glyph 9: Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Oliver wendall Holmes, Henry Holt, Edwin Markham, Walt Whitman, John Burroughs ..... Thomas J. Watson, IBM . Walter Russell ..... Yasuhiko Kimura, Laara Lindo ... evolutionary ethics . THINK: the first principle of business ethics


 

The Twilight Club

History of the Twilight Club, Laara Lindo

In the later decades of the 19th Century, the British philosopher, Herbert Spencer, took an honest look at world trends and predicted that civilization was on a downward trend, for culture, beauty and ethical practices were neglected in society. He believed that politicians were not likely or able to change the trends. If there was to be a change, how would it come about? He believed the poets, visionary thinkers and artists of the world would have the solution. In Britain he inspired men such as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Darwin to consider the problem. In America, his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Howard Bridge, Richard Watson Gilder, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Henry Holt, John Burroughs, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie took up the question. These men, searching for a way in which to change the negative direction of society to positive action, formed a gathering, calling themselves the Twilight Club, because they met at twilight—not simply the twilight of the day, but, as they saw the situation, they were meeting at the evening twilight of the 19th Century and the morning twilight of the 20th Century—at the twilight of civilization, unless the downward trend could be stopped.


When this glyph was first published, before 2006, there was a Twilight Club website. It seems that the Club has now gone into hibernation again, and the site is gone It was last revived by Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, who tells a bit of the story here: http://www.via-visioninaction.org/via-li/VisionMissionStatement.php

https://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/9.html
entered before July 9, 2006; edited/updated April 28, 2017

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