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While I'd agree that the modern espionage-industrial complex is not motivated by old-fashioned Puritanism in the historical sense, it certainly does have roots
by mesofile 11y ago
While I'd agree that the modern espionage-industrial complex is not motivated by old-fashioned Puritanism in the historical sense, it certainly does have roots in the sort of naive moral authoritarianism (which we call small-p puritanism) that political and religious figures have exploited to great effect in American society since Anthony Comstock and before. The creation of US security services like the FBI and CIA and the cultures they engendered owe a great deal to people like J Edgar Hoover who had a keen sense of this kind of puritanism, and accumulated a great deal of power by leveraging it.
- dalke 11y agoDoes "Puritanism" here reflect more a parochial understanding? The English have their own espionage-industrial complex, including one CCTV camera for about every 10 people, and a native author, Orwell, who famously wrote about near universal surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's also the Five Eyes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, wherein an espionage agency in one country can route around laws which restrict surveillance of citizens by simply asking a foreign agency to get the information and share it with the former. This might be based on a 'naive moral authoritarianism', which in the US might include 'puritanism', but I don't think puritanism captures the basis for the multi-national, espionage-industrial complex, any more than attributing it to some sort of 'Anglo-Saxonism' might.