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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.
Their conviction was that world peace, harmony and unity would only
come about through the brotherhood of man. They were convinced that a
person’s moral creed could not remain as words and platitudes, but must
be translated into action. Building on this idea, they formed The
Poets’ Code of Ethics, intended as a worldwide moral code that
related strictly to how people acted towards each other, the ethical
nature of the code being based on the concept of service to others and
to the world.
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