A Man Who Chose Not to Live in Quiet Desperation

Few writers have had as profound an impact on American culture as Henry David Thoreau, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that he has had a profound impact on the world.  Not too shabby for a goofy heir to a pencil-making fortune.  His signature work, Walden, has been a bible for those who love nature and scorn the assorted destructions of progress, industry and civilization.  A simple two word sentence from Walden--"Simplify, simplify"--has become iconic.  The work I've asked you to read, "On Civil Resistance," helped to change the world.  While Thoreau did not invent the concept, he articulated the process of civil disobedience and consequently created what stands as one of the greatest political manifestos ever written.  Mohandas Gandhi cited Thoreau as an influence in the civil resistance movement that ultimately freed India from British rule.  Closer to home, Martin Luther King, Jr. explicitly cited Thoreau as an inspiration in the development of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Thoreau's refusal to accept a role as a cog in the machinery of government and society has helped define him as the ultimate individualist.  It didn't hurt his reputation either that he was socially awkward and introverted, and often perceived by his neighbors as one who was, at best, within hailing distance of normal.  HIs efforts at finding even a romantic companion were thwarted not only by his personality, but by his looks.  By the standards of the day he was regarded as physically unattractive.  A story about him--perhaps apocryphal--is that he once wanted to court a woman he was fond of, only to have her tell him that she would rather hold hands with a twig.  (On the other hand, his friends, such as Hawthorne and Emerson, found him sweet, a brilliant and spiritual man.  Thoreau frequently played with Hawthorne's children, who apparently were quite fond of him.)

But don't be misled by this picture of a loner individualist.  Indeed, Thoreau was very much the individualist.  But his goal was not to lay out a plan for how to isolate oneself from one's society, but instead to figure out how an individual can engage in meaningful social action and change.  Even in Walden, Thoreau never advocates retreat as a permanent response to society.  Thoreau believed that one did have power as an individual, but because, as he writes, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," it was difficult to wake up to one's own power and affect change.  Perhaps more importantly, Thoreau was attempting to provide a means of power to the disenfranchised.  If you are not a significant member of society, where do you get power?  His night in jail attempts to answer that question: your power comes from your refusal to do something.  (Sound familiar?)  (By the way, Thoreau ended up spending only one night in jail because his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson bailed him out.)

                                                               Reconstruction of Thoreau's Cabin at Walden Pond

One question to think about with Thoreau has to do with his advocating that one refuse to vote.  That would seem to counter everything we believe as a culture about the significance of voting.  How can Thoreau lay claim to having any kind of say in the direction of this country if he's refusing to participate in a fundamental aspect of the democratic process?

A second question centers around his rather blunt--and even disrespectful--comments about the government.  We know he advocates resistance.  Is he advocating the destruction of governement?  Is it possible to have a society full of Thoreaus and still have a functioning society?

For those interested, as I mention in my comment, here is a link to Throeau's speech, "A Plea for Captain John Brown."

Life, Liberty and What?

In our culture, there is no document more central to our reverence for the individual than the Declaration of Independence.  The crucial line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," is in itself a manifesto for how humans were perceived in the Age of Reason:  truth was available to every individual, and not the privilege of a special few.  "Self-evident" simply means that one did not need an authority figure--say, clergy or government--to dole out the truth to the ignorant.  By virtue of being a sentient human being, an individual had the capacity to learn the truth for himself or herself.

This was Natural Law, as opposed to the laws made by institutions.  Now Thomas Jefferson (the primary author of the document) was not suggesting that man-made laws were irrelevant; rather, he was asserting that Natural Law trumped human law.  Human law did matter--but only when it illuminated and complemented Natural Law.  If human law contradicted Natural Law, well, then you have reason for--revolution.

     Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson, however, was hardly working in a vacuum when he composed this document.  In fact, the Declaration of Independence articulates fundamental principles that were abounding during the Age of Reason.  The notion that all men were created equal was not new to Jefferson or the Declaration.  The concept that a government can only work through the consent of the governed, and when the governed did not give their consent, they had the right and duty to rebel, basically restates John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689).  In fact, much of the Declaration--including some of Jefferson's phrasings--borrow substantially from Locke's writings about government and society in the 17th century.

