Very nice site!

Great to back and pull-on the mantle, but Emerson was a minister, and spoke to others trying to “save” them, but alas, decided to save himself by lecturing and publishing.Today we have the ghastly expansion of blowggers, and everybodies is saved?

Chris, I respect your opinion, but I disagree.

I see few bloggers as individualists. There is a herd mentality. People afraid to go against the grain.

And how can you not see the elitist undercurrent that pervades the blogosphere?

Thank God as more “common folk” start blogging the din of their elistist voices will grow fainter in my ears.

Fascinating. Thanks for the insights. I haven’t read Emerson in years and now feel compelled to visit him again.

From the Cautionary Tales Dept: The euphoria infused in these comments reminds me of the reaction of many in the mid-1980’s who came across “computer conferencing” at the other end of their dial-up modem connections. Think of The WELL, or Participate on The Source.

It was, truly, completely, something new under the Sun of free expression. In many settings, anyone could start a discussion topic, on any subject, and those who found it were welcomed to join in, thus creating a community of minds linked by interest alone.

For professionals trained in the dynamics of groups and for visionaries who were in concert with Emerson’s insight into common human experience, this was a platform for creative collaboration and expression with potentially universal reach outside the frame and control of institutional publishing and communications. Removed of process, time, space, and ultimately language constraints — even at a mere 300 baud (and this was all happening well far apart from the Internet and Usenet) — this global connectivity opened the door to advancing human understanding to a previously inaccessible level: whether among a small group developing policy; people sharing personal experience in support groups, or people with previously unconnected but shared politics coordinating global strategy.

When the Internet connected the isolated islands of commercial online services and BBS networks where conferencing was active in the mid-1990’s, the door opened large, and it remains opening, soon to get a supreme kick as AOL provides blogging to its millions of subscribers.

In a previous response here, J.A. Marrit reacts to Chris’ post this way: “…unless and until technology actually facilitates reasoned discourse, it’s hard to share your enthusiasm.”

The important goal is to determine whether and how technology might conceivably advance reason itself. As it happens, in those 15 pre-web years literally thousands of dedicated practitioners, many of whom were motivated by the very Emersonian tenets expressed here, deliberately designed their collaborative spaces to create a better common understanding for the people in their groups, whatever their size or purpose.

How have they done? I think it is fair to say modestly well. They are still at it. Still bringing groups together, creating useful collaborative spaces, many of which are now infused with blogs. But they also now work with a highly informed sense of technology’s limitations when it comes to affecting relationships among people.

For the purposes of assessing the presence of Emerson in the blogosphere, they might say, “Yes, he’s still out there, and more clearly apparant than at any time previously, and so there for anyone interested in bringing him into his or her orbit.”

Reasoned discourse, in other words, will have to speak for itself.

A thought-provoking piece, thank you. I am ready to see as Emersonian the proliferation of individualistic expression that blogs have permitted. I don’t think the idea of a distributed “mind” a la Google matches what Emerson described, however; in fact a distributed, populational mind is the opposite of his notion of a central, essentialist mind to which everyone have access. He’s a mainframe thinker (how’s that for an anachronism) in this population-thinking world.

A beautifule piece! thanks!

Along with Nehru and the other luminaries you mentioned, a certain german philosopher by the name of Nietzsche was also quite fond of Emerson’s writings in his early years!

Once again thanks for a wonderfully uplifting piece!

-A

Emerson’s multiculturalism was gleaned from the racist scholarship of the British Raj: he never experienced the living traditions from which the Indian thought he professed to admire emerged. In that sense, yes, he is an exemplary postmodern American, as is that Emersonian contempt for “mass culture,” which translates rather directly, I think, into a contempt for ordinary human beings … a very un-Christian failure of human solidarity. But I find very little to be proud of in acknowledging that fact. More thoughts at:

http://blogalization.org/community/comments.php?id=P623_0_1_0

why the question mark?

Yes, that Robert Manning of Boston, a would-be Emersonian groping for the tools with which to be one. Congrats, Chris, on your new web-site and double congrats for the fine Emerson essay. If we can believe Old Waldo’s essay on Compensation we can take hope that for each of the nasty things going on today in the world, especially in Washington, there is or will be a benign opposite.