Emerson, Past, Present, Future!

One of my primary concerns regarding the future of humanity is where and how humans will come to find purpose.  Today we gain purpose in an array of different ways.  Raising kids and earning money are the backbone of purpose in the majority of people’s lives.  Evolution definitely has something to say about both of those drives, although the cultural influence cannot be ignored.  I can imagine a day when parents will not be able to raise their own kids better than an AI.  While that may be a tough pill to swallow for some, it doesn’t change the fact that if parents really want what’s best for their children, they will have to come to terms with the fact that AI can and will do a far superior job of nurturing, teaching, and raising kids.  When the day comes that AI will be better parents than humans, that will also mean that AI will already be better builders, psychologists, lawyers, farmers, professors and just about anything else one could imagine. 

There are some people who absolutely hate their jobs, but despite that abhorrence, jobs fill our days with productivity.  They provide a means to interact with people, they provide a means by which to make a living, despite disliking a job, they provide a semblance of purpose.

In a post-labor world, in a post-parent world, in a post-_________ world, where will we derive purpose?

This is not a prediction, but in thinking about what that purpose might look like, I was moved to re-read The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The American Scholar was a speech given by Emerson in 1837 to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard.  Regrettably (or perhaps not) I find myself judging other professors based on their familiarity with this speech that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared “the declaration of independence of American intellectual life”.  I find myself going back to it every couple of years to remind me what the purpose of education is.  While I am somewhat critical of flowery prose, the message is meaningful, and the direction is purposeful.  Purposeful in a way that has nothing to do with rearing children nor making money.

While reading The American Scholar, it helps to remember that Emerson is responding to our dependence on European intellectualism and charting a path into a new American ideal.  Ignoring the political escapism that is going on, that path is not limited to a move from European influence to American confluence.  It’s a path that allows people, no matter when or where they are to navigate from the past to the future.

Emerson addresses the education of the scholar by nature, books, and action, pinning primacy on action over all else.

“I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake.  It is pearls and rubies to his discourse.  Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors of eloquence and wisdom.  The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by as a loss of power.”

“I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived through the poverty or splendor of his speech.”

“Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.”

“The World is his who can see through its pretensions.”

It’s not as if books are unimportant, but to live through books is not really living at all.

“Books are for the scholar’s idle times…the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts.”

“If the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.”

That is, we have to get out and live, inaction is contradictory to scholarship.  The simple expression ‘Climb On’ carries weight beyond the climb, it’s an instance of scholarly activity, because activity in itself is scholarly!

“Life is our dictionary.”

“The mind now thinks, now acts; and each fit reproduces the other.  When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness—he has always the resource to live.  Character is higher than intellect.  Thinking is the function. Living is functionary.”

That’s the point, that’s the past, the present, and the future.  Living is functionary!

Climb on!