However, there is a significant change that Jefferson makes in the Declaration that sets that document apart, and depending upon one's point of view, has brought much delight or much dismay to the American experiment.  One of Locke's more famous quote forms the basis for one of the most famous quotes from the Declaration; as Locke wrote, “Man... hath by nature a power.... to preserve his property - that is, his life, liberty, and estate [my emphasis] - against the injuries and attempts of other men.”  Unless we've been living in a closet, if we're American we should recognize two of the three elements of that trilogy.  And again notice that like Jefferson, Locke asserts that our power comes "by nature," not by human law.  So Jefferson clearly knows his Locke (no surprise, considering he was one of the smartest and most well-read people in our entire history).  But Jefferson also diverts from Locke in one meaningful way--he substitutes "pursuit of happiness" for "estate."


So there are two questions I'd like you to think about regarding the Declaration of Independence.  First, what do you think is the significance of adding a phrase about the pursuit of happiness to our revolutionary document?  The issue was not so much what Jefferson thought of property (he was for it), but that somehow he (and the others who signed the document) believed there was something important about codifying the right to pursue happiness.

                                                                            Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence                                                                                           

Second, we all are familiar with the phrase "all men are created equal," and as I've said, that's not a concept original to Jefferson.  We also know that these words exist in a document written while institutionalized slavery was quite prevalent in this country.  (We may or may not know that Jefferson had originally included language outlawing slavery, but removed it in order to get the pro-slavery signers to sign.  Even without their signatures, Jefferson still would have had a majority, but he believed the Declaration would be effective only if he had unanimity.)  The knee-jerk response is that Jefferson was simply a hypocrite.  But can you think of ways in which the existence of slavery could be justified (or perhaps the better term is rationalized) in a nation which declares in writing that all men are created equal?

Clockmaker, Clockmaker, Make Me a Clock

As you can probably gather from the previous post on the Age of Reason, religion took a hit during this period--at least formal, institutional, dogmatic and authoritarian religion.  Those who advocated for the philosophical revolution of the Age of Reason paved the way for what would become one of Karl Marx's most famous declarations in the 19th century, religion is the opiate of the people.  Rationalists commonly saw religion as an institution that used mystery to control the congregation, thus assuring that clergy (who presumably had the ear of God, the source of these mysteries) maintained power--psychological, spiritual, political and economic.  By stripping away the mysteries of how things happened, science was able to put autonomous control back in the hands of the common folk, thus freeing them from the shackles of such institutions as churches.

However, don't conflate the spurning of religion with the spurning of faith.  The Age of Reason did not lead to a rejection of God, but its focus on the individual and autonomy helped shape a different relationship with a divine being that would become particularly important in the shaping of this nation.  To explain this, I'm going to use a metaphor common to the Age of Reason: the clock.

It should not surprise anyone that given the significance of science to rationalists, they saw the universe itself as an orderly, coherent system that humans could understand through reason.  While the Puritans had the Howling Wilderness, the rationalists had Natural Law, and all the implications that follow the word Law.  Where there is Law, there is Order, and where there is Order, there exists the possibility that we can understand how things work, including the universe itself.  To express that notion, rationalists frequently compared the universe to a clock or watch. 

Here's where you come in, to try to tease out the implications of that metaphor.  Think about and respond to the following questions:

1. If the universe is a clock, who is the clockmaker?
2. How does a clock work?  Try to think about this by thinking of old-style clocks, ones that you had to get working by means other than plugging it in or putting in a battery.
3. Once the clockmaker (whoever that is) starts the clock, does the clockmaker have to do anything to keep the clock running?
4. Ultimately, of course, the clockmaker sells or gives the clock to someone else.  So imagine a clockmaker has given you a clock.  Whose responsibility is it to make sure the clock functions properly?  And if it doesn't function properly, whose fault is that?
5. So what does any of this have to do with individualism, autonomy and the changing relationship between humans and their divine being?
   

I Think Therefore I Am

As I mentioned in a previous post, the concept of the individual has been with us for only a relatively short period of historical time.  Obviously, as distinct biological organisms, we have been around for tens of thousands of years.  But the notion that each one of us has an identity separate from all others like us, and that that identity has a right to certain pursuits and certain standards of recognition (to paraphrase the language of John Locke and our own Declaration of Independence) is pretty darn new.

The historical period and events that mark the development of the concept of the individual and individual rights is commonly known as the Age of Reason.  Generally, that period spans the late 17th century through much of the 18th century.  And as is so often the case in American literature and American culture,  we borrowed the principles of the Age of Reason from Europe and adapted them to our own purposes.  (For example, as we'll see later, Jefferson and the other composers of the Declaration of Independence borrowed liberally from John Locke, but made a very significant change.) 

