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Fast Company
12 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
The case against ‘conscious leadership'
'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.' – Ralph Waldo Emerson There's a new orthodoxy quietly sweeping through executive leadership circles. It goes by many names—embodied awareness, whole-self management, conscious leadership—but the core message is the same: intuition and spiritual presence are the foundations of strategic leadership. At first glance, this seems like progress. Who wouldn't prefer a leader who's self-aware and emotionally attuned. In a business world riddled with brittle egos and performative hustle, a little more reflection is a breath of fresh air. But beneath its soothing language, the practice of Conscious Leadership has more insidious effects on business culture. Pioneered by groups like The Conscious Leadership Group, it has evolved into a sprawling, self-affirming ideology—one that displaces competence with charisma, rigor with resonance, and accountability with affirmation. The result? A growing class of business leaders who mistake internal coherence for external effectiveness—who believe that if they feel right, they must be right. It's not just anti-rational; it's anti-leadership. From Competence to Vibes At the heart of the formal Conscious Leadership framework is the '15 Commitments'—a framework designed to promote self-awareness, integrity, and responsibility. The commitments are trite and self-evident to anyone with a modicum of social or emotional intelligence. But it's not the principles that are the problem, it's their embodiment – conscious leadership heuristics have become popular shorthand in corporate and entrepreneurial leadership circles where Conscious Leadership has taken on its own ideological life. Take the idea of the 'whole-body yes.' It sounds poetic, even profound. But in functional terms, it's an epistemic disaster. The whole-body yes tells you that if something doesn't feel right—in your gut—it's probably wrong. Not just wrong for you, but wrong period. And therefore, you shouldn't do it. Or worse, you shouldn't have to do it. On its face, this confuses intuition with truth. But more dangerously, it provides a prospective license to avoid the hard work of intellectual and moral analysis. Every hesitance becomes an omen to be heeded. Every discomfort becomes a signal to say 'no.' Every debate becomes an attack on your 'authentic self.' In other words: if you don't want to do something, your subconscious probably knows it's ethically compromised or strategically unsound. Therefore, resistance becomes virtue. An undergraduate ethics major could tell you why this notion is so intoxicatingly fallacious: it is the embodiment of confirmation bias. It tells us that whatever feels right is, in fact, right. It's confusing righteousness with rightness, and it's a cloaking device for all of our basest instincts. Sociopaths exhibit this same kind of circular self-assurance. Like Luigi Mangione and the Unabomber, they are able to dress-up their prejudices in a pseudo-ethical manifesto to rationalize the overt violation of ethical norms. Modern neuropsychology has taught us that our brain is quite good at confabulating—retroactively fabricating a reason for unreasonable behavior. That's the essence of the whole-body yes; license for confabulation. Business Leadership Without Skin in the Game You can tell a lot about a framework by who evangelizes it. Conscious leadership tends to take root squarely among venture capitalists, consultants, HR departments, and coaching circles—those stakeholders that are structurally insulated from the consequences of strategic execution. These are not, generally speaking, people with direct exposure to existential business risks. They don't carry payroll. They don't answer to shareholders. They don't navigate hostile markets. They're not in the line of fire. And because of that, they can afford to substitute internal validation for external results. They can afford to confuse feeling good with doing good. In that vacuum of real-world feedback, Conscious Leadership thrives. It spreads through offsites and retreats. It drips into executive workshops and middle-management Slack channels. It cloaks itself in the language of growth while quietly eroding the foundation of competency-based leadership. The Reactionary Core: Anti-Rationality in a Pseudo-Spiritual Shell Despite proselytization among progressive business leaders, Conscious Leadership is a deeply reactionary movement. It doesn't evolve leadership—it regresses to a kind of anti-rational romanticism. It seeks not to integrate intuition with reason, but to replace rational deliberation entirely with internal 'knowing.' In ancient traditions—from Buddhist mindfulness to Greek Stoicism—true wisdom arises from tension: between emotion and restraint, instinct and inquiry, desire and discipline. The project of modernity was about striking this balance. In philosophy, the Enlightenment forced the end of insular thinking and the birth of objective bases for decision-making. In healthcare, we have evidence-based medicine rather than bedside impressions. In law, we have procedural justice instead of the will of the monarch. In finance, we have quantitative models instead of gut instinct. Intuitions may point to the source of what's most fundamentally valuable in human life. But one also needs to recognize that we only get to play the game of modern society if we are able to temper our emotional, gut instincts. Conscious Leadership indulgently short-circuits that developmental arc. You no longer need to sit in discomfort, wrestle with ambiguity, or act in spite of your fear. You simply check in with your 'truth,' and act accordingly. This kind of psychospiritual narcissism used to be the birth right of false gurus and religious fundamentalists, but executives are now importing it into the boardroom. 