Puritans, Pioneers And American Culture DOCX

Title	Puritans, Pioneers And American Culture
Author	Arthur Berger
Pages	10
File Size	29.1 KB
File Type	DOCX
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The present article is based on the premise that the roots of the America we currently know are firmly planted in the soil of some of the earliest and most influential Americans—a zealous group of Puritan-Protestants, who intended to create an inherently spiritual nation, envisioning it as a land of purity and spiritually righteous people (McNeil, 1954; Tocqueville, 1840/ 1990; Weber, 1904/1958). Numerous scholars have argued that since the inception of the first New England colonies, both Protestant work values (views on work and salvation articulated by John Calvin), and the pursuit of piety through sexual purity, have been at the forefront of American culture (Landes, 1998; Sanchez-Burks, 2002). This primacy is abetted by links between the two systems of belief. A disdain for worldly sexual pleasure complements norms against spending hard earned capital. The present research suggests the implicit influence of traditional values regarding work and sex still lingers in American minds (Sanchez-Burks, 2002, 2005; Uhlmann, Poehlman, & Bargh, 2009). Sanchez-Burks (2002) demonstrated that consistent with the Protestant work ethic, American Protestants are less spontaneously attentive to relational cues in work settings than Catholics, and Uhlmann et al. (2009) reviewed evidence of American moral exceptionalism in the domains of individualism and traditionalism. Here we argue that Americans are implicitly (and distinctly, relative to members of other cultures) affected by traditional Puritan values, such that the ethics of sexual purity are closely tied to the ethics of work and labor (Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Bargh, 2010). Eric Luis Uhlmann, T. Andrew Poehlman, David Tannenbaum and John A. Bargh "Implicit Puritanism in American moral cognition," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 47, 2011. pp. 312-320 Chapter 3: The Puritans In the epigraph to this chapter we find a recent study by social psychologists who argue that the values and beliefs of the Puritans still have an impact on American character and culture. Their beliefs and values, they write, still "still linger" in the American mind. Earlier, I quoted a French psychoanalyst, Clotaire Rapaille, who argued in his book The Culture Code that during the first seven years of life children are "imprinted" with the values, beliefs and practices of the countries in which they are raised. Wordsworth wrote "the child is the father of the man" and Freudian psychoanalytic theory also suggests that childhood is formative. In Charles Brenner's An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, he writes (1974:203): One is struck by the powerful and long lasting effect that childhood instinctual wishes have on mental life. They can determine the choice of career, the course of one's adult sexual life, one's hobbies, one's mannerisms, peculiarities, etc. In many instances it is more precise to say that these effects do not result directly from the instinctual wishes and conflicts themselves, but rather from the fantasies that arise from them. Brenner discusses a number of cases he'd dealt with and concludes (1974:203) "in each case a fantasy which arose from the instinctual wishes of childhood and the fears related to them became a major driving force, though an unconscious one, in the patient's life. We see, then, the as the twig is bent, the tree is formed. It is reasonable, I believe, to suggest that the Puritans have, in some ways, "imprinted" their values and beliefs on American character and culture and an investigation into the Puritans helps us understand much about contemporary American character, though we may not be aware of the role the Puritans continue to play in American society. It is probably Puritanism that explains why Americans take shorter holidays and work harder than citizens of many other advanced societies....