CLEAR-CUTTING THE OAKS

It's Emerson's Anniversary and He's Nailed 21st-Century America (ADAM COHEN, May 4, 2003, NY Times)

"Trust thyself," Ralph Waldo Emerson admonished, "every heart vibrates to that iron string." Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance," goes on to regret how much "we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions." Emerson's tribute to the individual is stirring stuff, but before long he is sneering at a request for charity. "Are they my poor?" he asks. "I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong."

The 200th anniversary of Emerson's birth is this month, and he starts his third century widely regarded as one of America's most influential thinkers. Emerson was part of the same mid-19th-century literary renaissance that produced Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau. He is known, college English students will recall, for his quotable essays ("a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"), philosophy-minded poems, and role in founding Transcendentalism.

Emerson's vast body of work is credited with playing a large part in shaping the American character. It provides, in particular, an intellectual basis for one of America's great traditions, rugged individualism. But also embedded in his writings are the stirrings of a more pernicious, and currently thriving, philosophy, of American individualism run amok--call it American self-absorption. [...]

Emerson's individualism led him to value dissent, and to take bold stands, including championing abolition. But his rhapsodizing of the individual also lapsed into self-absorption. "Life," he once observed, "consists in what a man is thinking of all day." His constant self-regard often led him to be less than fully aware of his fellow human beings. The attack on charity in "Self-Reliance" also includes gibes at "the education at college of fools" and "alms to sots," of which Emerson writes, "though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold." [...]

Most striking of all, again in "Experience," was his dismissal of human grieving in general, and the death of his beloved son Waldo, at age 5, in particular. He compares the loss of his son to the loss of property, which would be a "great inconvenience," but would ultimately leave him "as it found me, neither better nor worse."

Individualism run amok, transformed into a cruel self-absorption, is a good description of much of American life right now. Republicans, using the rallying cry "It's your money," are promoting a $550 billion tax cut that would take health care from sick children--a modern echo of Emerson's "wicked dollars." In foreign policy, the rhetoric is equally self-regarding: "You're with us," we tell the world, "or against us." [...]

Emerson liked to call his essays "lay sermons" and, defrocked or not, he was a minister to the end. But his writings on individualism speak not only to our highest natures, but to our lowest. Two hundred years after his birth, Emerson the secular preacher still matters not because he has all the answers for how we should live, but because he so intriguingly reflects who we actually are.

This being The Times, it's no surprise to see a tribute to the muddle-headed Emerson turn into an attack on conservatism, in fact, it's fitting since conservatives must find Mr. Emerson repellent. He sought to turn what Samuel Johnson recognized as a vice--"There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart, a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given himself something peculiar to himself"--into a virtue, elevating the individual to heights unwarranted for most of us.

One need read no further than the opening paragraph of Emerson's Politics to think him an unacceptably dangerous man:

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institution are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has in the character of living men, is its force. The statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article today? Our statute is a currency, which we stamp with our own portrait: it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority, by the pertest of her sons: and as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.

Compare this nearly nihilistic twaddle with Michael Oakeshott's attempted definition of conservatism:

The general characteristics of this [conservative] disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be . . . an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past.

I don't know if Hawthorne's Earth's Holocaust was written in response to Politics, but it was written the same year and serves admirably as one. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2003 8:03 PM