As Time Evolves, Do We Become More Moral?

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The time is always right to do the right thing.” What he means by this is that no matter what situation or place in time one is in, there is always the  opportunity to do the right thing, but is that always the smartest decision? In Arthur Dimmsdale’s case from the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, or in Mary Warren’s case from the Crucible by Arthur Miller,  the right and just choice for their circumstances wasn’t the smartest one for their lives. According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the meaning of morality is, “beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior.” Most people have  the ability to know whether what they are doing is right or wrong and since the Puritan days,  our ability to recognize what the right thing to do is, or our morality, has developed and become much superior. The world has become more moral since the 1600’s due to technology and education, learning from the mistakes we have made and the mistakes our ancestors made, more sense of law and morality; however, as a society,  we still have more growing to do. 

In the world now, everyone is entitled to an education, unlike back in the Puritan era. For the most part, men would get an education, not all women would. Black people or slaves would not get an education at all. In the present time, everyone, at least in the United States of America, has access to an education because of the freedom we have today. Back in Puritan times in the 1600s, if one recieved an education, it was mainly about religion. Now the world is way more focused on academic learning,  not extremely one sided like when Judge Danfourth said, “ that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there is no road in between”(Miller 94). What he means by this is that when judge Danforth thought John Proctor was going against the court by not saying anyone’s name which would be accusing them of witchcraft to clear his name. Danforth just wanted more names to add on the list and thought that if John didn’t say the names, he was against the court which was how they would think. Back in the Puritan times, one was either with them or against them and even if they were in the wrong, they were always in the right. Even if it was morally wrong on what they were doing, everyone just went along with it because of fear of them. They wanted to live so it’s either you choose to live on a lie, or die for the truth. Present time, everyone can live the way they want to live. In the USA, people can be what they want to be, and can choose what they want to live by. By no way is our society perfect, but the people are way smarter thanks to education and also technology plays a big role also. Anyone, at any time, can look anything up on the internet to learn or do research or to see what other people are doing in other countries. Although a lot of people use technology for bad, a lot of it is also used for good and other people feed off that good and have the chance to become more moral than they were before. What is done also through education and technology is looking into the past and present and learning and remembering the mistakes that were made by humans. 

Another reason that the present time people are more moral than the Puritans is that we have the ability to learn from the mistakes of the Puritans in the New World, and for the most part, we have definelity learned from them. In the present day, we don’t hold unfair trials and say one can get out of trouble if you give the court more names to accuse. The Puritans were ruthless in that way and if you didn’t listen and follow them, you would either be looked down upon, or essentially killed. The Puritans thought that everything they did was for God and that he accepted everything they did, even killing people. The Puritans were extremely narrow minded and their government was intolerant and according to “Peace, Love, and Puritanism,” “Puritans were self righteous and authoritarian, bent on making everyone conform to a rigid set of rules and ostracizing everyone who disagreed with them”(Hall). That is absolutely right and is another example of how immorale the Puritans were. We have learned from our mistakes, especially the ones made by the Puritans, some may argue that he didn’t learn it too quickly because of all the genocides that happned recently, the Holocaust, and murderers. But after the Holocaust, the amount of evilness slowed down trememdously as most things that the Puritans did does not happen anymore like  killing innocent people, unjust court trials, or what they did to Hester Prynn which was publicly shaming her for commiting adultery, which was extremely personal. Unlike now, the Puritans were blind to human life and only thought of what they thought was right. Our present day people are a lot more developed morally, educationally, and technologically. If we didn’t have the Puritans, our world would be very different and we wouldn’t have the free world we have now without them because if they didn;t make the mistakes they made, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn from them and see what didn’t work. If we didn’t learn from their mistakes in government and law, we would still be the way they were, which was very corrupt and narrow-minded.

Nowadays, the world has way more sense of law and morality thanks to the mistakes of the Puritans. The Puritans law system was extremely unjust and unfair as we saw in the Scarlet Letter with Hester as she was tormented, harassed, and humiliated for seven years for adultery. In this day and age, most people, but definitely not everyone, know the basics of what is right and wrong. Most people know killing is very wrong which is something the Puritans did not know at all. They were extremely ruthless, especially when it came to sinners, or what they thought were sinners. People accused in court, even if they were innocent, were forced to say they were guilty in the court system with the Puritans. There were many scenes of this happening in the Scarlet Letter like, “The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest in the spectacle of guilt and shame in  fellow creatures, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it”(Hawthorne 42). The Puritans saw good in shaming people and saw nothing wrong with it, like with Hester Prynne. They all listened to what the church said for everything like laws, punishments, and new laws. The society in the Puritan times was extremely religious, even in the laws. If someone had gone against one of the Commandments, they would either be killed or humiliated like Hester Prynne. If the Puritans never existed, we would never have had the law system we have now. We still use what they had, but we have kept building upon it for the last century and have made it much more fair, right, and just. Living in America now is ten times better now because of democracy, freedom, and safety. People living in the Puritan times were always scared that something would happen to them, even if they were innocent. Thanks to the law system now, most people don’t have to worry about that now because it is much safer and more moral and fair-minded to live in than back then, but it can still be much better. Obviously our generation is so far from perfect, we keep on improving as we move on.                                    

Although we are more moral than the Puritans, we still have way more building to do. Like the past, we just keep on building upon morality as time evolves. The world keeps on getting smarter and more moral. We live in a more peaceful world, but we still have growing to do. Everyday, people get judged all the time, but nowadays, most of the time, people keep it inside their heads and don’t say it because it would be extremely rude to say it. As The Conversation says, “As cultures evolve and societies develop, people’s ways of thinking about good and evil also transform. The nature of that transformation is a matter of speculation”(Haslam). Our society has developed an enormous amount since the time of the Puritans. According to this article, the way we think of good and evil has changed and that’s totally right. The Puritans did some atrocious things like killing and hurting. Most people now would look at the Puritans and say that they are evil, but back in the Puritan times, killing, hurting, and punishing was just a normal day in society which is just crazy to think about. Although we have developed so much since the Puritans, we still do have a little bit of Puritanism in the way we think, like judging other people, saying things that hurt other people, and making other people look bad to make yourself look better. It is not even close to as bad as the Puritans because our society has worked to just erase their way of thinking which is definitely for the best. 

The world would be very different without the Puritans because the people now learned a lot from them. Some good stuff, more bad things. They lacked morality, which in today’s age, is way better. They killed innocent people based on suspicions or accusations. In today’s day and age, people in the United States of America are way more moral than the Puritans in the way they live, speak, and act. If the Puritans never existed, our society would have never been this developed because the Puritans were the exact example of making mistakes. Luckily, we have learned and will keep on developing as the years go on. 

Work Cited

 Haslam, Nick Professor of Psychology. “Changing Morals: We’re More Compassionate than 100 Years Ago, but More Judgmental Too.” The Conversation, 6 July 2021, https://theconversation.com/changing-morals-were-more-compassionate-than-100-years-ago-but-more-judgmental-too-112504. 

  Huston, Matthew. “Still Puritan After all These Years.” The New York Times, The New                   York Times, 4, Aug. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/are-americans-still-puritan.html

Miller, Author. The Crucible: A play in Four Acts. Penguin Books, New York, New York 2016.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Signet Classics, St. PAul, Minnesota.  2009