Now, even summarizing the Age of Reason would take a while, so I'll cover other aspects in a subsequent post.  For this post, I'm going to focus of the primary instigator in the Age of Reason: science.  In a nutshell, what science was able to do that created the paradigm shift known as the Age of Reason was to make the world knowable.  This, naturally, was not an instantaneous moment, but a process extending over centuries.  The work of scientists like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo chiseled away at the mystery of how things happened.  This process culminated in probably the most significant scientific figure of the Age of Reason, Isaac Newton.  For our purposes, there's no need to go into the specifics of their theories and discoveries.  What we need to recognize simply is that the cumulative work of these scientists took processes and events traditionally viewed as the mysterious workings of God and demystified them, measured them and codified them.  So now one could predict certain physical behaviors, rather than passively sit back and say "what will happen is God's will."  Something as simple as the law of gravity changes the dynamics of how we move through the world.  Things fall not because God casts them down, but because there are physical laws independent of any divine being that make things fall.  (And as you can tell from the following illustration, not everyone was keen on this.)

Well, so what?  So everything.  If something is knowable and predictable, then something is controllable.  By us.  We are no longer at the mercy of a mysterious force that seems to have a will of its own.  So when things happen, or something needs to be done, we don't have to implore for the intercession of that mysterious force.  Because we now know the rules, the laws, the behaviors, we can fix things ourselves, we can do things ourselves.  We come to realize that we have control over our own lives.

To get some discussion started, what I would like you to think about are the connotations of the crucial word here: Reason.  How do you define and understand reason?  What does it mean to you to say that something is Rational (and, conversely, Irrational)?

I Did It My Way

Few concepts are as precious to Americans--and I would say that no concepts are--as that of individualism.  We have unquestioningly held to the notion that autonomy rooted in our own idiosyncratic identities is a right that comes from the simple fact of being human.  (Something that in another context would be called a Natural Law.) 

Within the larger context of history, however--both American and World--individualism is a baby of a concept, and for most of history the notion of individuality would have been a head-scratcher and often downright subversive.  In a future post I will delve more into the Age of Reason and how that particular period in history fundamentally manifested and codified the concept of the individual.  For this post, however, I will dwell on the earliest perceptions of individuality in our literature as they get played out in an historical event that inspired Hawthorne's "The May-Pole of Merrymount:"  the confrontation between the Puritans and Thomas Morton of Merrymount.

One point to keep in mind when reading the two different and competing narratives that Morton was not a Puritan, yet the Puritan leadership felt no hesitation about attempting to bring him in line.  A major reason for that would be that Bradford and the Puritans perceived Morton and his shenanigans as a threat to the community.

Also keep in mind that as a writer, Morton had more options about how he told the story than Bradford did.  As I indicated in earlier posts, the Puritans had very clear ideas and restrictions about the role of the writer.  Morton operated under no such restrictions.  Morton could engage in satire and mockery, modes of discourse not available to Bradford. 

The maypole, which was a centerpiece of the dispute, was a longstanding English tradition, but one which the Puritans banned.  You can imagine then how immigrants from England, completely disconnected from everything they knew and loved, would take this effort to forbid a tradition that would connect them to home.  Yet somehow the individualistic behavior of Morton, and the symbolic power of the maypole, were seen as dire enough threats to warrant clamping down on Morton and his activities.

So in what ways do you think Morton presented a threat to the Puritans?  And in what ways would the maypole present a threat to that community?

I Would Prefer Not to Write this Blog

In my previous entry on Melville, I had mentioned that he had a long-running antagonism with formal religious structures.  Melville, however, was an equal-opportunity curmudgeon, and he tended to deride virtually any kind of institution.  For Melville, institutions created two major issues.  First, institutions were necessarily authoritarian, meaning that their existence depended upon the obedience and compliance of any who belonged to the institution or who used its services; second, they usually got what they wanted because people were fundamentally sheep that did not want to be challenged or aggravated.

Illustration for Typee, by Mead Schaeffer

Melville's issues were to a large degree personal.  He  began his writing career as a popular writer, writing about his adventures in the South Seas (e.g., Typee and Omoo).  His novel Typee became a sensation, not the least reason being that it contained episodes of exotic sexuality among the natives he encountered in the South Seas.  (Hence churches looking dimly upon his work.)  So he was on his way to becoming that rarity--a writer who could actually make a good living as a writer.  (Something Hawthorne desperately wanted.)  So what's the problem?  Well, Melville was not content churning out soft core porn for the masses--he want to challenge himself and his readers narratively and philosophically.  It didn't help that Melville's philosophical penchant was for exploring darker, more disturbing themes.  You can probably tell where this is going--Melville's work became increasingly more difficult, and his readers became increasingly more--sparse.