'Conscious Leadership Isn't for Everyone': The Narcissism of Framing Dissent as Deficiency Perhaps the most telling artifact of this movement's epistemic regression is represented in an article from the formal Conscious Leadership group entitled ' Conscious Leadership Isn't for Everyone.' I felt a wave of relief when I stumbled upon this piece—finally, some humility to balance their ideological self-assurance. Surely, I thought, they'll acknowledge the limits of their framework. Something like: 'Maybe Conscious Leadership doesn't apply so well in a military context, where you can't pause to check in with your body before rushing to save a wounded soldier.' Or: 'Maybe your 'whole-body yes' should be informed by real analysis and empirical evidence.' But no. Instead of setting boundaries (the sign of a real discipline), the article castigates the un-initiated for their small-mindedness. For those not quite ready to 'do the work.' Here's the tone: If you don't resonate with the Conscious Leadership framework, it's not because the framework might be flawed. It's because you aren't ready. You haven't evolved enough. You're still trapped in your fear, your ego, your unconscious patterns. This is the hallmark of every narrow-minded epistemology, from religious cults to multilevel marketing: disagreement is pathologized. Non-belief is recast as immaturity. Critique is rebranded as resistance. What could have been a useful framework becomes a totalizing worldview and a litmus test for identity. It's a circular self-help theology wrapped in the garb of a professional services business model. Perhaps the most dangerous part of Conscious Leadership isn't its spread in coaching circles—but its growing adoption in boardrooms. As performance management becomes politicized and teams crave psychological safety, frameworks like these offer a tempting escape hatch: a way to appear ethical and evolved without committing to the hard metrics of performance or the messy realities of leadership. This trend is more than aesthetic. It's structural. We are watching as companies quietly substitute felt authenticity for functional accountability. Leaders are now praised for their vulnerability, but rarely challenged on the outcomes of their teams. Difficult conversations are avoided in the name of 'staying above the line.' Strategy becomes an exercise in inner alignment. Disagreement becomes a trauma response. But in this context, consciousness is the unique privilege of people who have, in some sense, already 'made it'. Being at the top, they have the material wealth and security to dedicate themselves to introspection and exploration. They exhort this new way of thinking, and discourage the exact model – ambition, competency-building, and hard-work – that allowed them to rise to such a position in the first place. In this way, Conscious Leadership is more rehabilitative than it is strategic; it is a framework that allows the executive caste to recapture some sense of humanity after years of grinding away in corporate gears. For the underlings, aware of the path it took leaders to become leaders, these platitudes ring false. Those being consciously 'led' are happy to pay lip-service to their leader's fluffy worldview as long as it protects their position in the organization. All the while, they feel the necessity to continue delivering tangible results – The only realistic, quantifiable source of security within the organization. The disconnect—between leadership speech and the results-oriented nature of business—simply breeds cognitive dissonance among employees. They need to confabulate a consciousness-based story to explain their strategic decisions, or worse, they actually use the Conscious Leadership Commitments to make those decisions. What Leadership Actually Requires Real leadership doesn't require denial of intuition, but it does require tempering it. It requires navigating the productive tension between feeling and thinking. It means honoring discomfort, not avoiding it. It means acting ethically even when your nervous system is screaming ' run'. And above all, it means holding power not as self-expression—but as responsibility. Leadership isn't about being your most authentic self in the boardroom. It's about making decisions under uncertainty, absorbing pressure so others can thrive, and balancing the needs of the self with the needs of the system. That kind of leadership may not feel as righteous. But it works, particularly