And here's another book I might assign in the future - The Dish talked it up in this post.
This fits with recent class discussions on stereotyping and how it helps build - or confirm - opinions.
This fits with recent class discussions on stereotyping and how it helps build - or confirm - opinions.
The narrow point concerns beliefs about the Puritans. The broader point is our collective refusal to use available resources to determine whether our beliefs are actually true. Aside from being lazy, it leads us to make incorrect evaluations of historical events and people. Here's some text highlighted by the Dish:
Puritans are thought to have taken a lurid pleasure in the notion of hell, and certainly hell seems to have been much in their thoughts, though not more than it was in the thoughts of Dante, for example. We speak as though John Calvin invented the Fall of Man, when that was an article of faith universal in Christian culture…
Yet the way we speak and think about the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism.
Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry. I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating. Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. This instinct is so powerful that I would suspect it had a survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.
