"...we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world." ~ Oscar WildeRalph Waldo Emerson and Oscar Wilde were on the planet for a only a few of the same years. and they lived on different continents, so i'm sure they didn't talk much.
"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
nevertheless, as i was reading Wilde's the soul of man under socialism and Emerson's self-reliance on the same day last week, i noticed similarities. individualism is the star that lights up both philosophies. but whereas Wilde's individualism appears to be only an art--free expression in a sense, Emerson's is more a matter of virtue, honor, and independence. but both ideas cross over into the other's perspective. "all influence is immoral," Wilde writes, invoking some sort of pattern of righteousness. And Emerson tells us "I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim," forsaking everything else for his own desire.
socialism and self-reliance don't fit together, ideologically. in his essay, Wilde wants the system rearranged, top to bottom, so that there will be no poor and no materialism. Emerson, for all his talk of integrity and virtue, appears to not care about all those poor people. "Are they my poor?" he says. "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."
But the same sort of ease appears in Wilde too:
"It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens."In Wilde's essay there are hints of transcendentalism. In Emerson's, small pieces of aestheticism. what worth can these ideals of spirituality and beauty be to us now? has the last century preserved anything of these philosophies?
more importantly, what do i think?
it is very easy to accuse me of being apathetic toward all these causes and ideas that i don't quite understand and perhaps don't quite wish to understand. socialism? are you serious? salvation army? hrm. i, like Emerson want to ask "Are they my poor?" being guilted into being charitable sounds horrible. if one doesn't really care about the plight of the starving people in africa, why should one be made to care? and i hate feeling guilty. but it happens all the time. that Emerson only begrudges the kindness he is roped into giving to people who do not belong to him is some consolation. among his friends and family he was presumably generous enough.
but to take responsibility for the entirety of the world's ills? impossible. "Thy love afar is spite at home," Emerson writes. it is too easy to subscribe to this cause and this ideal and forget about your brother. yet even the claims of a family interfere with this thing called myself. i must tend to my siblings, i cannot tend to my own dreams. unless, miraculously, the desire to serve others and the desire to be my own person coincide. on the other hand, in Wilde's opinion "And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all." i can donate all i want to some far flung charity, as long as i don't try and wear another person's hat.
so there is some middle ground, we hope. you can't be yourself if you lock yourself up in a box. and you can't be yourself if you are forever worried about other people, what they think, how they survive. poor is just an adjective, isn't it? just like blue-eyed or apathetic. we wade through all these adjectives, picking up ones we like and trying to brush away the ones we don't. it's a mess.
these two essays were published 50 years apart. we can't go back and ask their authors what exactly they meant in them, or if they really believed all that stuff they wrote. we must find our own truths. adopt our own stars.
8 comments:
'it is very easy to accuse me of being apathetic toward all these causes and ideas that i don't quite understand and perhaps don't quite wish to understand.'
By not wishing to understand, that, surely, is apathetic by definition.
I can't help feeling that bit above was sort of directed at me, after our conversation the other day. So I'm going to explain my view. Before we start, I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing you of being devoid of any kind of emotional connection with the rest of the world, but there are a few things you've mentioned or implied here that I feel the need to comment on.
Let's start with guilt. Of course it's ridiculous to expect anyone to spend their lives distributing themselves evenly over the entire population. You shouldn't feel guilty about something unless you're responsible for it. I think both Emerson and Wilde are right that there's something wrong with being charitable because other people thing you OUGHT to be. And what's life if we're all obligated to spend it helping other people? But then, in what ways can you be held responsible? You might easily say that you never took the poor guy's money. You're not responsible for the living conditions of all the poor people in Africa. But what about your responsibility as a member of your state? Of your country? While you're reaping the benefits of your country's prosperity or your position in society, is this, directly or indirectly, at the unjust expense of someone else? If so, don't you have some kind of responsibility then?
Take free trade. We are members of developed countries with robust economies. Developing countries are presently suffering from huge debts, and in return for clearing those debts, we've been demanding that they sign agreements removing protective tarrifs from their imports and exports (meaning that they have to conform to free trade too). The thing is, they're in no position to compete because they're still developing. So they either get stuck with their huge debts, so that they are in no position to develop, or we eradicate their debts in return for them eradicating their tarrifs, they lose their protection, their economy suffers, and...oh look, they're in no position to develop. A no-win situation for them, while we're getting richer and richer. And yes, 'we'. By contentedly living the way we are, as members of these developed countries, we are effectively exploiting others. We are part of the system that's doing the exploiting. Would you really say that in this case it's nothing to do with you?
