History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The rewards for such pedantry are found in a tone of clear thinking. A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means becoming more of a person. Ideas are stale things until they are personally dramatized. The only good writers of opinion are those who instinctively reproduce the atmosphere of discussion, whose sentences have the tone of discussion with themselves or with an imagined group. The impulse for discussion is an impulse towards the only environment where creative thinking can be done. All the more reason why an instinct for workmanship should come in to insure that thought does not lose itself in feeble sparring or detached monologue.

THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER

To the modern young person who tries to live well there is no type so devastating and harassing as the puritan. We cannot get away from him. In his sight we always live. We finish with justifying our new paganism against him, but we never quite lose consciousness of his presence. Even Theodore Dreiser, who has always revolted from the puritan clutch, finds it necessary now and then to tilt a lance against him. If there were no puritans we should have to invent them. And if the pagan Mr. Dreiser has to keep on through life fighting puritans, how much more intrigued must we be who are only reformed puritans, and feel old dangers stirring at every aggressive gesture of righteousness? For the puritan is the most stable and persistent of types. It is scarcely a question of a puritanical age and a pagan age. It is only a question of more puritans or less puritans. Even the most emancipated generation will find that it has only broken its puritanism up into compartments, and balances sexual freedom—or better, perhaps, a pious belief in sexual freedom—with a cult of efficiency and personal integrity which is far more coercive than the most sumptuary of laws. Young people who have given up all thought of “being good” anxiously celebrate a cult of “making good.” And a superstition like eugenics threatens to terrorize the new intelligentsia.

Every new generation, in fact, contrives to find some new way of being puritanical. Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice. Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness arises to bewilder and deflect the essor towards life. Just when convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to the race. This means not only that our daily living is to be dampened by the haunting thought of misery that we cannot personally prevent, but that our thirst towards love-experience is to be discouraged and turned aside into a concern for racial perfection. That is, we are subtly persuaded against merely growing widely and loving intensely. We become vague and mystified means toward nebulous and unreal ends. This new puritanism will not let us be ends in ourselves, or let personality be the chief value in life. It will almost let us sometimes. But it always pulls us up somewhere. There is always a devil of inhibition to interpose before our clean and naïve grasping of life. (You see, my puritanism takes the form of a suspicion that there may be a personal devil lurking in the universe.)

This is why the puritan always needs to be thoroughly explained and exposed. We must keep him before our eyes, recognize him as the real enemy, no matter in what ideal disguise he lurks. We must learn how he works, and what peculiar satisfactions he gets from his activity. For he must get satisfaction or he would not be so prevalent. I accept the dogma that to explain anybody we have to do little more than discover just what contentment people are getting from what they do, or from what they are permitting to happen to them, or even from what they are flinging their will into trying to prevent happening to them. For, if life is anything positive, it is the sense of control. In the puritan, of course, we have the paradox how he can get satisfaction from ruggedly and sternly subjecting himself and renouncing the world, the flesh and the devil. There is a popular superstition that the puritan has an extra endowment of moral force, that he reverses the natural current of life, that he resists the drag of carnality down towards hell, that his energy is thrown contra-satisfaction, that this control is a real straddling of the nefarious way. But, of course, it is just this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful and usually devastating channels. The puritan is just as much of a “natural” man as you or I.

But we still have to explain how this lustful, headstrong creature called man, spilling with greed, could so unabatedly throughout the ages give up the primitive satisfaction of sex and food and drink and gregariousness and act the ascetic and the glumly censorious. How could an animal whose business was to feel powerful get power from being in subjection and deprivation? Well, the puritan gets his sense of power from a very cunningly organized satisfaction of two of his strongest impulses,—the self-conscious personal impulses of being regarded and being neglected. The puritan is no thwarted and depleted person. On the contrary, he is rather a complete person, getting almost the maximum of satisfaction out of these two apparently contradictory sentiments,—the self-regarding and self-abasing. The pure autocrat would feed himself wholly on the first, the pure slave would be only a human embodiment of the second. But the pure puritan manages to make the most powerful amalgam of both.

