Optimists of any kind are rare among us now. Rather than entertaining visions, we think in terms of stopgaps and improvisations. A great many of us, in the face of recent experience, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic-sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills. It is not easy at this point for us to decide just what morality is or how to apply it to our circumstances. But we have priggishness at hand, up-to-date and eager to go to work, and it does a fine imitation of morality, as self-persuaded as a Method actor. It looks like morality and feels like it, both to those who wield it and to those who taste its lash…

 

So perhaps what I have called priggishness is useful in the absence of true morality, which requires years of development, perhaps thousands of years, and cannot simply be summoned as needed. Its inwardness and quietism make its presence difficult to sense, let alone quantify, and they make its expression often idiosyncratic and hard to control. But priggishness makes its presence felt. And it is highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring. The prig’s formidable leverage comes from the fact that his or her ideas, notions, or habits are always fine variations on the commonplace. A prig with original ideas is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus who can usually appeal to one’s better nature, if only in order to embarrass dissent.[1]

 

In all of her essays, Robinson has labored to demonstrate that we have assumed (and often misguided) notions about history and the great works of historical characters. In this essay she has pointed out that the Puritans were very socially conscious and not nearly so anxious about sexuality and related issues. By identifying anything related to serious moral thought with a received mythology of Puritan thought, we have truncated our moral discourse; and now we have been left with a priggish set of attitudes which represent only contemporary populist tastes.

 

If she is correct, we could say a lot about these conclusions. However, I find it most interesting that we ironically have a new kind of Puritanism – more fickle, more judgmental, yet more shallow – than the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony could ever have dreamt. We have come quite close to achieving the Nietzschean dream of morals as pure construct, and in so doing we have accomplished an even more Puritanically oppressive ethical world. Now even the expression of opinions – however ignorant or misguided – must be reprimanded.

 

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