Yes. So work life balance certainly is very very very important and notably the Puritans recognized the raising of children as an important form of work.Hell yeah. Because it is cuz work just is disciplined activity
serpent that I talked about. There was a lot of discussion about what that meant and even some efforts later to connect it to the supernatural. The very first sightings by Puritans in 1630s, 1640s, they were convinced these were manifestations of Satan. Big surprise with them, right? Because everything was. These were people who even thought blackbears were manifestation. Black dogs were manifestations of the devil. And so, it's really interesting that you move from that to
dinner and even little kids get a small glass of wine. Puritans . People blame Prohibition on the Puritans .
that shows that God has graced you and that you really have faith." The Puritans were not trying to promote capitalism. I mean, their concerns weren't even economic, right? It was just purely theological. I want to make a little amendment about that.
One ship-- they didn't fill up the ship, "The Mayflower." A few years later, the Puritans invade. The Puritans are a party, both a church and political party in England. And they are attempting to overthrow both the government and reform the church.
When Pierce gets to Providence Isle, he might have seen Africans for the first time in his whole life. The Puritans on Providence Isle had already begun to engage in the African slave trade. He sells the Indians and buys Africans and brings them back to Massachusetts.
They grow the soy bean plants until they're about this big and then they pulled them out and tested them. He was a Puritan .
If you-- now, by the way, I'm not like my colleagues. I'm not puritanical about this. The genie of technology is out the bottle when it comes to sleep, and it's not going back in any time soon.
So I'm going to quote the first colonial governor, the leader of the Puritans who invaded Massachusetts in 1630. I start with the Puritans because for a whole variety of reasons, I think we should all ignore the pilgrims. I hope there's no one here from Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The idea is just completely out of our paradigm thing, the idea that we would have asked to be invited. And so the Puritans come. And within 6 and 1/2 years, they are engaged in serious violent conflict
They understand that it's going to be too difficult to sell them into slavery, right, in a land that they have lived in for generations and the Puritans have only known for less than a decade. And so they decide to sell them into slavery away.
It's like working at McDonald's, and going, wow, I'm going to make you tacos here. It's not like there's some puritan going, that looks a little dark skinned for that time.
stumbled on a bibliography that listed 169 funeral sermons funeral sermons for you know the highest Puritan women so I wrote my article about funeral service and it actually turned out to be
And technology is now starting to come back and fix the ailments that technology started with our sleep. I don't mean to sound puritanical.
I don't know. Which one wins-- is it the puritanical side or the consumer side? Of course it's the side that's going to let us buy whatever is in front of us.
his homosexuality and and as a result he was tried and he was condemned to uh my um my uh uh puritanical cursor is right here. It's the it's the lower
was, it wasn't actually given by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was given by Oliver Cromwell in 1656. And he was reaching out to English Puritans , rather than Iranian Muslims. In that case, the Great Satan was not George Bush, but Catholic Spain.
quite Aid I'm very interested in these sermons because they told me things I didn't know about early American women and about Puritan ministers and some of their ideas about what women could and could not be and it turned out to
And that frontier mindset really does come from them. We owe them just as much we do the Puritans but they don't ever really get their due. And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand then, you know, how exactly could this group
ethic, but they're not equally valid in the sense that one of them is a logical extension of the original work ethic as conceived by the Puritans and one of them is a betrayal of it. This is the hijacking you're talking about. Correct.
Yes, we do. But you can see a little bit of that even in the Puritans . Yeah. So the Puritans are always desperately looking for signs, right, that they're saved. And they often took wealth as a proxy for how
offers a positive path for ethical businesses. That would be a great thing if all businesses followed the Puritans along those lines. And I also I never disparage hard work.
on Gloucester or the Salem witch trials, what was going on in this part of the country that caused so much of it to happen here? Scott: That's easy. Puritans . No, yeah -- in a way that's true. Actually, the first sea serpent sightings in New England were in the early 17th century. Although the Gloucester serpent that I talked about. There was a lot of discussion about what that meant and even some efforts later to connect it to the supernatural. The very first sightings by
dinner and even little kids get a small glass of wine. In fact, the Puritans drink. It wasn't their fault that Prohibition came about, but rather from a movement that came out centuries later. So yeah.
