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The Puritans and the Peasants

Posted on 17/02/25 in Politics, Trust

The opening of my forthcoming book with Edward Elgar, Blockchain Politics, setting the scene for its analysis of trust in the context of the zealotry of left and right:

21st century politics are utterly bizarre. Despite relatively few people engaging directly with extremes, we seem to have been transported to the 17th century world of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General. On one side we have a puritan, compassion-free, vengeful, punitive regiment of unsmiling moral police determined to suppress all trace of old sinful ways and to purge wicked traditions, contemptuous of due process and untarnished by presumption of innocence. They face a pugnacious mob of snarling, swivel-eyed, snaggle-toothed peasants with pitchforks, impervious to reason, disdainful of calls for calm, scornful of authority, oppugnant to the Riot Act, and utterly convinced by their preachers that they are beset by every kind of sprite, gargoyle and demon that ever featured in a story book.

To talk of political trust in these circumstances is heroic. Like the humane, sherry-tippling squire of 1647, we are trapped in a pincer by two terrible Manichaean movements, who agree only on the immanence of the apocalyptic struggle of Good versus Evil, cooperate only to drown moderate voices in a torrent of manufactured invective. The impediment under which we labour today, unlike the hapless squire of yore, is that ideas spread far more quickly and effectively with networked digital technology. And the technology that both sides use to automate their mobs is increasingly defended as a means by which society can be run devoid of trust. It wasn’t so long ago that trust was seen as the glue that held societies together and allowed them to prosper. Now, Puritans and Peasants alike see it as a dangerous vulnerability to be transcended.