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Show 321. philosophy which advertised in public that "hog, root, or die" was the only logic of l i f e ! Muir found i t abhorrent. So he tended to sympathize with the d i s s e n t e r s of the "social gospel" type, like Henry George, who believed that Man's problems were due not to the hardness of Nature, but to the inequalities of society. Compulsory r e c r e a t i o n , or what we now call ecological education, was Muir's program for the s p i r i t u al redemption of the individual c i t i z e n. Muir was also appalled at the economics of the social Darwinists. He c a l l e d i t the "gobble-gobble school of economics." Like Henry George he believed that blind progress was a dead end, since "what has destroyed a l l previous civilizations has been the conditions produced by the growth of civilization i t s e l f . " George Perkins Marsh had argued a similar thesis in Man and Nature, regarding the abusive and destructive exhaustion of national resources. Therefore Muir finally found i t necessary to speak against the narrow view of government which someone l i k e Sumner held. If a social Darwinist believed that government was responsible chiefly for defending only "the property of men and the honor of women" against crime, Muir believed that public good was intimately associated with Man's natural environment. And government would have to p r o t e c t that communal resource. This meant much. Muir would find some of his best a l l i es in the coming decades in the ranks of the Progressives, despite roany deep philosophical differences. They at l e a s t wanted to reform state and national government. |