Passage Four
Self-reliance is a nineteenth-century term, popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay of that time, but it still comes easily to the tongues of many of those to whom we talked. Self-reliance of one sort or another is common to every one of the traditions we have discussed. What, if not self-reliant, were the Puritans, many of whom, like John Winthrop, left wealth and comfort to set out in small ships on a dangerous "errand into the wilderness" They felt called by God, but they had to rely on themselves. Thomas Jefferson chose in his draft of The Declaration of Independenceto strike a note of self-reliance-when he said that emigration and settlement here "were effected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain," conveniently forgetting how recently the British had defended the colonists against the French and Indians, but expressing a genuinely American attitude.
The note of self-reliance had a clearly collective context in the biblical and republican traditions. It was that as a people we had acted independently and self-reliantly. With utilitarian and expressive individualism, however, the collective note became muted. The focus of the self-made printer or the poet who sang of himself was more exclusively on the individual. Emerson in his 1841 essay "Self-Reliance" even declared the individual and society to be in opposition. "Society," he said, "is everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. " Emerson was speaking to the world of the independent citizen and insisting that the conformity exacted by small-town America was too coercive. His friend Thoreau would push this teaching to an extreme in his classic experiment at Walden Pond. But in his essay, Emerson also expressed a more prosaic sense of self-reliance, one that has been the common coin of moral life for millions of Americans ever since. Emerson says we only deserve the property we work for. Conversely, our primary economic obligation is only to ourselves. "Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor" he wrote.
We found self-reliance common as a general orientation in many of those to whom we smoke. Therapist Margaret Oldham typically expressed it as "taking responsibility for oneself." But economic self-reliance is often seen as the bedrock on which the more general character trait rests. Asked why he worked so hard to support his wife and child after he first got married, corporate executive Brian Palmer said, "I guess self-reliance is one of the characteristics I have pretty high up in my value system." As a young husband and father, Brian felt "confronted with the stark realities of being self-supporting or dropping out of the human race."
Some critics have seen the "work ethic" in decline in the United States and a "narcissistic" concern with the self emerging in its place. In our conversations, we have found that an emphasis on hard work and self-support can go hand in hand with an isolating preoccupation with the self, as Toequeville feared would be the case. Indeed, work continues to be critically important in the self-identity of Americans, closely linked to the demand for self-reliance. The problem is not so much the presence or absence of a "work ethic" as the meaning of work and the ways it links, or fails to link, individuals to one another.
Please answer the following questions based on the above passage:
What made Emerson in his "self-reliance" declare the individual and society to be in opposition ？（）