in a business context where employees actually care about whether their organization succeeds. Here's another unsexy fact of life and business—the best way to grow spiritually is to find a base of stability. And in many cases, this means having enough material wealth to pay medical bills, repair your car, and care for your family members—and that means that the business must thrive in real financial terms. That's why Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is still a useful framework: we need material security and basic social cohesion before we can work towards self-transcendence. But so-called 'conscious leaders' don't realize that transcendence is path-dependent; they haven't reflected enough to see that rightful leadership is earned through competency, merit, and sacrifice, rather than verbal appeals to higher ideals. Most employees are happy to find enlightenment on their own time and in their own way. They don't want group therapy funded through the HR budget and proselytized by their boss. They'd prefer their leader to lead the way by making sound strategic decisions, and if that is at odds with being an empathetic and ethical human, then yes, you're in a crappy business situation. This isn't a revelation worthy of a book. Conscious Leadership isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. And after all that critique, frankly, the 15 formal Conscious Leadership Commitments are pretty much right. They are general enough to be unchallengeable, but they are represented (and treated) as a comprehensive leadership model. Principles, rules, and commitments are a protection against chaos. They give us something to latch onto in complex situations, like executive leadership. But the truth is, a leader who truly embodies morality, humanism, and empathy has no need for a formal principle. The people who are most ensnared by moral principles and ideologies are those people who most need them—the type of people for whom integrity is unnatural and hard-won. After all, the deeper essence of the 15 Commitments—individual responsibility, curiosity, integrity—ought to be ingrained early in life. These qualities should be nurtured through sound parenting, quality education, and lived experience. When foundational virtues like individual responsibility and empathy haven't been deeply internalized, frameworks like these can feel revelatory—not because they unlock new wisdom, but because they compensate for what should have already been there. Those who most loudly profess their principles often do so to paper over their fragility. Moral status, when secure, doesn't need to be declared—it's lived. So, live consciously and lead consciously, but if you ever hear someone start a sentence with 'in the spirit of conscious leadership', then I suggest you turn tail and run.
Globe and Mail
4 days ago
- General
- Globe and Mail
Leading change requires a paradoxical mindset rather than either-or thinking
Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon. In his 1841 essay Compensation, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that 'an inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half.' Blogger Billy Oppenheimer recently surfaced that quote and elaborated: 'Dark can't exist without light. Left can't exist without right. Hot and cold. Pleasure and pain. Up and down. Man and woman. Odd and even. In and out. In motion, at rest. Sickness, health. Peacetime, wartime. Strength, weakness. Order, chaos. More, less. Yes, no.' They must be understood as connected and tackled together. 'What is lost in one realm is always compensated for in another,' says Mr. Oppenheimer. 'To gain something is to have given up something.' Transformation and change are supposed to provide clarity for organizations – a mission, a path forward. But they too can be riddled by contradictions which if unaddressed might add to the reasons so many change efforts go awry. Going overboard on one element and ignoring the other element in a quest for dramatic clarity can sink your efforts. In The Art of Change, Jeff DeGraff, a professor of management at the University of Michigan, and his wife, Staney DeGraff, a consultant, say the complexities of change demand a nuanced approach. Adaptability is key and that requires a paradoxical mindset rather than either-or thinking. You must be flexible and agile. You must understand and grapple with competing elements. They identify seven paradoxes that crop up repeatedly and pose dangers if ignored: Instead of rushing to solve urgent issues, they urge you to spot paradoxes you are facing and reflect on them. Look for experiments, small changes that you can learn from. 