Emerson's Organic

I'm writing a longish piece on Secularism, not necessarily in the context of Chirac's charade, but in the context of how it may fail here. My basic idea is that Marketing's aim is personalization and tends toward the same direction as pluralism and multiculturalism, that is towards the individuation of products & services etc. This makes us more strangers, and less likely to create cultural products and institutions designed to serve a higherbrow populism. If we accept the premise that we don't share many values and in fact are practically atomic, then we will settle, as a democracy, for lower common denominators, rather than strive to achieve greater common factors.

In researching this phenomenon I want to bring forward some principled American ideas to show contrast, while I consider what advances in infotech and business have wrought. So in this I first went to Emerson. He is too large to swallow, so I'll dwell on him for a moment.

There is no better example of a dovetail between myself as an Organic and this by Emerson. It has been part of my angle as a 'brother outsider' for many years. I observe the raising of the race concurrent with its enfeeblement.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

Echoes of Heim on Heidegger! "As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed."