Where’s Waldo?

Ralph Waldo Emerson has been generously lauded for his philosophical writings and teachings. One of his most famous treatises is his essay on self-reliance (see: Self-Reliance). In a nutshell, Emerson’s transcendental message there had been previously stated by Shakespeare in Hamlet, “To thy own self be true.” Emerson expounds it (a little more clumsily) thusly, “To believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius” … and “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide”. But Robert Pirsig stated it most succinctly in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with his praising of “gumption” as the noble virtue.

In a real sense Emerson wove himself into the DNA of the United States with his writings and his many lectures. During the coming of age of America Emerson stood tall and called for nonconformity with a megaphone. And his message has been reprised over and over again in this country … by the nihilists of the early 1900’s, by the bohemians of the 1920’s, by the beatniks of the 1950’s, by the Woodstock love-children of the 1960’s, and the current anarchists that disrupt the financial summits. The major issue I have with Emerson’s message (and with that of many who followed him) is that, all too often, the tearing–down of societal constructs is done without a thought-through notion of what is to replace them. So the destruction caused by such militant nonconformity often takes another generation to rebuild. Sometimes things are better … sometimes, not.

However, my own life has often been “marching to the beat of [that] different drummer.” So when Emerson says: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist”, I must so comply and, as a result, question the universal wisdom of his teachings. That, after all is the irony of the man. How can he preach nonconformity and expect people to conform to what he says? Besides, take a look at Emerson’s above picture, does he look very much like a bohemian wingnut?