Emerson on the poor and the "wicked dollar" (with a comment from Michael Schiavo)

A powerful and perhaps surprising moment in Emerson's great "Self-Reliance":
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Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
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Michael Schiavo comments:

Of course the phrasing is important, and something that many people overlook, in Emerson, and particularly in this passage. It's not "the poor" but "my poor." We all have obligations to specific people. There's also this passage from "Circles":

"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty, another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty, and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker! there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?"

--October 27, 2011

Comments

[Kent Johnson]

Michael Boughn is co-editor of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and a longtime serious reader of Emerson. I shared the above post on the Emerson passage with him, and this is what he wrote back:

>>I know it well. The New Historical anti-Emersonians latched onto it in the 90s and used their misreading of it to attack Emerson as some kind of neo-liberal.

This is part of his critique of bourgeois culture, which is founded on alienation. Alienation from the things you make. Alienation from our true selves. Alienation from being-together, which we abandon in the name of society. Society takes on the functions of relation that belong to the person. We create a hell on earth and then invent "charities" to help out those mutilated by it, in the same way that we abandon moral judgement and turn over authority to a code. Thoreau said, If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my home to do me good, I would run for my life. In a world where people accept and honour their own authority, there would be no need of "charity" because each person would take care of their poor. Charity breeds poverty by undermining a world of actual relation and relieving people of their responsibility to those around them.

Have you read the essay? It's fucking brilliant. And it is NOT about individualism. It is about personal responsibility, and presence.