Best Lecture on Puritanism, Ever
If you never heard of George Smith, you should have.
George Smith (1949-2022) was a learned and extraordinarily charismatic autodidact. A wunderkind, or close to it, Smith published his most famous book, Atheism: The Case Against God, when he was only 25. I met him at a Cato Institute Summer Seminar in 1990, and again in the summer of 1991.
Talking to George was always thrilling. He once bragged that he dropped out of high school to start college, dropped out of college to start a Ph.D., and then dropped out his Ph.D. program to join the faculty of the Institute for Humane Studies’ Liberty and Society seminars. The following lecture, delivered around 1991, promotes Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies, a book of his masterful essays on philosophy and the history of ideas.
The intro is a risque PG-13, but please don’t freak out. The body of the talk is a deep – and deeply-entertaining - intellectual history of the ethics and psychology of puritanism. Enjoy.
A brilliant lecture, and one that showcases both what is attractive about libertarianism and what is flawed and anti-human about it. We absolutely are evolved for feeling that other people [in our small tribal community] are not merely our business but our very life, and if they're f**king up they're wasting resources at best and betraying us at worst. What Mencken describes as puritanical is a central part of the programming for any creature so socially-evolved as we are. Is there a way in the current year to implement this in a way that serves human flourishing? No of course not -- we're far past that now, maybe 20,000 years past it. But that doesn't mean libertarianism isn't itself a revolt against human nature, not so much blasphemy against God but against the gods of the copybook headings (in some more archetypical sense than Kipling meant).
Thanks for the great recommendations!