Most people think of Colonial New England as embodying the greatest period of conformity this country has ever seen. But the nature of Congregationalism hides a very great irony: structurally, this way of life demands individuality, not regimentation. The service is almost free of liturgy, emphasizing local preaching about local issues. This virtually guarantees dissonance inside the congregation. [my bold, he italicized the word dissonance] The constant struggle for clarity by every church member acting as his or her own priest, his or her own expert, invariably leads to progress toward the truth. Why do I say that? Well, what I've just described is the process that Aristotle and Karl Marx and Thomas Hobbes and any of a large number of creative thinkers have called the dialectical down to its roots, in a way acutely hostile to hierarchical thinking.
Central planners of any period despise the dialectic because it gets in the way of efficiently broadcasting "one right way" to do things. Half a century ago Betrand Russell remarked that the United States was the only major country on earth that deliberately avoided teaching its children to think dialectically. He was talking about twentieth-century America, of course, the land of compulsory government schooling, not the New England of Congregational distinction. Do you wonder where "Yankees" got their lasting reputation for stubborness, orneriness, and shrewd hair-splitting? Now you know. Roger Williams saw as clearly as any person of his time and recognized the inevitable connection between dissonance and quality of life. You can't have one without the other. [...]
Now I want us to examine something that seems embarrassing in New England civil life; and yet, paradoxically, I think it hides a secret of great power, which the social engineers who built and maintain our government monopoly schools are forced to overlook: Each town was able to exclude people it didn't like! People were able to choose whom they wanted to work with, to sort themselves into a living curriculum that worked for them. The words of the first Dedham charter catch this feeling perfectly; the orignial settlers wanted to (and did) shut out "people whose dispositions do not suit us, whose society will be hurtful to us." So in a funny way these early towns functioned like selective clubs or colleges, like MIT and Harvard do today, narrowing human differences down to a range that could be managed by them humanely. If you consider the tremendous stress the dialectical process sets up anyway -- where all people are their own priests, their own final masters -- it's hard to see how a congregational society can do otherwise. If you have to accept everyone, no matter how hostile they may be to your own personality, philosophy, or mission, then an operation would quickly become paralyzed by fatal disagreements. The common causes and purposes that mark human association at its best would then degrade into those few innocuous undertakings that have no political dimension, if such can be found.
