Foul Reign of 'Self Reliance'

Our teacher, let’s call him Mr. Sideways, had a windblown air, as if he had just stepped out of an open coupe, and the impenetrable self-confidence of someone who is convinced that he is liked.

And then he let loose the real hokum: “Absolve you to yourself,” he read, “and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

And then he let loose the real hokum: “Absolve you to yourself,” he read, “and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

Our teacher had merely fallen under the spell, like countless others before and after, of the most pernicious piece of literature in the American canon.

It’s just like the Devil in Mutton Chops to promise an orgiastic communion fit for the gods, only to deliver a gospel of “self-conceit so intensely intellectual,” as Melville complained, “that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.”

Before it does another generation’s worth of damage to the American psyche, let’s put an end to the foul reign of “Self-Reliance” and let the scholars pick over the meaning of its carcass.

One question first, though: Is there anything worth salvaging among the spiritualist ramblings, obscure metaphysics and aphorisms so pandering that Joel Osteen might think twice about delivering them?

One question first, though: Is there anything worth salvaging among the spiritualist ramblings, obscure metaphysics and aphorisms so pandering that Joel Osteen might think twice about delivering them?

“There is a time in every man’s education,” Emerson writes, presuming, with his usual élan, to both personify his young country and issue a decree for its revival, “when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given him to till.”

Boston — his “Divinity School Address” at Harvard in 1838, denounced by one listener as “an incoherent rhapsody,” had already caused an outcry — and published in his collection “Essays: First Series in 1841.”

We humans are fickle creatures, and natures — however sacred — can mislead us.

Emerson exhorted, “and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”

The larger problem with the essay, and its more lasting legacy as a cornerstone of the American identity, has been Emerson’s tacit endorsement of a radically self-centered worldview.

In calling out to all the misfits and the rebels and the troublemakers, the “round pegs in square holes” who “see things differently” and have trouble with the rules, the ad evokes the ideal first created by Emerson of a rough-hewed outsider who changes the world through a combination of courage, tenacity, resourcefulness and that God-given wild card, genius.

This is the problem when the self is endowed with divinity, and it’s a weakness that Emerson acknowledged: if the only measure of greatness is how big an iconoclast you are, then there really is no difference between coming up with the theory of relativity, plugging in an electric guitar, leading a civil rights movement or spending great gobs of your own money to fly a balloon across the

At the first, we clear our actions in the mirror (a recapitulation of the dictum “trust thyself”).