Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King Day is an appropriate, opportune time to examine a commonly overlooked theme of Emerson’s Self Reliance: his critique of progress.  King, now considered a hero of progressives, was far too fatalistic to embrace that mantle.  In The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch wrote:

Near the end of his life, King told his old Montgomery congregation that he was no longer an optimist, although he still had hope.  The distinction between optimism and hope was implicit in many of his earlier statements as well. He had seen too much suffering to embrace the dogma of progress, even though he was always careful to explain that he objected only to theories of ‘automatic’ or ‘inevitable’ progress and to ‘false,’ and ‘superficial’ optimism.

These thoughts bear a great resemblance to Emerson:

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

What King came to understand – and Emerson understood intuitively even though he shrunk from fights – is that the human struggle is never ending. There is no great end point to political life, right/left, traditional/radical. Those who hold dear to an ideology believing that only the failure to enact it in full has prevented its inherent goodness will never live to see this Platonic vision.  The end of one fight merely sets off another. All progress – even technological progress – comes with a cost:

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

Emerson’s disbelief in progress places his noncomformism in a different light. If struggle is a constant in life – including class struggle – it’s folly to assume another’s grand solution as your own:

A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

You choose to take a mere approximation of your thought. Better to follow your own beliefs – better in fact to wrong – and to let the democracy smooth out the rough edges systematically. As Samuel Beckett wrote, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Perhaps Beckett was an Emersonian too:

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience dies with them. And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental—came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire; and what the man acquires, is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes.