The tropical route to perdition
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, April 24, 2025 – What the Declaration of Independence did for political entities in 1776, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address did for persons in 1838. The establishment of government of the people, by the people, and for the people made obsolete every doctrine of arbitrary and inherited power that had oppressed the human race throughout history.
The imposition of caste- and sex-based hierarchies via theocracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, plus the imposition of dialectic equities, are ruinous to the ideals of personal liberty and equality upon which America is founded and from which Emersonian thought flows.
When he declared people to be as free and open to divine revelation as Moses was, it is surprising that his brother preachers and their congregations did not react with anything like the violence King George visited upon his rebellious subjects.
Although Emerson’s clerical colleagues suggested he may indeed be guilty of heresy, his response was to thank them for their consideration of his beliefs, and to compliment them on the assertion of their own. The religious establishment wanted to transform Emerson into a target for the arrows of their self-justification, but he wouldn’t join the fight.
In an Oct. 1838 letter of reply to criticism by the Unitarian leader Dr. Henry Ware, Emerson writes “…when I see myself suddenly raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such thing. … I shall go on just as before, seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see…”
Here is what Emerson had told the 1838 class of Harvard’s Divinity School “…truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition. What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject it.” Otherwise, “… the doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul.”
By not packaging and sending his revelations into the marketplace of ideas, placed within the vast inventory of religions, Emerson declined the establishment’s invitation to become either salesman, marketer, advertiser, or influencer for the gifts he had so freely and evidently received. No wonder he is completely unknown in our errant and ill-named comsumer economy, where churn is the ideal, profit is master and consumer is servant.
Such a stand against “the majority of voices” would get Emerson in deep trouble with today’s talking heads and professional pundits, all of whom champion democracy without first insisting on the firm establishment of a republic.
That mistake betrays fuzzy thinking, because it raises the neutral tool of democracy above the positive ideal of a republic, which demands government of, for, and by the people. As is ever so sadly obvious in today’s MAGA reality, majority rule leads straight to a supermax tropical prison.