Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s a great question. That’s a terrific question and one that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Being a Puritan is a great way to live a psychologically very candid life, [laughs] if what you want is actually not to be repressed at all. We think of the Puritans as very repressed, but instead, you want to be marinating in and giving a lot of attention to all of your own insecurities and sense of, “I goofed that up. I messed that one up. Oh, that didn’t work out very well.” If you want to cultivate your inner life, it’s really great to be a Puritan. If you want to live a kind of high-octane life of extremes, you want to feel the exultation of a day like this in New England, where the green of the grass and the blue of the sky announce to you that God’s creation is the most eloquent of all creations. If that’s what you’re after, that kind of intensity, New England Puritanism is a really good religion for you. I’ve just been paraphrasing Jonathan Edwards, who, even though he was the writer who said that we were spiders hung over the fire who would sizzle on a . . . I think it’s Robert Lowell who said that we would sizzle on a brick. He said we’re spiders hung over the fire — also wrote these gorgeous lyrical essays on the natural world that drew from aesthetic experience, increased piety. If you like intensity rather than moderation or serenity, if you like intensity, a Puritan’s a good thing to be. If we think about America, it’s the world’s wealthiest nation, most powerful nation. It has a disproportionate share of the top universities, including, of course, Harvard. Is this going to mean that, in essence, most things American are overrated? More people read English, so if you’re an American author or American poet, people will study you. They will write about you, and compared to, say, Neruda and Mistral from Chile, or writers, poets from other parts of the world, American artists, maybe they’re all overrated, overpriced. Do you agree? I don’t know. I’m having trouble with these valuation questions that American poets are overpriced . . .…

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