'By considering creative and hybrid solutions and implementing them with intentionality, you can effectively navigate paradoxes and drive meaningful change,' they advise. One of the paradoxes they highlight is about transcending limits while still being within them. They note that to transcend our limits, we always have to start by acknowledging them – the limits of our knowledge, resources and time. Once we acknowledge those limits, we can facilitate lots of experiences and experiments to learn from them. Perhaps there is another contradiction to consider there: In change, we usually think carefully beforehand, develop ideas that are really theories but become prescriptions, while in fact the learning and understanding (and best prescriptions) come after experimenting with change possibilities. Jason Fried, chief executive officer of Basecamp, raises another duality when he observes that one of the reasons companies have a hard time moving forward is because they've tangled themselves in the near past. They trap themselves looking for certainty where there isn't any, actional advice where there are only guesses. 'Eyes aimed backwards rather than ahead, staring at the dark, feet in their own concrete,' he writes on his blog. He stresses that isn't always wrong. If the process is highly mechanized or isolated, you can look back and find the exact moment when something went wrong. But he argues that most failed projects subject to retrospectives are searches for reasons where there are only humans to be found. We are plaintively searching for reasons where – here's another duality – there are only mysteries. 'A better path is to reflect forward, not backwards. Develop a loose theory while working on what's next. Appreciate there's no certainty to be found and put all your energy into doing better on an upcoming project,' he says. 'But how will you do better next time if you don't know what went wrong last time? Nothing is guaranteed other than experience. You'll simply have more time under the curve and more moments under tension to perform better moving forward.' Tina Dacin, a professor of organizational behaviour at Queen's University, raised another paradox when she looked at Lady Gaga's recent Coachella performance where the singer paid homage to past greats such as Michael Jackson and Prince as well as her different past selves. Prof. Dacin's research with colleagues has found leaders involved in stewarding change and transition in organizations are 'custodians' – people with a vested interest in protecting traditions, while also reimagining and renewing them over time. 'Such custodians in workplaces or social organizations facing disruption take valued remnants from the past and curate them to be accessible and relevant for the future,' she writes in The Conversation. But not just custodians of the past. In making change, she says, you must be custodians of hope. You must craft futures worth preserving. There's a bundle of dualities in there to consider as you reflect on the paradoxes of change. Cannonballs Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn't Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
Irish Examiner
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: Bloom is the crowning jewel of our capital city
Ah, Bloom! That annual horticultural hootenanny where the scent of freshly turned soil mingles with the aroma of artisan sausage rolls, and where the only thing more abundant than the flora is the flurry of floppy hats. This year, Bord Bia Bloom 2025 blossomed once again in Dublin's Phoenix Park, transforming 70 acres into a veritable Eden of eco-consciousness, culinary delights, and enough garden gnomes to march on the Aras and stage a coup. The earth laughs in flowers, so said Ralph Waldo Emerson, yesterday, it was in stitches. First, an admission of guilt. As a novice, the name of this festival confused me. Bloomsday falls on June 16 each year. That celebration of Joycean pomp is no relation to Bord Bia Bloom, but the timing and title caught me a little off guard. Were there enough Ulysses nuts to warrant a five-day celebration in the largest public park in any capital city in Europe? No, it turns out, there isn't. Which is a relief. This is something else entirely. It's reductive to compare festivals — each lives and dies on its own merits — but given the scale and logistical footprint of Bloom, the National Ploughing Festival is an obvious and worthy inspiration for Irelands premier gardening and horticultural festival. Beginning on Thursday and running throughout the Bank Holiday weekend, Bloom will have attracted over 120,000 punters through its gates by the time the last tent is collapsed on Monday. If the ploughing is Glastonbury, Bloom is Electric Picnic. The setting is majestic and the mood more than a little mischievous. The variety on display from the moment you enter is so rich it'd make a willow weep. Puns aside, Bloom means business. I'm no sooner in the gate but I'm watching the Ballymaloe crew do a cooking demo on the Dunnes Stores stage. Chef Neven Maguire is hanging in the wings signing autographs like he's a member of Metallica. Maisie Carton, aged 15, from Dundrum, was prepared for moody weather in the Phoenix Park. Picture: Moya Nolan If there are politicians about, they are keeping a low profile. The weather, too, is appropriate; wet on Thursday, Friday brings dark clouds broken up by brilliant sunshine. Good gardening weather, right? Weather so rich you can feel the grass grow beneath your feet. Excited school kids follow patient teachers like mini climbers trailing their sherpa. Grownups who should know better sip Aperol spritz from recyclable plastic cups. With a taste of summer already lingering in the back of our throats, the timing of Bloom could not be more apposite. The heart of the festival lies in its show gardens — 21 verdant visions ranging from the sublime to the surreal. Take, for instance, the 'Make A Wish Foundation Garden' by Linda McKeown, a space so enchanting it could make a grown man weep into his compost. Then there's the 'GRÁ' garden by Kathryn Feeley for Dogs Trust, a canine-centric paradise where even the shrubs seem to wag their leaves in approval. Not to be outdone, the 'Tusla Fostering Garden' by Pip Probert offers a vibrant tapestry of colours and textures, symbolising the diverse journeys of foster families. Bloom, though, is not just about seasoned green thumbs; it's also a fertile ground for budding gardening superstars. The 'Cultivating Talent' initiative, now in its third year, continues to nurture and showcase the next generation of garden designers. This year's standout is Dr Sarah Cotterill — an assistant professor at UCD — whose 'Into the Woods' garden pays homage to Ireland's Atlantic rainforests, proving that even civil engineers can have a soft spot for ferns. Billy Alexander of Kells Bay House and Gardens in Kerry brought his Chelsea Flower Show-winning fern garden to Bloom. Picture: Moya Nolan For those of us whose idea of gardening involves little more ingenuity than picking herbs for a G&T, the Food Village offers enough distraction to fill a day. I unwittingly followed one chap who easily reached his daily calorie quota by exclusively eating free samples. It was an admirably frugal tactic, if a tad unnecessary. Unlike other festivals, the food was ample and reasonably priced. The village — which features nearly 100 Irish producers — is a smorgasbord of local delights. I'd eaten two gourmet burgers and a hot dog before lunchtime. Not every day in the trenches is like this, and this one-man army marches on its stomach. The food stages are accessible and unfussy — culinary luminaries like Neven, Darina Allen, and Fiona Uyema are on hand to whip up some dishes that would make an intermittent faster reconsider their life choices. The atmosphere is collegiate, the food divine. Sure, there are plenty of healthy options on display, too, but Bloom is not the space to suddenly become precious. There is lots of cream and butter, and the fun and food police are conspicuous in their absence. A key theme running throughout the festival is sustainability, with the Sustainable Living Stage hosting 40 talks on topics ranging from food waste to natural skincare hacks. The festival walked the walk — quite literally — by offering free shuttle buses, ample bicycle parking, and ensuring all food and drink packaging was compostable or recyclable. There were even volunteers on hand at each bin to advise you on what goes where. Keen not to take itself too seriously, Bloom isn't just for the horticulturally inclined; it's a family affair. The Budding Bloomers area offered a range of activities for the young and the young at heart, from bug workshops to interactive performances. Chef Tricia Lewis giving a cookery demonstration to a crew of hungry festivalgoers. Picture: Moya Nolan For those looking to bring a piece of Bloom home, the Grand Pavilion and Plant Emporium offered everything from handcrafted garden sculptures to rare plant species. It's the kind of place where you go in for a packet of seeds and come out with a bonsai tree and a newfound appreciation for macrame rope. In its 19th year, Bord Bia Bloom continues to be a testament to Ireland's love affair with all things green and growing. It's a safe, creative space where gardeners, foodies, and families converge to celebrate the simple joys of nature, nourishment, and community. In a time when the deforestation of the island is a hot topic, Bloom offers an antidote to the doom and gloom that can sometimes suffocate green-adjacent conversations. The jewel of the crown of this festival, however, is not any one of the celebrity gardeners, chefs or even Juniperus Communis on display. It's not even the extra-mature cheeses, of which I consumed quite a few. No, it is unquestionably the venue. The Phoenix Park frames this event and makes it a masterpiece, a celebration of nature its creators and organisers can absolutely be proud of. Verdant and resplendent, the vastness of the park itself makes access and egress easy. The walled gardens within the festival compound act as a spine for a sprawl that is beautifully organised, but never contrived. Great oak trees provide shelter from the infrequent showers. The grass acts as a quilt to lie on and bask in the brilliant sunshine. Just outside the fence, a herd of fallow deer skip by, as if curious about the din inside. There is a lot wrong with our capital city, and, understandably, we spend plenty of time talking about it. Bloom is an example of something done incredibly right. A festival of nature, food, colour, and life, hosted in a public park at an incredibly reasonable price. Accessible to everybody, and not a Joycean scholar in sight.