Walden and “Civil Disobedience”
By Henry David Thoreau
1854 and 1849
The Quotable Thoreau
Thoreau has been one of my favorite non-academic philosophers for many, many years – even since high school. To get a sense of why, I thought I’d start with a selection of quotes because he is so highly quotable. Just a sampling could include:
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
I came into this world, not chiefly to make it a good place to live, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
If you build castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Also, he rocked one hell of a neckbeard.
Thoreau’s Religion
Thoreau was part of the American Transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism started as a Romantic reaction against John Locke (the bald guy on “Lost”) and his influence on Unitarianism and Deism. John Locke, the great English Empiricist, argued that only knowledge which can be proved to the senses was valid. If you couldn’t see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, and pass it through your lower intestine, then it didn’t really exist. Many Unitarians and Deists (including many of America’s Founding Fathers) followed the religious implications of this precept and adopted a more naturalistic, science-friendly religion. The Creator exists but doesn’t intervene in His creation. They discounted miracles, divine revelation, sacred texts and mystical experiences. Thomas Jefferson, for example, edited out of the New Testament any references to miracles or the divinity of Jesus. Jefferson regarded Jesus as a great moral exemplar (like Gandhi or Martin Luther King), but not a god. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many theological leaders embraced this more rationalistic religion.
Transcendentalism began as a reaction against that kind of materialist religion. In Germany, Hölderlin, Kant, and Fichte attacked Lock’s assertion that only what we can sense is real and true. Similar to Buddhism and the Upanishads, German Transcendentalists argued that what we can sense is, in fact, less real than what we can’t – that what’s really real “transcends” human senses and can only be known by intuition, purely logical deduction, or direct poetic/mystical revelation – and thus can’t really be communicated to anyone else; you just have to seek it for yourself. Emerson (America’s most important Transcendentalist, and Thoreau’s mentor) termed the “voice of God within man” man’s “Oversoul.” It is by listening to our inner Oversoul (not through our senses – and also not by reading sacred texts) that we come to know God.
The Transcendentalists were not Christians in the mainstream senses (for they placed direct insight and personal experience above sacred texts and Biblical revelation, and, like the Unitarians, they generally denied the unique divinity of Jesus), but they did seek to put the spiritual back into religion, which they felt the Unitarians had moved too far from. They also did not believe in the necessity of institutional religion, arguing that every child is born with an intuitive knowledge of God and of right & wrong (i.e. their Oversoul). Each man is his own master and answers to no one and nothing but his own conscience, so they were also mostly against majority rule. Politically they seem to be kind of like benign anarchists.
Thoreau’s Politics
In 1841 Henry David Thoreau was invited to join an artist/writers’ commune. A group of Concord Transcendentalists planned to merge their limited finances and property for mutual support. Thoreau declined, noting that, “When sticks prop-up one-another for support, none, or only one, can stand-up straight.” Such an ardent individualist would hardly be an advocate of the modern welfare state. He opens “Civil Disobedience” with: “I heartily accept the motto, -‘That government is best which governs least,’… Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, –‘That government is best which governs not at all’… The objections which have been brought against a standing army… may also at last be brought against a standing government.” (These certainly aren’t conventionally patriotic books he wrote: Thoreau outright calls soldiers going off to fight in the Mexican War “fools.”)
Certainly on the surface Thoreau sounds akin to today’s anti-government, libertarian, far-right movement. Privatize everything. Cut entitlements. Make government small and, if possible, non-existent. Remember Ruby Ridge and Wacco! However, there are a couple of good reasons to doubt that Thoreau, transplanted from 1841 to (say) 2011, would be part of the TEA party movement. For one, even in his own day Thoreau was too much of an individualist to be part of any mass-movement or political party, even an anti-government one. He was an abolitionist and anti-war, but he wasn’t terribly politically active. Rather than crusade against the evils of society, his approach was (like a Hindu yogi) to just turn inward… and to turn to nature… to ignore society as much as possible. So even if he was sympathetic to TEA Party-like sentiments, it’s hardly plausible that he would march with them.
But it’s also less than certain that Thoreau would be sympathetic to the modern Right. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote: “When a laissez-faire policy seemed best calculated to achieve the liberal objective of equality of opportunity for all – as it did in the time of Jefferson – liberals believed, in the Jeffersonian phrase, that that government is best which governs least. But, when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state.”
Individualism and freedom must now extend to freedom from mega-corps as well as freedom from mega-governments, from billions as well as from kings. I don’t want my freedom infringed upon either by politicians telling me how I must live – or by corporations limiting my choices and opportunities or making vast changes in the environment without me having any say in it, or by exercising undue political influence through PACs, lobbying, or propaganda.
In today’s context, with massive, multinational corporations polluting the land, sea and air, and altering the Earth’s climate, I have no doubt at all that Thoreau, a “Secular Saint” of the ecological movement, would be squarely in the Progressive/Green camp. The two things he was religiously devoted to were individual freedom and Nature. Today, billionaires, big-tech, oil companies, and other mega-corps threaten both of those values.
The solution of the Progressive/Green movement is that the government has a legitimate role in protecting the environment, protecting workers rights, ensuring that our food and drugs are safe, protecting our privacy, ensuring that when we buy a pack of cigarettes it comes with a warning label on it… but the government has no legitimate role in telling people who they can love and marry, how they can worship, what they can say in print (mostly), what books they can read, whether or not they can have an abortion, etc. I think that’s generally where a modern Thoreau would fall: protected liberties for individuals but regulations for big, powerful forces that would otherwise dominate us.
