…a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
–RW Emerson, Self-Reliance   

[Men’s creeds are] a disease of the intellect.  They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not God speak to us, lest we die.’
–Ibid 

It will happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master’s mind.  But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not [the means]…the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built….They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even unto theirs.                                                                                                              
–Ibid                                                  

To have its full meaning today, the challenge Emerson set before Americans, to live heroically, in “self-trust” – has to be more than just reinforcement of liberal self-satisfaction, which it mostly has been in the 175 years Americans have been reading those stirring words in “Self-Reliance” and other essays.  I first read Emerson’s Divinity School address as a Div School student aiming at a career in Unitarian ministry.  For me the address thrillingly ratified the liberal air I already breathed, confirming me in liberal religion’s secure top ranking, due to its scorn for orthodoxy, but also to its wide beneficent tolerance and admirable social and environmental commitment.  I did not hear it calling me to something for which I was completely unprepared and would have rejected had I known!  Trust thyself?  What did I think that meant?  I had no concept of myself, of what a dark complexity was contained in me, enshrouded behind an extremely thin layer of conscious knowing, the hidden – as it turned out –  far more interesting than the known!

The obscurity of the deeper self in secular liberal reality, the non-existence for liberal people today of their real soul is what makes Emerson so useful to the greeting card industry (i.e., the sympathy card in my hand reads “Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.”) But he, though rejecting the church’s “embalmment”  of divine reality in formalism,  retained his intuitive connection with the living God.  In today’s secularist, atheistic fundamentalism, divine reality is dismissably non-existent; few realize what they dismiss is the “embalmed,” and not the real.  Thus, Emerson can be heard by people just as far as they’re comfortable hearing, never a hairsbreadth beyond. Just as we’ve learned to hear Dr. King only just so far, or Jesus, or anybody who might have made us uncomfortable had we heard them rightly.  Dead and unable to defend themselves, they can be bent to our own purposes – essentially, to the purpose of stasis, the default condition for people whose caste status is secure, but at the cost of their souls.

For Emerson asks for much, much more than liberal self-satisfaction! And where, today,  can motivation be found to take on that task that demands its own heroism? That is, “We must go alone.” Withdrawing oneself from the crowd, rather than seeking to be one with it, in order to know oneself to the depth wherein one connects with the All-One carries with it great risk.  The sea of the Unconscious is vast, the tiny vessel of consciousness is small and vulnerable. Furthermore, to be fully in the spirit of pro-abolition Emerson, trusting thyself  does not remove old-fashioned obligation to “virtue,” the moral concern that is just too serious for people today.  In Emerson’s sense, the self one trustsis God; self-trust essentially a voluntary enlistment in the army building God’s (better) world; one’s social role is complicated by much self-reflection and conscious decision-making as to how one shall live with other human beings in accord with that higher harmony.  But God-less liberal reality, its special kind of liberty,  allows people to assume obligations are relative; virtue, its meaning now demoted from “moral excellence” to something close to“chastity,” a term that no longer has a use.

What, then, can possibly motivate a person to embark upon what will be a lifetime of self-reflection and awareness of one’s non-negotiable (moral) obligation in a completely interdependent universe?  Such tasks are  impossible to reconcile with the complex and very real demands upon us in modernity, even if it weren’t for the fact that the conveniences and distractions work so well – for those who can afford them – to defend against life’s seriousness. Here’s where I insert my appeal to the values widely shared on the liberal left:  goodness and right behavior, justice and peace in the world, care for the earth.  These goods we profess are absolute goods; we did not make them up.  They cannot be made relative by us; we may do nothing but live in accord with their demand for moral discernment, unless we are exceptions, that is, unless we’re entitled. Thus, motivation to take up Emerson’s challenge of self reliance all the way depends upon letting go of false entitlement.  Not simple, but it can be done if – and only if –  in betrayal of the liberal promise, one one has the realization one’s will is not free. 

