In Mencken's time and now, puritanism may be our biggest flaw

"Puritanism assumes that every human act must either be right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong."
-- H.L. MENCKEN

For nearly 50 years, most of the first half of the 20th Century, Henry Louis Mencken was the pre-eminent critic of American society. He didn't waste his time on small targets like books, plays or films.

Mencken criticized America itself, and two of his best examples were the word "booboisie" and his most famous quote:

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

But where he criticized this country the most, and indeed where other, older nations tend to smile indulgently when they think of us, is Puritanism. In his introduction to "Mencken's America," Mencken scholar S.T. Joshi said he saw it as "Americans' inveterate habit to judge all thoughts and actions from an ethical perspective, and to disapprove the great majority of them as subversive of 'good morals.'"

It's why many Americans aren't just uninterested in art but are actively hostile toward it. Look at the fuss a generation ago about the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Instead of just accepting them as art that wasn't meant for everyone to appreciate, we had people acting as if seeing a crucifix in a glass of urine or a man with a bullwhip inserted in his rectum were somehow signs of the Apocalypse.

The bullwhip photo

When Mencken railed against puritanism, he wasn't writing about the Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the 17th century. His primary targets were the puritans in the decades after the Civil War who took aim at what they felt were immoral practices.

Anthony Comstock, for example. Comstock was a postal inspector who made it his life's work to keep the American public moral. He founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which worked hard to keep Americans from being able to read books like "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and also prevented people from sending information about birth control through the mails.

Of course there were also groups like the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, who worked for more than half a century to get Prohibition passed in the form of the 18th Amendment.

Comstock

I'm not sure there is a so-called "free" country in the world in which more people spend more time worrying that someone somewhere is having fun as the good old USA.

George Bernard Shaw, who wasn't quite England's Mencken, coined the term "comstockery" in his attack on modern puritanism.

Wrote Shaw: "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all."

Where we seem to want to outdo the rest of the world is that it isn't enough for our modern-day puritans to keep things like pornography away from children. Our Comstocks don't even want responsible adults to enjoy themselves in the privacy of their own homes.

Essentially, what they want is to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. There wouldn't be any movies made that every member of the family couldn't see, or any television shows that weren't fit for children. Books might be different, but only because young children might feel overwhelmed by books written for adults.

The problem is that we have never been good at compromising in this country. There really are few cases where we strike a happy medium, and a major reason for that is that it's nearly impossible to compromise when you consider something a question of morality.

And when you consider everything a question of morality, you find yourself constantly battling the world. Even when you win, you're not happy because there is always another battle to be fought.

When you never stop fighting, maybe you need to ask yourself why you're really doing it.