Resurrect Emerson

My Transcendentalism class is seriously blowing my mind, and, after four weeks of classes, I cannot shake the feeling that we should attempt to bring Ralph Waldo Emerson back from the dead.
After reading his social commentary in the Divinity School Address and his essay "The American Scholar," I believe absolute hell would break loose. During the time Emerson wrote and spoke at lyceum gatherings, the industrial revolution had barely begun. Already, Emerson warned his contemporaries against the "iron lids covering the sluggard intellect." He was caustic toward the scholar who settles for less than his full potential and mindlessly reads dead books of the past and repeats nonsensically back what he was taught to think. "Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called 'the mass' and 'the heard.'" Emerson mourned the fact that his contemporaries lost sight of nature and the ability to comprehend the richness of meaning in the abounding natural world.
Emerson's worst fear was that the United States would become so caught up in Manifest Destiny that it would become thoroughly absorbed into a culture of materialism, rather than a culture of artists and poets.
In the year 2009, it is difficult to say that Emerson's worst fear did not come true. What would he think about our cellphones/laptops/facebook/twitter/multiple cars/GPS/iPhones? As a culture, we are completely displaced from nature--too busy to contemplate the "refulgent summer" with the air "full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay." Emerson saw himself as a sort of prophet for his age. If he were alive today and (God forbid) saw what became of his country after the industrial revolution--what would he say? And would anybody listen?