Pun Salad

Portsmouth is somewhat of a bastion of progressivism in New Hampshire, and that's reflected in its library. The staff took the liberty of producing an "Anti-Racism Zine" last year, enthusiastically weighing in on the Robin DiAngelo/Ibram X. Kendi/Angela Y. Davis side of a contentious public issue.

Fortunately, however, they do a decent job of keeping their shelves ideologically neutral. And when I submitted a suggestion for the purchase of this Noah Rothman book, they agreed, and even put it on hold for me when it came in. Now, I'm under no illusion that casual browsers in months hence will pick up the book, read it out of curiosity, and, bingo, Portsmouth Bernie Sanders voters en masse turn into National Review conservatives. I'm just happy to have it there, in case.

The author is the Associate Editor of Commentary, and I've mentioned him favorably over the years (here, here, here, here) I thought his 2019 book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, was flawed but basically OK. This one is very good.

Of course, Mencken's famous definition of Puritanism is deployed early on: "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Zing!

But, somewhat surprisingly, Rothman does not use "Puritan" as a simple epithet. (Something I didn't know: the term was originally conceived as an epithet.) That would have been pretty easy to do: simply pick and choose from the hundreds of tales of censorship, deplatformings, deinvitations, cancellations, firings; arrange them into themes, and voilà, you got a book. Instead, he looks back at the historical heyday of Puritanism, mostly in America, and if you (like me) were only paying fleeting attention during your history classes, you'll learn a lot.

Rothman shows how the "new" Puritans unconsciously echo the attitudes and actions of those bygone figures, and how that plays out in many areas, with tactics we've all noticed: theological-style indoctrination, denunciation and persecution of apostates, censorship of literature and art, humorlessness, and (above all) earnestness. (As P. J. O'Rourke observed: "Earnestness is stupidity sent to college". The Puritans, it should be noted, founded Harvard.)

Rothman laces his trenchant narrative with a dry wit: he notes that, in decline, the Massachusetts Puritans referred to the increase in civil litigation to resolve disputes as "creeping 'Rhode Islandism'". And comments: "Even today, the very concept is enough to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who doesn't live in Rhode Island."

And, it should be noted, Rothman goes out of his way to demonstrate that, in both historical and modern versions, Puritanism isn't an unalloyed bad. Historically, for example, they were famed for the "Puritan work ethic". Hey, I'm a fan. And in the current age, the new Puritans really did, for example, improve things in the workplace for women and minorities. (Not without going overboard in many cases, of course, but still.)

What about "fighting back", as promised in Rothman's subtitle? To a certain extent, the old Puritans carried the seeds of their own eventual irrelevance. (One of their last gasps, however: the witch trials.) Rothman recommends mockery; and clarifying "where culture ends and politics begins".