Scholastic Mythbusters, Part I

Those Killjoy Puritans

One of the more pernicious myths of our age is that knowledge, particularly "modern" knowledge, is objective. The terms “rational”, “scientific”, “factual”, “objective” and “truth” are used as virtual equivalents. If something is said to be scientific, it is thereby considered necessarily factual, rational, and true. If it is rational, it must be scientific—and so forth.

This state of affairs rests on a stinking morass of decomposing assumptions. But because the grass appears green over the detritus, both the unthinking masses and the professional academics think all is well in the garden. Until, of course, a renegade starts to poke around and discovers the mess underneath.

We can add one more attribute to that which is factual, rational, scientific, and true. In our modern Age, repetition equates to truth. This is why urban legends and conspiracy theories are so persistent. Something incessantly repeated must be credible. After all, we live in the age of Enlightenment.

What this has produced in our modern Age is breathtaking arrogance amongst academics and professional scholars, on the one hand, and a tendency to be fooled or duped, on the other. The more our Age has asserted the primacy of reason, science, facts and truth, the more gullible and ignorant it has become.

Philosophers such as Polanyi and Popper have pointed out that the more truly rational and objective scientists are, the more they are sceptical, doubtful, and questioning. As the quality of scientists and academics declines, assumptions are, well, assumed—unconsciously, and without question. They are treated as beyond doubt, particularly if one wants to get a job in academia and have the respect of colleagues.

In this series of posts we will provide some examples of persistent errors, in unrelated fields, held intact as being true, objective, etc. by scholars and professional academics for years—yet which finally are demonstrated to be just plain wrong. They all beg the question of how scholarship could have failed so dismally, for so long.

Firstly, in the field of music. Percy Scholes, in his delightful and exhaustively researched volume, The Puritans and Music (Oxford: University Press, 1934, reprinted 1969), exposes the prevailing academic prejudice that the Puritans were killjoys who hated and suppressed music, fine clothes, fashion, art, drama, dancing, and opera. He reviews the copious works, all of which make the allegation, and most of which rely upon one another for authority and support (that is, they cite each other as authorities on the subject) on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, consider the following typical assertion:

The Pilgrims or Puritans . . . would have deemed concerts a very heterodox thing. . . . At the very start both Pilgrims and Puritans, although differing on many points of doctrine, united in a distrust of music. . . . The Pilgrims would have abolished it all but for the fact that the ancients enjoyed psalm singing in their religious services. (L C Elson, History of American Music—1915).

To this day, the myth remains powerful.

But it is a myth. Scholes demonstrates that if one lays prejudice and ideological (and probably religious) cant aside and actually studies the period and the historical evidence available from the time, the myth explodes and the Puritans emerge as a music loving, fun loving, boisterous and vibrant people. Scholes writes:

It has been my experience, during the months of study which the book has necessarily entailed, to find that every charge against the Puritans of freakishness or crankiness, when one looks into it, turns out to be empty. The Puritans were, it now seems clear to me, just normal English people of the period, of a particular religious trend of thought. (p.115)

We will cite but two instances. Firstly Oliver Cromwell was actually a great lover of music—Scholes goes so far as to call him an undoubted, genuine connoisseur. At the marriage of two of his daughters (which occurred at the same time) the feasting, the musical performance, and the festive dancing went on to five o'clock in the morning. (Needless to say, Cromwell was a Puritan of Puritans.)

And what of the dark clothes in which modern representations of Puritans are incessantly portrayed? That too is myth. It appears to have arisen because scholars assumed that that is what Puritans ought to have been like. It amounts to a kind of academic and scholarly ad hominem. But the facts are very different. Scholes (p. 105) cites authorities describing the Puritan Vice Chancellor of Oxford (a university which formally had supported the Stuart monarchy.)

The Puritan Vice-Chancellor's dress he (Anthony Wood, 1659) described in detail, and very fine he must have looked walking down the High with his “hair powdred, cambric band with large costly band-strings, velvet jacket, breeches set round at knee with ribbons pointed, and Spanish leather boots with cambric tops.”

This was John Owen, DD, the Independent divine, one of the two or three most eminent Puritan preachers and most learned Puritan authors of the seventeenth century, Cromwell's chaplain in Ireland, the preacher of the sermon to Parliament the day after the execution of the King, of the thanksgiving sermon for the victory of Worcester, and of Ireton's funeral sermon. . . . A Puritan of the Puritans, a man of saintly life, who on the Restoration sacrificed all his career rather than conform against his conscience—and by the way, a flute player!

Well, the evidence uncovered by Scholes is voluminous and both exposes the myth for what it is, and explodes it. But the question is begged: How could so many scholars be fooled for so long? We suspect that in our rationalistic Age it occurs because they believe their own press. They all too often assume scholarly objectivity and proceed blithely to assert as fact what is mere supposition. Self-criticism has waned. Consequently, ignorance has risen.

The Enlightenment, with its deifying of human reason, in its belief that the fruit or produce of human reason was in actuality the voice of god, leads to credulity, error, myth, and ignorance. Post modernism has had a salutary effect in that it has exposed the objective rationalism of the modern world to ridicule—which is appropriate. Just as Elijah, the prophet of the Living God, lampooned and mocked the idols of his day, post modernism has lifted its voice up to mock the hubris of modern rationalism.

But, in the end, post modernism cannot carry the day, for it too is just another idol. It leaves us with a nuclear winter where academics live in holes and shelters, but few things grow.

In our next post, we will take up another modern example of rationalistic myths—this one drawn from the field of ancient Egyptian chronology.