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#Post#: 8105--------------------------------------------------
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anti-Slavery, And Why He Would Really Hate
Your Twitter Feed
By: guest55 Date: August 16, 2021, 8:32 pm
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Ralph Waldo Emerson would really hate your Twitter feed
[quote]We can’t understand Ralph Waldo Emerson the philosopher
of self-realisation without understanding Emerson the radical
abolitionist. In fact, his language and philosophy helped shape
the contours of the antislavery movement in New England. As
Bostonians’ dislike of slavery began to grow into active
disobedience to the laws that supported it, many turned to
Emerson’s ideas to understand their actions. This happened even
as Emerson frankly disliked the insincerity and bad faith of
many reformers – for whom moralism replaced an authentic
character. Ultimately, through examples such as the militant
abolitionist John Brown, Emerson came to celebrate a certain
form of antislavery political activity, one that expressed
heroic and authentic moral character traits and that could be
experienced as resistance to the conformity to the marketplace.
In some of his earliest extant letters and journal entries, as a
young man, Emerson expressed a hatred for slavery and wanted to
see it abolished. It was in the 1830s, while he was coming to
many of the philosophical and existential conclusions that would
mark his Transcendentalist thought, that he first spent time
with radical abolitionists. In 1831, he had surprised the
buttoned-up parishioners in his Unitarian church by allowing
abolitionists to address the congregation. In 1838, the leading
abolitionist newspaper of the day, William Lloyd Garrison’s
Liberator, republished Emerson’s letter protesting Cherokee
removal, which he called ‘so vast an outrage’. As the
conservative clergy in Massachusetts mobilised to condemn
Emerson’s Transcendentalist movement, he often found himself
allied with abolitionists, who also tangled with the religiously
orthodox on questions such as church reform or
antisabbatarianism. Importantly, as the 1840s progressed,
Emerson began to spend more time with Black abolitionists. He
was familiar with Frederick Douglass as early as 1844, he shared
antislavery stages with fugitive slaves such as Lewis Hayden,
and he encountered William C Nell, an activist and
groundbreaking Black historian, in New England’s parlours,
intellectual clubs.
Still, Emerson’s reputation in the public mind as an
antipolitical thinker lingers. To be sure, in his contrarianism,
Emerson often espoused an antimoralism, one that privileged
individual authenticity rather than public displays of
solidarity. Emerson was in some ways the mirror-opposite of some
of today’s preening Left intellectuals; the Transcendentalist
was almost embarrassed of his own political commitments, as if
he hoped you didn’t notice the antislavery rallies he spoke at,
the support he gave to abolitionist militants. He had an
instinctive allergy to what he called the ‘rosepink
sentimentality’ of reformers, preferring the smirk of an honest
rogue to the scowl of a self-righteous prig. In essays such as
‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), he had accused some abolitionists of bad
faith, of concealing their greed and ‘spite at home’ through a
Mrs Jellyby-like ‘incredible tenderness for black folk a
thousand miles off’. He saw how a moral crusade, maybe
especially if it is so clearly righteous, can serve as an
existential crutch for people, allowing them to fill the void in
their souls with the applause that comes from cheap moralism. He
would have hated your Twitter feed.[/quote]
[quote]As a result, Emerson’s Romantic existentialism sometimes
made him wary of abolitionists and other reformers. When his
friend George Ripley started a commune at Brook Farm, outside of
Boston, Emerson debated joining. Finally he demurred, writing to
Ripley that ultimately he didn’t want to ‘put on your community
the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself.’ It
was a nearly perfect statement of how he sometimes contrasted
political struggle with self-development. Part of his disquiet
came from his, perhaps unfair, sense that the abolitionist
leadership, particularly Garrison, were shallow people,
contorting their personalities to meet a political goal. After
meeting with Wendell Phillips and Garrison, Emerson took to his
journal to offer a devasting critique of their inauthenticity:
I have always the feeling that they may wake up some morning
& find they have made a capital mistake, & are not the persons
they took themselves for. Very dangerous is this thoroughly
social & related life.
