Christopher Lydon Interviews...

A God for Bloggers

# Posted by Christopher Lydon on 6/21/03; 4:29:33 PM - Comment (14)

(copied from: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydon/2003/06/21 )


Ralph Waldo Emerson on his 200th birthday this spring is "closer
to us than ever," writes the great Harold Bloom. He is a man for
bloggers to embrace most especially, not for Emerson's glory but for
our own understanding of a transformative moment we are living
through.

Poet, public intellectual, performance artist and incomparable
diarist, Emerson (1803-1882) has glory enough. It's we who need his
encouraging frame around bloggery--this still strange and marvellous
exercise in democratic media.

Dave Winer reported in Scripting News yesterday that I'd been
ranting about Emerson's prophetic grasp of the bloggers' emergence.
But then Dave said he didn't get it. So here goes, Dave. Doc
Searls, as a non-tech and spoken-word kinda guy, I think you can help
us out here. Come one, come all.

Here's my point. When we talk about this Internet and this
blogging software, this techno-magic that encourages each of us to be
expressive voices in an open, universal network of across-the-board
conversation, we are speaking of an essentially Emersonian device for
an essentially Emersonian exercise. Starting with the
electronics. "Invent a better mousetrap," as Emerson wrote, "and the
world will beat a path to your door." Well, here we are.

Here's Emerson in a paragraph: blue-eyed, slope-shouldered, with
an Indian nose that formed the gentlest of hatchet faces, he was a
child of the Boston Latin School and the youngest member of the
Harvard class of 1821. He was a Christian minister who left the
church in his mid-thirties to be a professional talker and writer,
a "diamond dealer," someone said, in moral and ethical ideas. His
friend Henry David Thoreau kept the vegetable garden at Emerson's Old
Manse in Concord, the same house where the young Nathaniel Hawthorne
wrote his classic early stories. We all know fragments of Emerson:
the Concord Hymn about "the rude bridge that arched the flood"
and "the shot heard round the world," which Robert Frost thought was
the finest of American poems. We all know that "a foolish
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and other bits of the
essay Self-Reliance, and that "to be great is to be misunderstood."
Or the warning that: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the
manhood of every one if its members." Melancholy and enthusiasm are
contrasting strands through all Emerson, but there is no summing up
this man who disagreed with himself and both perplexed and dazzled
his friends. Walt Whitman loved it that nobody could tag Emerson's
thinking: "no province, no clique, no church." Whitman felt "a flood
of light" about Emerson, an impression of pure being. Hawthorne said
Emerson "wore a sunbeam in his face."

In the booming energy of blog world, we are glimpsing the
fulfillment of an Emersonian vision: this democracy of outspoken
individuals.

"Trust thyself," was Emerson's refrain. "Every heart vibrates
to that iron string."

Speak your own convictions, and your own contradictions, he
urged. Claim your own ideas before someone else does. "I hate
quotations," begins another of the famous aphorisms. "Tell me what
you know." Which is what the great bloggers keep doing.

"In all my lectures," Emerson boiled it down, "I have taught one
doctrine, the infinitude of the private man." Bloggers, do we
recognize ourselves?

We are glimpsing also, through individual voices on the World
Wide Web, the fulfillment of Emerson's universalism and his
confidence in cultural connectivity. The definitively American
thinker was a globalist before there was such a thing. He was anti-
racist and anti-nationalist, a student of Persian poetry and
Buddhism, an inspiration to Thomas Carlyle and Jawarhalal Nehru. Not
because he was a multi-culturalist but because he thought the human
mind and heart were capable of immense and innumerable
expansions. "There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no
circumference to us," he wrote in the essay: Circles. And now with
the Web we understand more nearly what he meant.

Ahead of the evolutionary and cognitive scientists, Emerson
believed there was one human brain, one universal mind.

We are, almost all of us, in range of Aristotle's intellect,
Emerson fancied. "The mind is one," he wrote in the essay,
History: "There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man
is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once
admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole
estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt,
he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can
understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all
that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent."

