Sunday, August 11, 2019

Public Righteousness

According to the stereotypes I grew up with in the 50s and 60s, that would refer to good, respectable church-going people who we less virtuous beneath the surface.  They might be business cheaters, adulterers or molesters, abusive, or secret drunkards, but they pretended well and kept up appearances. Self-righteous instead of righteous.  There was some truth to it, but it was sometimes overblown by people who did not want to be respectable, looking for excuses and people to accuse. That there was social pressure to act this way was also true, though again, I think overblown.

Public righteousness these days is more likely to be enforced from an activist left, and different items are on the righteousness list.  In some corners there is a great deal of social pressure, including threat of violence. Fortunately, that isn't true in most places. I don't think those activists picture themselves as the cultural descendants of small-town Baptists of the 1950s, but it's pretty similar, just with more threatening these days.

3 comments:

David Foster said...

Oh, absolutely. I'm confident that some of the more vitriolic SJWs are the kind of people who...had they lives 60 or 70 years ago..would have happily participated in driving an unmarried pregnant girl to suicide, or mocking a woman as an 'old maid' because she had chosen a career instead of marriage. The point is the cruelty against a safe target, not the content of the belief system that justifies the cruelty.

I might have cited this here before...In 'Faust', Gretchen...just after finding that she is pregnant...is approached by her awful friend Lieschen, who (still unaware of Gretchen’s situation) is licking her chops about the prospect of humiliating another girl (Barbara) who has also become pregnant outside of marriage. Here’s Gretchen, reflecting on her own past complicity in such viciousness:

How readily I used to blame
Some poor young soul that came to shame!
Never found sharp enough words like pins
To stick into other people’s sins
Black as it seemed, I tarred it to boot
And never black enough to suit
Would cross myself, exclaim and preen–
Now I myself am bared to sin!

There’s a lot of this…”sharp enough words like pins to stick in other people’s sins”, combined with the pleasure of preening, going on today. And many if not most practitioners thereof will, unlike Gretchen, likely never repent.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I think you did post it, but it's a good reminder.

RichardJohnson said...

Fortunately, that isn't true in most places. I don't think those activists picture themselves as the cultural descendants of small-town Baptists of the 1950s, but it's pretty similar, just with more threatening these days.
Maybe the activists don't, but those who have looked at the situation have considered the similarity rather obvious. Not the first time I have mentioned Joseph Bottum's book. An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America From the Amazon review:
Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "The Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old Mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to "The Swallows of Capistrano," the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying Mainline voice in public life.

The most strident political activist I knew of my parent's generation was the daughter of a Congregational minister,who had left her father's church. No accident, I believe.