Richard J. Severson

Transcendentalism was one of the most notable intellectual movements in American history, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—its chief architect—one of our nation’s most authentic apologists.  His essay on self-reliance still resonates as a manifesto of the American spirit.¹ Trust your own minds, he admonished his New England neighbors, and live according to your own solitary intuitions and virtues.  That is exactly what Thoreau did at Walden Pond.  Never conform to society’s expectations, for to do so would be suicide.  That’s another one of Emerson’s admonishments.  Don’t sacrifice your untamed liberty to the deadening demands of the past; instead, live as if your own life were a spontaneous and original classification.  Whatever else might be said of them, the Transcendentalists were not shy of bold statements.  It’s an American trait—or, perhaps, a hazard of our patented rebelliousness.  “Give me liberty, or give me death!” surely resides along that peculiar fault line.  We are an upbeat yet querulous nation, as we recently witnessed in the politicized response to the seemingly simple act of wearing a face mask to stop the spread of the covid-19 pandemic.

Emerson was no admirer of Aristotle’s interpretation of virtues as settled habits of imitative behavior.  To imitate somebody else is the epitome of conformity, which is the antithesis of self-reliance.  Yet Emerson didn’t dismiss virtue altogether.  Instead, he argued that we must create our own individual habits of mind.  He was convinced that too much civilization had made human beings soft, and that we must recover the wild and untutored voice of truth that dwells within each one of us.  What would a virtue without precedent look like?  Aristotle had no answer to that dilemma because you can’t imitate something that doesn’t yet exist.  How, then, do you invent your own virtues from scratch?  That is precisely what Emerson insisted that each American must do.  Self-reliance requires it of us.  It is the prototype of a virtue without precedent.  Only a self-reliant person could be called a bona fide individual.    

Any virtue that is wild and unprecedented is inherently heroic because it is a bold adventure to set out on a new course of action.  A life of self-reliance is not for the timid at heart.  Yet it is the traditional purpose of virtues to make us less wild in our nature; they are the typical means of our own self-domestication.  It’s why imitation was so important to Aristotle.  Mimicking the behavior of someone you admire abrades the erratic wildness out of your character.  Unprecedented virtues do the exact opposite.  They don’t grind us down to fit established patterns; instead, they lift us up in celebration of our own uniqueness.  Self-reliance is the supererogatory (heroic) behavior of a unique individual who faces life as if it were a brand new adventure designed just for him/her/them.             

Self-reliance may seem like the perfect virtue for a frontier wilderness nation where you had to fend for yourself in order to survive.  That’s only part of the American frontier story, however.  Emerson’s portrait conceals two great ironies that many observers have pointed out, including Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who visited the country during the heyday of Transcendentalism.² The most obvious irony is that nobody survived by their own wits alone.  North America wasn’t a deserted island, after all.  It was sparsely populated, to be sure, but Native Americans often provided assistance to the upstart newcomers.  In some cases, they served as ideal role models for how to live off the land.  The original Thanksgiving feast consisted of foods that could have been collected from a Native American root cellar.  Not only that, many of the earliest settlers were members of close-knit religious congregations that shared their labors, resources, and hardships.  They survived as cooperative communities, not as loosely connected individualists. 

If each one of us really could manage to live as a rugged individual, without the sweet succor of civilization, we would no longer be unique because we would all be doing the exact same thing that everybody else was doing.  That’s the second great irony regarding self-reliance.  If everybody is an original classification, then nobody is.  As Tocqueville noted, Americans had a tendency to isolate themselves and pursue their own individualistic dreams of material success.  Consumerism became the norm for American-style individualism, which is a peculiar kind of conformity.  We are a country that aspires to originality, yet most Americans have the same aspirations as their neighbors.  There is a dialectical tension at the heart of the American character that Emerson didn’t fully appreciate. 

