The legendary Dr. Pat Deneen’s contribution to Culture11 today is about how the honorable McCain should encourage ordinary Americans to take personal responsibility for the financial crisis. They should start living more frugally, with genuine self-restraint, and more ecologically in the broadest and most anthropocentric sense. They really should think of themselves more as parts of worlds larger and greater than themselves and do more to put the common good first. There must be SOMETHING to this critique of our modern excesses, and whatever it is must be POSTMODERN—insofar as it’s based on reflection on the limits of the modern world. So to what extent is AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM actually a return to our PURITANICAL origins?
Here’s what we might owe the Puritans—our devotion to the heart-enlarging effects of participatory democratic citizenship, an understanding of human equality that’s neither resentful nor condescending, a concern for the welfare of the poor and vulnerable, our commitment to universal education, our continuing identification of "familiy values" with human happiness, and our continguing suspicion that belief in personal responsibility depends on belief in a personal God.