Melville eventually became so frustrated with what he saw as mouth-breathing readers and editors that he gave up writing fiction by his mid-30s.  As he wrote, "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned--it will not pay.  Yet write the other way I cannot."  And so--he didn't.  In essence Melville saw himself as akin to a prophet crying in the wilderness, with the wilderness being a culture that had become incapable of confronting complex and challenging ideas.  It was a culture full of citizens that had become complacent, compliant, the perfect cogs in the machines of authoritarian institutions.  (To see another good example of that, read his story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids"). 

So how does this help us with "Bartleby, the Scrivener"?  One of the more central aspects of this story is how Bartleby responds to authority.  For some, Bartleby isn't simply a disgruntled slacker--he's a revolutionary, perhaps even a fictionalized version of Melville himself.  What do you think?  What are the implications of his oft-repeated phrase, "I would prefer not to"?

While we're at it, though, let's not overlook an often-overlooked aspect of this story.  The story is told from the first person by Bartleby's boss, one of those authority figures.  Everything we know about Bartleby--everything--is filtered through that narrator's eyes and perceptions.  Let's also not overlook another often-overlooked aspect of this story: as much as we might find Bartleby irritating--his boss lets him get away with it, and in fact goes to extraordinary lengths to keep Bartleby functioning.  Why?  Assuming the boss is no sucker (and since he manages a successful business, there's no reason to think he is), why tolerate the likes of Bartleby to the point that he moves the entire office rather than kick Bartleby out?

Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!

The first thing to take note about "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is the subtitle--a Tale of Wall Street.  The power of this story--and indeed, this is one of the great short stories in American literature, and in literature period--derives not only from the complex interactions between Bartleby and the narrator, but also that they occur smack in the center of venality, where human worth is measured in terms of commerce.  Melville's choice of settings is purposeful, because for many in the mid-19th century (when this story was written and set) few places in America symbolized the degradation of American character more than Wall Street.

Much as now, Wall Street was the financial center of New York City, though not quite yet the financial center of America and the rest of the world.  However, while we have been so long immersed in the capers of Wall Street that we barely give them a thought, when Melville was writing Wall Street was still a relatively new concept--and for many a deeply troubling one.

Wall Street, 1850

You see, then as now one made money on Wall Street through speculation; that is, one fundamentally "guessed" at the potential profitability of a company, and if one guessed right, one could soon be living large.  For us this isn't a problem, and to a degree we can even be in awe of this ability.

But for Melville and others, this was a troubling turn in American character.  Remember our friends, the Puritans?  Well, among their many cherished values was a work ethic, one in which work actually produced something tangible, and produced something that would also benefit the community.  Work for the Puritans had moral value, and one's work (or lack of it) reflected one's character.  While the Puritans as a clearly identifiable group had disappeared by the mid-19th century, their values (as I have emphasized multiple times) persisted and have always been at the core of American character.  Consequently, the "work" of Wall Street stood against everything many Americans--particularly those of a religious bent--valued about work.

First, one did not produce anything that benefited the needs of the community; in fact, one did not actually produce anything at all on Wall Street.  One made money through speculation, not labor.  (The Puritans had no problem with people making money, but they could have problems with how.)  Second, one profited through speculation, which was simply another term for gambling.  To use a more current reference point, those who looked dimly at Wall Street would have had the same misgivings about playing the lottery.  Speculation meant trusting to luck rather than God.  Finally, someone who profited on Wall Street profited by someone else's work.  In short, a Wall Street speculator was little more than a cultural parasite.

Herman Melville

Now, Melville himself was anything but a Puritan.  In fact, Melville bristled at just about anything that smacked of religion, or at least organized religion.  Years of church leaders condemning Melville's work as immoral had deeply embittered him towards religion.  It also didn't help that Melville may have been bi-sexual or homosexual (there are some indications in Hawthorne's personal writings, for example, that Melville may have had romantic interest in Hawthorne); while that's not absolutely certain, since the private Melville is very elusive, if he were that would further exacerbate his relationship with formal religions, which would be quite intolerant of this.  (The one exception may have been Unitarianism, which tended to have a live-and-let-live philosophy.)  But in spite of his animosity towards religion and dogma associated with religions, he was nevertheless one of our most moral writers, at least in terms of his social consciousness.  Unlike many of his Romanticist contemporaries, Melville was deeply attuned to social injustice and cultural oppression.  So while he may have been metaphorically bedding down with assorted religious leaders in his disdain for Wall Street, Melville's concern wasn't particularly religious.  He did see Wall Street as a potent force in the destruction of human character.