You might still say that you can't be held accountable for such things, or that it's not your fault because you were never aware of it, but surely that is your responsibility if you decide that you don't want to know. Maybe you think that the free trade example is still too big in scale for the individual to have any impact, but if it's the responsibility of your society, that society consists of numerous individuals including you, and collectively you should be doing something about it.
So there's an example where there's genuine reason to feel guilty about people you don't know. Here's another, smaller, example. Say you walk past someone who's getting beaten up. Say you could actually do something to stop it. You might think, 'Well, maybe he deserves it. There might be a good reason for him getting beaten up.' If you choose to ignore it and walk on, how are you ever going to know if that was the case? This example is different to the free trade one because you lose any specific personal responsibility - it's not your fault this guy is getting beaten up in the first place. But does that mean it's perfectly OK to shrug and walk on?
In this instance, rather than guilt, maybe you should be feeling compassion. That's a very Christian word; maybe another way of putting it would be 'some kind of emotional awareness of fellow humanity'. Again, it makes no sense to be compassionate just because you OUGHT to be. That's empty. If you should be compassionate or guilty, or have any other kind of moral obligation, it has to be because you genuinely see a reason behind it.
And here's a reason: because you're part of this world. (Heh. As Merry says to the Ents in the Two Towers film. This geeky aside was not intentional, but it works.) You can ignore the outside world all you like and live blissfully unaware in a little community or family unit, but supposing your happy circumstances change in a way that beyond your control and suddenly you're living a miserable existence. If the people you know cannot help you, who helps you then? If you honestly think you could just shrug it off if you were ever in that position and would not expect any kind of help from anyone, then fine. There really is no argument I can make against that if that's what you truly believe. But I think it's worth looking at like this: we're all living in this same world, and as a result, everything we do is going to effect somebody else, so in a way we are all responsible for each other. In this sense the world is almost like a giant community. Yes, it's ridiculous to expect us as individuals to be held accountable for the lives of every other person on the planet, but to the extent that we can do something, there's no reason why we shouldn't.
I mean, you're about to go on a Mission for 18 months, right? What kind of thing are you going to be doing during that time? Trying to convert people. Trying to welcome more people into the Church of LDS. Why? How can you care for the soul of someone you don't know and might never have affected your life in any way, but not care if they're living in poverty? It seems to me that without genuine general compassion here, all you have left is self-righteousness.
The impression I got from reading this post was that you see it as a choice between helping others on the one hand and being your own person on the other. These things are not mutually exclusive. You talk about finding middle-ground, but they're not opposites on the same spectrum. Why can't your helping others be part of who you are? People can't be compassionate if it's not part of their character, after all. Otherwise it's not compassion; it's just empty oughts.
I want to end on this, because honestly, I can't see the reasoning behind it: 'poor is just an adjective, isn't it?'. What are you trying to say? That 'poor' is just a meaningless label we apply? That if we got rid of it, there would be no problem? You go out there and try saying that to a farmer struggling because of circumstance to keep his family alive, or you can say it to yourself should you ever find yourself in such an unfortunate position. And I'm not saying this just to make you feel guilty. It's not about guilting you into anything. I'm saying it because I really believe that there's something to be genuinely considered there.
you are right.
i am responsible, directly or indirectly. i'm still learning what i can do about that.
adjectives are adjectives. the fact that a person is poor or rich doesn't define them completely. they're not meaningless words, but they aren't identities either. in this post as in most of my posts i am merely thinking out loud. in fact the economic implications of these two essays are only a tiny piece of what they mean to me. i wonder why you seem to focus on those more? perhaps just because that is a point on which we seem to disagree. those points just want more attention.
anyway, we've talked about all these things before... it is not my place to judge, however i might ramble on about the meaning of life and the way i'd like things to be. so i can look at things like poverty in an abstract (perhaps meaningless, because abstract?) way, and toss ideologies back and forth. what does it do?
sitting around discontent with the way things are is no real action either. there are ways in which i try to do my part. for some reason i feel more comfortable parading my apathy than my few good works. maybe that's more proof that it's just a facade to cover my inadequacies.
but before i go too psychoanalyst on you, i'll stop. i'm glad for your opinions and your sharing of them.
