Word: puritans
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Seventeenth century artists depicted sober, stiff youngsters, dour in face, erect in posture, adult in demeanor. Life for a child in Puritan New England, after all, was a sobering proposition: one-half of all youngsters died before the age of ten, and those who survived were continually reminded that they had been born in sin and were doomed to hell if they did not submit to the commandments of parent and preacher. To adults, play was a manifestation of a depraved nature, and they tried to coerce their children into becoming models of rectitude. One dictum for raising properly passive...
Hookers, happy or otherwise, do not necessarily lack the puritan virtues of hard work, thrift and capital accumulation. Nevertheless, Lasch, a history professor at Rochester University, legitimately finds cracks of doom in our sanguinity. His thunderings shrivel our "ironic detachment," his term for a sense of humor...
Still, the official moralistic ethic-it might almost be called Puritan-prevails. China's leaders inveigh against the licentious life-style of the imperial past. When Mao's widow Chiang Ch'ing first came under attack, she was frequently portrayed as a latter-day Empress Wu Tse-t'ien, whose career began in the 7th century as a 13-year-old court concubine and ended in an orgy of sex and assassination. Another execrated royal personage is the 8th century Emperor Hsüan Tsung, who was hopelessly enamored of a shapely concubine, Yang Kuei...
THUS THE LOYALTY test assumes for Jones an almost ritual importance. It is a way of keeping absolutist beliefs absolute. It is not the first the time Americans have heard of loyalty tests: McCarthy once advocated them. In both men it is the old Puritan penchant for the absolute truth surviving deformed through history, breeding paranoia and, in Jonestown, total tragedy...
These are the legacy of the Puritan's Covenant psychology, and they are a great source of the old American demon, absolutism. The movements epitomize one half of the national psyche, the Puritan conscience, and contend with the other half, democratic license. They take up, once again, the Puritan's vision of an ideal community and a steadying of morals and manners. Their history is mostly a history of failures--the continent is littered with testimonies to American visions. And the People's Temple was really no different: it sought the ideal community, too. Like all its American predecessors...