Strike Three | Dan Conley

Even the great ones strike out. Compensation is one big embarrassing whiff from Emerson, the less said about it the better. Instead of recounting what Emerson writes here (which, sadly, gives fuel to the argument that he’s an American Pangloss), I’ll just make a few general points:

There’s no squaring Christian theology with Emerson’s claims in this essay. He has no obligation to do so, but the Sermon on the Mount counts as nothing if you buy Emerson’s cosmic accounting in this essay. While I’m not a Christian, I do believe that the traditional faith has a greater appreciation for injustice in the world than Emerson’s theory of morality and justice.
Emerson’s belief in a form of cosmic accounting of right and wrong should serve as a cautionary tale about extrapolating the laws of nature too literally. Physics is our understanding of the world at this moment, based on math and experimentation. It is subject to revision based on future knowledge. Creating a cosmic theory of justice based on incomplete cosmology is perilous.
It’s possible to tease out some interesting parallels with Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, especially in regard to good/bad morality, but this essay annoys me too much to give it any credit.

In short, I believe that the universe is cold, cruel and out to kill us. We’re accidents by species and birth. To believe that every action has a reaction, every compensation a cost, is to create the conditions for massive envy and despair. Anyone who believes this as a child will be doomed to a miserable life unless he or she is lucky enough to roll the dice into the top .1 percent.

And so I’m going to leave the final word to Woody Allen:

People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.

Rex Styzens

RWE’s notion of compensation is also for me the most difficult to rationalize. I do it by crediting him with being a theologian as well as philosopher: compensation is a statement of faith. Elsewhere in his writings similar episodes give evidence of his faith that doing the right thing is rewarded beyond the evidence of calculation.

I read somewhere that some see it as simply the idea that we cannot do everything at the same time; in order to do one thing, we must accept that we cannot do the other thing. Then RWE’s view of compensation might compare to Newton’s law that every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction. I expect that had to be taken on faith in its time. Today we have a more complex view.
Rex Styzens

I have read that RWE maintained his belief in compensation the whole of his lifetime. While the details of his explanation in the essay by that name can be contested, and while in his later essay “Fate” he makes clear that he is aware of the dangers and threats to life, if you are looking for confirmation of your view of the universe as “cold and out to kill us,” I am sure you will not find it in his work.

Nor will you find proof that life is a gift. But that is RWE’s worldview.
Anonymous

That’s okay, I don’t need confirmation and I’m perfectly happy to have my core beliefs challenged. Although I will say that my view is closer to the universe is cold, cruel and out to kill us, but life is a gift. In other words, given what we know about the universe, we’re extremely lucky to be alive in it and we should treasure that fact. I’m much closer to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence than Schopenhauer’s gloom.