When he speaks of "access to this universal mind," he could be
describing the leveling effect of Google search engines. He
encompasses the idea of distributed intelligence, and the ideal of
networked computers as a democracy of end-users.

"Democracy has its root," Emerson wrote, "in the sacred truth
that every man hath in him the Divine reason." Even though "few men
since the creation of the world live according to the dictate of
Reason, yet all men are created capable of so doing. That is the
equality and the only equality of all men."

The electronic liberation of information is giving a new kick to
Emerson's theory and hope.

Emerson celebrated consciousness, the miracle of self-awareness
in each and every one of us. He would still today be fighting the
scientific reduction of its magic. In his journal, at age 23, he
sounded like many a burbling blogger: "There is a pleasure in the
thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment may be new
in the Universe; that the emotions of this hour may be peculiar and
unexampled in the whole eternity of moral being."

Emerson was himself a sort of group blogger in The Dial, a
magazine he founded with Margaret Fuller in 1840. He designed it as
a compendium of the "good fanatics," like Thoreau, Alcott and
Channing in his Concord circle. "I would not have it too purely
literary," he wrote to Fuller, venting a blogger's ambition. "I wish
we might make a Journal so broad and great in its survey that it
should lead the opinion of this generation on every interest and read
the law on property, government, education, as well as on art,
letters, and religion."

Emerson's purpose in The Dial, he said, was "to give expression
to that spirit which lifts men to a higher platform, restores to them
the religious sentiment, brings them to worthy aims and pure
pleasures, purges the inward eye and reconciles the practical with
the speculative powers." In short, he said, in a perfect distillation
of himself, the magazine must become "one cheerful rational voice
amidst the din of mourners and polemics."

When I first read that line in the mid-1990s, it was like a
thunderclap in my ears. The din of mourners and polemics, 150 years
after Emerson coined the phrase, was deafening in Bill Clinton's
America. The mourners were mostly in the print press (mourning, for
starters, the decline of their own medium). The polemicists like
Rush Limbaugh were hammering away on the airwaves. But by then I had
found in my own public radio talk show that "cheerful, rational"
space for public conversation across an Emersonian range of gab.
Emerson's couplet caught the spirit of it: "The music that can
deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech."

The next trick will be to use audio capacity on the Web to add
the timbre of "vox humana" and integrate the mosaic tiles of blog
wisdom in authentic conversation.

Emerson encourages me. "Bad times have a scientific value," he
wrote. "These are occasions a good learner would not miss."

Harold Bloom and others say that we are all Emersonians by now,
willy nilly, for both good and ill.

I start more narrowly. My modern Emersonian is, first, a non-
dogmatic believer with an alert interest in the inward and the
invisible mysteries of a spirit-driven creation.

I want to embrace bloggers in general as Essential Emersonians:
radical democrats and individualists, sick unto death of our
imprisonment by mass media, mass emotion, the retribalization in our
time by mass labeling, mass marketing, mass following, sheepish mass
everything. That modern Emersonian is nonetheless cheerfully banking
on the reawakening of individual conscience, individual ambition,
individual possibility.

The modern Emersonian celebrates the astonishing advances of
biological sciences and evolutionary history confirming what Emerson
knew intuitively was the unity of our polyglot and multi-colored
species.

The modern Emersonian celebrates also the Internet technology
that can sustain a free, democratic, global conversation as intimate
and as broad as the chatter of Emerson's venerable Saturday Club in
Boston.

The modern Emersonian is, in short, an ecstatic melancholic, an
unquenchable optimist in a darkening world, aware that the big trick
for grown-ups is to look unblinking at the torture and tyranny, the
pandemic disease and progressive brutalization of people and the
planet and know that is not the whole story and that this is no time
to give up.

# Posted by Christopher Lydon on 6/21/03; 4:29:33 PM - Comment (14)