RW Emerson, GB Shaw, and Me

This is from the early 2000's - part of an attempt to more clearly define myself and my intellectual development. 

Savoring Emerson and Shaw

    For the past decade or more, I have been engaged in a unique and diligently pursued enterprise. I have tried to immerse myself in the minds of two men, who together span the 19th and first half of the 20th century. I was born in 1947, and that means that G. B. Shaw, like my own grandfather, was still alive (but very old) in the first few years of my own lifetime.
    My grandfather Stephens was born in 1865, so he and I were in synch for growing up in a period of post-war euphoria and paranoia which shared the characteristics of being punishing and moralistic, and not among the better periods in our history, from an ethical and esthetic point of view. His lifespan and Shaw's were very close. I've often had reason to think that the fact that my first 6 years were spent in his company had much to do with my subsequent affinities with 19th century thought and culture. My grandfather was an educated man and a devout Christian, more in the sense of living the example than preaching it - something of a rarity in frontier Montana in the 1890's.

    My interest in Emerson goes back to high school and college. Emerson was still the pre-eminent American thinker, and my grandparents' generation read his essays and understood them in the high school curriculum of their day. My father was an enthusiastic Thoreauvian in his own way, and Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller were no doubt read and admired by my grandparents and/or their sisters. The political persuasion of the Stephens family was somewhere between Teddy Roosevelt and Jeanette Rankin Republicanism. My great-grandfather James Stephens had voted for Lincoln, and his father in-law knew the young Abe Lincoln personally. My grandparents were both Progressive and Prohibitionist, at a time when these parties fielded candidates or endorsed main-party candidates such as William Jennings Bryan or Robert LaFollette. My grandfather supported (and actively worked for) TR's break from the Republican Party, but like most Americans he was opposed to our entry into World War II right up until Pearl Harbor.  My grandmother Stephens was always outspoken against FDR and the New Deal - probably much more so than my grandfather, who rarely if ever made negative judgments about anyone.  

    My mother's aunt, Pearl Goodall, lived in Helena and knew Jeanette Rankin personally, and also worked hard for her election as the first woman in Congress, and in her anti-War causes generally. My grandmother Stephens liked Jeanette Rankin, but criticized her for her second vote against war in 1941, where it was politically inflammatory. Most Montanans had resented our participation in World War I, but we got on the bandwagon all the way in World War II, and continuing hatred of Asians was something I grew up with.  I can still remember being idignant as a student at UCLA when I was criticized for referring to China as "Communist China" - by other students of Chinese descent, of course. 
    According to our family history, Jeanette Rankin visited our family home on one occasion - probably when she was running for Congress the second time. My grandfather had been a state legislator for one term, and knew most of the prominent Republicans in the state, as well as the progressive Democrats. Montana Democrats were slow to embrace FDR's programs, and some, like Burton K. Wheeler, became political powers in their own right. Wheeler was LaFollette's running mate as a Progressive in one election (1924?).  Later, he became a leading Isolationist, but party pressure brought him around well before Pearl Harbor.  He also worked hard for a TVA-style federal dams program for the Missouri River, the fruit of which was Fort Peck and several other large dams in the Dakotas. 
    With this background, it is not such a stretch to imagine a rural Montanan being able to savor the writings and biographies of Emerson and Shaw. The first play by Shaw I remember seeing performed was “Arms and the Man,” which I saw at the age of 13 performed by a travelling company in our school. One of my friends in college enjoyed Shaw, and frequently quoted him. I saw a few more plays, learned about the Fabian movement, studied other figures in that milieu, and finally purchased the complete Holroyd biography - one of the great biographies of our time.
    An equally good (but shorter) biography of Emerson, Robert Richardson's Emerson  The Mind on Fire, appeared a few years ago, and I have read and selectively re-read from it constantly over the past two years. I have also had the good fortune to know a direct descendent of Emerson, and thus to get a better insight and flavor of some of the ideas and events in his life. The evolution of Emerson's work and ideas and their impact on the larger American and global culture is what interests me the most - mainly because I am sympathetic and thoroughly persuaded of the correctness of virtually all of his vision. The only real problem I can see is one of misdirected militancy - something which both Emerson and Shaw seemed to favor when real threats to human dignity and well-being were present. Both were missionaries for their view of progressive values and improvements in the quality of the human condition. Emerson was more of a universalist than Shaw, but both maintained a higher, idealistic kind of social vision.
    John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, Herzen's My Life and Thoughts, the work of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hugo, and other towering figures of 19th century thought have further affirmed my affinities with the progressive element in every age and place. How can these ideas have failed to triumph, and now be in full retreat or ruins? It's an obsession which I have had for my entire life: why does what is true, good, and beautiful have to constantly struggle against what is cruel, insane, and ugly? Perhaps there is a Gaia Hypothesis for history as well as science: our culture is sick and self-destructive. We cannot continue to prevail with the population density, the technology, and the awareness (or lack of it) which our governments and other social institutions are now burdened. We are destroying the earth and everything good in it, and there are natural processes which will cause us to self-destruct before that happens.
    It is imperative that we somehow reverse this course, and begin to reaffirm the science and philosophy which can save us - what Emerson first called (before Nietzsche) "the joyful science" of realizing the full potential of the human species through the individual. All of nature is contained in a leaf, and a leaf is a microcosm of all nature. Most of all, our human bodies are part of nature, as is our material survival, along with that of every other species. Human interactions are also part of nature, while Mind or Soul or Spirit is above it.
    Emerson was the first explicit phenomenologist, so far as I can tell. All of material reality is phenomenological in the sense that it reflects the highest understandings of individual and universal consciousness. Jung, too, should pay a heavy debt to Emerson's pioneering synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy and tradition.
    As a pacifist/isolationist (in the sense of the "Prime Directive" of not interfering, or allowing interference in other nation's affairs, and certainly not defending multi-national corporations' interests), I am particularly disturbed by the militancy expressed by both Emerson and Shaw, the latter having gone so far as to endorse Stalin, and the former to have championed John Brown. Violence in a noble cause was no problem for them - indeed, they were often leading the charge.
    Of course, they lived in the pre-nuclear age, and could not imagine a world in which one nation could destroy not only its enemies but itself in the process, and probably set human civilization and its evolution back thousands or millions of years. This is the factor we must correct for, and one of the very few of them from the highpoints of 19th century thought. Another involves cybernation and the nature of the modern techno-state, with numerous totalitarian strategies and technologies at its disposal.
    One major difference between Emerson and Shaw is their place in their respective societies. Emerson was born to his vocation, and a figure of unblemished grandeur and integrity. He was a full-time philosopher-theologian with intensive training in the classics, and an active participant in the main-stream intellectual and social movements of his time, from Abolitionism to Feminism, Transcendentalism to the natural sciences.
    Shaw, on the other hand, was always on the fringes of respectable society, writing music criticism, fiction, and finally his famous plays, while engaging in a prodigious amount of organizing and propagandizing for the radical Left. Both seemed to have been workaholics who spent their entire adult lives in the single-minded pursuit of an intellectual enterprise which others only dimly understood. Both were evangelists for a new way of thinking, and highly successful in changing the way millions of people live and think. Yet, neither was an academic philosopher nor much in favor of academic life in general. Both preferred to address the public directly, whether by Emerson's lectures and published Essays, or Shaw's plays and political rallies.