The roots of new puritanism
Recent polling conducted by Ipsos Mori for The Economist appears to lay to rest the debate over whether the British would end up rejecting lockdowns and long-term limits on social interaction because of their “freedom-loving” qualities. In a display of puritanism, 19 per cent of the British public favours night-time curfews regardless of Covid risk. Incredibly, 40 per cent favour mask-wearing to be enforced in shops and public transport in perpetuity. Worryingly, a majority of respondents favour maintaining the full gamut of measures we are living under “until Covid-19 is under control globally”.
Rachel Cunliffe of the New Statesman, and formerly Reaction, responded: “There is a subsection of society who have always wanted to deny others the right to do things they personally have no interest in… The pandemic has just given them perfect cover to pretend their puritanical instincts make them virtuous.” I can certainly see how the view that the pandemic has allowed a latent puritanism to run riot is consistent with the atmosphere north of the border.
The Scottish professional class cultivated a public morality of decorum and self-discipline. To be a modern bourgeois Scot was to acknowledge at least in principle the attraction of the ideal of “Godly discipline” championed by John Knox. Robert Burns’s immortal satire of the Calvinist mentality “Holy Willie’s Prayer” in which a corrupt minister castigates his wayward flock for their indulgences (“O Lord, Thou kens what zeal I bear, / When drinkers drink, an’ swearers swear, / An’ singing here, an’ dancin there…”) is so resonant because it strikes at the bourgeois Scot’s secret fear – that his creed of personal restraint, “everything in moderation, dear” is easily mocked as hypocrisy and being miserable for the sake of it will not open the gates of Heaven to him.
But in England? Really? Full-blown puritanism, in England? After all, the nation’s imagination is populated by boisterous fat men. Brimming with patriotic fervour, John Bull always seems to be just about to burst out of the confines of his Union Jack waistcoat. He symbolises a “strong natural feeling,” a 19th-century American observer remarked. “Banish plump Jack and banish all the world,” Falstaff pleads to young Prince Hal in his doomed attempt to keep himself in “Harry’s company” after he becomes King. The English hero may be a glutton, but he is redeemed by his frank pleasure in life. The Englishman takes Falstaff’s side – banish food and drink? Why not banish “all the world” too?
There are notable exceptions – for example, the New Model Army and their puritan supporters of the mid-17th century, or teetotal religious nonconformists of the late 19th century crusaded against the “doss houses” of the industrial cities. No, the reason why the new puritanism commands so much support is because it is a new beast – and as a consequence holds a unique appeal to the English chattering classes, whose manners and tastes were genuinely resilient to the appeal of the old religious puritanism.
The new puritanism is motivated, not by the firebrand teachings of John Knox, but by existing generational tensions. The young are often cast in the role of vaccine-hesitant disease vectors, uninterested in “doing their bit” in the fight against Covid. It is also motivated by modern cultural anxieties. We have come to expect longer and longer life-spans as a result of ever-more expansive scientific and medical progress. A novel disease that did not respond to existing treatments and appeared to cut down a significant number of people before they had had their “three score years and ten” had the capacity to really shock a public unused to heavy mortality due to infectious disease.
By the time my grandfather was a teen, he had lost his mother and father. My grandmother’s father died before she had reached 20. All three of them would have lived for many, many more years had they been fortunate enough to have lived in the 21st century. Those formative experiences of death to close relatives are thankfully so much less common than they used to be. But as a result, we increasingly see death, not merely, in Donald Rumsfeld’s helpful term, as a “known unknown” but as an “unknown unknown,” something that happens to young risk-takers, in dreadful one-off events like terror attacks, and to the very, very old.
The true puritans will always be merely a vocal minority. Far scarier is the genuine majority in the UK who have quietly embraced a public morality that takes as its guiding ideal: “better safe than sorry.”