This can happen whenever one’s true condition as creature is confessed or admitted, as in the alcoholics confession at an AA meeting. It is a cessation of the entire effort of the will not to realize nature’s truth – I am – you are – we are powerless in relation to nature (i.e., we are born, we die). This realization makes it possible to take those “shared liberal values” to the extent of actually changing one’s life, making conscious life commitments that bring one down and intoexisting social relationships, all the while conscious the choices are wrong.  Down here,  in the local, where relationships can be tended, like beggars in Mother Teresa’s Calcutta,  we may be  life support for humanity’s disintegrating sense of social obligation, of relatedness. Here, where one’s choices will be baffling to most of your friends, the motivation to seek spiritual assistance is very different from the kind that evolves from personal crisis alone.   

Think of the late Pope Francis’s Catholicism:  “preference for the poor” changes the character of that religion from being about pomp and rules and hierarchy, into a way of life that points to the essential in-commonness of all men and women.  That identification reflects a real quality of soul.  Such a commitment “downward” puts the brakes not only to the high value put on Catholic formality and hierarchy.  It calls a halt to the entire neoliberal faith in progress, equally dogmatic and unquestioned,  that makes souls irrelevant.  Culture work, now, must be in the hands of individuals in families and communities, who can learn to connect with their souls, establishing a relationship that puts their soul’s aliveness before TV and Internet,  re-establishing Divine (moral) order for which the soul is the medium.  The relationship hinges upon creativity; to give voice to the soul in words, words have to be found.  They must struggle to be born and to exist, in poetry.   

That is, in lives stripped of automatic entitlement, self reliance will not be a means of liberal self-satisfaction, but of the heroism of self-trust.   It will go unrecognized as heroism of course; in fact, it may be interpreted as deviance, or just inexplicable, strange, foolish, self-harming and may well be all those things.  Because of its invisibility to those among the unconscious entitled, embodied self reliance will require constant attention, so faltering doesn’t turn into permanent paralysis. But such embodiment will emanate the life-giving soul-to-soul signal, the vibe all but extinguished in neoliberal, corporate consumerist reality.  Important to remember given our recognition-seeking egos, the embodiment of self-reliance is felt positively by social others even when they don’t know how to respond.   

The Emersonian project indeed has strings attached; there’s no candy-coating it – it is sacrifice for a greater good, compensation for which is not in afterlife.  Crucially,  the greater good of self-trust is not altruistic but self-interested.  However, the satisfaction it brings is very different from what is possible when accepting the rewards of liberal entitlement.  It is only possible to achieve when  harmony within oneself is not merely enjoyed as a sign of special (entitled) blessing, but recognized as the aliveness of God, the grace that it is.

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Talented young jazz trumpeter/band leader/composer Freddie Hendrix performed at The Other Side in April, one of the most popular shows we’ve had in our 15 years of jazz programming.  He featured many of his own compositions, as do many of the musicians music director Mike Dubaniewicz brings up from NYC to our space. Always, in my position as co-producer, I feel “risk” in leaving the “standards.” Our Utica audience is not one that routinely goes out to jazz clubs. (there aren’t any here!) And who, at least in some part of themselves, does not yearn to hear the tune they know, albeit given a jazz treatment?

Freddie likes to sprinkle his performance with talk, and that night he shared with us something about being a composer:  composing made him know himself.   For this reason, he implied, he valued it above (or differently from?) playing the tunes written by others.  Of course, while audiences everywhere want you to play the familiar (myself included), the artist’s soul demands the journey into himself, to find out what is there longing for the artist to bring it into existence, as sound, or words, or lines drawn on a  paper. This is the self-satisfaction of the artist, not altruism, but a life-giving gift of genuine culture.  

But how do those of us who are not recognized artists come to know this different satisfaction?  More importantly, how does one come to know art-making as a demand upon oneself, not for geniuses only?  I suggest the demand will make itself felt when one is following the Emersonian project, including commitment to the soul’s downward ideal, to tending the repair of essential social bonds made relative under corporate capitalism.  Importantly, the downward commitment is not the one liberal conscience calls us to, i.e., not to oppressed others in post-colonial countries, immigrants, black lives, etc. (which is not  to say humanitarian or liberation-supportive help – even revolution –  isn’t called for!).  In fact, looking at the record of the liberal conscience, the social world is not helped when we give up our in-place, sad world in preference for the other and the exotic, anymore than the earth will be helped by Musk’s plan to settle human beings on the moon.