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: from Quatrains by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poet TO clothe the fiery thought In simple words succeeds. For still the craft of genius is To mask a king in weeds. Gardener TRUE Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet, Expound the Vedas of the violet, Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop, See the plum redden, and the beurré stoop. Heri, Cras, Hodie SHINES the last age, the next with hope is seen, To-day slinks poorly off, unmarked between: Future or Past no richer secret folds, O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds. Casella TEST of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove; Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard graduate, minister, essayist, orator and popular philosopher, he was a crucial figure in the development of American liberal values. He was a founding father of Transcendentalism, the literary movement rooted in English and German Romantic traditions. These four short poems are from the group of individual verses entitled Quatrains, first included in the collection Mayday and other pieces (1867). They can be read here in their initial sequencing. The suggestion, made on the basis of Emerson's own comments, is that they respond formally to the Persian genre of epigrams and gnomic verses. The first, Poet, is particularly four-square and hymn-like, but its command, 'to mask a king in weeds' has different possible interpretations. Does it declare the poet's obligation to speak truth to power, or suggest that the poet must refuse to acknowledge worldly power altogether? And what about 'weeds'? It's an old word for clothes so might suggest a king disguised in a non-ceremonial, simply woven garment, but there's an inevitable hint, too, of the botanical kind of weed in all its clambering natural vigour. It's also interesting to imagine the king as emblematic of the major cultural figures Emerson names in his poem Solution. Solution is a rather long-winded companion poem to another shorter one, The Test, in which the Muse sets us a puzzle: to identify the five creative spirits whose work burns brightest. The answer is: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg and Goethe. In Poet, Emerson might be reminding himself that the 'craft of genius' lies in resisting the display of such influences, using 'simple words' rather than grand, imitative gestures. Or perhaps the matter is more basic and technical: any 'fiery thought' in a poem is stronger if it creates the impression of having occurred as naturally as a weed. The Gardener of the second quatrain is addressed as 'true Brahmin', a priest of Brahma. In Hindu thought, Brahma is the supreme being, manifesting himself throughout the universe. Artists sometimes depict him with four heads – and perhaps the quatrain form itself distantly reflects that cardinal structure. Emerson, deeply influenced by eastern philosophies, unites the Brahmin, the Gardener and the (ideal) Poet. Because of his particular identification with nature, 'hid in vines, peeping through many a loop', his vision will be sharpened and refined rather than obscured. In the imagery of the vines and the 'beurré', a variety of pear whose ripening causes its branch to 'stoop', there may be an echo of the opening lines of Keats's Ode to Autumn. And despite the specifically Sanskrit reference Wordsworth, I think, would not have found the 'Vedas of the violet' an alien concept. Heri, Cras, Hodie (Yesterday, Tomorrow, Today), juggling the usual, chronological word order of the Latin list, expands on the ancient eastern theme of mindfulness, (described engagingly here as 'not wobbling'). The three chronological units, Past, Future and Present, are skilfully evoked, with a rather effective shift into personification characterising the Present as an outcast, a 'poor relation', almost: 'To-day slinks poorly off'. There's a rhetorical force which works especially well in the vatic tone of the last couplet: 'Future or Past, no richer secret folds, / O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds.' This poor relation offers wealth to those who can ignore the ever-attractive 'shine' of times past and the tendency to squint, vaguely hopeful, at something that cannot in fact be 'seen'. My selection of Quatrains ends with a return to the Poet as central figure. Casella isn't himself a poet: he is the composer and singer who appears in the second canto of Dante's Purgatorio, and who, it seems, has set the poet's own work to music. I can't help feeling that Emerson, while a huge admirer of Dante, is making fun to some extent of Casella, or of romantic love itself. The dactylic rhythm isn't the only feature that suggests a comic undertow. There's the end-rhyme of the last couplet, with its insistence on a mis-stress (if not a mistress). If you stress the word 'OF' instead of 'YORE' as the metre demands, the result is one of those double-rhymes that often signals bathos: 'OF yore' and 'LOVE-lore'. The poem might have trembled more empathically, it's true, but I warm to that possible flash of good-humoured mockery. Emerson the writer is remembered today as a major essayist rather than a major poet. His poems are at their best, I think, when their focus is small-scale. The Quatrains are poetic distillations of his key ideas, but have the directness and vitality that prove them more than a by-product.
