new england is still a calvinist experiment - blog

i was born and raised in new england. for most of my life, i had no idea how different it was from the rest of the united states. even today, i still am reminded of things that are strictly new england based that don't exist elsewhere. what do you mean you don't offer coffee milk as one of the milk options to elementary school students?

so like... why is it like that? every region in the US notoriously has its own things, but new england is some separate type of covenant. if you trace it back to the beginning it makes a lot of sense. the puritans were not coming as fortune-seekers the way virginia got settled. they came in huge congregations with a religious utopian project in mind.

before even setting foot in the massachusetts bay colony, john winthrop gave a sermon to the first group of colonists, repeating his expectation that massachusetts will be different from anywhere else in the world. he called it "a city upon a hill", referencing the teaching of salt and light in jesus's sermon on the mount in the new testament. that is to say, if the puritans failed to uphold their covenant with god, then their sins would be exposed to the world.

that seeded a cluster of traits that outlived the actual belief:

the town as the fundamental political unit: town meetings, congregational self-governance, direct democracy on a small scale (think gilmore girls)
an obsessive emphasis on literacy and education: you had to read scripture yourself, hence Harvard's establishment in 1636 (think good will hunting)
plain-style suspicion of ostentation and a deep habit of moral self-scrutiny
- "the lowells talk only to the cabots and the cabots talk only to god"

strip the god out of it and you still have that work ethic, thrift, anxious conscience, and scolding reformist streak. weber basically used new england, and some boston guy named benjamin franklin, as his exhibit A to prove a protestant ethics thesis.

that settlement pattern, the tight clustered villages rather than dispersed estates, produces a social texture people actually notice: high internal trust and civic participation, paired with reserve towards outsiders. if you're not from here, we know it and pass that down through generations. it varies between the northern leave-me-alone-in-the-woods and the eastern massachusetts academic corridor, but its the same parochialism.

the issue is the land refused to cooperate with this ideal. glaciated rocky soil, short growing season, no cash crop. plantation economy was impossible here, this region traded slaveholding planter aristocracy for plausible deniability (by only profiting off the trade and shipping). scarcity pushes people into 3 directions:

subsistence farming on family-sized plots (potato hills up north, cranberry bogs down south)
the sea (cod, whaling, lobstering)
early industrial manufacturing (river water-power = mills)

this combination effectively ignited the american industrial revolution. that's where "yankee ingenuity" comes from. use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

the weirdest part is the persistence of it all. abolitionism was strongest here, transcendentalism happened here, the temperance and early feminism- all of that is secularized puritan moral seriousness persisting. new england keeps appointing itself the conscience of the country centuries after the theology that instilled that instinct mostly evaporated. add that to the post-civil-war emptying out, you get that whole lovecraft thing, the granite stoicism, and the sense that the good days are always behind you and you have to endure the cold because that's what you do.

and here i am, 400 years later, with a dump sticker on my car and dead certainty that other people are doing it wrong.