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Ralph Waldo Emerson on Peace
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts; he was the son of a Unitarian minister.
He graduated from Harvard College in 1821. Emerson married in 1829, but his wife died less than a year and a half later.
At this point he doubted his beliefs and profession as a minister, and he decided to resign, stating that it was because of the Eucharist. In 1832 he went to Europe where he met such noteworthies as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle.
Emerson gave public lectures, and in 1836 he published Nature. He had become the sage of Concord, and the literary colleagues gathering around him became known as the Transcendental Club.
Emerson's inspiring lectures, essays, and poems elucidated a philosophy of life based on the inner resources of the self and revelation from the divine presence of the soul.
"Trust yourself," he would say, and live spontaneously and freely in harmony with nature.
He described the spiritual laws of life in essays like "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," "Self-Reliance," and "The Over Soul."
He found his own insights echoed in the Hindu scriptures and the Romantic poets. He urged an American renaissance of culture and influenced writers such as Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and the Alcott family.
He believed that culture was a way of modulating violence.
Violence is not power, but the absence of power.
He concluded "Self-Reliance" with these words: "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
At the age of twelve Emerson produced the following couplet on the Revolutionary War:
Fair Peace triumphant blooms on golden wings,
And War no more of all his victories sings.
In 1832 he heard the "very good views" of Channing at a peace meeting.
Emerson criticized the Mexican War which he felt was caused chiefly by the interests of the slave states, and he prophesied that there would be retribution for the nation just as there is for any private felon.
In a discussion with Thomas Carlyle at Stonehenge a few years later, Emerson put forward the pacifist philosophy of non-resistance and non-cooperation with governments which institutionalize violence, as an indigenous American conviction; this idea was championed by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and others who would not compromise on this point as Channing had.
Emerson gave one or two anecdotes which made an impression on Carlyle, and concluded, "'Tis certain as God liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution."
For Emerson, the soul transcends all conflict and has no enemies; soldiers he considered to be ridiculous.
War is "abhorrent to all right reason" and against human progress.
From the perspective of spiritual oneness he spoke of "the blazing truth that he who kills his brother commits suicide."
He looked at the Civil War as a retribution to purge the nation of the evil of slavery; he detested the lack of freedom during the war, and in 1865 he vowed that if martial law came to Concord he would disobey it or move elsewhere.
He foresaw "that dream of good men not yet come to pass, an International Congress."
Prophetic also was this: "As if the earth, water, gases, lightning and caloric had not a million energies, the discovery of any one of which could change the art of war again, and put an end to war by the exterminating forces man can apply."
In 1838 Emerson delivered an address to the Boston meeting of the American Peace Society which has been published under the title "War" and contains his thinking on the issues of war and peace.
He describes war as "an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels."
He could see that violence was dangerously contagious. War, for Emerson, is part of wild and primitive societies, and the primitive stages of religion lead to religious wars. "It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part."
Cruelty and violence are juvenile, and the mature spirit renounces them.
Like others, Emerson notes that trade works against war, because it gives people contact, knowledge, and familiarity with their enemies.
The development of learning, art, and religion make war seem like fratricide, and he adds that it is. History depicts the slow mitigation and decline of war.
Yet the doctrine of the right of war still remains.
Emerson asks the perennial question - Cannot we have love instead of hate, peace instead of war?
This idea, he points out, was not invented by St. Pierre nor Rousseau, but it is "the rising of the general tide in the human soul-and rising highest, and first made visible, in the most simple and pure souls, who have therefore announced it to us beforehand; but presently we all see it."
Societies have been formed on this thought, and the hopes and prayers for peace are preparing for its actualization. Though it appears to be visionary to most, the idea is growing in influence and is inevitable.
"War is on its last legs; and a universe peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms.
The question for us is only "How soon?" What is good and true will eventually prevail. The wise learn to trust ideas over circumstances, for appearances depend on the mind.
"Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought." Our war establishments "serve as an index to show where man is now; what a bad, ungoverned temper he has; what an ugly neighbor he is; how his affections halt; how low his hope lies."
However, friendly attitudes can change all this and make weapons things of the past to be displayed only in museums.
Emerson delineates three stages of cultivation in regard to war and peace.
At a certain stage of his progress, the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. At a certain higher stage, he makes no offensive demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable heart.
At a still higher stage, he comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but, being attacked, he bears it and turns the other cheek, as one engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an individual but to the common soul of all men.
Emerson answers the common criticism of non-resistance even to the extent of not defending oneself or one's family against robbers and assassins.
This, he says, only looks at the passive side of the friend of peace.
Lovers of peace obviously do not choose to be plundered or slain, and if they accept martyrdom it is for some active purpose, some equal motive, some flaming love.
If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great and able men.
Let me know more of that nation; I shall not find them defenseless, with idle hands swinging at their sides.
I shall find them men of love, honor and truth; men of an immense industry; men whose influence is felt to the end of the earth; men whose very look and voice carry the sentence of honor and shame; and all forces yield to their energy and persuasion.
A peaceful nation is protected by its spiritual power, because everyone is its friend. In individual cases it is extremely rare that a person of peace ever attracts violence.
Yet Emerson adds that the wise do not decide in advance how to respond, but follow the guidance of Nature and God.
Emerson observes that organizing societies, passing resolutions, and publishing manifestoes are not too effective, especially when the participants do not practice what they preach when put to the test.
He prefers private conviction to public opinion; our hope is "increased insight" which is "accomplished by the spontaneous teaching, of the cultivated soul, in its secret experience and meditation."
Thus man can expel his devils, transmute his bestial nature, hear the voice of God, and go forward in his right mind.
Nor is fear the right motive for peace; nothing great can be attained by cowards.
Courage must be transferred from war to the cause of peace.
Individuals are responsible for themselves and should not ask for protection from the state. The man of principle cannot be coerced into any wrongdoing and will not compromise his freedom and integrity.
The cause of peace is not for the cowardly preservation of the safety of the luxurious and the timid.
Peace must be maintained by true heroes who are willing to stake their lives for their principle and who go beyond the traditional hero in that they will not threaten another man's life-"men who have, by their intellectual insight or else by their moral elevation, attained such a perception of their own intrinsic worth that they do not think property or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of principle as treating a man like a sheep."
Emerson places his faith in "the search of the sublime laws of morals and the sources of hope and trust, in man, and not in books, in the present, and not in the past," and hopes that these will bring war to an end.
The way this happens is of little importance, although he predicts that society and events point toward a Congress of Nations.
Once the mind accepts the reign of principles the modes of expression are easily found.