Thoreau’s Economics
Today, our culture tells us: “Embrace technology. Get hyper-socially connected all the time. Work hard to make as much money as possible. Follow the rules and norms, and don’t rock the boat.” Thoreau is a big, huge F.U. to all of that. Technology and inventions are, for him, unnecessary distractions – instead we should read great books and look to nature. For Thoreau, it’s fine to socialize from time to time, but don’t use others to cover-over the gaps in yourself. He doesn’t like jibber-jabber talk, but seeks meaningful conversation. His take on the telegraph applies 1000 times more today to social media: what’s the point of all this communication technology if it makes you not-think? Pick up Homer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Emerson… James Joyce or Doris Lessing… Toni Morriosn or Nikki Giovann… Will Eisner or Neil Gaiman – and get off fucking Tik-tok!!!
I’ve read Walden 4 or 5 times, and I still love it. The first chapter, “Economy,” is a knockout every time! It’s about how people waste too much of their time working so they can have money so they can buy things they don’t need anyway. (“He has no time to be anything other than a machine.”) It made me think of Aristotle’s distinction between work-work and leisure-work. Work-work is when you have to do things just to earn money. Leisure-work is work that’s also intrinsically rewarding. To quote Leonard Cohen, “I never wanted to work for pay, but I always want to be paid for my work.” It’s best to earn your living doing something intrinsically rewarding that you enjoy. Failing that, Thoreau’s advice is to work as little as possible by living as cheaply as possible. In his estimation, it’s better to live in “voluntary poverty” and have greater leisure time to enjoy higher and more personal pursuits (reading Aristotle or the Bhagavad-Gita, having intelligent conversations with your friends, and quietly communing with nature) than to toil away at an unsatisfying job just so you can have money to buy more stupid crap. Very few people look back over their lives from their deathbeds and say, “Damn, I really wish I had bought more crap.”
One thing I like about Thoreau is that, although he draws attention to how few things we actually need in order to have a satisfying and healthy life, he doesn’t encourage us to be misers. He’s not encouraging us to hoard-up our pennies. (“Men work themselves sick so they will have something set aside for sick days.”) What he wants us to be stingy with is our time. Our time should be spent chiefly in higher quality pursuits that feed our mind and soul… which is generally easiest to do by living simply and cheaply and working (i.e. work-work) as little as possible.
I followed Thoreau’s advice by going into teaching. I have a leisure-work job that is intrinsically rewarding and meaningful to me, and also I’m a 10-month employee who is happily unemployed for 2 months of every year. (I even have a house by a delightful pond, the scenery of which “is on a humble scale,” that I absolutely love.) Nobody should have t0 work all 12 months of the year! Most European countries legally guarantee workers 20-30 vacation days every year. American workers are guaranteed none. Most Americans get only 5-10 vacation days per year, and over 60% don’t use them. (80% of Europeans take all their vacation days every year.) This is not only bad for us, but it’s bad business, as various studies have shown that European workers are more efficient, getting more done in less hours. A favorite study of mine found that when the work day was shortened from 8 to 7 hours, workers got the same amount done. I strongly believe that we should reconfigure the economy so that everyone can live reasonably while working less!!!
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail…. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” – Thoreau
In a world full of people working hard to buy more stuff, Thoreau is the guy who shrugs and asks, “Well, why don’t you just try wanting less stuff? Then you won’t have to work as hard.” To live the good life, we need to have leisure time. To have that, we have to want a whole lot less stuff. For that, we have to stop wanting unimportant things, and just want important things: a few unbroken hours each day with a great book… intelligent conversation with interesting friends at our local pub… time each day to go for a hike, a swim, gardening, or just sit under a tree. Is sitting under an oak tree better than Netflix? Maybe so… the tree just doesn’t have a marketing team selling it to you – and it takes time and patience, and a certain peace of mind, to appreciate the tree. (Thoreau could sit so still that snakes would slither over his legs and fish would swim around his feet as he dangled them in the pond.)
Want the right things! And then, importantly, Thoreau encourages us to follow our bliss now. Don’t wait. As soon as you identify what you want to do with your life, start right away. None of this, “I’ll take up painting when I’m 65.” No, follow your bliss, now!
Could you build a society full of Thoreaus? No, in a society full of Thoreaus, your GDP would collapse and everyone would be living in poverty. But there’s no danger of that. Thoreau (like Nietzsche) is an introverted, smart, romantic oddball writing to other introverted, smart, romantic oddballs. His is the story of a man who got fed-up and went to go live by himself in the woods. But even Thoreau only did his Walden Pond experiment for two years – this isn’t a guide to how to live your whole life. Whatsmore, Walden Pond is his experiment, and the point of the book is that your experiment is going to be different. The point of reading Thoreau (like reading Nietzsche) is just to shake you awake, make you rethink your priorities, and ask, “What’s really important to me, and what can I do without?” For that reason, my well-worn, dog-eared, little copy of Walden & Civil Disobedience is still one of my very favorite wisdom-books. My life has been pretty darn good so far, and I credit a fair bit of that to this little volume in my personal “Bible.” Thank you, Mr. Thoreau.