Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture By John Carroll

First published in 1977 Puritan Paranoid Remissive investigates the process of the transformation of Western society in the twentieth century The author questions assumptions of sociological fashion and goes beyond the descriptions of changes in the economy government education the family work leisure and the arts to a deeper level of historical cause He proposes three character types or patterns of psychological disposition to indicate respectively the Puritan past that is waning the immediate paranoid past that has exemplified society s crisis of transition and the remissive future whose ideology already permeates the present These types reflect his leading theme the historical decline of the authority of the individual John Carroll believes that culture has moved faster than character Focusing on what is conventionally the upper middle class the bourgeoisie he proposes the emergence of a new remissive culture from the ruins of the old Puritan order and concludes that the pathology the remiss nervousness of contemporary Westerners results from their futile attempts to adapt their enduring Puritan disposition to their hedonist ideals The twenty first century carries remnants of this transformation and will be of interest to students of sociology philosophy history and political science Puritan Paranoid Remissive A Sociology of Modern CultureRushdoony commented A book that is quite interesting hardly commendable in the spirit in which it is written it is a rather arrogant book but brilliant all the same It is by John Carroll The title Puritan Paranoid Remissive A Sociology of Modern Culture This is published in London in 1977. The book is a delightful one as far as its thesis is concerned in spite of the author s wild statements at times He simply does not understand the Puritans But his thesis has some very real merit He says that our culture modern European and western culture the world over is very much under the influence of the Puritans It is in revolt against them The Puritans created western civilization with their work oriented way of life For the Puritans he says the highest art was the art of living and it was to live in terms of God to work in terms of a vocation a calling. Now he says we have seen since the decline of the Puritans the paranoid culture and now the remissive What is the paranoid culture The Puritans were marked by a strong sense of sin and responsibility They felt that man was responsible to God that what he did he had to give an accounting for Therefore in everything he did man had to be a responsible person. Once you take away that faith responsibility to God then man begins to make excuses Instead of saying he is responsible he says the environment is responsible or his parents are to blame or his culture or Capitalism Anything other than himself Now he rightly terms that the paranoid perspective the paranoid culture And once western civilization left its Puritan background it became paranoid. Marxism of course is in terms of his thinking the classic example of a paranoid culture because for Marxism is the fault of someone else of the Communists of the it is the fault of the Capitalists of the Christians of the exploiter class And all you have to do to have heaven on earth is to eliminate all the exploiters This is paranoia made into marching orders for the world. Thus the paranoid personality and the paranoid culture are particularly dangerous and have dominated our world for quite a while with deadly results As he says For the paranoid it is always someone else who is to blame Misfortune like all emotional states and influences comes from without Even sin is projected Hence the paranoid s chronic fear of the unknown his lack of curiosity and his one dimensional imagination The paranoid accepts the existence of authority but in a negative punitive form He lives the antithesis of personal responsibility having no self It is the external that is always guilty unquote. Well the paranoid he says has always been marked by a love for radical politics Socialist or Anarchist and the paranoid invests the core of the under privileged the deviant or the insane classes with extraordinary powers of latent virtue and is uniquely capable of redeeming society And he adds the notion of the volk played the identical role for Nazi ideology This of course ties his thesis in with Bruckner s in The Tears of the White Man. But now he says the paranoid culture is giving way to the remissive In the remissive culture the sins of the fathers are now no longer important Man is supposedly free to live out his hedonist philosophy And the result is an aimless unimpassioned meandering he says after pleasure There and I quote The remitted man is a depressive Dionysius drained of ecstatic fury seemingly gutted than remitted In his ways he is remiss The remissive culture s intellectual father was Freud On the subject of child development Freud commented In mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish unquote. So we are the victims of the past but we grin and bear it We surrender the battle and we meander after pleasure It is an anti moralist culture and he says the remissive hedonist s one conscience norm is to be anti Puritan to doubt all inherited values And as a result he in effect surrenders any struggle in life What is in it for me is his philosophy He is not interested in knowledge and his only goal is pleasure to gratify himself and to seek his will Radical politics still maintains the paranoid personality but increasingly most people drift into the remissive culture Our education says Dr Farel is remissive And whether it be universities like Berkeley or the grade schools what they are communicating to children is the remissive culture And as a result we are committing suicide. Now this is an interesting comment The decline of Puritan authority has had as one of its dimensions public intrusion on privacy especially on that of men of affairs The USA has gone so far that the senate and the media now consider it their national duty to inspect the private financial and personal life of a candidate Nelson Rockefeller for the post of vice president More would have been learned of relevancy to his suitability for the position from his public record in politics The public now demands to know everything unquote. Well it is a very important work and because the paranoid culture has such a hatred of the past one that the remissive inherit the family is seen by some like Lang as pure evil Religion is seen as evil because it hampers the freedom of man and so on and on 148
Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture By John Carroll
0710086229
9780710086228
English
148
Unknown Binding
Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture.

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Librarian Note There is than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. John Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia and a fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University: There is a great deal in this book which is as I say poorly written arrogantly written but brilliant