So intent were these activists on making themselves efficient
public mouthpieces for a cause, that they had no time to be a
full human. They were ‘mere mouthpieces of a party, take away
the party & they shrivel & vanish.’ They lived their lives,
Emerson worried, as a means to a political end, not as something
worthy of serious attention in itself. [Something's just never
change apparently].
Still, in 1844, with his address ‘Emancipation in the British
West Indies’, Emerson had cast his lot with the abolitionists.
Antislavery activists were thrilled: John Greenleaf Whittier
tried to recruit Emerson to run for office with the Liberty
Party, and the Concord philosopher soon became a regular
presence at abolitionist rallies, helping to bring in audiences
with his literary celebrity. As the Massachusetts senator
Charles Sumner wrote to him in 1851: ‘You have access to many,
whom other Anti-Slavery speakers cannot reach.’ Nell noted that
Emerson refused to speak before segregated lyceums, publicly
withdrawing from the New Bedford Lyceum when he discovered that
it did not admit Black attendees.
So how did this happen? How did the antimoral existentialist
become notorious as an abolitionist? The key is that Emerson
distinguished authentic moral choice from the self-serving and
safe moralism that was its pale imitation. While the moralist
trades in a false coin, superficially embracing heroic moral
qualities, but doing so to try to use political righteousness to
import a false clarity into their anxious souls, there were
some, such as Brown, who actually ‘believed in his ideas to the
extent that he existed to put them all into action’. As Emerson
and his friends began plotting resistance to the Fugitive Slave
Act of 1850, they developed a language of authentic behaviour
and heroism that could be mobilised against conformity with an
unjust law. Eventually, the rhetoric and practice of New England
abolitionism began showing Emerson’s influence.
Emerson had long worried about how the emerging industrial
division of labour was forcing Americans into roles, reducing
their capacity to live authentic and integral lives. People were
taking on specialised employments – as clergymen, lawyers,
mechanics or sailors – and beginning to think primarily through
the demands of those employments. ‘The priest becomes a form;
the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the
sailor, a rope of a ship.’ People seemed indistinguishable, in
other words, from the tools they used. Religious or moral
considerations took a back seat to their professional roles.
Markets made people into specialists, rendering them divided and
inauthentic, and the resulting division of labour produced
shrunken and limited thought. The attorney or the merchant no
longer thought like a human being – weighing moral and
existential questions with the seriousness that they demanded –
but reasoned from the confines of what was good as a lawyer or
cotton trader. Privately he wondered whether leading
abolitionists were also playing a role, that they ‘had only a
platform-existence, & no personality.’[/quote]
[quote]The central turning point for Emerson was probably the
Fugitive Slave Act. The act required Northerners – particularly
policemen, judges, jurors and attorneys – to participate in the
rendition of fugitive slaves. Historians are increasingly
becoming aware of how interlinked were Southern slavery and
Northern capitalism. But to Emerson the problem was not so much
material as it was moral: the market, by tying people to a
career and profession, was destroying their ability to think in
any sort of morally authentic way – to ‘Reason’ in his Romantic
language, rather than use mere ‘Understanding’ – and thus was
leaving them susceptible to the pressure of the Southern
slaveholders. The State Street merchant who traded in Southern
cotton, the Boston policeman who arrested a fugitive… both were
excellently performing their roles as merchant and policeman and
for that exact reason were blinded to how they were being used
for a terrible injustice. As his friend Henry David Thoreau
declared, people like this ‘are just as much tools, and as
little men’.[/quote]
Wonder what Farmer John would think of all of this? ;)
[quote]Soon abolitionists began sounding like Emerson. Theodore
Parker, who helped lead the main organisation dedicated to
protecting fugitives in Boston, wrote of those who followed
their official duty rather than their moral duty that ‘he is no
longer a man, but a mere president, general, governor,
representative, sheriff, juror, or constable.’ Sumner resigned
his position as a US commissioner – as did one Joseph Hayes, a
captain in the Boston police – rather than be asked to return a
fugitive slave. The social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson –
who later became the mentor and editor of Emily Dickinson –
wrote a letter to an old boyhood friend, then serving as a US
commissioner, pleading with him to resign or violate the new
law: ‘can you as a man with a reason, a conscience, and a heart
become what the law calls on you to become – the paid tool of
another’s injustice and cruelty.’ A ‘tool’, the abolitionists’
favourite insult for someone who followed the law, was, of
course, something that is used by another, something that cannot
think for itself. Policemen and soldiers could be tools, but so,
Emerson thought, were a growing number of intellectuals:
ministers, editors and professors who repeated others’ words and
inherited dogma without any critical thought of their own.