Boston Globe
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Revolutionary lessons from Thoreau
Concord took no real note of the anniversary until the 1820s, when the war was more recent in town memory than the Vietnam War is to us today. The town marked it first in 1825; again in 1835, during the bicentennial of its founding; and even more grandly in 1837, when Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his Advertisement Henry David Thoreau was a young man at the time. As his neighbors marched, sang, gave speeches, and lit bonfires on the anniversary to toast their political freedom, it didn't seem to Thoreau that they were free in how they lived. As he saw it, they had entrapped themselves in social expectations and material pursuits that enslaved them, and indeed much of his writing would become a critique of mere political freedom. In order to truly honor 1775, he believed, another, more interior revolution was needed, similar to the experiment in 'self-emancipation' he would undertake at Walden Pond, beginning on Independence Day in 1845. Thoreau saw political freedom as but a means to moral and spiritual freedom. That deeper kind of liberty meant freedom from rank materialism, from racism, from a purely utilitarian view of nature, and from religious doctrines and institutions that bound the spirit rather than expanded it. 'Men talk of freedom!' Thoreau wrote. 'How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice?' Advertisement One way Thoreau thought his Concord neighbors abrogated the freedom won for them was their devotion to commercial pursuits and acquiring possessions. In 1837, the year the Battle Monument was dedicated, Thoreau decried the 'blind and unmanly love of wealth' in a speech at his Harvard commencement. The world, he declared, 'is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful.' And in 'Walden,' he wrote that most people 'even in this comparatively free country … are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.' Thoreau invoked the rhetoric of our revolt against England to suggest that we enslave ourselves. 'We tax ourselves unjustly,' he Another way Americans were not free was the endemic racism of his day and the institution of slavery. 'What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?' Thoreau asked in his essay ' Advertisement Thoreau called for a 'peaceable revolution' against slavery in his essay ' Thoreau also saw a need for spiritual freedom, for freedom from institutions and creeds that narrowed the soul and sought to define or control the human experience of the sacred. 'The wisest man preaches no doctrines,' he He noted in 'Walden' that religious freedom remained a rare commodity. Middlesex County had many fine houses and churches of brick or stone, he Thoreau's writings about religion were among his most revolutionary. He took religious language back from the churches because he refused to let them have the last say about God. He rejected sectarianism, which mushroomed in Massachusetts during his life. 'The gods are of no sect,' he wrote, 'they side with no man.' Refusing to fit God into a theological shoebox, he urged his readers to know God through direct, unmediated experience. And he expressed faith that people could intuitively grasp the spiritual and moral laws of nature on their own. Advertisement Ultimately, Thoreau found moral and spiritual freedom in the natural world, in his experience of wildness as a divine, liberating force, and in his inextinguishable faith in life. 'Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed,' he wrote in one of his earliest pieces. Thoreau never explicitly called for revolution. His jeremiads about freedom were more literary and philosophical. But his writings amount to a revolution in thought, in what we value and how we live our lives. Thoreau hoped his readers would keep the revolution of 1775 alive by turning in a new direction, but he was wise enough to know this would take a long time. 'We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outsides of freedom, the means and outmost defenses of freedom,' he wrote in 1851. 'It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.' Thoreau's critique of freedom is as salient today as it was when Concord first celebrated April 19, on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in 1825.
