Emerson postage stamp, issue of 1940 – Public Domain
I desire, even with profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Oversoul
All reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
– Ibid.
[I}n Emerson’s mind…we can measure all that we have disowned or buried, and may, if we go further in the same direction, lose forever…It is by entering Emerson’s mind once more that we may recover at least a portion of our lost heritage, and gain courage – “courage enough!” – to seek a better life.
–Lewis Mumford, intro., Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals (1968)
Facing the fact I had a talk to give at a Unitarian Church nearby, I was flooded with the misgivings that come, in these years since I left the ministry, when speaking formally to the “liberal world” outside my circle of friends. More or less, my circle has been centered in our Cafe, formed over nearly 22 years, gone now one full year. Closest of all are people who’ve become volunteers for the Cafe’s related-but-separate (and still existing) performance and arts venue, The Other Side. I believe it was the Cafe’s origins in Orin’s and my anarchistic utopian idealism that defined the Cafe’s space. The unmentionable – anarchism (which is simply the word used to name serious idealism in the jealous capitalist context) gave the Cafe its undeniably attractive vibe. It was this vibe that attracted people to our cultural project. In particular, the Cafe’s exuberance, along with its soul-deep moral base provided me – and all of us – a kind of magic protective shield against liberal defensiveness; its charming coffeeshop persona was one face of an “autonomous zone” wherein we were allowed to be a bit braver, to be our deeper, truer selves.
So in a “free country” liberal defensiveness is not an actual censorship, or is it? Still, conformity makes a powerful pressure to conform, as Emerson certainly knew and dedicated his most famous essay to combating. “Being oneself” is a soul matter; uniqueness of character depends upon obedience to its truth. Though bowing to the liberal spirit of his time, using “profane words” instead of “sacred,” Emerson understood soul’s truth as God’s truth. Without that connection with the soul, the net of conformity will sweep you up and you will be forever a child in the world ruled by adults, helpless to defy the ego-defended reasonableness all around you. When one’s own ego dominance is unchallenged by deeper self-knowledge, social mores move in to replace the “Higher Law”; with social demands superceding the demand of one’s soul people are convinced the soul’s power, like everything else, is relative. This means that for many of us, who need social connection, for whom relationships have ultimacy, one will only go so far in speaking its truth in the world.
Thus, outside of this ‘free speech’ zone the Cafe made for me, I have to be prepared for liberal friends going silent when I – however gently – attack their shibboleths – i.e., liberal identity, unquestioned faith in the Democratic party, NPR and the New York Times. The shibboleths protect them from the shadow part of the soul whose revelations they’re not ready for (and never will be unless brought to it by either desire or catastrophe or both). However, I figure now’s the time for people most alarmed/offended by the rise of Trump, Musk, and Christian fascism to be able to acknowledge the catastrophe is here! So I went for it. That is, I brought with me an essay of mine that had recently appeared on Counterpunch, surely mine was one of the milder indictments of liberal Democratic politics one can read on that website! There might now be an opening for me: people might be ready to see/acknowledge the ground for Trump was prepared before he and the MAGA appeal made plain the unhappiness of so many under liberal hegemony that had conjured the rise of a demagogue. Liberals might be ready, that is, for a deeper analysis that might mean letting go of faith in liberalism for something better.
Without question, focusing our aggrievement on Trump and his followers is easier; in fact one hardly has to make any kind of studied critique: just say “deportation” or “tariffs” or “Medicaid” and no more need be said! But surely now, when the fantasy we’ve clung to crumbles in front of our eyes, we can see the inefficacy of aggrievement to bring about change. Although exchanging false god for true is no simple matter, in the absence of a shared sacred language action from the left now must be based in the “eternal” reality of joy and beauty and love made so plain to us by Emerson 175 years or so ago. To do so will depend upon each person’s willingness to take on the personal project to find these ineluctable goods for herself, to be responsible for knowing they are real. If the goal on the left is, ever and always, “the better world,” one has to, personally, know that better reality in the present, in imagination.
Of course, dropping blame leaves one defenseless. As in any bitter dispute, one has to be prepared to find the complaints against liberalism are justified, even if only part of the story. A liberal hegemony exists not just in the triumph of secularism, but in a vast system that has entirely lost its sense of direction – that goal of justice and liberty for all – which, even if the wealthy propertied founders didn’t really mean it, many many Americans since them have meant it. We may hate and fear the direction Trump wants to take us in, but just what was the direction we wanted? Votes at Presidential elections for the lesser evil do not tell us much about that direction, nor about the passion of liberal hearts for the better world.