'the fact that a person is poor or rich doesn't define them completely. they're not meaningless words, but they aren't identities either.'
Agreed.
'in fact the economic implications of these two essays are only a tiny piece of what they mean to me. i wonder why you seem to focus on those more?'
Really, I don't think I do. My post here was directly in response to your own comments, only indirectly about the two essays. In talking about the world's ills, you mentioned the poor and the starving. I'm assuming you didn't mean these in any artistic sense.
Both our posts now have been about the individual and the treatment of other people. On my blog, I talk about freeing people up to be themselves; on yours, you talk about not having to free other people so that you can be yourself. You're right, disagreements always get more attention. We have different thoughts about helping other people. Economics inevitably comes into that, for as long as we're talking about the earthly realm, so it's been a part of both of our responses. But it hasn't been what they're about. A guy getting beaten up is not economics, after all.
And do you really think I was so keen on you reading that Wilde essay just for its economics? :P The whole point for me was that, despite its title, it transcended all that stuff and surprised me with where it went with individualism, art, families, machines and all that. Ah well.
exactly. transcendental, hence the inclusion of mr. emerson.
i guess everything can be a lot bigger than you first think. experience is a strange thing... and in my head it seems best when it remains a personal thing. that's why i loved wilde's talk about individualism so much.
i mentioned the other day my father's motto 'live and let live.' my family and even its individual members tend to keep to themselves. in fact, when one brother expresses concern or gets upset at the actions of another, the parents usually say 'worry about yourself.' so there's where my attitude toward other people and helping them comes from. going back to the guy getting beaten up... this is going to sound crazy, but i almost wouldn't want to rob the guy of the experience, just like i wouldn't rob my brother of the experience of sneaking out of the house once or twice, or listening to his own music, even if those aren't technically 'the best' things for the kid. you know? but then, by not interfering, i'm robbing him of the experience of meeting me. it's hard to tell which way things ought to go.
'i mentioned the other day my father's motto 'live and let live.' my family and even its individual members tend to keep to themselves. in fact, when one brother expresses concern or gets upset at the actions of another, the parents usually say 'worry about yourself.' '
Well yeah, you have to worry about yourself first or else when you're expressing concern over the actions of other people, you run the risk of being a hypocrite. You have to sort yourself out before you take it upon yourself to sort other people out.
(If your parents don't mean it in this sense, but rather just 'let them worry about themselves', I can only point to my big fat post up there. :P)
But there's a difference between a person's actions and a person's circumstances. One might lead to the other, but not necessarily. If you see someone being treated in a way that you would consider unjust, it makes sense to worry about them.
I'd say the same difference is worth noting between the guy who's getting beaten up (assuming, for the sake of the example, that his beating really is 'unjust'), and your brother sneaking out or listening to whatever music he likes. In your brother's case, you could view it that you're robbing him of a necessary experience because he has to experience them before he can really know that they're wrong. Can you say the same for the man receiving the unjust beatings? Or the farmer in poverty, for that matter? I'm not so sure you can.
P.S. But yeah, it is hard to know where to draw the line between those times when you should help and those cases where you shouldn't interfere.
this puts me in mind of a question i have no answer to, and it is how much are we really in control of what happens to us? it'd be hard to believe that the guy getting beaten did absolutely nothing to put himself in that position. but it's pretty hard to believe, also, that the way our family responds to my brother's mild disobediences doesn't affect his choices at all. so who do we blame for it all? god? the devil? who knows?
i like to believe we all have the power to change the way we act and the circumstances we surround ourselves with. but there are oh so many limits. i can't feasibly run away and live on a beach. it probably wouldn't work.
Well, some act will have got him there, but that doesn't necessarily mean he deserves to get beaten up over it. He might have just been walking by, got mugged, fought back, found himself against a stronger individual. Or countless other things.
How complicated. We all affect each other, whether we like it or not. Blaming the devil would be easy, I guess.
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