Emerson’s argument in “The American Scholar” about American society still holds true today.
Man has one job in life, but he is capable of having many jobs. Like when Emerson says “Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.” Soldiers in Afghanistan right now are not just soldiers they are teachers, engineers, farmers, salesmen, politician, and much more. From man doing more than they are originally doing they will become a complete man.
Men now in society don’t think on their own, they rely on past information from man before. Emerson says “In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.” They don’t rely on their own thinking because now they have technology that can do that for them. They get information from TV, internet, books, and newspapers/ magazines. Man needs to become more self- reliance.
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Good examples. I liked how you talked about how man gets information by having it handed too him instead of man finding it on his own.
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