The Idea Of A Perfect Human Society

Early in the seventeenth century, a small group of dedicated men founded a modest colony which was to be the embryo of the world’s most powerful nation. Man was making a new start. He was going to build a rational and supremely ethical society. He was going to attempt to emancipate himself from history and oppressive traditions, from the bondage of the past. He would trade space against time and attempt to use the time thus saved to shape a new human society according to his enlightened ideas.

Many speculative writers of the Renaissance such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon had conjured out of their daring imagination remarkable pictures of ideal Platonic republics and, late in the sixteenth century, many sober nonconformists of England had instinctively come to identify this mental ideal with the remote coast of North America —a savage, deserted coast, far removed from the brilliant and opulent world of the West Indies and Latin America with its glittering cities full of priceless Baroque churches and palaces, its mines and inexhaustible tropical resources. The wealth and splendor of Latin America must have seemed as distant to a lonely way farer on the Hudson River as the splendors of Greek Sicily did to a Roman farmer plowing along the Tiber. But this primeval wilder ness, with its virgin land where life was still wholly prehistoric, was alluring to all those dissatisfied elements in English society who suffered from the political tyranny of the Stuarts and the Anglican reaction of Archbishop Laud.

So it was, translating long-meditated thoughts into action, that the stern Puritans founded on the coast of New England what they thought would be the land of Canaan, the new Jerusalem of their dreams, and what we can now label far more accurately the New Rome. In November, 1620, off Cape Cod, these Biblical-minded men concluded the Mayflower Compact, the original social contract that became the historic foundation of American political philosophy: government resting exclusively on the consent of the governed.

When they landed and began to penetrate the fringes of the immense forests, they took possession of an empty land—empty because, in those days, agricultural settlement, not nomadic hunting, constituted real possession. The roaming Indian tribes, in Puritan eyes, belonged to the animal rather than the human world and in spite of a few early attempts at missionary work among them —those of tender-hearted John Eliot and others like William Rogers—the early settlers developed a policy of pious but ruthless extermination. They were never deliberately cruel or bloodthirsty as the Spaniards had been further south. They were cold, implacable, and determined to clear the land of all obstacles —mosquitoes, Indians, and trees. They refused to be seduced or intimidated by what Cotton Mather called “pernicious creatures” —the redoutable Iroquois confederation of Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas. They had braved the fogs and storms of a vast ocean, the deep, awful silence of the immense forests, the howling winds and impetuous rivers, the terrifying solitude of an unexplored primeval world. They would brave anything else—but in so doing, they denied and cast out of their consciousness the undoubted seductions of the New World’s savage life.

The sober fanaticism of the Puritans stood as an opaque screen between their sentiments and the overpowering nature all around them. They had left their sense of history behind them in Europe and had never possessed an intuitive feeling for the beauties of nature. They were iconoclasts who clung tenaciously to an abstract Idea— the idea of a perfect human society which would actualize on earth the Almighty’s dream. All other settlers in America —Portuguese and Spaniards, the French in Louisiana and Canada—sooner or later succumbed to the overwhelming influence of American nature. They befriended the Indians and in their humane weakness reverted often to an entrancing form of primitive life to whose charms the English and the Dutch were immune. Archaic tendencies are always deeply embedded in every human being and the confused instincts of pre historic life were often able to develop unchecked among the Latins who entered into full communion with the wild spirit of the American earth. Not so the iron-willed Puritans. They imposed their abstract plans and concepts on nature from the very start, making no concessions to the land, determined to dominate, not to bend and adapt.

Whereas the European Puritans soon had to compromise and amalgamate with the numerous other religious tendencies of the Old World and gradually disappeared as a separate entity, their migrating coreligionists took full physical possession of New England and later, through their moral influence, took mental possession of the whole continent. Thus they set the pattern of American life and thought from the very start: an absolute domination of rational man over a nature with which he refuses to enter into communion. America was destined to become the expression of Europe’s dream, a dream which could never come true in the Old World because the cramping limitations imposed by tradition, and the pressure of relatively large populations impinging on one another in a limited space, stood in the way. In order to make an idealistic Utopia come true in Europe, violent coercion was necessary because there was no virgin space where a new society might be built up without affecting unwilling neighbors. And Europe’s past history with its accumulation of venerable traditions, deeply ingrained customs, its gradual elaboration of complex and conflicting philosophies and ideals, could not be dismissed simply as a troublesome nightmare. It was discovered, from the French Revolution onward, that no Utopia could be attempted in Europe without violence and brutality, bloodshed and tears. It had to remain a dream.

