“The Dark Side of Today’s Society”

Although after thousands of years of evolution, of all the traces that human beings have left during history – of all the wonderful scientific discoveries that human beings have been able to build, after all the wars that have happened in search of power, after all the failures and achievements of humanity – have we improved in our morals? Or have we regressed in our morals?

The reality is that the morality we have today, unlike the morality during the Puritan era, is a two-edged sword: the morality we use today has evolved since the arrival of the Puritans to the American Continent; there have been points of improvement in said moral; nevertheless, far from advancing as a society, we have regressed in various aspects of said morality.

The Puritans have only one teacher who guided them on their way, the Bible; this gospel was what the Puritans relied on to build their way of thinking. They had the firm conviction that if they were sinners, there would be no salvation for them. Nowadays we are less moral, because unlike the Puritans, we do not have something or someone– supreme being– to fear. If only before the Puritans were limited to committing some crime for fear of being punished by religion, today the people have put religion aside, so we are more likely to have less morals, and therefore we commit more crimes. Likewise, Puritans were extremely strict; the Ten Commandments were the bases of their laws, which they followed to the letter. If someone made a mistake in dictating the ten commandments, he could even get into trouble; such is the case with The Crucible, when Reverend Hale asks John Proctor to recite the ten commandments and Proctor forgets to say one: “Rev. John Hale: Do you know your commandments, Mr. Proctor?

John Proctor: Aye.

Rev. John Hale: Would you recite them please?

John Proctor: The commandments?

Rev. John Hale: Aye.

John Proctor: Thou shalt not kill.

Rev. John Hale: Aye.

John Proctor: Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods, nor covet thy neighbor’s wives, thou shalt have no other Gods before me, thou shalt not use the Lord’s name in vain, thou shalt keep holy the sabbath day, thou shalt honor thy mother and father, thou shalt not bare to false witness … thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wives” (Miller 67). And as the Puritans were very strict and square with their ideals, in the same example of Miller in The Crucible we see how Reverend Hale uses the fact that Proctor has forgotten the sin of adultery, and this serves as sufficient evidence to label the Proctor family as sinners in the eyes of God, and evidently the community. Consecutively we know that for the same cause they end up taking Proctor´s wife, Elizabeth Proctor, to incarceration: “She walks out of the door, Herrick and Cheever behind her. For a moment, Proctor watches from the doorway. The clank of chain is heard” (Miller 78). At that time, at least the Puritans clung to religion, and they feared the power of God, so it limited them to do more bad things, and gave them morality; if they had already sinned, at least it kept them out of their situation and made them bow to redemption, such is the case of John Proctor in The Crucible. Proctor, having had the opportunity to make a false and public witchcraft confession of his guilt in order to live, he rejects it at the last minute, because he knows that his immense pride and concern for his personal integrity is more important than his public reputation. By refusing to give up his personal integrity, Proctor implicitly proclaims his conviction that that integrity will take him to heaven. In the end he goes to the gallows as a hero redeemed for his previous sins. Ultimately, Elizabeth Proctor says “He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!” (Miller 145). Because of this act of honor and pride, Proctor’s honesty and goodness, lost during his affair with Abigail, are being recovered; he bowed down to redemption and died the right way. On the other hand, today, religion has lost followers as such, today everything is freer, so people no longer fear, and this results in them being able to perform bad deeds without having the fear or worry of being punished by a supreme being. Likewise, the Puritan, as his own name indicates, wants at all costs to feel pure, and for this reason he will never be able to give up finding the guilty, sealed with the original stain of weakness or crime. So how could they allow their honor to be tainted? The Puritans thought two or more times before acting, out of fear of the power of God over mere mortals, so it stopped them and as a result they acquired more elements related to morality.

We often see how religion, and therefore the fear of Almighty God, plays an important role in various parts of the novel The Scarlet Letter; an example is when Minister Dimmesdale mentions to the protagonist Hester Prynne “The judgment of God is on me” (Hawthorne 132) referring evidently to the judgment that Dimmesdale will have at the time of his death regarding the sin–adultery– that he has committed. Also, this example shows us the remorse Dimmesdale had for having committed this sin, which is also reflected in Hester Prynne, where on more than one occasion, she was repentant regarding the same sin that she committed with Dimmesdale. When Hester, for whom the scarlet A is a mark of humiliation, willingly accepts this humiliation in lieu of drawing suspicion upon her partner in sin: “It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself” (Hawthorne 40). This line describes the consequences of her sin: being isolated, and not treated like a normal woman as a punishment imparted by the strict rules of the Puritans hand in hand with the word of God.

In both examples cited above, it is demonstrated how clearly all Puritan morality took religion as its point of origin or beginning; over time, the impact of religion and the power of God has drastically diminished. A study taken in 2015– 300 years after Puritanism to be exact– showed that specifically 53% of the entire world population is a practitioner of some religion (Jenik). Today, a little less than half of the population does NOT fear something or someone whereas before, the Puritans were limited to committing some crime for fear of being punished by the word of God. Nowadays people have put religion aside, and have been given more freedom, so people are now more likely to fear nothing and have no remorse thus leading to more atrocities.

