University of Virginia Library

Robert Gillmore

...And Individual Transcends State

We attended a delightful
colloquium Monday night - an
introduction to the thought of
Henry David Thoreau in the form
of a light and bouncy production of
the play, "The Night Thoreau
Spent in Jail," which might have
been more accurately and invitingly
titled "The Life Thoreau Spent on
Earth."

The play is funnier than it is
profound, and though it is in its
own way memorable and moving, it
does not capture that part of
Thoreau which marks him as a great
mind.

There is little from the most
brilliant Chapter of Walden,
"Economy," where Thoreau
precurses Herbert Marcuse's Eros
and Civilization and
One-Dimensional Man and
especially Hannah Arendt's The
Human Condition. Thoreau here
criticizes totally the cyclical
materialism of ordinary life where
things are arranged and cleaned and
polished today only to be arranged
and cleaned and polished
tomorrow; he tells how he threw
three shells out of his Walden hut -
his only bric-a-brac - just because
it was not worth his time, his life,
to dust them, and because nature
could dust them better.

Unfortunately, too, the full
scope of Thoreau's radically
individualist political theory was
not apparent but a little distorted.
The unaware might think Thoreau
some kind of activist, a
mid-nineteenth-century equivalent
of the present day anti-warrior.

Apologist For Quietism

Thoreau, of course, was neither:
he was not Wendell Phillips or even
William Lloyd Garrison. "I am not
responsible for the successful
working of the machinery of
society," Thoreau wrote in Civil
Disobedience, adding, "government
does not concern me much, and I
shall bestow the fewest possible
thoughts on it."

Why this apolitical Thoreau?
This apologist for quietism? His
answer: "As for adopting the ways
which the State has provided for
remedying the evil, I know not of
such ways. They take too much
time, and a man's life will be gone.
I have other affairs to attend to."

For Thoreau, as he said, "came
into this world, not chiefly to make
this a good place to live in, but to
live in it, good or bad." Or again:
"It is not a man's duty, as a matter
of course, to devote himself to the
eradication of any, even the most
enormous wrong; he may properly
have other concerns to engage him;
but it is his duty, at least, to wash
his hands of it..."

Bill Olson (who, ironically, is
Ralph Waldo Emerson in the play)
calls Thoreau "the first hippie."
And for these reasons, and
especially his transcendentalism, he
was.

Thoreau indeed has some big
blind spots.

One was his inability to see the
wonders not only of nature but of
the civilization he derided. It is not
enough to pooh-pooh the telegraph
"because we have nothing to say;"
we must - must we not? - find
both something to say and
something to say it with.

Nor was Thoreau aware, as his
fellow Yankee, Oliver Wendell
Holmes said, that "taxes are the
price we pay for civilization."

Nor was he aware, as was his
contemporary Orestes Brownson
(not to mention George Fitzhugh!)
that Harvard University, where
Thoreau received at least his
mis education, is built on the backs
of labor.

Fundamentally, Thoreau
overlooked that a man who truly
loves individuality - who thinks
the world should be filled with
many different kinds of persons -
must look out for the individuality
of other men: he must enhance
their freedom and capacities
through political action.

If Thoreau would have freed the
slaves in the south and end the
imperialism in Mexico, he would
not have gone to Walden. But he
did.

Too Selfish To Share

Like many of our own would-be
revolutionaries who have cultivated
little more than their own
impotence by an elaborate quietism
of drugs and dropping out, Thoreau
was too selfish to share: he liked his
individuality. He protested his taxes
not merely because they helped kill
Mexicans and perhaps expand the
slaveocracy, but mainly because
they were his taxes. Were his taxes
not paid-were his hands "washed"
- then all would be right with his
life. Such is of course one logical
extension of individualism - but
the very wrong one.

Individualism can also lead to
elitism - and it did for Thoreau.
"The only obligation which I have
the right to assume," he wrote, "is
to do at any time what I think
right." "Unjust laws" should be
disobeyed, for "it is enough," he
said, if the law-breakers "have God
on their side...any man more right
than his neighbors constitutes a
majority of one." So why, Thoreau
asks, does not government "cherish
its wise minority?"

Victim Of Conscience

Yet another blind spot: in a
relativist age, we cannot know truly
if we are right and even then, when
we are - or even what right is or
ought to be. Democratic majorities,
moreover, do not claim to be
"right"; they are - as Thoreau said
they were not - expedients that are
both practical and in some tune
with the ethical ideal of equality,
and they express not so much
"right" or "wrong" or "good" or
"bad" but sentiment and interest of
the greater number.

For Thoreau himself was a
victim of other men who followed
their "conscience," who were sure
they were "right," Would Thoreau
like to be governed by the
conscience, by the conceptions of
"right" of George Wallace, Strom
Thurmond, or even Harry Byrd -
let alone the Rev. Carl McIntyre or
Robert Welch?

Metaphor For Liberalism

No, of course not. For Thoreau
revised the Jeffersonian dictum to
say: "That government is best
which governs not at all."
Government, Thoreau adds, is but
"an expedient by which men would
fain succeed in letting one another
alone."

Thoreau is thus a metaphor for
the heart of the old, classical
liberalism itself: of government
which constitutionally protects an
individual from the consciences of
ebullient men, government of men
who find their ethical life not in the
state but in their own houses - and
in their huts on Walden Pond.

But this lovely thought is only a
half-truth, and too much a dream
within our real life.

For we are not Thoreau: we
cannot call our citizens, as Thoreau
did, "a distinct race from me by
their principles and prejudices."
And we cannot say - or ought not
properly say, as did Thoreau - that
on one of the "highest hills"
around Concord, "the State was
nowhere to be seen" or "long as a
man is thought-free, fancy-free,
imagination-free," the state is then
"not seen."

Thinking Alone

And this was Thoreau's biggest
blind spot. Yes, as Dante Germino
has written, "We think as we die,
alone." But that thinking is not
wholly our own. The "State" is
more than our government: it refers
also to the climate of opinion
which shrouds every human word -
if only because it is a word - and
every human thought that is
expressed in words.

Listen to the deacon if you see
the play, for he reminds us that
Thoreau's pupils are not his but the
state's - and not deliberately by
some plot, but by the order of
social things. Unlike Thoreau, most
of us live in town, and unlike
Thoreau most of us are aware of
that fact. We know that the state
can never be just our "neighbor." It
has a visible claim to our taxes and
an invisible claim to our consciences.

Yet Thoreau's image of the
thoroughly individual man - if it
must be only a dream - remains
also, I think, a rather sad reminder
of something which perhaps ought
to be but cannot: like Rousseau's
Geneva: le temps perdu, but which
was not even lost: it never was.