Walden and Civil disobedience

I preface with a quote from E.P Thompson, a historian of early modern Britain, from his work The Making of the English Working Class:

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”

I read Walden as a primarily historical document, channeling the worldview and cultural outlook of a particular person in a particular place in history, rather than as the quietest and contemplative treatise on the philosophical value of solitude prima facie. In reading any historical document, our goal is principally to have some conversation with the past, to accept their premise and to our best to subordinate ourselves to their expression. I find the words of E.P. Thompson to partial to a twin interpretation with regards to Thoreau – on the one hand, I must resist any Whiggish or Presentist tendencies in the reading of this document, and to reserve my judgment of the overall themes of Walden in the light of modern fact. Yet on another hand, Thoreau himself seems committed to condescension toward the common man in the light of his present. He abides in a chauvinistic arms-length attitude about the civilization which produced him. I will quote him thus:

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph between Maine and Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as a man who is earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main action was to talk fast, but not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic, and bring the Old World some weeks neared to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American Ear is that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

While this passage reeks of a sort of holier than thou pretension about whatever pre-modern TMZ proclivity for gossip inhabits the mind of primordial and civilized men, the general spirit of the comment cannot help but recall an oft-quoted and infamous claim from our own Paul Krugman:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s Law” […] becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Damning phraseology deservedly parodied and lampooned often, though if you dress it up in the fatigues of a critique from outside modernist meliorism, it acquires some kind of respectability. The people of our civilization just fail to value to the correct things, Thoreau might say, communicated well in a strange passage about his distaste for news and newspapers. This worldview puts the reader of a historical document in an interesting situation; I’m charged with evaluating what amounts to a critique of Thoreau's contemporaries. That critique can be criticized from my own worldview, where I happen to believe that things like electricity, modern medicine, and wicked-sick video games are actually tight as fuck, but to do so would fail to engage with the book on its own terms. But to avoid doing as much might count as accepting the book uncritically. It’s a puzzling thing, from my point of view.

Yet there is much to appreciate about the simplicity of Thoreau’s prose, replete with rustic and bucolic descriptions, as he finds himself “neighbor to the birds, not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them.” I have a great deal of affection for the passage in which he describes a war between red and black ants, referring to them as “vast legions of myrmidons.” One gets the impression that no less than Jacques Cousteau may have been deeply inspired by the following descriptions of the Pickerel of Walden Pond:

“They posses a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky, but they have […] yet rarer colors, like flowers or precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden Water.”

Ultimately, the worldview in Walden is, perhaps not equally, constructive to and reflective of a particular American cultural judgment, echoed from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Overstory: what you want to do is to get away from society, to retreat from civilization. Only therein can spiritual or philosophical awakening and purity be attained, or perhaps, most easily there. I do not deign to approach such admonitions through the lens of any modern scientific views on socialization or human sociability. Why, after all, should socialization be restricted to human beings?

“What space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. I have a great deal of company in my house […] I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond, that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself […] I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean-leaf, or sorrel, or a horsefly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the North Star, or the south Wind, or an April Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in a new house.”

Stirring stuff. Ultimately, what I find Walden stoking is my second-order desires, quickening the hunger for my ego death. I wish I was the kind of person who found mystical union with the natural world possible, or that I was the kind of person from whom a first reading of Walden awakens one from their dogmatic slumber.