When the first European immigrants arrived on the shores of the New World, their methods of measuring distance and size were overwhelmed.  Everything about this new land was so much larger than what they had been accustomed to back home.  Even to get here required an arduous journey across a seemingly endless ocean.  It wasn’t until the 20^th century when we fully comprehended the fact that oceanic fisheries are not an inexhaustible resource.  The same was true about America’s primeval forests.  Myths were necessary to grasp the true immensity of America’s natural bounty.  Paul Bunyan was such a larger-than-life character.  He could fell an entire forest with his mighty axe.  But even he couldn’t make a dent in the never-ending forests that extended beyond the horizon.  All around them, Americans encountered evidence of the infinite.  Ponce de Leon was unable to discover the mythical fountain of youth, but he was enchanted enough by this bountiful land to give it a try.  As the Transcendentalists believed, even eternity whispered its truth to authentic Americans.  Self-reliance is a reflection of their natural optimism, which is in perfect accord with a continent so immense that it had ample room for everyone who wished to come.  The fatalism of old souls and beaten down civilizations is out of place in this immigrant’s paradise, where rainbows have no end.   

Naturally, the New World never lived up to its infinite potential.  How could it?  Infinity is a dream state, not a real world where we actually live.  As a young nation with seemingly unlimited resources, America has stood closer to its dreamy zenith than most.  Yet even the Louisiana Purchase wasn’t immense enough to escape eventual settlement.  The inexhaustible potential of the frontier was eventually exhausted.  The pioneers who braved the Oregon Trail put down roots in the Willamette Valley once their epic journey ended.  The practice of homesteading came to a close long before everyone who wanted a piece of the windblown prairie could stake their claim.  But the pioneering spirit of America didn’t just disappear.  It got transferred to other arenas—new frontiers—and heroic medicine (we can cure cancer and every other nasty affliction!) was one of the most important.  The movement to end slavery and begin the long process of facing up to the racism inherent to European immigrant dreams was another one.  So was the movement to preserve remnants of the disappearing wilderness in national parks and monuments.  The closing of the wild frontier was a moment of great disenchantment and moral reckoning for Americans.    

What do you do for an encore after your country has fallen from its lofty perch?  For such a young country, America is haunted by nostalgia for what it once was.  I suspect the short history of America is a condensed version of the longer history of Homo sapiens.  For one thing, we have living memory of our sojourn in the Stone Age, and we yearn for the clarity of purpose that experience inculcated into the national soul.  And yet we are also a forward-looking modern people who embrace the future without reservation because we lack many of the burdensome ties to encrusted Old World traditions.  America is a city on the hill, watched and envied by other nations, as John Winthrop persuaded his Puritan brethren to believe on the eve of their emigration to the New World.  It represents a microcosm of human labors, a passionate struggle between the finite and the infinite, civilization and wilderness, scarcity and abundance, old prejudices and new beginnings, mean-spiritedness and purity of heart, fallibility and heroism, conformity and self-reliance, and on and on.

The struggle between the finite and the infinite is a basic pattern of biology.  Every organism desires to keep on living for as long as it possibly can.  No matter the species, every living thing fights for more and more life until its final breath.  Nations are no different than individual organisms in that regard.  The more indelible the infinite bounty of this great land became upon our national character, the bigger the onus it placed upon us to fight against our own finitude.  I think that is one of the more obvious legacies of our immigrant experience upon the style of medicine that is practiced here.  We fight against disease and death with the same pluck and determination that enabled us to settle an untrammeled continent.  It would be unimaginable to our common sense to question the value of fighting to save each and every individual life, no matter the cost.  Medical heroism is as American as apple pie, and as ingrained in our folklore as cowboys riding the open range.  We revere cancer survivors with an emotional depth that borders on the religious.  Before his fall from grace, one observer actually described Lance Armstrong as the “cancer Jesus.”³ That he endured a harrowing medical ordeal in addition to winning multiple Tour de France races elevated him to an untouchable (doubly-heroic) status.  It’s probably what enabled him to get away with his doping scheme for as long as he did.

