Predestination is Calvinism’s fundamental doctrine. To the Calvinist, all human effort is utterly futile, since nothing we could ever possibly do could affect our salvation, or lack thereof, which was decreed by God long before the foundations of the world were laid. How the hell you get from “all human effort is futile” to “we must totally remake society” is above my pay grade, feel free to check Walzer if you want to give it a go, but it’s obvious that the Calvinists did get there — see the English Civil Wars, which themselves were a sideshow to the whole charming episode we pros call The Period of the Wars of Religion, 1517-1648.
The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul …
… and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state …
Ideology, then, removes the distinction between public and private. You can’t simply say you’re a Puritan, you really have to BE one — constantly, perfectly, since there’s nothing that Puritanism doesn’t touch. And the only way to do that, of course, is to do everything in full public view at all times. Calvin did — as Walzer remarks, John Calvin, the man, is almost completely absent from Calvin’s writings. (Unlike Luther, whose idiosyncratic, not to say lunatic, personality comes through in practically every sentence). Calvin achieved that clear windowpane prose Orwell claimed was the mark of a great writer — nothing between audience and subject at all. Calvin would, indeed, take the remark that he’s almost a complete cipher, personally, as a very high compliment.
Severian, “Ideology II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-09.
June 1, 2023
QotD: “The Puritans were the SJWs of their day”
Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: Christianity, CivilWar, England, Ideology, Puritanism, Severian, SocialJustice — Nicholas @ 01:00
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