Transcendentalism For Today - modern lessons of self-reliance

Growing up on the South-West coast of Australia, I considered Tim Winton’s “An Open Swimmer” my bible as I explored how to understand risk and identity through my relationship with the natural world - and my church was the Indian ocean.

Then I came across this piece of writing attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson from the 1860's:

"To laugh often and much,

To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children,

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends,

To appreciate beauty,

To find the best in others,

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition,

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived,

This is to have succeeded"

At the time I was literally as far away as possible on the planet from where Emerson was writing about, yet the piece resonated immediately, and so I enthusiastically adopted it as another tool to help me navigate my early years. Now, some forty years later, and recently having had the great fortune of being able to spend patient time deep within the Catskill mountains of New York, while quietly looking on with awe and respect the way both my children are forging their way through defining who they are with such strength of individuality, I realize the piece may be even more relevant today.

Emerson, along with Thoreau, Burroughs, Whitman, Fuller and Alcott, was central to the mid-nineteenth-century American movement referred to as Transcendentalism, which argued that truth was not handed down by institutions, scripture, or social convention, but discovered directly by the individual through intuition, direct experience, and a close relationship with the natural world.

Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" opens with a warning that it takes courage to trust your own thought rather than the version of it that comes back to you, amplified, from someone else. I don’t think Emerson was arguing against learning from others, but that he was arguing against the habit of mistaking a borrowed opinion, repeated confidently enough, for a conclusion you actually reached yourself. In today's media environment engineered to serve the opinions of others before you've had the chance to form your own, that distinction has become harder to notice and more important to protect. The algorithmic feed is, in a sense, the exact mechanism Emerson worried about - a machine for delivering "the aggregated opinion" directly into a mind that hasn't been given room to think first.

Alongside Emerson, Thoreau’s two-year experiment at Walden Pond to reduce life to its essentials by stripping away the possessions and obligations that had accumulated without examination, was about creating enough distance from ordinary noise to hear your own answer to a basic question: what do I actually need, and what have I simply accepted? Arguably even more courageously for the period, Margaret Fuller’s urging of young women to seek greater independence from the home and family through education in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and the enduring appeal of why Louisa May Alcott's character Jo continues to inspire so many, went to the core of the importance of challenging a group think mentality.

In contemplating how profound the work of these men and women was at the time, it occurs to me that Transcendentalisms core claims are turning out to be more urgent today than when they were first written, precisely because the forces they warned against - conformity, borrowed opinion, and distraction from direct experience - seem to have only grown more powerful - and the lessons to be drawn from it more important.

I think that one lesson is that unmediated experience - time outdoors, unstructured thought, direct observation rather than someone else's summary - is not a luxury but a requirement for clear thinking, and that a life lived entirely through other people's curated interpretations of the world is dangerous. And I think that a second lesson is simplicity is not deprivation but a form of clarity - that most of what accumulates in a modern life, digitally and materially, obscures rather than serves the questions that actually matter.

Neither of these lessons demand moving to a cabin or rejecting technology outright, but what they do seem to require is the same thing Transcendentalism argued in 1854: that periodically stepping back far enough from the noise of borrowed opinion to ask whether the thoughts you're having, the life you're running, and the wants you're chasing are actually yours. That question was hard to ask honestly in Emerson and Alcott’s century. It has, if anything, gotten harder in ours - yet even more necessary for exactly the same reason.