Emerson can lead to naval-gazing and even solipsism. Googling one of his aphorisms, I find powerpoints from assertiveness training and slick empowerment seminars. Sure, that is true; as I’ve gotten older I sometimes have less patience with that cheerful old group. Still, reviewing Robert Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, I was struck by his summary of the ideas Thoreau found so congenial in Emerson. And it reminded me that felicity may be the most reliable and most important consequence of a restrained but dominant individualism (and its byproducts) – and the first victim of policies now being contested:
The danger in setting society at a higher value than the individual, the trouble with encouraging people to identify themselves primarily with some group, was that it then became easy to transfer the blame for one’s own shortcomings to that group. If one looked to society for one’s identity and one’s satisfactions, then surely society should be held accountable for one’s dissatisfactions, lack of identity, alienation. Emerson had already set himself against this view, and Thoreau was now thinking along the same line. (34)