For who’s to say what help other people need when we know not the needs of our own souls?  To ask this is not to endorse Trump’s cruel disembowelment of USAid and other humanitarian agencies.  Liberal reality  imagines the world as travel playground, as a feast laid down before us for one’s personal delectation.  Is this not the entitled perspective that blossoms into Trumpian dreams of annexing Greenland and Canada, or turning Gaza, once rid of its native people, into a resort?

What if the humanitarian sacrifice wanted of us (or at least most of us) is here, in place,  in willingly taking on what to us feels like harsh limitation in this globalized world that offers itself so readily to anyone with sufficient income for travel, let alone to she who has the talent and the will to get ahead in it? For it is here, in this restrictive locality she will be forced upon her own means, forced toward the soul, in the direction of her own creativity not as means to success, but as an act of simple cultivation, to make and sustain life amidst barrenness, to bring to bloom locally other things than more Walmarts and Dollar Stores.   But for this downwardness to be about social transformation and not simply defending tradition, the first repairs must be to the foundation, in the soul, in creative work.

As for our neighbors in the “local” who are not here to serve the dream of the larger good, many of them Trump enthusiasts, once we acknowledge our entitlement, we can see the the basis of their aggrievement.  Many of them feel the full unfairness of the entitlement taken for granted by liberals. But we can do nothing better about their aggrievement than pick up the liberal task set before us in Emerson’s words. It addresses the in-common source of aggrievement  – in the bypassed, scorned and traumatized soul. Art-making is not an elite occupation!

+++

Entitlement is a close relation to narcissism, many liberals’ favorite word for Trump. Akin also to arrogance, and pride, those traditional  stumbling blocks to salvation, entitlement is central to neoliberal identity and intrinsic to white liberal caste.  It slips in at birth, when the infant “realizes” that if she is to survive she better get with the program that’s going, never mind what other message her soul may have had for her.  This sense of powerlessness is birthright in liberal society, originating in the trauma of the wounded soul, denial of which, under dogmatic liberal optimism, assures its unconscious survival.  Denied it makes everyone perpetually aggrieved and offended.  A real culture would nourish people with meaning and purpose –  food for starved souls – rather than with careers and generous retirement benefits/buyoffs that instrumentalize the aggrievement. If a culture is to be regained, if imagination is to do its real transformative work, entitlement –  caste, white supremacy – however we name the spurious social identity,  has to be sacrificed.    

In ordinariness the quagmire of class and entitlement and empire may be transcended. Not only, as in the example of Pope Francis’s Catholicism, by taking the vow of preference for the underclass, but also, and firstly, preferring one’s own impoverished, abandoned, low-caste, ordinary-as-hell forsaken soul.  Soul reclamation begins in resuming local living, being anchored  in the ordinary “Utica” place that’s yours  –  in unmediated relationships, our on-the-ground social roles and our efforts to inhabit them making virtue meaningful once again.

In this way, bound rather tightly within committed relationships with people and places, can avaricious liberal entitlement be curbed in order to make room for the world’s others. Genuinely religious ties – meaning, those based in the Emersonian  honoring of souls  – are not a movable feast, except in imagination.  Art-making, cultivation of soul, is the foundational task of self-reliance,  the necessary, anchoring practice for such culture-making endeavor.   

Restoring Emerson’s true legacy is akin to, when honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,  remembering the inconvenient truth that his advocacy for poor people included critique of capitalism and opposition to the Vietnam war.  It is akin to remembering what happened to Jesus, whose love was based in defense of the underclass. The  liberated (libertarian) individuality that has us looking out for #1, against conscience, was forced on us before we had a choice.  But a bit of luck for us –  the isolation of liberal individualism can be used to turn the tables toward embodied community,  based in alive souls.  Though difficult, it is a difficulty that can take society beyond reformation to transformation, a revolutionary heroism on behalf of true in-commonness.

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