The materialization of this dream was in American Puritan hands and in Puritanism was reborn the temper of the Biblical Jews, with their emphasis on strict morality, the terrible feeling of unbearable tension between God’s will and man’s hopeless inadequacy. To them, beauty was of no importance, sometimes even possessed of diabolic undertones. Purity, simplicity, were the bases of their life. This lack of aesthetic feeling, of taste for culture and for the resulting integration of man’s manifold possibilities and aspirations into a harmonious whole, gave to the Pilgrim Fathers the characteristics of civilized rather than cultured men. Only a portion of man’s countless potentialities was able to develop freely, but that to an unparalleled degree.

In the years following the Pilgrims’ first landing, wave after wave of Puritan emigrants came ashore. One colony rose after another in quick succession: Salem, Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, creeping up along the coast of Maine, founding little city-states that came to resemble closely their Classical counterparts. Communal freedom and decentralization were established from the very beginning, and all official positions were elective. But individual freedom was remark ably restricted. The franchise was tied to property qualifications and church membership. The local governments were empowered to regulate politics, religion, economics, and customs. The idea of mass democracy was repulsive to the Puritans, who were imbued with a Calvinistic faith in their predestined superiority. John Cotton, Winthrop, and other leaders believed firmly in class distinctions, so long as they themselves were the social and political elite, rid of a profligate aristocracy which had bothered them in England and contemptuous of the lazy lower classes. But theirs was no selfish desire to enjoy social superiority or political power for their own sake. They were God-fearing men, stern and self-reliant, who journeyed through life as through a probationary purgatory. “It is enough that we shall have heaven, though we should pass through hell to it,” was Governor Winthrop’s sober comment after the founding of Boston.

Like the early Romans of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Puritans founded communities of self-disciplined men whose unremitting toil was wholly dedicated to abstract entities—the abstract deities of the Roman state, the Almighty of the New England “Saints.” In both cases, individual men were, in contradistinction to Greece and Europe, ruled by the community and public opinion. Mutual vigilance, methodical organization of communities, tyranny of the group, devotion to duty and self-control, all these characteristics of the coming American nation were born in these early days. Romans and Puritans were dedicated to a severe, joyless life; determined men who bowed to no other men, natural born republicans. Two thousand years before, the Romans had come to loathe the very idea of monarchy to a degree never equaled by the Americans. After having expelled the Tarquin dynasty in 508 B.C., Publius Valerius put through a law according to which any man who attempted to make himself king should be put to death without trial. The American Puritans sympathized with their Cromwellian brethren when they beheaded Charles I. Romans and Puritans were idealistic fanatics who had a horror of useless luxury, vanity, self-indulgence. The loyal devotion of both did not go to any human being but to the abstract, impersonal authority of Law. When they became a social elite later on they felt strong and worthy enough to act sincerely and firmly as trustees for those fast-increasing populations in their expanding realms who were not yet deemed capable of sharing in the government. Discipline was the motto of the Romans as well as “the very ark of the Puritan covenant.”

Puritanism, under its moral aspect, eventually conquered the whole of America as Stoicism was destined to conquer the entire Roman world, this very Stoicism which John Buchan defined as “Puritanism stripped of its element of rapture.” Both had in common the fact that they were not so much elaborate philosophies as ways of life, psychological attitudes, the ultimate ethical consequences of Protestant reformations. They made few demands on the mind but a great many on the character and both stood opposed to the prevailing Epicureanism of Greek and European cultures. They espoused the ethical point of view of Civilization rather than the aesthetic outlook of Culture.

Roman religion was originally a cold, formal creed which did not indulge in the warm mythology of Greece. Rome’s ultimate acceptance of Stoicism could have been as easily forecast as the rise of the European Reformation, which brushed aside the “mythology” of Catholicism. It was a question of psychological disposition, not of ultimate truths. Rome’s austere gods were as impersonal, abstract, and formless as the Puritans’ Almighty. They were embodiments of moral principles restraining passions, but were at an infinitely remote distance from the worshipers —such abstract deities hovering over Rome as Justitia, Fides, Veritas, who had little in common with the flamboyant and whimsical gods of the catholic Greek Olympus. Roman priests were “professors of spiritual jurisprudence” as Dean Inge expressed it. Greek priests served gods of pleasure, sensual or intellectual, gods capable of inspiring great cultural achievements, gods of art and literature, strong and weak gods, warm and humane. By contrast with Greeks and Europeans, neither the Romans nor the Anglo- Saxons were interested in metaphysics. Their emphasis was wholly on morality, on ethical standards.

-exceprted from “The Coming Caesars” by Amaury de Reincourt (1957)