I'll admit to being a voracious reader, ever since I was about 3 or 4. Now, 20 years and a minor in philosophy later, I am tackling some of the great American thinkers, including Henry David Thoreau and most recently Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I find that both of these authors speak to me for various reasons—Thoreau with his love of wildness and meaningful solitude, and Emerson with his Transcendentalist philosophical outlook. However, the latter's writings/lectures on Man the Reformer and The Young American seem remarkably applicable today, and I wish today's conservatives would take note.
For example, take note of this quote from his lecture "Man the Reformer," delivered to the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association in Boston, Jan. 28, 1841:
But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes of living, a nobler morning than that Arabian faith, in the sentiment of love. We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep him so. An acceptance of the sentiment of of love throughout Christendom for a season, would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tearsm with the devotion of his faculties to our service. … Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions. It is better to work on institutions by the sun than by the wind. The state must consider the poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child that is born must have a just chance for his bread. Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich. [emphasis added]
In these days of cuts to Social Security, food stamps and other assistance programs—where gratuitous freeloading remains the exception to the rule—and in direct contrast to the growth of corporate greed, let us take this point of Emerson to heart. [More below the fold.]
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