Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: A Thanksgiving Turkey From a Chickenhawk Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/a_thanksgiving_turkey_from_a_chickenhawk#10235 Post contents: The image of a shining city on a hill that provides the model for others' salvation misses Puritanism's key idea: the most important task of each person is to save his/her own soul. Everything else is secondary to that. In this sense, Puritanism was both extremely inidvidualist and extremely selfish. Puritanim's social effect stemmed from what people had to do to save their souls: to overcome highly asocial sins/ personality traits such as pride, envy and hatred, and to inculcate prosocial traits such as humility and forgiveness. Early modern theologians were well aware of the beneficial effects this personality change brought to society, but they regarded that as a side-effect. Acknowledging and overcoming one's own faults does not feel pleasant, and many people tried to avoid this part of religious morality by focusing on correcting the morals of others. I.e., those people remained proud, vain, quarrelsome and greedy, but they believed themselves to be virtuous, because they tried to eliminate these -- and other -- flaws from people around them. Puritans knew well this "avoiding my faults by saving others" personality. These people were thought to be an example of the "seeing the mite in other person's eye but not the beam in their own" type, and they were classified as a common and dangerous subcategory of hypocrites. This is very probably where Puritans would have placed the neocons and their interpretation of the city on the hill idea. The formerly all-important focus on one's own personal morality is totally missing from that interpretation. Sent at: 2008 07 05