If Ralph Waldo Emerson is to be believed, it’s not just the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse we should be worried about, i.e. Conquest, War, Famine and Death, but another one – not mentioned in the Apocrypha, namely Things.

The horseman serves the horse

The neat-herd serves the neat,

The merchant serves the purse,

The eater serves his meat;

Tis the day of the chattel

Web to weave, and corn to grind,

Things are in the saddle

And ride mankind.

There are two laws discrete

Not reconciled.

Law for man and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild

And doth the man unking.

The lines are from Emerson’s Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing – a poem not much read these days. But – and especially for those who live in consumerist societies - the lines about things being in the saddle and riding mankind are – arresting and thought-provoking. Which is no doubt why they are quoted from time to time in educated conversation – though rarely with certitude about the source.

The idea that human beings have forfeited their freedom in pursuit of unworthy materialistic goals is to be found in the writings of other Americans of that era. A dominant theme in the writings of Emerson’s friend, Henry David Thoreau, is that the conditions of life in rural New England are not conducive either to human happiness or human goodness. With its advocacy of austere self sufficiency Thoreau’s Walden is a text that has resonance in a world in which the condition of economic stringency, if not servitude, seems set to be the new norm for so many people. But Thoreau’s take on it is unexpected and may indeed be unwelcome inasmuch as he holds the view that people – or at least his fellow townsmen of Concord - are largely to blame for their own economic and existential misfortunes. Those “serfs of the soil” as he calls them, live lives of quiet desperation, crushed by a kind of economic slavery they have brought on themselves. “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”

In spite of the fact that the popular press is quick to give anarchism a bad name, there is much to be admired in the stance of the American Transcendentalists who, far from being advocates of mindless violence and wanton destruction, were simply advocating a better way of life than that lived by people in general, a life (as Thoreau puts it) of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. The fact that those values are so rarely celebrated in modern culture doesn’t mean that they have been altogether superseded, or that they are not there. They cannot, however, be said to figure prominently in public spaces. Which is a pity but no doubt it was ever thus.

Other bits of Emerson’s ode to Channing are a bit more problematical, e.g. the following:

The over-God

Who marries Right to Might,

Who peoples, unpeoples,

He who exterminates

Races by stronger races,

Black by white faces,

Knows to bring honey

Out of the lion,

Grafts gentlest scion

On Pirate and Turk.

This sounds uncomfortably like an anticipatory vindication of the doctrine which was later to cause so much grief for those perceived as lesser breeds, i.e. eugenics. On the face of it it sounds like a casual and offhand kind of racism – but then that was how they tended to talk about race in those days. And for the record it must be noted that at the time of the American Civil War Emerson was clear and consistent in his opposition to slavery. “The South calls slavery an institution…. I call it destitution…. Emancipation is the demand of civilization."