Word: puritans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...late Harvard sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin. By this he meant the glorification of pleasure over Puritan duty, of leisure over work. The '60s was a time of almost frantic experiment in sexual liberation; in the next decade, thanks in part to the Pill, sex will continue to be casual. But it may also be less frenetic. Divorce will be even more common, and the law may come to recognize term marriages, unions that will dissolve automatically after a certain length of time. Marijuana most likely will be either legalized or condoned...
...better at extrapolating from the past than anticipating surprises. Could all these trends that seem to lead from the '60s to the '70s be reversed? Certainly. After all, the heady air of freedom in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I was suddenly stifled by the Puritan Revolution in England, and staid Victorian laws followed the carefree boisterous spirit of the Regency. It may be that the early '70s will see a period of repressive reaction against the Dionysian tendencies of the young. There may also be a purely spontaneous swing back to discretion and suggestion. "Writers...
With tongue in cheek, Christianity Today noted the renascence of a fine old Puritan practice. In Pottstown, Pa., teen-agers have banded together in the Society to Bring Back Bundling as a distinct improvement over the variable climate and other distractions of, say, the drive-in theater and dead-end street. Reports the magazine: "Parents and preachers, roused by a badly bungled moral code, banned bundling; better heating in larger homes cooled it. Bundling has been rekindled by a spark from a new moral code." Said the president of the Pottstown bundlers: "In many colleges, boys and girls today...
...Puritan ethos was a stimulus to striving and hard work; no wonder that it gave way to its secular descendant, pragmatism-the uniquely American philosophy articulated by C. S. Peirce, Dewey and William James. Americans are the exemplars of pragmatism, of rational humanism. The pragmatist, of course, does not deny the existence of evil-although he likes to call it something else. But he optimistically assumes that it exists in institutions rather than men, and can therefore be legislated away. Thus evils, in the American experience, have always been seen as concrete problems that could be dissected and analyzed-like...
Thus the American ethos-part pragmatic, part Puritan, part Pelagian-has had the synergistic effect of masking the popular consciousness of evil. Traditionally, evil has been something distant, Wholly Other, rather than an enemy within. When Rap Brown complained that "violence is as American as cherry pie," most Americans dismissed the charge as the aberrant nastiness of a Black Power fanatic. When the Kerner Commission proposed that America was a racist nation, the U.S. public reacted with "Who, me?" protests of innocence. But there is a dark underside to American history: the despoliation of the Indian, the subjection...