What we may call the puritan process starts with the satisfaction of the impulse for self-abasement (an impulse as primitive as any, for in the long struggle for survival it was often just as necessary for life to cower as it was to fight). It is only the puritan’s prestige that has attached moral value to self-sacrifice, for there is nothing intrinsic in it that makes it any more praiseworthy than lust. But its pragmatic value is immense. When the puritan announces himself as the least worthy of men, he not only predisposes in his favor the naturally slavish people around him, but he neutralizes the aggressive and self-regarding who would otherwise be moved to suppress him. He renounces, he puts on meekness, he sternly regiments himself, he makes himself unhappy in ways that are just not quite severe enough to excite pity and yet run no risk of arousing any envy. If the puritan does all this unconsciously, the effect is yet the same as if he were deliberately plotting. To give his impulses of self-abasement full play, he must, of course, exercise a certain degree of control. This control, however, gives him little of that sense of power that makes for happiness. Puritan moralists have always tried to make us believe in this virtue of self-control. They forget to point out, however, that it does not become a virtue until it has become idealized. Control over self gives us little sense of control. It is the dreariest of all satisfactions of the will to power. Not until we become proud of our self-control do we get satisfaction. The puritan only begins to reap his satisfaction when the self-regarding impulse comes into play.

Having given his self-abasing impulse free rein, he is now in a position to exploit his self-regard. He has made himself right with the weak and slavish. He has fortified himself with their alliance. He now satisfies his self-regard by becoming proud of his humility and enjoining it on others. If it were self-control alone that made the puritan, he would not be as powerful as he is. Indeed he would be no more than the mild ascetic, who is all abnegation because his self-regarding mechanism is weak. But in the puritan both impulses are strong. It is control over others that yields him his satisfactions of power. He may stamp out his sex-desire, but his impulse to shatter ideas that he does not like will flourish wild and wanton. To the true puritan the beauty of unselfishness lies in his being able to enforce it on others. He loves virtue not so much for its own sake as for its being an instrument of his terrorism.

The true puritan is at once the most unselfish and the most self-righteous of men. There is nothing he will not do for you, give up for you, suffer for you. But at the same time there is no cranny of your world that he will not illuminate with the virtue of this doing of his. His real satisfaction comes not from his action of benevolence but from the moral of the tale. He need not boast about his renunciation or his altruism. But in any true puritan atmosphere that pride will be prevalent. Indeed, it is the oxygen of that atmosphere. Wherever you come across that combination of selfless devotion with self-righteousness, you have the essence of the puritan. Should you come across the one without the other you would find not the puritan but the saint.

The puritan then gets the satisfaction of his will to power through the turning of his self-abasement into purposes of self-regard. Renunciation is the raw material for his positive sense of power. The puritan gets his satisfaction exactly where the most carnal of natural men gets his, out of the stimulation of his pride. And in a world where renunciation has to happen to us whether we want it or not, the puritan is in the most impressive strategic position. In economy of energy he has it all over the head that is bloody but unbowed. For the puritan is so efficient morally that he can bow his head and yet exact control both out of the bowing and out of the prestige which his bowing gives him, as well as out of the bowing which he can enforce on others. The true puritan must become an evangelist. It is not enough to renounce the stimulus to satisfaction which is technically known as a “temptation.” The renouncing must be made into an ideal, the ideal must be codified, promulgated, and, in the last analysis, enforced. In the compelling of others to abstain, you have the final glut of puritanical power. For in getting other people to renounce a thing you thereby get renewed justification for your own renouncing. And so the puritan may go on inexhaustibly rolling up his satisfactions, one impulse reinforcing the other. The simultaneous play of these two apparently inconsistent personal impulses makes the puritan type one of the stablest in society. While the rest of us are longing for power the puritan is enjoying his. And because the puritan is so well integrated he almost always rules. The person whose satisfactions of control are more various and more refined is on the defensive against him.