The Transcendentalists taught us to commune with nature as a means for uplifting the soul.  They were inspired by European Romantics, but a fondness for wilderness seemed to be tailor made for the rugged American continent.  Whereas the traditional Christian pilgrim fights against sin and temptation in order to secure a place in heaven, the naturalist traverses virgin landscapes in search of inner strength and solitude.  The two perspectives need not be mutually exclusive; Emerson was a Unitarian minister, after all.  Yet the great outdoors represented a different kind of salvation experience.  Similar to a Native American vision quest, perhaps, a sojourn in the wilderness was meant to awaken the individual soul to its proper verve and purpose.  Afterwards, in the face of life’s inevitable difficulties, the memory of that defining experience would serve as an anchor of fortitude and meaning.  It would become the source of courage and other requisite virtues that could never be acquired by imitating someone else.  How could you pretend to be courageous while risking life and limb amongst the granite peaks of the high Sierras?  At such moments, it is incumbent upon each one of us to find the courage to carry on within ourselves alone.  There is no time for imitating others when we are being our true selves.  This is what wilderness experiences invite—opportunities to face life in its raw and unrehearsed immediacy.  Each soul must hearken to its own original memories and experiences.  That is the ideal of American individualism.   

I think the way we practice medicine has been infused with this brand of natural salvation.  Medicine is in the business of saving lives, but not for the sake of an afterlife.  The significance of the afterlife has been on the wane in Western societies for more than a century.  Medical salvation has more to do with providing patients with second chances in the here and now.  Like a sojourn in the wilderness, to survive a harrowing medical ordeal is an original experience capable of awakening the spirit to its true calling.  Cancer survivors often speak of finding a new inner fortitude that enables them to face life’s ups and downs less anxiously.  Even death no longer frightens them as much as it once did. 

What makes America so singular is the conviction that the good of society is only an extension of the good of the individual.  No nation has ever been founded on such a radical interpretation of individualism.  It is a system based upon what Adam Smith called the invisible hand theory.⁴ A nation of individuals pursuing their own self-interest will, as if guided by an invisible hand, create a more just society than one where some classes of people have the power to rule over others.  One of the unintended consequences of that stark political experiment is that we look more and more to medicine to help carry the burdens of meaning that are heaped upon each individual life.  To be the poets of ourselves is, or can be, an exhausting (sickening) task. 

For its European immigrants, America represented the unlimited opportunities of a New World.  That has remained true even after the closing of the wild frontier.  The past lumps us together into one classification, or grouping, whereas the future individuates us into inimitable autobiographers.  It is interesting to note that very few literary memoirs predate the 19^th century because the prospect of pointing out what made a person unique was viewed with distaste by premodern people.  In the past, it was more important to imitate other members of your own cultural group.  We, on the other hand, like to shine and stand out from the madding crowd.  We think being lumped together with everybody else is boring.  The past no longer has a stranglehold on our imagination.  Instead, we get excited about what new adventures life has in store for us.  As our favored horizon, the future has set us free. 

Emerson’s vision of the American spirit implies a cultural indifference, or uniformity, that never really existed.  That’s another obvious problem with our patented sense of rugged individualism.  American immigrants didn’t show up on the shores of this new continent as blank slates without the prejudices and habits of their former homes.  The melting pot metaphor is, or can be, detrimental to the truth about cultural diversity in America, which is a big part of what makes it so unique as a nation.  I want to end this essay with a brief foray into multiculturalism.  It is one of the most important social issues of our time, and I think it actually strengthens the case for interpreting America as a self-reliant nation.       

