[MD] Royce and the West;

[John Carl]

Stumbled across an interesting page, comparing the philosophy of W. James
and J. Royce with Jimmy Buffet.


http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/SAAP/TAMU/PD08.htm

Jimmy Buffett encounters American Philosophy

Specially  excerpted due to it's coincidence with Pirsig's point about the
Western mythos (cowboys and indian west)  that shaped our national
character:


Royce himself is a fascinating character.  A native of a small western
mountain town, he thought and wrote extensively about the ideas of community
while in self-imposed exile at Harvard.  Although he refused to return home
to California for anything more than short visits, California and the West
shaped nearly everything Royce touched.  He is likely the only philosopher
to write both a western and one of the most important “lost” histories of a
Western American place.

Royce’s history, as biographer John Clendenning put it, “is a study of
disloyalty.  The evil that Royce persistently describes is that form of
individualism which seeks personal gain at the expense of social harmony.”
Whereas myths of the American West as a place shaped by individual heroes
were firmly entrenched in the late nineteenth-century American mind, Royce
debunked with aplomb and points out that racism, greed, and violent mob
action—not heroism—won California for the U.S..  His history and his novel
help illustrate a larger point seen throughout much of his philosophical
works about the importance of community: it can ruin us or help make us
better as individuals. In his later years, Royce celebrated the idea of
small communities and a “wholesome provincialism.”  As John, E. Smith has
noted, Royce felt that “because of the vastness of national unities and the
consolidation of social forces which drives towards uniformity, conformity
and the dead weight of mob-thinking, we must find refuge and renewal in
small communities in which the individual can regain his self-consciousness
and dignity. Once again, the community must restore the individual.”