We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Ethics and Epistemology at Plymouth Plantation.
- Authors
Schwartz, Ana
- Abstract
What is the history of the desire to be good? Many people lead rich and fulfilling lives without asking themselves such a question, so it may be extravagant to expect the early modern English settlers in Algonquian territory to have done so. But maybe not. Many settlers were ready, after all, to commit great violence in the name of goodness. Just as importantly, they were also eager to cultivate lives committed to that virtue—and to chase that project across an ocean. This essay attends to some of the conditions and consequences of neglecting to critique one's own motivations in the pursuit of goodness. It examines some of the earliest writings of English settlers in Wampanoag territory: the Separatists at Plymouth, the merchants and protocapitalists at Ma-Re Mount, and the spectacularly inept thieves and starvelings at Wessagussett. Across these settlements, this essay observes a frequent correlation—on the one hand, a conviction of superior ethical knowledge among English settlers; on the other, an addiction to a paranoid epistemology. In these texts that ethics and this epistemology complement each other powerfully. That power's historical conditions come to light when we look beyond the conventional antagonism between Plymouth and Ma-Re Mount, Bradford and Morton; and instead, reckon with their similarity, and with the conveniently familiar distraction the cliché of their antagonism provides next to the alien and alarming challenge to the Christian vision of goodness that one clumsy Wessagussett settler, Phinehas Pratt, unhappily encountered. His ineloquence testifies to the unthought intertwinement of ethics and epistemology in colonial encounters, and to how dearly settlers sought scientific certainty as a substitute for the terrifying intuition that their ideals of goodness and their God were not, in fact, as universal as they had once thought. Their terror can be our gain. It invites modern historians and literary critics to examine the motives and the methods of our own pursuits of goodness in the present.
- Subjects
ETHICS; THEORY of knowledge; ALGONQUIANS (North American peoples); HISTORIANS; CRITICS
- Publication
Early American Literature, 2022, Vol 57, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
0012-8163
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/eal.2022.0033