Welcome to Man Thinking
The goal here is to write with integrity — to write what feels true and useful, to write with courage and clarity. Most of the writing is about government and politics.
The name for the substack comes from the essay “The American Scholar,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I profess to being an Emerson fan, but I will confess that I hadn’t read that essay until I was searching for a title of this substack. But now — having read it — I am thoroughly enamored by it.
It is “man” as in “humanity," as in — in Emerson’s words — the “One Man," of which we are all a part:
…there is One Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man….
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. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his….
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. 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.
I will concede that it is a tough title for a Substack today. Our ears are attuned to hear “Man” in this context as an adjective, as if this is about a type of thinking that is only for men. But a title serves a few different purposes, and the place where “Man Thinking” excels is in reminding me of the attributes that writing should have before it appears here: resonant with nature, informed but not governed by the wisdom of the past, in the world and determined to act upon it. And so, I intend to keep that as the title.
One last note. It turns out that sometimes I’m wrong and sometimes I change my mind. I suspect that publishing to a Substack won’t change either of those things.
And with that, you are up to speed on what I’m doing here. I hope that it feels interesting enough that you will subscribe.
