"The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps you from enjoying it"
About this Quote
Isaac Bashevis Singer pokes at a particular American moral inheritance: the stern, Puritan-inflected ethos associated with New England. The phrase New England conscience conjures a culture of self-scrutiny, thrift, and suspicion of pleasure that lingers long after Puritanism itself. Singer suggests that this moral legacy often operates less as a brake on behavior than as a temperature control on pleasure. You may still do what you should not, but an internalized voice ensures you cannot savor it.
The insight is both psychological and sociological. Psychologically, guilt functions as a clever mechanism of control; it colonizes the inner life, turning joy into anxiety. Sociologically, it reflects a regional ethic that shaped American norms: respectability, industriousness, and a tight rein on appetites. From Hawthorne to H. L. Mencken, observers have noted how Puritan residues can produce a culture where the fear of enjoyment becomes a virtue. Singer crystallizes that tendency in a witty paradox.
There is also an outsider’s shrewdness at work. A Polish-born, Yiddish-writing immigrant who settled in New York, Singer knew both religious rigor and the tug of desire from his own background, and he often dramatized that tension in his fiction. By applying the lens to New England, he hints that moralistic cultures, whether Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant, share a common strategy: they may fail to eradicate temptation but succeed in souring it. The conscience becomes a spoil-sport rather than a guide to flourishing.
The line carries a deeper critique of virtue enforced by shame. If morality primarily makes pleasures feel illicit without cultivating inner freedom or wise restraint, it yields neither saintliness nor happiness, only a habit of grim participation. Singer’s humor keeps the observation light, but the jab is sharp: a culture that measures virtue by discomfort may produce people who sin like everyone else and suffer more for it.
The insight is both psychological and sociological. Psychologically, guilt functions as a clever mechanism of control; it colonizes the inner life, turning joy into anxiety. Sociologically, it reflects a regional ethic that shaped American norms: respectability, industriousness, and a tight rein on appetites. From Hawthorne to H. L. Mencken, observers have noted how Puritan residues can produce a culture where the fear of enjoyment becomes a virtue. Singer crystallizes that tendency in a witty paradox.
There is also an outsider’s shrewdness at work. A Polish-born, Yiddish-writing immigrant who settled in New York, Singer knew both religious rigor and the tug of desire from his own background, and he often dramatized that tension in his fiction. By applying the lens to New England, he hints that moralistic cultures, whether Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant, share a common strategy: they may fail to eradicate temptation but succeed in souring it. The conscience becomes a spoil-sport rather than a guide to flourishing.
The line carries a deeper critique of virtue enforced by shame. If morality primarily makes pleasures feel illicit without cultivating inner freedom or wise restraint, it yields neither saintliness nor happiness, only a habit of grim participation. Singer’s humor keeps the observation light, but the jab is sharp: a culture that measures virtue by discomfort may produce people who sin like everyone else and suffer more for it.
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