Best regards from Barrie O’Leary.
Thursday 11 September 2008

You’re right, of course; my little rant is in oversimplification and unfair generalization.

I think it’s something of an unconscious response to the stories this year of teachers being suspended or censured for suggesting (just suggesting) that students look into life drawing classes or taking students on field trips to museums in which “nudity” was on display.

I never actually did a post on these, perhaps afraid that it would just be a long rant and be interpreted as political. But idiocy like that, and the general anti-art, anti-science and anti-rationality stance of the current crew in Washington has not stopped bothering me. (Oops, there I go, getting political.)

Not being a real student of history, I tend to take liberties and use common images of various groups to make a point, which, of course, I would gripe about if done by someone else (grin).

Other readers may want to check out Paul’s blog, quare id faciam?, his site, and sketches.

Probably worth considering, though, that until the last century most religious Italians (and there used to be a lot of them) on the whole would undoubtedly have identified more closely with the morality of the 16th- & 17th-century Puritans than with the alternative social schemes of our pan-cultural industrial-progressive & positivistic Modern/Postmodern world.

It’s been popular for a long time to dismiss the various English Calvinists & other Dissenters who have a particular place in early North American history with such blanket labels as your ‘dour’ here, and also to credit them with giving original shape to whatever remains of relatively strict sexual and family moral ideals in American culture today. But neither notion is really correct. The groups we lump under ‘Puritanism’ today have to be seen as part of their 16th- & 17th-century politically & religiously conflict-ridden English context — as part of a complex cultural scene, in other words, that although hardly Mediterranean was anything but cold-blooded. Their particular forms of social & ecclesiastical strictness accompanied particular forms of interest, for instance, in individual-centered political freedom. (Consider that John Locke was raised & educated a Puritan.)

As for what’s considered conservative morality in American society today, it’s important to realize that much of its substance as social theory depends (with increasingly frank acknowledgement among Evangelicals) on Catholic ethical thought — which, of course, still has its ideological heart in Rome.

Thanks for all the great art history posts!