The American Psychological Association regards these values as obsolete and pathological. “Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct,” writes an APA committee. “The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity and of connectedness.” Among those “components of traditional masculinity” is “self-reliance.”

How times have changed. When Emerson was writing, Americans like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Lucretia Mott were skeptical of authority and valued dissent and independence of thought. They understood that dependence makes you vulnerable, even though we all do depend on one another in various ways. If you rely on the government for food, clothing, and shelter, you are at its mercy—currently that of Donald Trump. And as Thoreau argued in “Civil Disobedience,” if you depend on the government, you are disabled from resisting it. Recognizing that relationship between freedom and self-reliance, many feminists—from Abigail Adams’s era through the 1970s—taught that women must become less dependent on men.

circa 1870: American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) who was among the leaders of the transcendental movement in Boston. (Photo by Otto Herschan Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Photo: Otto Herschan Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Emerson’s essay is about self-development and self-realization, values that the APA in another mood might praise. And it is about the importance, for each of us and for society, of independent thought. “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature,” writes Emerson. “A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you.”

Even more than in Emerson’s time, we tend to think in groups or as groups. Many of us vociferously express opinions we do not hold or came to hold through a process of self-deception. It turns us into tribes of warring, servile conformists. Perhaps without realizing it, the APA is articulating a set of moral norms. That is also what Emerson was up to in his essay, though he was aware of it. These systems of values are exquisitely incompatible, an additional sign that America, for better and worse, has become something like the opposite of what it was.

Mr. Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.