Emerson essay for this week

Every week, around Sunday, I'm going to try to include some material from a Unitarian or Universalist thinker to inform our perspective on current affairs.

This week, my selection is from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's style may sound a bit stilted to the modern ear, but imagine this as an address given as a sermon -- read it aloud, if you would, and you'll hear the rhythms of it.

Much of this essay is couched as a dialog between a Conservative and an Innovator. Although much of the essay is meant as an apology and elucidation of the rationale of the Conservative, toward the end, the Innovator seems to be the hope for the future.
(In some of Emerson's work, he differentiates between conservatives and democrats, those being the two major party factions of his time.)

I'll say for myself that many of my friends are conservatives of the old school -- what I think of as "baby with the bathwater" conservatives who fear that we barrel headlong into change and lose more than we gain.

Liberals, of course, barrel headlong into the future with equal faith in the Progress of Man [sic].

Emerson in many of his essays identifies youth with liberalism and age with conservatism. "The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe and gone to seed."

Or, to quote a bumper sticker I gave my hippie brother when his only girl hit high school: "A conservative is a liberal with a sixteen year old daughter." I don't think it was Emerson who said that, but he might have!

So, with that introduction:

The Conservative

A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841

The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical would talk sufficiently to the purpose, if we were still in the garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is right, but he makes no allowance for friction; and this omission makes his whole doctrine false.

The idealist retorts, that the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other extreme. The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue. Now that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped itself in the human generation, and misers are born. And now that sickness has got such a foot-hold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box; the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved itself into a Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine.

If any man resist, and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good against the general despair, society frowns on him, shuts him out of her opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread, and will serve him a sexton's turn. Conservatism takes as low a view of every part of human action and passion.

Its religion is just as bad; a lozenge for the sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper; mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; always mitigations, never remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honors, — never self-help, renovation, and virtue.

Its social and political action has no better aim; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the day and year about, and make the world last our day; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to sink the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent creation; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades whatever it touches.

The cause of education is urged in this country with the utmost earnestness, — on what ground? why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are not instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading, trading, and governing class, inspired with a taste for the same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth itself, and new distribute the land.

Religion is taught in the same spirit. The contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore, some years ago, found the Irish laborers quarrelsome and refractory, to a degree that embarrassed the agents, and seriously interrupted the progress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the police, and build a Catholic chapel; which they did; the priest presently restored order, and the work went on prosperously.

Such hints, be sure, are too valuable to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath, or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about maintaining them. They have already acquired a market value as conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should fail, the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the Banks, the very innholders and landlords of the county would muster with fury to their support.

Of course, religion in such hands loses its essence. Instead of that reliance, which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth and duty, men are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the moment they cease to be the instantaneous creations of the devout sentiment, are worthless. Religion among the low becomes low. As it loses its truth, it loses credit with the sagacious. They detect the falsehood of the preaching, but when they say so, all good citizens cry, Hush; do not weaken the state, do not take off the strait jacket from dangerous persons.

Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can; must patronize providence and piety, and wherever he sees anything that will keep men amused, schools or churches or poetry, or picture-galleries or music, or what not, he must cry "Hist-a-boy," and urge the game on. What a compliment we pay to the good SPIRIT with our superserviceable zeal!