WALDERN/CIVID DISOBEDIENCE
Disclosure: when I was married and went on my honeymoon in 1978, I thought it a great adventure, one that people would not be able to take for granted in the future: we actually drove cross country and back over a month! The issue? Gas shortages with an unclear way forward and a sense of catastrophe about energy supplies and (not exaggerating) the whole world order. Conclusion? I don’t call them right every time…. I have a touch of romanticism in my perspective about history and society.
Henry Thoreau was a Romantic…….
Disclosure #2: I did not read the following—I listened to them on audiobook, often while riding a bike in rural settings and honestly, sometimes, my focus was distracted from the material and more on the truck, dog, person who was trying to cause me harm.
So, where will I begin? Walden and an essay on Civil Disobedience. “Shit!” you say? No worries, I don’t do formal book reports. This is what struck me most about Thoreau in these two readings.
David Thoreau died in 1862 of TB (FYI, I have a doctor’s perspective on history. TB=tuberculosis). His book, Walden and essay on Civil Disobedience were front and center in High School English classes in the 1960’s as his themes were pertinent to those times: He wrote important and crystalizing thoughts for many on environmentalism. He strongly reinforced what already existed in young America ie a sense that one serves one’s individual conscience before anything else—family, community, state, and nation. When he speaks of right, he means Right vs Wrong as though these are obvious and absolute. Viet Nam was front and center in the 1960’s as a practical reference to the application of this work as was a nascent environmentalism (as in, “ Pave paradise and put up a parking lot”).
Pertinent History: Daniel Webster is the subject of his scorn. (Shit! Who was Daniel Webster? —the dictionary dude?). Daniel Webster, along with Henry Clay and JC Calhoun were prominent regional/national leaders — head and shoulders above the others in the generation after that of the US Constitution’s birth. Daniel Webster helped legislate “the great compromise” of 1850. This included the Fugitive Slave Act which was an important Federal Legislation that overrode state’s rights in the North, compelling them to enforce the return of fleeing slaves back to the South. Southerners, a minority as related to the country’s voting population had a disproportionate influence in Federal Legislation at that time and this law was something of a poison pill that would help lead to the Civil War.
To be more clear: The culture of New Englanders disapproved of slavery. They thought Southerners wrong in practicing it. That is as far as it went—-like that brother in the family who misbehaves and is at times unethical but invited to Thanksgiving. When the Fugitive Slave Act became real, black people were forcibly taken from New England communities and held by Federal Authorities for shipment back to their owners in the South with news reports of their whippings and punishments clearly outlined in the antislavery press—-the nearness of the injustice and the sense of needing to “get along” eroded over the next ten years, despite the reality that the New England economy had a dependence on the cotton industry. This erosion was also catylized by radicals (called abolutionists) to the point that war with the South was more than palatable when it came.
Does any of that seem relevant today?
Carrying that thought: On leadership, the essay finds Thoreau saying this about Daniel Webster:
He is a lawyer and so is worried more about consistency than in Right or Wrong.
He is not wise, but prudent. He was after all, a New Englander.
He does not lead but rather defends the constitution. To paraphrase: if it was good enough for the crew of 1787, it is good enough for me. If slavery was part of the deal, I can accommodate myself to that.
He is eloquent which is beguiling, but what has that to do with actually leading and where does it leave Truth?
In a daydream, I try to have a conversation with Henry about what followed the Civil War to this day. He would have a few, “I knew it!” moments. He would be energized by how some of his ideas caught hold and he would be depressed by what he was critical of and how all that accelerated exponentially:
1) He was an ascetic who loved nature; the mindfulness movement channels his thinking on the environment and one’s place in it. He lived in the time of great scientific advance when “hands on” application of science was changing the world. He both admired and hated that.
He tells a great story about the beauty of taking a train to a town 30 miles away. He tells a friend he can walk there faster than the friend using the train despite the advance it represented. How so? To earn the cost of the ticket, you would have to work a full day while I would be walking to the town—-you would have to rely on the schedule to coordinate your trip and by the time you arrived, I would be there to greet you……….
Imagine his thoughts on global warming. It would make perfect sense to him scientifically (Walden is full of his observations and measurements of nature around Walden pond), and philosophically (why rely on expensive technology that pollutes when you can live a perfectly good life without it?).
2) New Englanders in general shared a human characteristic we all recognize, that of acquisition of material goods. He notes wagons of people leaving an estate sale with furniture, much of which had been stored in a barn, and likely to be stored in a barn again only to be re- sold at the estate sale when the purchasers died—-and he wonders what is the point of all that?
3) He anticipated what we all take for granted in the modern world. He comments on people working their whole lives on farms that were not paid off when they died. 3% of the farms around Concord were owned free and clear and the remaining 97% chained the “owners” to a life of toil — to what end? Millenials, take heed!
4) He anticipated multiculturalism: he quotes Far Eastern sources on religious and philosophical matters. He reminds us that for a fraction of the cost, historical records teach us that the native Americans lived quite comfortably in the winters of New England when Europeans first came—and in housing that was in fact, portable and much less expensive to build when compared to the “vain” houses and updated features available in the 1840’s.
5) He did not think much of charity, largely because poor people in his experience, were just as blind to what was really important as middle class people and likely to spend their money on foolish unnecessary things.
6) He anticipated the generation gap gone crazy: he points out the costs for fashionable clothing and the standard and cost of keeping up appearances when in just 20 years, the younger generation will be rolling their eyes with derision regarding your choices and needs while filling in their own futile and wasteful standards……
7) He got that good people can be conflicted: many celebrated the anti-slavery stands made by New Englanders and yet they were compromised by the fact that the economy of New England was very much dependent on the cotton industry. “It’s the economy, stupid,” would have been an interesting assertion in those times and without an unambiguous answer.
He had an answer though:
Thoreau gave a speech in support of John Brown’s assault on the armory at Harper’s Ferry. This was radical thinking for the time. His indignation about the lack of leadership in the United States found him in the camp of accepting open warfare to take down the economic might and moral failure slavery represented to a country already claiming a monopoly on Freedom—as in “Land of the Free.”
Bottom line: Henry Thoreau was a youthful, educated, full-of-himself introvert, who wrestled with the issues of the day. The world he described was a youthful version of what we have now. To live in a world of 6 billion people stresses his problem-solving for the aggregate. I can’t get my mind away from the conclusion of insurmountable problems, but then as now, for the individual, there are gems in this book worthy of the mindfulness he preached.
Comments