Bookchin v. "lifesyle anarchism"

[Gordon Fitch]

Carl Remick wrote:
> >More attention should be paid to New England-style everything, in my
> >humble, regionally chauvinistic (being a Massachusetts native)
> >opinion ;-)  I just watched a C-span discussion on Emerson and
> >Thoreau (part of a new series on American authors) and was struck
> >again by how fresh, vigorous and accessible their thinking was and
> >is.
> >
> >America's cult of the individual has today devolved into a
> >retrograde celebration of selfishness.  But I believe that the New
> >England Transcendentalist tradition, in which E and T were so
> >prominent, offers a way to tap into the appeal of individualism yet
> >avoid the constrictive narcissism that characterizes so much of US
> >society today.  Renewed attention to Transcendentalism could, I
> >think, help to replenish a sense of basic community and even help to
> >re-legitimize the concept of socialism as a worthy aim.

Doug Henwood:
> Huh? Emerson was all about self-reliance. He was a case study in
> narcissism - I almost wrote a dissertation on that, in fact. "Are
> they my poor?," he asked someone soliciting contributions. He did pay
> Thoreau's tax bill, so the sylvan solitary didn't have to go to jail.
> I must dig out the excellent parody of them in Melville's
> Confidence-Man, which shows them as weird, icy isolates.

I think it's difficult to say whether Emerson was about anything
in particular.  As Marc's Nabokov says, in effect, it's not
what you say but how you say it.  "Trust thyself -- every
heart vibrates to that iron string" doesn't mean anything
except in a vague poetical sense, but people like to hear it.
He might as well have said "Trust the Force" and gotten in a
very successful movie. 

Thoreau, on the other hand, was a serious person, an earnest
moralizer who went to jail in opposition to imperialism and
slavery.  That's not isolation, although it may be icy and weird.
I don't recall if Emerson ever answered his famous question
on that occasion.