Everybody above the rank of sergeant got a book contract. The books had names like "Cannibal Cousins," "Black Baghdad," "Voodoo Fire in Haiti," "A Puritan in Voodoo Land," "The White King of La Gonave," "Full of Children Bred for the Caldron," "Pins and Needles and Voodoo Dolls That Don't Exist," "Zombies Crawling out of the Grave
Now the point was, of course, to be humanitarian. And that's where you have the great imbalance that reminds us of Puritan art history, like colonization, where the white man's burden was to go around and help these poor people while we were stealing their mineral resources.
Protestant work ethic? Is the religious foundation essential? Absolutely. This is coming right out of the Puritans . The Puritans in England were basically Calvinist in theology and obsessed with getting certainty
of people who are saved. The critical issue then is you're all desperate to know whether you're saved. Hopefully to know that you're saved. And the Puritans said, "The only way to tell is if you are working really, really hard because that shows that God has graced you and that you really have faith."
anything true and important in that tradition of thought? Well, the tradition of course I'm extracting some different lessons from it. I do think the Puritans themselves were actually pretty good business ethicists and they made a very strong distinction
And so many capitalists in Massachusetts insisted on, although they would have no slaves themselves For example, you described the Puritans as invading, which completely fits with what I know now and, even if I think about it,
Those were leftovers from the Cleopatra years. And I've always wondered what Cicero thought about being wedged between the Puritans on both sides of him there. Salem is a little bit our national campfire tale.
his profession of value neutrality in social science, condemned the work ethic as consigning us to an iron cage. And he contrasted the Puritan attitude towards work as a calling that they wanted to work at in contrast with the capitalist
Right. I say it's amazing that it was such a Puritan beginning.
palaces and peep shows dot all Western capitals however the Arabs are criticized for being overly Puritan I
And I think she just awakened America to the pleasures of cooking and to get rid of all that sort of Puritan ethic and enjoy slapping the little chicken. Somebody asked her why
that comes the conservative and progressive work ethics. Tell me about these competing work ethics and and really what happened here. Probably most of us know the Puritans as the biggest killjoys in European history, right?
Instead, they said you should be able to take your leisure, take your pleasures, enjoy yourself. They totally cast off the aestheticism of the Puritans . But of course, you know, the other side, the neoliberal side, also cast off the aestheticism of the puritis, but in the
that was part of romantic ideology in the UK, to New England Puritanism.
So listen carefully, because I want to get these words right. So I'm going to quote the first colonial governor, the leader of the Puritans who invaded Massachusetts in 1630. I start with the Puritans because for a whole variety of reasons, I think we should all ignore the pilgrims.
When the very first lamp was filled with whale oil on the streets of Havana, the Puritans hadn't actually reached the United States yet, or America,
And at that point, after some centuries of discomfort, Puritanical Americans in the 18th century decided this was not a stable state of affairs.
It was a plague that involved 100 witches, a number that grew to 307 or later to 500. Very unforested. There had been a remarkable-- basically the Puritans arrived and cut down all the trees, is the long and short of it.
that believes in freedom of religion, even though the Puritans came here and they burned witches and they punished Pagans and Indians and all of that because they didn't conform
They had already sent other Indians that they had captured to Bermuda. But the captain, for whatever reason, decides to go to a Puritan colony that had been founded a few years before Massachusetts off the coast of Central America which they call Providence Isle.
thank for that nugget? Yes, we do. But you can see a little bit of that even in the Puritans . Yeah. So the Puritans are always desperately looking for signs,
And in fact, everyone ought to be that way. Always look for another dollar if you can find an opportunity to make it. So, in fact, businessmen today just are modern Puritans . You've mentioned the word neoliberalism two or three times now. That's a scary word, a boogeyman word at this point,
And as I got older, I wanted to experience different things using my money. It's funny. We live in this paradoxical culture that, on one hand, it's very puritanical-- a lot of finger-wagging experts telling us what we can't do with our money.
If you look at this, the Oxford English Dictionary, this is today-- defines the Pilgrim Fathers as the group of English Puritans , which is not correct,
You do have to bear in mind that in the states, we have this-- compared to the rest of the world-- this very special cocktail of puritanism
That's wonderful. So people who don't know what a bundling board was, the Puritans would have unmarried couples-- this actually sounds sort of racy--