Why do men barbeque outdoors while women do all the cooking in the kitchen?  That’s a question Richard Shweder entertained while trying to explain how Americans account for their ethnic differences in an era that celebrates cultural diversity.⁵ In his view, most cultures can be distinguished according to their tastes regarding gender relationships and child rearing practices.  There are two ideal types.  On one end of the spectrum, there is the nomadic sensibility that blurs the differences between the sexes in both adulthood and adolescence; and, on the other end, there is the settled sensibility that takes pride in the separation of gender roles.  Both ideals coexist inside all of us, often creating uncomfortable tensions.  Even in a largely nomadic cultural setting like America, where equality between the sexes is widely endorsed, women don’t barbecue and men stay out of the kitchen.  Why is that?  Shweder thinks it’s because there are residues of settled cultures that still have a lingering influence over us.  The melting pot theory of American cultural uniformity was always defective in his view because the immigrants who came here never really shed all their old customs and habits.  While airline travel, television, smart phones, and international commerce are transforming the entire world into a complex ethnic soup, not every culture embraces the nomadic ideal.  In India, for instance, men and women still keep their traditional distances.  As Shweder remarked, “Hindu men are convinced that women are so powerful they may be hazardous to your health” (p. 294).  Nor did the Israelis have much success in eradicating the differences between boys and girls in their Kibbutz collectives.  Like human nature itself, every culture comes with a past that is fraught with tensions regarding basic differences that compete for our allegiances in a pendulum fashion.

There is no uniformity in American culture, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a plethora of cultural influences that continue to shape and reshape our multi-faceted identities.  Shweder thinks it would be a mistake to equate pluralism with relativism, or the absence of standards for judging the differences between cultures.  The danger in a largely nomadic society like America is that we make judgments about cultural differences without realizing that we are doing it.  We employ the language of pathology and disease to identify societal problems such as teenage pregnancy that can then be cured by federal programs that seem objective and culturally neutral.  But these cures are often the silent carriers of latent cultural ideals.  It is a Puritan ideal, for instance, to believe that only married couples are capable of raising well-adjusted children.  One study that Shweder cited found that children who come from single-parent homes did just as well in school as children from two-parent homes.⁶ The study also found that children who do best come from homes where there is a strong commitment to a particular set of values.  Exactly what the particular values were wasn’t as important as simply having them.  In other words, growing up in any coherent cultural tradition is better than growing up without any tradition at all.  There are many ways to craft a good life.  Having children out of wedlock might not be the social disease that our public policy experts seem to think.  The appeal to pathologies and diseases that need to be cured by governmental programs is intended to create a sense of cultural neutrality; but there is probably no such thing. 

I think Shweder’s nomadic cultural sensibility correlates well with Emerson’s self-reliance.  Like self-reliant individuals, cultural nomads have a strong desire to uproot moral precepts that interfere with their own autonomy.  They don’t like restrictions on their freedom to move about and live as they see fit.  They are pragmatists, not traditionalists; rule-breakers, not rule-followers; optimists, not pessimists; open to new experiences, not closed-minded.  As I mentioned before, when the pioneers reached the end of the Oregon Trail, they settled down.  They didn’t continue to wander like nomads.  But their settled sensibilities were still far more self-reliant and nomadic than the settled cultural norms of their previous existence.  America represents a unique blend of nomadic cultural indifference coupled with a few settled habits of the heart. 

Our nomadic tendencies aren’t confined to our cultural preferences alone.  We are also nomads of the self.  We browse and shop for experiences that will authenticate our own sense of individuality.  We are forward looking roamers, free from the limitations of the past.  Categories that used to be binding for everyone are becoming optional for us.  We are re-defining the meaning of gender and sexuality.  Even the species-centered nature of biological evolution could become nonbinding because of our efforts to transcend ourselves.  We are beginning to tinker with our own DNA, and recombine our flesh with manufactured implants.  We seem more than willing to become the first species that differs biologically from both its parents and progeny.  Whatever scientific medicine is capable of achieving, we are willing to try on for size.  We are nomads of the soul who are pushing the boundaries of self-identity, consciousness, and life itself.  We are capable of empathizing with the earth, and the empty universe.  Our medicine will require us to become deep ecologists in order to remain healthy.  This beautiful land is ingrained in our hearts.     

Notes:

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (Peter Pauper Press, 1967).
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Classics of Liberty Library, 1992). 
3. Rayvon Fouche, Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 
5. Richard Shweder, “Why Do Men Barbeque?” Daedalus 122, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 279-308.
6. Thomas Weisner and Helen Garnier, “Nonconventional Family Lifestyles and School Achievement,” American Educational Research Journal 29, no. 3 (September 1992), 605-32.