On the other hand, as a justification for the acts they carried out, the Puritans used their conviction about God and the devil as a mechanism to further their laws, and therefore to argue their actions. Unfortunately, today, atrocities committed by individuals are no longer generally justified by factors such as religion. Whereas the Puritans, as described in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, during the “Salem Tragedy” in 1629 (Miller 6), where at least five of the defendants died in prison, and the twenty-six people who went to trial were convicted, and a second court sentenced twenty-nine people for witchcraft, where nineteen of the accused– fourteen women and five men– were hanged, they did so with the justification of what they interpreted through the bible. It is true that several officials with great influence in the Puritan court only had an interest in obtaining more power in the form of territories or goods, evidently abusing their authority to obtain their own benefit at the cost of damaging others; this activity continues to this day, but the difference is that today those who abuse their power can no longer use the pretext of religion as a valid reason. During the 18th century, science was not advanced, there was almost no technology, so all they had was religion. If all were faithful believers in it, or only used it as a defense mechanism to acquire more power, we will not be able to know. But what is a guarantee is that atrocities were committed before, as in the case of the Salem Tragedy of 1629, due to religious ideals. As an example, in 2019 it is recorded that it was the year in which there were more mass shootings in schools in the United States, where there were more than 41 shootings and a total of 211 deaths (US saw highest number of mass killings on record in 2019, database reveals). If we compare it to the Salem Tragedy, the total casualties from the shootings is more than 7 times the death toll in Salem. Of course, we must take into account factors such as the fact that today there are more people in the world, weapons are more developed, and that also the shootings happened in a longer period of time; however, if we observe proportional factors of both times, statistically, what happened in 2019 is still more drastic. This clearly shows how morals and honor have been declining over the years. It should be noted that when referring to the idea that Puritans had more morals than before, it does not mean that their morals have been completely correct, but they did have more honor before, which unfortunately has been lost over the years.

As a last point, although Puritan morality was that morality that referred to sin and guilt precisely to repress women by assigning them a subordinate social, and sexual role, and fortunately the role of women has evolved and improved over time– nowadays women have the right to study and work, and participate in the decisions of society– even though slavery has been abolished, and the panorama has been opened to people who are part of the LGBT + community, individuals continue to be killed for the simple fact of having a different characteristic– skin tone, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or race– there is more violence in the world than there was 300 years ago, and the honor of man has diminished. A study carried out in 2021 showed that despite being only 13% of the population, African Americans have been 26% of those killed by the police in 2021, and they are 2.5 times more likely than whites to be killed by the police only because of being a “person of color” (Sinyangwe). From a few decades to the present, acts of violence against African Americans have been like a roller coaster ride, growing and decreasing. Great figures of American literature have shared their experiences of racism against them for the simple fact of being “black“; such is the case of Ta-Nehisi Coates: “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible — this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white” (Coates 7). Here we realize the lack of morality that exists in American society, because it is incredibly unfortunate that people see others as inferior simply because they are different; either because of the tone of their skin, their nationality, sexual orientation, or the simple fact of being a woman. At present, in the United States there is no federal law that explicitly protects the LGTBI community (lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual and intersex) in situations of employment or housing discrimination; twenty-eight states lack state laws that prevent an LGTBI person from being fired from work or expelled from home by the owners (Tombesi, Díez). On the other hand, studies show that every nine seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States (“11 FACTS ABOUT DOMESTIC AND DATING VIOLENCE”). The morality of a society goes hand in hand with the way they behave with respect to different situations; violence is a way of response by a society to a circumstance. Since the Puritan era, violence in American society has dramatically-and-exponentially increased. In the last twenty years, according to the US Department of Defense, “the total military spending in Afghanistan–from October 2001 to September 2019– had reached $ 825 billion, with about another $130 billion spent on reconstruction projects. That brings the total cost– based on official data– to US $ 955 billion between 2001 and 2019” (“US saw highest number of mass killings on record in 2019, database reveals”). Moreover, the US spent about $ 4.69 trillion on World War II. It also disbursed more than 300,000 million dollars in World War I, $389.81 billion in the Korean War, in addition to another $843.63 billion in the Vietnam War, among $1.01 trillion in the Iraq War (Harrington & Suneson). What moral is a society like this going to have, which prefers to invest the vast majority of its finances in wars– where no one gains anything, and everyone ends up losing– instead of spending it on things that do not include violence. The entire budget spent on wars in the USA represents almost 35 percent of GDP (O’Hanlon), while the budget for the health area is only 5 percent of GDP. With all the money that has been spent in the last 100 years in wars, it could have been used to improve health, even to improve space technology. But it is the reality. America’s morals dictate that we must spend the most on developing weapons, prioritizing wars, violence; all this is what is reflected in society today; it is what the next generations are learning. At least in Puritan times the best they could hope for their budget was to improve their judicial, executive, and legislative systems.It is clear that although the Puritans’ morals were not entirely correct, they did have more morals during the 17th century than today. Our morals today reflect violence, inequality, unethical, and poor judgment within our society. We have already seen how it is that now individuals are not afraid of being punished and being brought before spiritual justice; how is it that now there is no valid justification for the crimes we commit; how is it that now there is more violence, more deaths, more inequalities committed every day in our society. Although we have evolved and have brought positive points to this society, our morals have changed, we no longer have honor and we have more and more moral decline; what are we passing down to our children, if we cannot even respect our fellow man?

“The lack of ethical and moral values are the root of social problems today.”