NY Times -- It's Emerson's Anniversary and He's Nailed 21st-Century America

Individualism run amok, transformed into a cruel self-absorption, is a good description of much of American life right now. Republicans, using the rallying cry "It's your money," are promoting a $550 billion tax cut that would take health care from sick children — a modern echo of Emerson's "wicked dollars." In foreign policy, the rhetoric is equally self-regarding: "You're with us," we tell the world, "or against us."

In the private sector, the self-absorption is every bit as naked. Enron and Tyco executives seem almost unable to see their shareholders — or to conceive that assets that belonged to them cannot be shunted into private partnerships. Wall Street analysts gloat in e-mail about sending out bad stock recommendations that mislead the public — people who, they might say, "do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong."

The great Unitarian hero and one of the founders of Transcendentalism, Emerson nails the American obsession with individualism but reveals the warts - a callous disregard for others. Ayn Rand.carries the indivualism and self-interest further with a complete hostility to altruism or anything that stands in the way of self-interest.

I always say I am a Universalist or a Unitarian Universalist. Emerson regarded the individual and the mind and Nature as Supreme, Universalists add love and compassion and social connections.