Although we might question Emerson's relating travel — or culture — to religion, both substitute an external source of wisdom for an individual's inner wisdom. The person who travels "with the hope of finding [something] greater than he knows . . . travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things." The reference to youth reminds us that the self-reliant individual is childlike and original, whereas a person who travels for the wrong reasons creates nothing new and chooses instead to be surrounded by "old things."
The urge to travel is a symptom, according to Emerson, of our educational system's failure: Because schools teach us only to imitate, too often we travel to experience others' works of art rather than create them ourselves. In "The American Scholar," Emerson advises young scholars to break with European literary traditions.
Likewise, in "Self-Reliance," he addresses American artists with many of the same arguments: "Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any," if only American artisans would consider "the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government."
Emerson's criticism of society, and especially its ill-conceived notion of progress, differs from his earlier comments on the subject. The progression of ideas symbolized in the zigzag line of a ship is not what he is addressing here. He is arguing that society does not necessarily improve from material changes. For example, advances in technology result in the loss of certain kinds of wisdom: The person who has a watch loses the ability to tell time by the sun's position in the sky, and improvements in transportation and war machinery are not accompanied by corresponding improvements in either the physical or mental stature of human beings. The most effective image for this static nature of society is the wave. A wave moves in and out from the shoreline, but the water that composes it does not; changes occur in society, but "society never advances."
