big to be regulated by the face-to-face informal social control of the village. In the village everyone knows everyone else and the community of women determine who is naughty or nice, as in my immortal catchphrase: "I can't believe she said/did that."
But when the world gets too big you need the impersonal authority of formal social control with governments for the external control of people's acts and monotheistic gods that can peer into your soul to control your mental acts.
But the thing is that we are all programmed for the intimate world of the village and informal social control. So we are outraged, outraged that there are people out there actually allowed to write stuff that we know is evil and opposed to everything we believe. The nerve! And so we get the Puritan witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts, of which everyone has heard tell. And we get the Reign of Terror witch hunts of the French Revolution, of which everyone has also heard tell, but with which some of our lefty friends fail to make the connection. Oh and the Great Purge of 1930s Soviet Union, and the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, and the Maoist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Today we are having a similar experience with the postmodernists and "political correctness." And this witch-hunt was specifically recommended by left Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay on "Repressive Tolerance."
Our Big Problem, I think, is that there is another social control concept that has taken hold in the last 200 years. It is what we might call the "indirect social control" of the market economy. The market economy does not directly say: "Thou Shalt" and "Thou Shalt Not." It only gives you a nudge.
In my view there is a problem with the indirect social control of the market. It does not have enough valence, enough moral drama of good against evil. People want to live in the moral drama of the battle of good against evil, and they think something is missing in their lives if the moral drama is missing.
Against this appetite for moral drama is the opinion of Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. In his view humans cannot handle the heightened drama of a witch-hunt or a Reign of Terror for too long. And so there is always a return to normalcy, what the left calls "Thermidorean Reaction" because the French Reign of Terror ended in the revolutionary month of Thermidor.
There is also a theory that witch-hunts stop when the hunters start coming for respectable women that are wives of local notables. It is one thing to sweep up witches on the margins of society, but quite another when high-born women are involved, darling. So does Prof. Amy Wax count as a high-born notable? Does the reign of microaggressions stop with her?
We shall see.
But I think that the key to the whole matter is to understand the interplay of the cultures of "informal social control," "formal social control," and "indirect social control."
And remember what Harry Hotspur said about the claim of Henry IV to be the King of England.
[The king]Yeah! You give 'em hell Harry.
Broke oath on oath, committed wrong on wrong;
And, in conclusion, drove us to seek out
This head of safety; and withal to pry
Into his title, the which now we find
Too indirect for long continuance.
Because that is what the left has been doing in respect of the market economy for a century and a half: prying out the title of capitalism, which they find too indirect, too lacking in moral drama, for long continuance.
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