Do white middle class “leftward” people even realize we dropped allegiance to something – that Big Dream of the better world that “engages us to obey?” Do they see how we’ve distanced ourselves from the actions of those “saints” living faithfully toward the better world, such as the Wobblies at the turn of the last century, or the hippie dreamers some of us were back in the last century? Why did we begin to treat the dreams of peace and love as words with no signifiers, nothing to take seriously, such that even would-be dreamers were likelier to cave into self-doubt, their activism more grievance-led than dream
If one ponders this Big Dream-loss problem at all, the answer could be fear, and surely that is part of it. But fear – even realistic fears of nuclear annihilation, climate-caused extinction, the rise of fascism and the end of life as we know it – even fear of losing one’s job – does not have to dominate. It can be disempowered – when people find connection to a dream, or to a “principle” equally intangible. This idea appears in Pedro Almodovar’s 2024 movie The Room Next Door about Ingrid, a woman writer with a confessed fear of death, who has agreed to be present for her terminally ill friend’s suicide. At one point, her thoroughly pessimistic boyfriend, Damian, a writer of books about climate change and mass extinction, etc., tells her he’s aghast his son and wife are expecting a third child. But Ingrid, influenced by her friend, or maybe by her own loyalty to life, has found a spiritual place to be in that refuses such pessimism.
In the 1960’s, changes in consciousness allowed many people – mostly but not entirely young – to be captured by the dream. Maybe they suffered from too little preparation, too little influence from elders who could have prepared them for persisting in imaginal reality that can take a longer view on outcomes. Long before the 1960’s, any such elders, outside indigenous communities, holding such an “extra-historical” view in our society were practically extinct. Most of us were accustomed to heed the hierarchy exemplified in TV’s “everywhere-all-at-once”, and to scorn the possibility of a local source of wisdom or vision; we’d come to favor the instant gratification communicated via the medium of electronic images and advertising, and to treat the virtue of patience as vestigial at best.
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In the end, a few Unitarian feathers got ruffled that morning. In the Q & R, one woman defended NPR, another the (local) Democratic Party. Yet another scolded me for my saying I try to avoid broadcast news- she even watches Fox news! Back when I was a member of the paid clergy, “spirituality” was the touchy subject. Today spirituality as a private wealth passes muster, but “the sacred” – outside of indigenous societies – is still superstition. The power of spirituality in the pews is relativized by whatever it is that causes people to reflexively defend the liberal establishment from me. ( Instead of defending they could, say, share their own efforts to hold to the mast against the siren call of the gadget, or the latest bamboozlements from the liberal establishment. They could make their church an “autonomous zone; they’d lose a few members, but also might gain some younger ones.) Whatever it is, wil
Yes, we know. Vote for the lesser evil this time, and in time a good guy or better, a woman, will come along. For many liberals I know their activism means keeping things as they are, not making them as they ought to be; this, a failure of imagination. The ideal cannot be the object of devotion because it’s not real.
What means something to me today is that, at long last, I don’t care about the ruffled feathers! If the liberal best can’t be moved beyond their own shibboleths, so be it. My “problem” is to speak the Truth that connects me with “my nature,” as RW Emerson teaches me to do. (And how do I know it’s not the Devil speaking? I might not answer this question just as Emerson did: “To me [my words] do not seem to be such but if I am the Devil’s child I will live then from the Devil.” )
But, if I answer it differently it’s not because I don’t believe in the Devil. It’s because I actually want to “radicalize” (the left) through re-introducing the religious dimension it has vainly thought it could be/do good without. If, as I say, people are beginning to see the Devil is real in his Trump incarnation, if the specter of evil people imagined was gone with Hitler they now see is alive and well, coming closer each day, perhaps now the white liberal left can be open to a different, more metaphysical or archetypal, less naively optimistic, darkness-denying, technology-embracing, affluence-and-suburbia-
To find that higher law in one’s own unorthodox way, all we had to do, had we taken up the wisdom offered us back in the early 19th century from our own literary father, Emerson, was uphold that“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature….the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.’
And what is it we stand to lose if we serve the “Highest Law” instead of neoliberalism? Back in 2002 when Orin and I started our Cafe, an act of idealistic localism, even here in Utica everyone was championing the cause of “the local.” But this stopped none of the chain stores taking over the local economy. Most people could not see this as a “war” and that sides must be chosen. Without allegiance to the Good-for-all, divisiveness is inevitable, but so also is moral “neutrality” that refuses to see where is the real enemy – there in the safe shelter of multi-million dollar marketing, consumer approval ratings, of everybody goes there, of the conformity Emerson spoke to 160 years ago.
Under liberalism’s sweeping amnesty for its way of life, actions and life way choices that just make practical sense suddenly lose their aspect of “moral choice.” My role as writer and occasional preacher, it seems is just continually posting the ideal and making the necessary critique of the system liberal ideology upholds that is both so very attractive and morally indefensible. White liberals who can make such life way choices ought to become capable of drawing a line. Not to be letter-of-the-law purists who swear off using cellphones, darkening the door of Walmart or who put their antiracism where their sentiments are and move from the all-white suburbs to the city and its schools ( defensible choices, all!) But, rather, to be each an impractical utopian/anarchist idealist who will draw her line at forsaking her ideal because it is the life pulse in her own breast that is hers alone to defend.