In the secret societies dedicated to violating the Fugitive
Slave Act, a new type of abolitionism was developing – heroic,
autonomous and nonconforming – that Emerson had helped to create
and that he could admire. He began to celebrate abolitionist
heroes such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Elijah Lovejoy, the Boston
Vigilance Committee (which had recently killed a US marshal
while attempting to free a fugitive slave). It was, above all,
Brown, the half-crazed revolutionary committed to fomenting a
slave rebellion in Virginia, whom Emerson venerated. These
figures, in Emerson’s mind, shared a certain heroic commitment
to individual autonomy, a rejection of the bourgeois virtues of
prudence and expediency, a rebellion against the given world.
Above all, they were willing to transcend the demands of society
and role, to see themselves as self-created moral agents. Brown
did not act or see the world primarily as a wool merchant (he
was pretty bad at that); instead, he sold wool in order to
finance his moral actions.
As the Civil War approached, then, Emerson had overcome any
reservations he once had about the reformer mentality. When
Brown was caught and executed, Emerson’s declaration that Brown
would ‘make the gallows as glorious as the Cross’ was widely
reprinted throughout the press, both by supporters and by
outraged conservatives, and played a significant role in making
Northerners feel that it was acceptable to embrace the executed
martyr. After their father was executed, two of Brown’s children
– Annie and Sarah Brown – even boarded with the Emerson family.
Where he had once worried that a friend had ‘ceased to be a man
that [he] may be an abolitionist,’ he now saw that Brown had
proven that being an abolitionist could make one a ‘man’, an
authentic moral agent.[/quote]
HTML https://psyche.co/ideas/why-ralph-waldo-emerson-would-really-hate-your-twitter-feed?utm_source=pocket-newtab
[quote]Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882),[7]
who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist,
lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the
transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen
as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the
countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his
thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500
public lectures across the United States.[/quote]
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
HTML https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson_ca1857_retouched.jpg
See also:
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualism
HTML https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Political_Spectrum_Chart_NPOV.svg/1024px-Political_Spectrum_Chart_NPOV.svg.png
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
#Post#: 8611--------------------------------------------------
Re: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anti-Slavery, And Why He Would Really H
ate Your Twitter Feed
By: guest55 Date: September 6, 2021, 3:28 pm
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Chris Hedges DESTROYS Twitter 'Activists'
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRX7NNenZNk
Comment:
[quote]Not all prisoners have done horrible and terrible things.
A good percentage of them did nothing more than get high and
never harmed anyone. Most Americans could care less what happens
to their fellow man. Now that their rights are being threatened
they cry about it. Their lack of action when the government was
stripping the rights of their fellow citizens is why it's so
easy for their rights to be violated. Guess what no one gives a
f about them either which is exactly what they deserve.[/quote]
'Rights' are given to people by someone else, therefore they can
just as easily be taken away. 'Rights' are arbitrary, universal
compassion is not.
Non-Western 'American' leftist activists should be organizing as
Hedges prescribes in the above clip. They should also be
training with firearms.
See also:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/firearms/
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/historic-left-wing-ahimsa/
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/true-left-breakthrough-ahimsa/
True ahimsa is universal compassion in action!
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